On Sunday 7th April I volunteered as one of the photographers at the Pup Up cafe event at Exeter Phoenix. I got in touch with the organisers through Facebook and they very kindly said they would like to have me to help build my portfolio. This event was a meet up between humans and sausage dogs. There was about 130 sausage dogs that visited throughout the 6 hours of the event. My job along with Shola was to take images of the dogs and humans arriving through the doors, get pictures of the people and dogs mingling outside, the dogs with their owners, the prize winners and just the event itself. I have only ever assisted a photographer before and never been one of the people responsible for producing the images so I was a little nervous but I put the nerves to the back of my mind and just started shooting along with some cuddles from the pups as well of course (just like the image below)!
~ Image taken by Shola Naylor, sourced from Pup Up cafe social media accounts
I was in quite regular contact with the organisers prior to the event as I didn't want to forget anything or get there and not know what was going on, I wanted to know as much as possible. They got in touch with me a week before the event to ask if I had a Dropbox account as they were creating folders for the edited and unedited pictures from the event to go in. They also told me they wanted the logo in the lower right corner on all edited images. They shared the logo with me so I opened it up and saved it to my computer ready for when the images were ready to be edited. They had said they wanted the images within 24-48 hours after the event which was something I was aiming to do as on time as I could. I asked how many images they were ideally wanting from me and they said they had 6 sessions with 20 dogs per session so ideally they wanted at least a picture of each dog per session and others of the session so around 150-200 images. I then just wanted to check that I had understood it right so asked whether there was 6 sessions all of an hour long and how big they wanted the logo and whether they wanted the opacity changed.
To make sure I had enough equipment and equipment that I could use depending on any situation I booked out a few lenses from the ERC along with the lenses I already had to make sure I wasn't shooting images that weren't going to look as good as they could with better equipment. I ended up taking with me to the event: Manfrotto Tripod, Manfrotto Small Handheld Tripod, Canon 100d body, 18-55mm lens, 10-18mm lens, 50mm lens, 35-80mm lens, 85mm lens, 18-200mm lens and a 55-250mm lens along with my battery charger in case my battery started to run low as I was shooting for near enough 7 hours straight.
The event opened up for the first session at 10am but I got there half an hour early to make sure I was ready when the first people arrived. I got all my camera settings set up and had a quick briefing from one of the organisers about what was happening throughout the day and what sort of images he wanted.
Session 1 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
Session 2 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
Session 3 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
Session 4 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
Session 5 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
Session 6 in pictures:
~ All images taken by myself
It's easier to show how the sessions went through a few edited images from each session rather than explaining it but as you can see it was really fun and I really enjoyed myself. It was hard at some points because most of the images I was looking at after I had taken them weren't fully focused because the dogs were moving so quickly but I managed to get more than I thought that were in focus looking back now. It wasn't as nerve-racking as I thought it would be and I think I did a really good job considering there was only two of us photographing and we had both never photographed an event before and I only had the experience of assisting.
Because the images were wanted around 24-48 hours after the event I needed to get on and edit them as soon as I got home. I was aware of how many images I had taken because I had about 1600 photo space on my SD card and at the end of the day I had 5 images left to take. I started to look through the images and started with the images that were in focus. To help me choose the images as there were so many I was aiming to choose one from each dog and then thinking about what images I would like to see from the event if I had visited the event as a saying customer. Luckily my images didn't need much editing as my camera had been set correctly throughout the day so I just needed to change the shadows, contrast and exposure a little and then crop the images and erase anything that was a bit distracting. Once I had done all the adjustments I needed to add the logo onto each image which took the most time because I had to drag it onto every image and make sure the logo was placed in the same position on each image and the size and opacity was the same on each image so that each image was consistently the same. The logo was set to 75% opacity and the width and height was 25x25 as I thought that looked about right on the images.
As I was editing I was realising I was editing session by session so was easier to make folders of each session so that it was easier for me but also easier for the organisers then it came to posting. Because I didn't realise hw many images I had it took longer for me to edit my images than I thought so they actually got all of the images by the Thursday evening which obviously I was aware was a lot later than they wanted but I was in constant contact with them and they were fine with the time the images came through as I had been sending each edited session over once they were done so they could still post daily.
As my edited images were coming in they were posting them session by session on there Facebook page. Although I had taken the pictures they technically were Pup Up Cafe's images as their logo was on it but they do still belong to me. When the images were posted my name was mentioned so that everyone knew who had taken the images (as you can see at the bottom of the image below).
Throughout the day we would both have quick catch ups with Marcus one of the organisers and he said he would have to get us both to come back when they do more events. I was expecting the events to be in a couple of months time but on 4th May they're having another event but this time its in Plymouth so they've asked me to come and photograph the event and this time it will be paid and I'm really excited and happy that they have asked me to come back again. I am photographing solo this time which I am looking forward to but I will have a lot more to do.
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