Photographing events, being busy, and exploration

One of my favourite things about film and photography work is how it keeps you in constant motion. You find yourself in locations and surrounded by people you never thought you'd come across. Within spaces that you otherwise have no purpose to be in if not for the production side of things. For me, this is one of the great perks of having this sort of job, where you are never really stuck in one place, never really fixed in a cubicle or office space. One day you might find yourself surrounded by professional tango dancers in a dimly-lit old former Soviet house, the next you're in a grand hall photographing a cultural celebration on the return of a loved one from the military service. It can be exhausting work where you end up burning out with the late nights and keeping up with fast-paced atmospheres, but it's so, so fun. The other week I picked up something just for fun, to shoot some little presentation for a small architectural school here in Yerevan. I had no idea what I would turn up to shoot prior to the shoot, I didn't really know what to expect. School-like environments are odd to me given my hatred for that period in my life, the monotony of such an environment, how it drains creativity from the soul.

Though this was a fun experience. It was small, quite inspired in regards to the creativity. From what I recall, the students had the option to create a small architectural design based on influences in their own lives, something that reflected their minds and emotions, in the design of something home-like. Consider the fact that most, if not all of these people were Russian and only spoke Russian, so whatever I actually managed to pull from this environment for context is a miracle. The room was small though, and upon entering the lighting went from great, to completely horrific. Not the sort of environment you would want to shoot an event where you need to capture faces and emotions, as well as a screen that displayed the context to the audience. A bit of a presentation, really. This is the bad luck of a photographer, to step into a space where you're expected to photograph something, and have that setting completely lose its appeal. Incapable of fixing it, knowing the images are going to come out terrible. It took some magic in post-processing to fix them a bit, and out of the images I took, I only came out with a few that I felt were decent. Pure luck, even.

One of the fixes I had to perform was removing all colour from the images and replacing it with black-and-white, also adding in some film grain to make the images look a bit more aesthetic and 'architectural' while removing the lack of quality the colour images had. This meant that there was less to see in regards to the mistakes from poor lighting, the bad shadows for example. A bit of a switch to ensure the attention of the viewer went elsewhere. It's a good thing that this actually worked, and to some degree suits the general photography aesthetic that such schools pursue. A downside to so much photography as of late though, is that I don't feel I have much free time, constantly having to take pictures and edit them later on. Sort of like I've sold my soul to the camera; and certainly not always getting enough out of it. Part of that comes from being in a new space where I have to create a name for myself again, and build some reputation before I can be more decisive on who I short for, and how much I charge.

For the best experience view this post on Liketu