DIARY 021

What i've been up to this week.

** Apologies for this being a day late - I wrote half of it on the train yesterday and it promptly deleted when I lost signal in a tunnel - couldn’t quite face doing it again straight away **

MONDAY

Delivered the final imagery for the US brand I shot last Wednesday. I’m really loving the quick turn around of all the shoots I’ve done the past few weeks - quick delivery, immediate invoicing, moving on to something else. It’s perfect for this time of year and it’s really keeping my diary clear enough to have spare time to print, and make plans for the year ahead.

I have some breathing space for a couple of weeks before my next shoot and want to use it to get all my channels updated. I’ve done a lot of personal work on my travels this year, and have spent a lot of time in the dark room playing around with my own photos - making pictures with no deadline and no client, which is something close to a dream for me. As I mentioned in my Looking Back to Move Forward episode, I am realising that this year has been a massively developmental year for me style-wise and (humble brag here - my apologies) I’m so happy with the direction my work is taking. I have a real moment of pride whilst putting some new work up on the website.

However, even after adding new work, my portfolio as a whole needs to reflect the new direction. At the moment it doesn’t, so it’s time to have a clear out. I do an initial scroll through the website and any imagery that stands out as feeling out of sync, I quickly unpublish it - I say quickly because if I hesitate, I have a tendency to overthink. I start remembering why I like that image, or why someone somewhere might think that image is good for this specific type of project and do I want to alienate them by getting rid of it blah blah blah. I just have to rip the plaster off - go on instinct. Conversely, I need to start going back through my archives and find work that I think now does fit; older projects or shots which have thus far languished out of sight on my hard drives, which can be printed. In doing this I get totally sidetracked looking at old photos and spend half the day just filing away film scans from 2017-2022 that I never labelled properly - suddenly I’m having a digital admin day which I hadn’t planned at all. But thats why having space between shoots is great because this stuff has to be done some time, and now I have a great sense of achievement as well as some newly dugout negative frames that I’d forgotten about so it’s a win win.

TUESDAY

Now the nights are drawing in I need a better lighting set up outside the dark room to be able to proof the colours of my prints. You need that all the year round really but I’ve been winging it until now and realised how unsustainable that is now that the sun is disappearing at about 3pm. Not that the sun is a remotely consistent measure of light either as it’s a totally different tone depending on the time of day, the weather etc. etc. I ask my printers and they put me in touch with who they use and I spend and hour on the phone talking with a wonderful bloke who’s clearly been in the industry for 1000 years about stuff I really don’t understand, and come out the other end with a quote for about £5k all in. Probs not ready to spend that just yet so it’s back to the drawing board. Luckily I gleaned enough information about the right kelvin and CRI (no I don’t know what that means either) from him that I could pass onto my husband, who is a lighting designer (qu. handy in this scenario), so he’s going to fashion something for me that will do the job for now.

Carry on going through my archive and pulling out frames I want to add to the portfolio - I’ve got a lot of printing to do….

WEDNESDAY

London day. My friend has tickets to see Vogue: Inventing the Runway at Lightroom in London, which is absolutely incredible and so inspiring - definitely go and see it if you’re in the UK. It really takes me back to my first years in the fashion industry, working for newspapers and having to report on and build galleries of the shows as they were coming in. I remembered how I felt the first time I watched the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2010 show - how unnerved but transfixed I was by it - and reminds me why I love fashion so much. Sometimes, when I’m feeling stuck I have idly wondered if I should let go of shooting fashion and focus on travel or interiors or but then something like this makes me see that fashion is what really drives me forward, and what energises me the most. I absolutely love the other parts of my job, working in beautiful places and seeing amazing spaces, but growing up in a ‘fashion-y’ family like mine, clothes are sort of in our DNA and moments like this really bring that home to me. I literally bounce out of the exhibition full of ideas and energy.

THURSDAY

Before I went to Sicily I lined up two potential pieces with a travel journalist, who writes for two different, but both brilliant titles, so I’m spending the next couple of days printing my favourite shots of the hotel and Taormina. Then i’ll artwork them up in InDesign to show the journalist a sample of some layouts, and see if the pieces are a goer.

I posted a couple on my stories and the owner of the hotel sees them and gets in contact straight away to say how much he loves them and to offer me a free stay in return for the usage of the images across their channels. I am super happy with the pictures so if I can get some press and a free stay, it will have been so worth putting in the effort to shoot the interiors and the area in general whilst I was out there, alongside the fashion shoot. I know I said this last week (or week before?) but even though I find these trips pretty stressful to produce, it’s so worth it for the portfolio and I’m already hatching plans for the next one.

FRIDAY

I am biblically opposed to waste. I don’t know if it’s something to do with my childhood but I really struggle to through things away if I think there’s another use for them (actually I do know where I get it from - my mum is very much the same which is why my kids are wearing the clothes she saved from when she was a baby - in the 1950s…). Something that I’ve struggled with having a dark room is there is so much waste paper from off cuts, test strips and faulty prints. Most people throw it away but I’ve just collected it all for a year, building a bigger and bigger pile in a basket on my desk with a plan to eventually use it for something - namely making collages in my sketchbooks, which I bought months ago in readiness and have sat unopened. Today I just started, without even thinking about it. I grabbed some scissors and glue and started playing around whilst waiting for prints to come out of the processor. I find the creative brain so weird and unpredictable. I recently read Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Big Magic’ and I loved the way she described ideas as being a separate entity from ourselves, sort floating around until they land somewhere and someone does something with them. I think creativity and inspiration behave the same way which is why you can procrastinate and delay and overthink for weeks/months/years and then one day just do something out the blue.

*THINGS I DIDN’T DO*

Add anything else to the Job Board. My shoots are winding down for this year so the opportunities I have to offer are a bit fewer but I’ve recently had my first enquiries for January so I’m sure the opportunities will be coming in thicker in the new year. Until then, please do let me know if you have anything to list yourself and I’d be very happy to host on the page. I also post last minute job opportunities over on the PP Instagram which I see on other channels / via people I follow on social media so do get your alerts turned on for those as there’s some real goodies.

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P.S. Do you have any assisting opportunities you need to get great photographers for? Or are there jobs you can’t do that you want to pass onto someone else? To list them on our Job Board and tap into this amazing community of creatives, just send the details to studio@aliciawaite.com.