The state of the union and why you should shoot for free...

Hey! I'm back! It's cold outside and I'm sitting at work reading the Strobist blog and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I should get around to using my blog like I was originally intending. If only it were that easy.


So in the past couple of months there has been at least one DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist meet that I've been to and several opportunities that have come up along with some moving forward in the world of a photography business.

About two weeks ago I applied for a West Virginia business license. I filled out the information on the website and found out that this was going to cost me a whole $0. Yeah. That's a lot of pocket lint right there. So now I have filed for a business with the name of "Digital Room Studios", a little play on dark room. I didn't want a business name based on my name, like CK photo or something similar. I have plans that may one day include not just me.

Other than that I have a wedding coming up in December that I may be shooting. I'm going to go meet the bride next week. I also did some photos of a friend's little girl. A little more money in my pocket. Canon's new 5D MKII is coming out the end of November after all.

And what's with the second part of this post's title? Shoot for free? Rubbish! Heh. Maybe. I did some photos for my neighbor. She's a personal trainer at Gold's Gym. The other night she told me that her boss mentioned something about needing photos for the gyn and my neighbor immediately gave her one of my cards. Looks like doing a little free work can have it's bonuses. I just hope everything pans out. I'm still going to try and update this on a regular basis, but we'll see how that goes.

Read the full post and comments.

A month has past...

...Since my last post. I've been doing some things here and there. There hasn't been a lot of shooting going on, but I got started with a business card design that I finally ordered and I'm having a website being built. New opportunities have been opening up and I'm taking advantage of what I can.

I've had an offer from a fellow photographer to pass me a few jobs when he's too busy for them, a barter for building a website in exchange for photos, a few prints and a passport photo for a few beers. Not exactly the money maker, but it's getting there.

My latest offer was an invitation to shoot and sell prints for the bartending competition at TGI Fridays in Hagerstown, MD. I originally offered to shoot the event, but when I informed the general manager of my price I was told that they don't even have a budget to support a DJ. He said I was welcome to show up and shoot and sell prints of the event, so I'm thinking I may try that even though print sells of events can be notoriously unprofitable.

I do have a studio setup at my new place. It's a backdrop stand and several rolls of seamless paper in the living room. Thank god for my roommates' minimalist approach to decorating and hardwood floors.

If you view the large image by clicking on the photo, you can see lines around the band members. I did erase those and fix this image, but didn't save it for the web version. Not bad, but I couldn't fit the bass player in. I tried what I could, but it just didn't work out. He just seems out of place. All in all, I got to test out the back drop.

Now I just need some more paying clients to put it to good use.

Read the full post and comments.

Witty title goes here...

And we're almost off. I've got a slightly different strategy, but I couldn't just jump out there with no place to shoot. Last week I got an Alien Bee B800 and a soft box to complement the rest of my setup. That's what I used to take that really sweer (lame) shot you're seeing there. Tomorrow I'll be purchasing a backdrop stand and a roll of "super black" and "super white paper. That should be everything a proper photographer needs to make a studio in his or her home.

Oh, and I moved...that's the most important part.

I moved into a town house with a friend of mine, his girlfriend, and their son. The girl friend is into photography but hasn't had much time to do anything with having to deal with their son, she's more than happy of having me there to teach her stuff. I'm going to have a live in assistant. The best part is, is that they took a very minimalistic approach to their living room. Couch, TV, easy to move table on a rug, and hardwood floors (yes!!!). The backdrop stand is going up and over the sliding glass doors and it will be out of the way. Studio complete. I'm going to make up some flyers, or possibly have some printed off by a friend of mine and pass them out around town to see what kind of response I can get.

I ended up helping a friend shoot two kids of a mom that his wife worked with last week (follow that one?) and it turned out fairly well. I think I'm finally in a position where I'm confident with my gear and everything else that I can do this and have mainly satisfied customers. I mean, you always have to account for those people that are never happy, or are only happy when they're getting your services for free.

Read the full post and comments.

Hoo-ray! It's over!

The DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group's shoot at the Frederick Key's stadium in Frederick, MD is over with. What a disappointment...


All the attendees were great and it was a perfect day out. I even managed to get two good pictures that day and two out of about twelve models that said they were going to attend actually showed up. What a let down. We had about 15-20 photographers from the group there and most of us spent the day either trying to squeeze in a shot with one of the two models or sitting around and doing much of nothing.

There was plenty of twiddling with gear, photographing setups, photographing surroundings, and wishing some one would show up for us to take pictures of. All in all, we did the best we could with as bad a situation as we were delt. Adam Pohl, the Keys' PR guy was great as well. He was the man who allowed us to do this shoot and accomodated us with several jerseys and access to the stadium with no one there but the cleaning crews.

The above photo is one of two that I managed to get. It's not my favorite, but John Miliker's arm wasn't blocking the Keys logo on the jersey like in the other one. I know I have at least one floating around of me sprawled out over several seats in the stadium like a bum.

