Take a break between a big project and the post production. Maybe get up in the morning and go for a walk. Shoot in the anti-planned mode.

I think it's always a good idea to look up every once in a while. It's especially good if you are a cartoon character and prone to having bank safes and grand pianos fall on your head out of open windows. 

I worked a full day yesterday, making fun photographs for a client. But no matter how fun it is, when there is money involved you have to plan, be on your game and constantly check to make sure you've got the details right. If you're not a bit tired when you get home from a day of immortalizing models for commerce then you are better at this than I. 

We wrapped early yesterday. I credit good preparation on the part of the clients and also the very professional nature of our talents. I just tried to hold my part of the adventure together as well as I could but I cheated by selecting my own make-up person and also bringing along a smart and on-the-ball assistant. 

Since I dodged the rush hour traffic I decided to pull off part of the post production bandaid and edit the images from the shoot before our late dinner. Thursdays are always (always!!!) pizza night at our house and it's a tradition Belinda and I started back in the advertising days. We were all young and a bit crazy back then and we were surrounded by creative people of the same age. We usually gathered at my apartment in Clarksville to eat delivery pizza and watch "The A-Team" on my 13 inch, black and white television set.

The "A-Team" was one of the worst written and most aggregiously over-acted shows ever produced and the cherry on the sundae was the inclusion of Mr. T as super tough, B.A. Barracus. His performances never ceased to amaze and entertain us through the beer goggles of pizza night. With 15 or 20 half drunk advertising "professionals" in one's apartment on a Thursday evening you might imagine that Fridays were our least productive days at the shop. At least during the morning hours....

At any rate, the ritual of Thursday pizza has stuck with us for better than 30 years. It's a hard stop for work on any but the most critical of Thursday projects. We're more sedate about it now that it's just the family. But once the vaccine is totally rolled out......(right...). 

At any rate I hit the edit hard yesterday. I was pleased to find that the technical stuff was right on the money so no frame-by-frame corrections were needed. I used Lightroom to convert about 2,000 raw files to medium sized Jpegs and once the process was spinning and grinding away I called it a night. 

My schedule for today called for doing the state sales tax report, getting checks to the bank and getting all the gear we used yesterday back to the shelves that keep it organized. But I've found that I'm a lot more productive if I put a bit of time and shoe leather between the shooting of a job and anything else mandatory/productive so I got up early, made coffee and a piece of whole wheat, multi-grain, sourdough toast, put some crunchy peanut butter on it then added a layer of blueberry preserves, ate breakfast, savored coffee and then headed out to the studio. I wanted to hit "upload" on the 2,000 files and get them into Smugmug.com before Ben and Belinda got up and started grabbing for their share of bandwidth...

Button pushed, gallery created,  I headed into town with a cute, happy, precocious and very able, black  Fuji X100V hanging in front of my chic sport coat. 

I was making a big loop through the downtown area when I came to this new commuter train station, adjacent to the Convention Center. I looked up at these shade constructions modeled after an Imperial Cruiser from Star Wars and noticed that the underside of each one was made up of mirrors. I thought they were funny and also visually interesting. Can you find Waldo? (the photographer...). Hint, he's in the second shot.

In a marvelous bit of "Wow! That never happens!!!" my client from yesterday has already made their selections of six different looks for each of six models. I have the list in hand and I'm changing gears back into "work mode." It's the fastest turnaround/decision-making I've ever experienced with a client. 

More from this walk in the hopper. Please stay tuned.