Why Photographers Ought to be Paid More Part II

I posted a short article on why photographers ought to be paid more about five months ago [Link Here]. I talked about how photographers, along with other visual arts professionals, have to maintain portfolios which in itself requires resources. Now I will talk about another reason why we ought to get paid more than a typical "office worker" - Test Shoots.

This happened last week on set:

As you can see, it looks way too dark. It's not supposed to look like that, and it was immediately corrected in the next image as seen on the thumbnails on the right-hand part of the screen. That, my friends, is because of a test shoot I did two years ago.

I rented a studio to do some still-life shots that are different than what I normally did at my "day job." My friend Christina and I set up the lights for a stylized jewelry image and the first photo we took needed some fine-tuning with lighting. I adjusted the key light, took another shot, and the image looked just like the image above except WAY WORSE. "Wow. That was way too much." I tweaked the light, took another shot, and got the same look. "Well, that didn't work very well." We took another shot and got the same result. This whole tweaking the light, taking another shot, and getting a similar image fiasco went on for several minutes. We went through an elaborate and systematic troubleshooting process including re-metering (measuring) the light and using another flash unit in case the one we used was faulty (which is rather common for that brand), but the results were the same. It wasn't until the end of the allotted time for that shot that Christina pointed something out:

Those who have worked with me and those who follow my IG stories know that I am not the type of person who makes such drastic software-based adjustments. Christina pointed it out and I was surprised myself because I certainly did no such thing. Although this wasn't a paid shoot, I still needed to finish another shot because I told a friend I was gonna give him the products the following week. We scrapped that look and did the third look without any issues. I got home and posted what happened on Reddit to see if someone could shed light (pun intended) on the issue.

Bingo.

Reddit user u/CaptureJuan said that it's likely from using the keyboard shortcut "Cmd+L" for Auto Adjust. It made total sense. The keyboard shortcut to fire a camera tethered to a computer is "Cmd+K." K and L are right next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. We could have accidentally clicked "Cmd+L" (Auto Adjust) instead of "Cmd+K" (Capture) and got the wonky image. I have never used that feature in the 12 years I've been using the program, so I could have easily misinterpreted the wonky image as a flash misfire. Since I do my adjustments on set (camera and lights) and not in the software, it never occurred to me to check the adjustments panel because I don't do my adjustments there. And since the software is set so that it copies the same software-based adjustments and applies them to the next capture, all of our subsequent frames had the same wonky adjustments from pressing the "Cmd+L" Auto Adjust accidentally.

I paid about $300 for that shoot hoping to get three portfolio images for a production cost of about $100/image. We got two images and essentially paid $100 to learn that lesson.

That lesson came in handy during an actual paid shoot because I was able to get back on track right away.

Test shoots. They give the photographer a chance to f*ck up and recover on their own time and dime so they don't have to do so on yours ??.

**Profanity is used in my posts so you know it's not written by Ai ??**