So, back to the root of all evil... I was even supposed to have one girl, that I was told had previous modeling experience, meet me in Shepherdstown at 9:00AM. I told her I had to be in Frederick by 9:30, so I would be cutting it close. OK. 9:05 rolls around and she calls. Great. After getting off the phone I learn that she's just woke up...she even asked if there was a certain time I had to be there by *smack's forehead*. She told me she was going to rush so I said that's ok (what else was I going to do?. I called a friend of mine that was heading to the meet to let him know I was going to be late and delegated responsibilities (Thanks Jeff).

Sooooo....






......Twenty minutes later I get another phone call. Apparently she still wasn't ready and didn't feel comfortable going and was cancelling (?!?!?!?!). I mean, really...I'm sure she knew from the moment she woke up late that she wasn't going. Thanks for making me wait twenty minutes for you to make up your mind...

Anyways, I made it to the meet later, angry, and well angry. Of course I got over it. I mean, it wasn't the any of the models' fault that they're generally unreliable and undependable and that us photographers are generally at their mercy to trust them. After all, we're not the ones that that want to do something in name only. Man, I'm cynical.

Well a good ending to the day was fried chicken at Cindy Dee's, right on the border of MD & VA (that's not the best fried chicken I've ever had though...). There we figured out that the only reliable model is a paid model. It seems that un experienced models tend to say they want to model but never make it farther than in front of their own P&S cameras. I'd really not be in such a model bashing mood and it would probably be right of whom ever reads this to say, "Well one experience isn't a good way to judge by" and I'd tend to agree and say, "But of course, but the third or fourth experience is showing a trend here."

I think I'm taking a break from arrange these meets to focus on doing the photography thing for myself. I'll be keeping an eye peeled for venues of course, but it's pointless to try for bigger and better things when we have very limited capacity to function in the smaller meet ups due to things out of our control. Besides, that was way too much hassle and headache for two photos.

Read the full post and comments.

Nothing new to report

And here we are. Stalled out a bit. Life and other activities kind of jump in the way. I had a shoot to go to last week that was a little disappointing. It was just a meet and greet for the DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group. There's another one coming up next weekend that I'm stretching to find models for. Why don't I get paid for this, again? It'll all work out. I have some free time this weekend so I'm going to look into some things.

I did send a photo to the Bavarian Inn a
few weeks ago to see if they wanted to use it for advertising or whatever. I haven't heard back from them though. Maybe they'll give me a call one day.

Read the full post and comments.

Hooray for business cards!

My next goal. I'll be making some of these up this weekend so I can hand them out to local businesses in the area with a flyer of my rates. I'm going to have to make a website, so we'll see how all that goes. If everything goes as planned, my long dreamed of goal to conquer the world should be nearing completion.


Did I say conquer the world? I meant, become a professional photographer.

Read the full post and comments.

WHCC, the almost easy way

So I got my prints back from WHCC yesterday (Yay!!!). They weren't the quality I was expecting (Boo!!!). They were acceptable though (Meh...).

The blown up prints were great, I'll talk about those later. The 8x12's, not so much.

I got my account setup with the test shots and those were awesome. It was the quality I expected from them, so I was ready to order...


I sat down Friday night and opened Roes and this is were the trouble started. WHCC's directions aren't very clear in some spots. No where does it say that the quality of the photos you see in the ROES ordering software is going to be complete and utter shit. Pixelated and anomaly filled shit. I started to worry. After a post and PM on the Photography On The Net Canon DSLR forums, I received an answer I was looking for. Yes, it's just a thumbnail and they'll look that way. So after the reassurance, I placed my order of a bunch of 8x12's, four 24x36's, and one 30x45.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, Yesterday evening and off work early, I make it home about twenty minutes before the UPS guy shows up at my porch and hands off the order. I take them inside and inspect the 8x12's. They're good, but not the quality I got from the test batch. I did something differently.

So I'll go into that now. The 8x12's with the first batch where done by resizing the image in Photo Shop to 8x12 and 300ppi, like the website said. So on the second batch, I used the crop tool to set them to 8x12 and 300ppi. Apparently, this doesn't work so well. If you're ordering smaller sized prints, physically resize them using the image size box and don't just use the crop tool.

And then I was going to open the enlargements. I cracked open the cardboard tube and pulled them out...damn that would be a mess if I opened now and had to transport them. I ended up tossing everything in the car and driving over to Wise Guys tattoo studio. Travis, the client, had just left, so I put the 8x12's in his room and cracked open the enlargements. Niiiiiiiiice! They were great for the most part. I did learn some valuable lessons.

OK. Enlargements. I just used the crop tool as the website said and used the crop tool to "crop" to 24x36 and 30x45 with the ppi left blank. I actually just selected the entire image size with the crop tool so the setting would take. No other size adjustments were made. What I did learn was that 8mp is fine for enlargements of this size, but more pixels are better. One image in particular was amazingly clear. You have to make sure your picture is as sharp as you can manage on your monitor for enlargements of these size. Also, skin smoothing needs to be done very carefully. It looked like very small amounts of pixelation in some places on the 30x45 where I did some heavy skin smoothing. It was barely noticeable from close up and overall, everything turned out well.

With remembering to correctly resize my images, I believe I'm going to be very happy with WHCC's products and customer service.

