Working as a freelancer while studying is really hard. You are always short of time, because you have to juggle schoolwork and jobs, and its really tiring when you are done with schoolwork at midnight and realise you still have to write a whole essay to submit by 8am the next morning. Or two.
It's bad enough that they don't want to pay you on time, like how my cheque for my jobs in August came in December, but when you have to act as the pawn between two organisations and be the fall guy just because different departments within them just cannot see eye to eye with each other, it's really upsetting.
I currently write advertorials, and sometimes, because there are no photographers available, I am forced to do the photoshoots myself as well. While I can handle simpler shoots, like outdoor ones where there is sufficient lighting, for the more challenging ones, I am severely limited by equipment.
I don't have a remote flash unit, which is absolutely essential for such shoots only so that you can shoot burst shots off your camera with flash, bounce the light off a reflector, or you can mount the light source elsewhere rather than right on top of your camera, which always gives my subject a beautiful deer in headlights effect. In other words, stark, uncompromising, and absolutely unflattering. You can't use your trusty zipai camera for studio photography, trust me.
I don't even have the right lenses to do these shoots. For most of these shoots people are not doing static poses, they are jumping around, like the dance shoot I had to do yesterday. It didn't help that the dance instructor I was working with couldn't understand that certain dance poses are simply not photography friendly.
He wanted to do all sorts of weird lifts, one of which I remember very vividly had the girl's head facing up and back away from the camera. Well, I could take that but do you really want to see the back of her head? It was not even an angle thing. You can't take a picture of two people's faces straight on if they are both facing opposite directions. It's mathematics.
It is the reason why you always see the same types of poses for dance photography, the jumping pirouette, static poses midway through routines, it is because these poses ensure that you can see the face of the subject while giving some illusion of movement.
Back to equipment, all I have is a travel superzoom lens, which focuses slowly. It's what the photography buffs call a "slow" lens. Trying to use that to catch people jumping around under insufficient lighting is a photography nightmare from hell. I can do it, but I can guarantee you the pictures will not be sharp. I don't even have to do the shoot to know that. It's a basic photography principle. Slow lens, insufficient light, slow focusing equals motion blur.
Well I used to have the equipment, but that was because I borrowed it from school to do another project altogether. Now that the module's over, I'm back to being a photography amateur. And if the school knew I had been using their equipment to earn money, I think they would refuse to lend me any in the future. But really, what is a hard-up student to do.
The photo department I'm freelancing for isn't going to lend me any because I'm a freelancer. Worse still, they often put such jobs at the bottom of their priority chain because its not news, its not the thing that sells the paper.
Unfortunately, the people who put these ads in actually pay a damn lot of money. So they have every right to expect a professional photographer with good equipment to do their shoots for them. But since the photo department thinks so little of them, it will often send freelancers like me to our certain deaths by sending us to shoots we are vastly undertrained or underequipped for, and then letting us deal with the inevitable fallout that occurs.
Which leads me to the question. Why even create this stupid mess in the first place? If we don't do the shoot well, which we won't, the shit hits the fan, lots of people get hot and bothered, I get calls all through the day while I'm transcribing my FYP, and in the end the photo department has to do the shoot anyway because it gets rescheduled. And I get a bad reputation as a freelancer which I do not even deserve because I always send in my articles on time and cleanly written.
This whole mess is really because in reality, the marketing and photography departments just don't talk to each other. I don't know why, considering they have this symbiotic relationship, but it really shouldn't be my problem.
Sigh.
“妈，孩儿懂了。钱真的很不容易赚。”