Friday

Today I went through an album for Sara that she was sending to a customer and made sure that each picture fit  in the category it was supposed to be in. For example, I made sure that the pictures labeled detials did not have any portraits in there by accident. Also, Sara had a friend come to teach her how to become more organized with her computer. He showed her how to backup files and how to categorize everything, so that it is all easily accessable. He taught her ways to be more efficient with her file names. He taught her all about organizing a business. I feel that throughout this process I have learned a lot about how to run your own business especially since I was pretty much helping Sara restart her business in PA. Also I feel that the ability to be in an actual working environment is beneficial instead of just being in school  I was able to get real life experience.

Thursday

Yesterday I finished up going through the wedding album favorites and putting them in orders, so that Sara could upload them to her blog. After I was done with that she had me go back through the vendor list and visit the vendor websites and put the vendors in categories based on what I thought would be the best vendors to contact first. I used a color coated system. The ones that I ranked higher had good lighting and were mainly outdoors since that is what Sara likes. After that I used another color to mark the second best as well as color to mark venues that are museums, galleries, or theatres. 

Wenesday

Today Sara told me that she needed to update her website because the images she has up are old. She had me use lightroom and go through five engagement favorite albums, her favorite photographs from each wedding shoot, and choose out around twenty from each one to feature as engagement shoots on her website. Each engagement shoot had over a hundred photographs in the albums, so it was not easy to just choose twenty. Then I went through and reordered the images that I chose so that they made sequencial sense as well as putting the best photographs first. That is because when people are on her site they most likely are not going to spend very long looking, so she wants her best to be first. After I was done with that I began to work on going through the five weddings that she gave me. I got through one and half because one had 160 images and the other had around 700 images in the favorites albums.

Tuesday

On Tuesday I continued working on Sara's logo. I did a lot of drawings of different options. It was fun and interesting to play with the idea of growing tree photography as a logo. It is interesting to think in the mindset of someone that is looking for a photographer. The logo is really important because it is one the first things that a person will see and it is a big part of marketing yourself and what you want to do. It is really hard to create something that has a lasting wow factor is what I am learning because in the beginning you like it but once you stay looking at the logo it becomes just okay. Also Sara has a lot of different ideas of how she wants to represent herself and that also makes it harder because your work needs to please the other person and what they want not just what you like.

Monday

Today Sara told me that she was having a graphic designer from California redesign her logo, but that the designer was not creating a logo that she loved. Sara and I talked about what she wanted to see and she showed me the inspirations that she sent the designer. Sara and I agreed that the designer just seemed to be copying almost exactly what Sara was sending her. Sara wanted them to use the inspiration as a starting point and make a creative and new logo from them. Sara had me look online for inspiration as well as add color to one of the designs that the person from CA sent her. Also, she had me start doing sketches of logos that I thought she would because I now have a sense of what she wants as well as what will attract the sort of customers she wants. Another thing I did today was go on the wedding blogs to see if anything new was up. On Green Wedding Shoes Wedding Blog there was a new wedding, but the photographs were extremely over exposed and soft. When I showed it to Sara and told her who the photographer was she said that she knew of them and that they always had very light images, but that the images on the blog now were even more extreme than normal. I really did not like the images because they were really hard to see and all of the white detial was lost becaue it blended in with the things behind it.

Saturday

Today I did research for the vendor list again. It is getting difficult to find many more vendors in the PA area that are also people who Sara would want to work with. Sara does not want me to find traditional wedding vendors, but the vendors that are more whimsical and untraditional. This seems to be the way a lot of weddings are going now, especially in California. The trend especially stands out when I look through the popular blogs because most of the popular blogs are not completely traditional weddings. Also I looked through the popular blogs to see any new posts. Once wed had a couple cute new engagement shoots up, but none of the blogs had anything that would help Sara get her name out.

Friday

Yesterday Sara and I edited the engagement shoot in NYC that I went with her to. We went through the images and selected the ones we thought were the best and that the bride anad groom would like. We did color corrections on all of the images using lightroom and also used photoshop to fix some flaws in some of the images. For example the girl had this lump from her belt under her shirt and so we went through the images and took out the lump. It is amazing how much you can fix with photoshop. After we were done working on the images in photoshop we put them back into lightroom and then exported and uploaded them to a private album on her blog. Her logo was put onto the images through the upload and we put it in a private album because after we sent and email to the couple with a password that would allow them to view and order prints of images. Also we discussed how I was going to most likely start sending out emails to vendors in PA next week. We were talking about the most efficient way to do that and how many vendors to send the email to for starters because she does not want to get too many emails all at once.
This week I did more editing and learned a lot more about the programs used in photography because I had more hands on experience with the programs.