Read the full post and comments.

Why do I shoot for free?

I've read that once you decide to go pro and make money, that you should refuse to shoot for free. Purely opinion of course. I still do free shoots. I guess you could say I'm getting paid by having photos to add to my portfolio in trade for my time. I only do it on my terms though and usually unless a really good friend request a photo here or there, I'm the one asking them to stand in.




Come to think of it, the last real shoot I did, I paid to be there. It was only covering studio rental fees, but the shooters that attended got some hints from Don Giannati, the Lighting Essentials guy.

He was in town for a workshop he was running in Baltimore on Saturday, so one of the guys setup a meet and shoot the night before. He brought out Briana, the model that ends up in most of his pictures. Yeah. It was worth it. This guy knows his stuff and even though, regretably, I did not make the workshop I can vouch that it works. There's several shooters in the DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group that attended his workshop and several photos of theirs that I've seen from the workshop and from afterwards amaze me in the jump in quality. Two in particular that I know from previous meets had a jump from doing pretty good to doing great. I'll definitely be attending that when it comes around in September.

So back to the free shoots. Is it worth it? For me it is. I love having material that I think is great to wow clients. Having a couple of photos to choose from is OK, having a multitude is even better. Plus it's all really like a big round of practice, preparing you for the big thing. Boy scout's motto right?

Read the full post and comments.

The Tattoo Gig

OMG. Blogger is a piece of trash. I had this whole entire detailed post typed out and when I went to publish, it said that my blog was flagged as spam and no further publishing could be done to it...this was after I saved my post mind you. Then after I requested a review and found it unlocked this morning, there was a nice two sentence draft of my post saved. What retards. I mean, I had ONE link in ONE published post for The Strobist Blog and they did that to me. I'm angry. Too bad this isn't a pay service, then I could really tell them to go to hell.

Anyways...



My first paid gig. I'm acquaintances through some friends with a guy that opened up Wise Guys tattoo studio next door to a recording studio I'm associated with. I talked to him about a shoot several months back and he finally took me up on the offer. It was $80 for two hours and he purchased $300 in photos after the fact. He got a discount as I'm going to do future work for the shop and I know the guy. My regular prices are going to be a bit higher.

I should be getting the photos back today from WHCC and then I'll post a review on those guys. The test prints were perfect, but the first order using ROES took a bit and was semi confusing...maybe my experience will help some one avoid the problems I had. I'll post about ordering and all that too.

Sorry for the dry post and the lack of details, but after having my first book deleted by some stupid spam protection that can't recognize one like and one post is not spam compared to millions of links to the same site on several post, I don't feel like reciting it again in detail. Pics from the shoot are below. They're small, but if you click on them, they'll take you to the Flickr page with a bigger photo.

Read the full post and comments.

Welcome

Hi and welcome to "A Working Photographer". This is going to be my blog that documents my attempt to break into the working photographer profession. I'll be posting up my experiences through out this mission of mine as well as keeping a running tab of money spent and money made so maybe one day some one wanting the same carreer change and experience can use this for a little bit of reference.

A little bit about me can be found after the link.


My name is Corbin William Kronk. Most of my friends and aquaintances call me Will. I've been dabbling in photography since I was about 16 or 17 and a junior in high school. It was purely film back then. In fact, I still have my Minolta Maxxum HTSI with my Quantary 70-300 lens sitting downstairs in my basement with a set of dead batteries in it.

At about that point in my photography fascination, it was mainly point and shoot and develop at Wal-Mart. I had no formal education in photography and have never touched a dark room. After I graduated, I signed up for Shepherd College as an IT major and wanted to take a few photography classes. Unfortunately, you had to have a photography major or minor to pretty much even get into the classes which left me with nothing but general studies. I really regret that. I think if I would have been able to get into the classes, I wouldn't have wasted 4 years on learning something that I ended up hating.

Anyways...Until about two years ago, I really hadn't touched a camera as everything was digital and the point and shoots didn't have the control I wanted in a camera. Plus this was back when entry level digital meant Canon Digital Rebel and $1000. But I inherited a used Digital Rebel and that's where it all began. I shortly moved up to a 30D and a 50mm f/1.8. The roots. About two or three months of owning the camera I really felt like this is what I could do with the rest of my life and be happy, so much so that at that point, monetary earnings wouldn't be an issue once I got my financial status straight.

In October of 2007, I started poking around on several forums and trying to learn about lighting after unsuccessfully attempting to photograph a friend of mine and having all her pictures turn out looking pretty horrible. I then found my gold mine, The Strobist Blog. This gem of a site was exactly what I was looking for as well as many other photographers out there. I started reading and within weeks had my first flash and set of Pocket Wizard Plus II's. I was ready to go.

Fast forward six months to now and I've already got a decent portfolio, one paid shoot under my belt, and the drive to start really doing this. I feel like I've increased my knowledge and skills a hundred fold since findind that site and learning about lighting and how to get the shot I want regardless of the conditions. So here I am.

I'm 26, a photographer that thinks he's a hotshot and that's really the anti-christ of modesty. I know I'm good and I want to see how far I can take this.

Read the full post and comments.