My week Peter Franz Photography / Australian Landscape photographer
A few months ago I opted to have a work place student for a period of 5 days 9-4, filled out the paper work and never thought anymore about it. Then a week prior to his placement, he arrived at the Studio letting me know that the following week he would be arriving to start his weeks work experience. We had a brief chat about what may be happening during the work experience week and parted company till the following week.
As soon as he left,my mind started to run amuck with all these thoughts “ What I am I going to do with him” and this went on for a couple of days. Finally had a chat with my wife to see what I could come up with that would make an interesting week for this student. I firmly believe that if you take on this commitment, you need to provide a good positive learning experience in how your particular business functions in its day to day activities and also what is involved in having a business in today’s environment.
We started the week with chatting about one of the key elements to any business, that of marketing its self. I use a number of different resources one of them being mail outs or letterbox drops to target areas. And Monday was the day I had set down for just such an exercise. So we grabbed 550 DL flyers and set out for our destination, which was the local area of Hewitt near Gawler in South Australia.
Well what an experience it was mountain goat country up hill and down dale, and big house blocks so big distance between letterboxes. It took us about 3 1/2 hours with a lunch break to distribute them. At he end I don’t know who was more stuffed him or me, I think it was me.
The following day I decided to take him out and introduce him to what landscape photography is all about, mainly through the Barossa area looking for Australian landscape locations in the Barossa Valley for future photos, but I also wanted to bring a few back. Of course this also involved a certain amount of walking, but the main aim was to introduce him to Digital photography as he had never done any. So I handed him my spare camera for the day a gave him a few basic instructions and set him lose. And he did just that, at the end of the day back in the studio we uploaded the images into lightroom to critique them.
My dozen, his ninety. It was a start, he had understood the basics of shooting in manual mode which was a good start. Now we only needed to work on the creativity and composition. This I said we’ll work on tomorrow and of course the question was asked “what are we doing tomorrow?”.
Well I said, “ I’d like to get an early start and get the early morning sun out at a location in Altona Conservation Reserve that I had seen a few days earlier I felt it needed to be photographed in the early morning light, I mentioned that I would like a 7-30 start, is that alright with you. The answer was yes. but the comment was “I DIDN’T REALISE THAT THERE WAS SO MUCH WALKING IN PHOTOGRAPHY!!”. We captured a few good photos, (still working on them, will have them up shortly). When back at Lyndoch Studio we had a short discussion about what is involved in various disciplines of photography. As he left for the day my parting words were “ next 2 days we’re in the studio.
What I had planned was to run through a series of product shoots, giving him an insight into lighting and creativity in producing quality product work, shooting tethered in lightroom and using photoshop to bring the images to life.
All in all I think we both had a terrific experience, I know I certainly did.
