New Skills

Due to my sometimes-role as cinematographer at work, it's not an unusual sight to see me walking around the office with a camera.  One of the managers I occasionally work with, Nick, noticed and asked if I had any experience as a photographer.  As a matter of fact, I told him, I was in charge of taking product shots for the website of a company I worked for years ago.  I warned him I was out of practice, but with a little time, I could be back up to speed.  Nick agreed that it was worth the experiment, but he needed the images pretty soon.  Normally, we have any product shots we need taken by the company's image maestro, but he didn't have the right products on hand and is on another continent, so we either needed to provide the images ourselves or hire a professional photographer.  Like I said, Nick thought it was worth the experiment, so I gave it a try.

I should point out that I was able to use a professional-grade camera that Danfoss owns and Nick ordered a proper backdrop to use, but we didn't have professional lighting.  Instead, we used the sun.  Over the course of three days, I took nearly a hundred pictures because, as I learned from a photographer friend years ago, the first rule of photography is: film is cheap, take lots of pictures.  And it's funny because even with all of those pictures, we'll probably only use two or three of them.  But, we're actually going to use them!

Here's the picture I took (and I also digitally touched-up):

And here's what the final ad looks like:

How awesome is that?!  Now, the picture still has some problems that I would want to eliminate next time, but considering I'm an amateur, I think it's pretty impressive.  Nick thinks so too, and said that he's coming to me the next time he needs products shots for anything.

And the one above isn't even the best picture I took so far.  That would be this one:

The hardest part is finding a white void in which to take the pictures.

Who would have guessed that when I started this job five months back that I would be picking up so many new skills?