The time is now upon us at Western Academy of Photography, to complete our school year and hand in our final portfolio. An accumulation of all that we have learned at the school summed up in 12-15 images and 50% of our overall diploma mark.
That’s aproximately 6% per image. Wow, never thought of it that way though. Although, as I was fretting about getting enough images to even edit down to 12 shots, I recieved a tweet from Chase Jarvis. “chasejarvis: Escaping your portfolio http://twurl.nl/ggyilz” is all that the message stated. It was enough for me to find the nearest computer, sit down, read the entire thing twice and then come to a conclusion. He is absolutely right. I have done almost nothing on my portfolio since the last day of class up until that text message. It was time for me to stop thinking of this as “portfolio time” and start thinking of it as “where-are-my-clients-now-that-I’m-done-school-and-need-work-to-pay-for-said-school time”.
I had a photoshoot today. I told my old co-worker and his girlfriend to meet me down at Bastion Square, a local area with plenty of backgrounds to shoot. When I arrived there it was packed. Three cruise ships had arrived for the weekend, tourists were flooding the streets. In fact, they seemed to control the roads as sidewalks seemed to lose borders as pedestrians spilled out on to the road in front of traffic. Not only that, it’s also Swiftsure weekend here. A very large, international sailing regatta hosted by the Royal Victoria Yacht Club. It was busy, to make a long story short. Thankfully, Robin stated that there is usually a quieter area down by the water that we could start at. It was quiet, nice and in the shade. The background was so over lit that I had to use my flash (with already dying batteries) to fill for almost all the shots. Everything turned out and it was a great experience. I had never really taken pictures of people I didn’t know that well that were outside of models or people hired by the school. It was different and well worth it. Tomorrow I have two more projects, one in a coffee shop and a forest, the other in a railyard.
Posting here, getting these words out, regardless of whether people read it or not is surprisingly helpful. It makes me realize, that I’m not completely useless, and I’m making progress.
Tags: Photography, portfolio
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