"Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today." - Edward Abbey
Today is Saturday March 6, 2010. It's a beautiful day on the mountain and I am scheduled to work for the day. Not a bad thing when you are a mountain photographer and the weather cooperates. I know the work day of high winds, cold temps and snow is coming. I'll be prepared. For today, I was feeling good. It was a Saturday I was expecting a good turnout of photo shoot customers and hopefully some buyers of those shoots.
The day started off well. People were coming off the lifts and many people did not even have to hear me suggest that they should get photos taken. My focus of the day was to have constant creativity going in my mind. There are so many things to think about. You want to engage the customers with conversation. That can distract you from parts of the shoot, but as you snap more pictures more of the little things become routine. Things like making sure their lift tickets are tucked in a pocket and making sure poses and props give angles and depth to the picture are important. Squinting would be a huge part of today so I had 6 sets of prop sunglasses with me. Turns out customers used my own personal sunglasses the most! I have a sleek pair of Nike ones and I always offer them (off my face) as an alternative to my prop pairs. At about 11am a group of 4 women from Florida approached me. They said they were waiting for 5 more of their girlfriends (also from Florida) to show up and that they wanted a group photo. My mind started to race. This would be the largest group shot I have done and the more people you have, the more creative and observant you have to be. Read the quote of the day one more time. It fits well right here. My time to capture this groups' memory of this trip is today and I need to do my best to make sure all 9 of them are happy and look good. If one of them does not like their smile or does not like their pose, then they will not keep the memory and others could be persuaded too. I would have them get into three different group poses to give them options. They all had sunglasses (very color coordinated I might add) so that part was easy. The photography lingo "filling the frame" simply means get as much of the person (or group) in the picture frame as you can, without cutting off arms, feet, heads, etc. The more people you have, the more tricky it is to fill the frame. I kept that in mind and would even lay on my stomach to make the group stand out with the mountain back drop. I worked today, but I did not just show up for work. I worked at work and for the first time I started to think about how my enjoyment of this job would impact decisions I make about work in the future.
I attached a picture of a photo that I took back in August of 2009. The person in the photo is Jay Bearfield and he is the owner of Liquid Landscape Designs (LLD). He and his team designed a backyard makeover of a backyard space at my Cambridge, MA condo. Jay's team, show hosts Dean Marcisco and Derek Stearns, and producer/director Doug Nelson's entire production team would come to Cambridge for three days of work, play and recording in August of 2009. The show was "Indoors Out" and it was recently aired (January 2010) on the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Network. It was a great experience. In the above photo Jay was scribing (cutting) stone so that it would fit around some boulders in the backyard space. He was doing this around 11pm at night. Every part about this picture fits my quote of the day. The dark outline of him (like a shadow) is powerful and the light in the background makes the picture what it is. He would scribe stone only on this night so my time to capture this unique setting was exact. If you click on the picture and enlarge it you will even see the sparks shooting out as the metal blade hits the stone. Pretty cool.
As it turns out, this group of 9 women from Florida would be my best photos of today and every other day I've worked here. When I arrived in the shop, hours after their photos were taken, I unpacked my equipment and then waited for customers to come into the shop. About 5 of the 9 women eventually arrived and they were happy with the pictures. Most of them bought a picture or two and some were to travel home and discuss which ones they would buy on line with their husbands. My superiors at work even commented on how nice the pictures of this group came out and that meant a lot to me. They are the pros and like I said before the best part about this job for me is to learn from them. With that, here is a link to the best work of my day:
Hopefully you were able to open it. Thank you for checking in and I hope you are doing well. Good night from Telluride.
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