The Art of Photography: A Week in New York City

As I sit here in my hotel room, reflecting on the past few days, I am reminded that working with professional talent requires a unique set of skills. It's not just about capturing the perfect shot, but also about creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable and at ease. This is especially true when working with individuals who have different levels of expertise in various areas, such as hair and makeup, lighting, and more.

Over the past three days, I've had the opportunity to work on a project that has been a real challenge, but also incredibly rewarding. The studio we were using was wonderful, with a great team and a really positive energy. Despite having only three of us working together, we somehow managed to make it work, and I think this is largely due to luck and good planning.

One of the key things that helped our shoot go well was my ability to think on my feet and be flexible. When working with a small team, you need to be able to adapt quickly to any issues that arise, and I've found that experience has really helped me in this regard. Additionally, being extremely prepared is crucial when it comes to photography. Over the years, I've learned that it's essential to double-check my equipment and make sure everything is in order before heading out on a shoot.

In fact, one of the most important things I do now is take lots of pictures of my gear before each shoot, so that if I forget something later on, I can refer back to these photos to remember how it was set up. This has really helped me to streamline my process and avoid mistakes in the future.

Despite the challenges we faced during our shoot, I think what really made the experience special was the opportunity to work with such talented individuals. As a photographer, you're often working with people who are passionate about their craft, but may not have the same level of expertise as yourself in certain areas. Being able to understand and appreciate this can be incredibly valuable, and I feel like it really added an extra layer to our project.

One thing that struck me during our time in New York City was just how photogenic everything is here. From the towering skyscrapers to the bustling streets of Manhattan, there's no shortage of inspiration for photographers. And yet, as beautiful as this city is, it can also be overwhelming and stressful at times. As someone who's been living in a city like Paris or Tokyo, I've learned that it's essential to make time for personal projects and creative pursuits, even when you're feeling exhausted.

As I prepare to leave New York City and head back to Dallas, I'm excited to revisit the footage we shot during our project and see how everything came together. It's been a really fun experience, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such a talented team. Despite the challenges that arose, I think what made this shoot truly special was the chance to work with people who were passionate about their craft, and to learn from them in the process.

In the end, it's not just about capturing the perfect shot – it's about creating an experience that brings people together and inspires creativity. As a photographer, you have the power to do this, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to pursue my passion for photography in such a beautiful and vibrant city like New York.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody welcome back to another episode of the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes in this episode tonight we are broadcasting live from New York City believe it or not it's probably not live as you're probably watching this but it's live as I'm making it if that makes any sense but basically if you haven't seen the last episode I wanted to do a small series of shows here because I had a big project that had been working on in New York that wrapped up today and I wanted to chronicle some of that and I wanted to talk about what goes into it some of the thoughts behind it and share this with you and a lot of times when I do projects you know you have non-disclosure agreements you're not really allowed to talk about the project when it's going on and this project is a little different and I am allowed to talk about so I thought it'd be a great thing to kind of chronic a little bit on the show now the downside to this is that when you're actually working you have very little time to actually capture behind the scenes so what I have done is we weren't shooting I have done some b-roll in some other video that we could talk about just because that's really all you have time for so I know it's not perfect but hopefully this will give you a little bit of behind the scenes and an insight into you know when you're working on a project like this how it goes and what goes on so anyway if you haven't seen the last episode that was part one and I did that back in dallas right before I left tonight I'm coming off of three days of shooting and the project if you haven't seen the last show or you're still unclear about what it is my day job I work for an art museum and we are producing a video project and a set of stills that are going to go along with an exhibition of Islamic art that we have coming to the museum and I have the complete honor and privilege of working with a curator who is an expert in Islamic art and her name is sabiha alchemy r and she has just been a complete delight and joy to work with and the one of the upsides to what it is that I do and the kinds of projects that have work on is I tend to work on a lot of art based projects which obviously comes with the territory of an art museum and I think one of the most enjoyable things out of that is just the the the kind of people yet to work with subby has one of those people who's absolutely brilliant and what she does and I want to share a little bit of this with you now she is a curator so she's going to bring an art spective along with a lot of this the project we're working on a lot of the job and so what we are creating is for the video component which is what we've been working on we are doing a series of videos that will play in the exhibition as you walk in to give you an introduction to the Islamic art that you're about to see now this is going on in dallas texas which is where I live and obviously Islamic art is a little bit of a foreign concept in Dallas so it's really important to be able to give people a little bit of an education into what they're about to look at the objects they're about to see and what brings the cohesive nature of the exhibition's a whole end so that more or less is the driving factor of what we're doing up here and you know it's been a lot of video work and I've done some still work around it i'm going to do some more stills in New York tomorrow in the morning and we have a meet up in the afternoon so by the time you see this will then the meetup and I hope I'm sure it will have been a lot of fun so anyway I want to talk about that and I want to talk about when you're shooting some of the things you want to keep in mind for those of you who are photographers which I assume if you're watching the show you probably are and some of the things that went right and what you can kind of go by and you know just talk about this project a little bit so that's what we're gonna do today in this show and again I have you know kind of created a makeshift studio out of a hotel room here and I noticed that there's not a lot of traffic on ninth Avenue behind me but anyway it is New York and I'm trying to have a little bit of fun with that so without further ado we're going to get in and get moving with this so here we go ok so the impetus for actually coming to New York to film this was mainly out of convenience the curator that when working with sabiha lives in New York and so for her it was really you know when you get into doing an exhibition particularly if you're a curator once she's in Dallas and we start setting up for that our time is really tight so it was really easy just to book three days off come up to New York you if you watch the last episode you saw the set up abroad which is very minimal and I think one of the interesting things about this and I talk in terms of how my career is gone and being able to be adept enough to do both stills and video I think it's really important now I haven't talked a lot about video work on this show and mainly because being the art of photography and mainly we discuss a lot of still work I think for those of you who are working photographers today this is just a fact of life that it's a merging of media and that sometimes were required to do both those things at once so you know in looking at this trip and how we were setting it up and how we were in set the whole project up the name of the show is newer and spelled nur and nor translated out of Arabic means light and it was really important and one of the deciding factors in the beginning that we incorporate light is a concept because it's a concept with the show and so one of the things that really wanted to do was work with natural light now if you guys have done video before it's a lot different in still because you do have that that commitment to time that comes into it a still image is just an image in a space and time you can use flash bulbs you can use you know whatever light you're presented with and with video you have time so it does change so one of things was conceivably difficult about this is that we rented a photography studio and not a sound stage to do this on but this was really important because in the wastes of behind I we're looking at this project is we you know the underlying thing here is light and we wanted to be able to use natural it you know situations from the Sun and so I ended up using a photo studio that is a really kind of downtown I guess 25th and studio called elk studios which I would highly recommend to anybody they were very affordable they were cheaper than the sound stage which just happened to be and it was just an amazing situation they have the entire 12th floor of a small building there's two studios there's a North studio and there's a South Street we opted for the South studio because it's got West light and south light the north space has offices and other things so you're going to be dealing with a lot of noise in that situation so we opted for the South studio and the light does change during the day so you can't just set up and expect to have the same results throughout the course of the day if you're doing still photography you certainly can do this but for video work it's a lot more difficult to deal with that there's also the element of Street noise that you happen to have if you're working on a sound stage that is actually optimized for video it's generally going to be soundproofed off in a lot of and the place that we were at today was not however with what we were working with she was working with a script we used a teleprompter and she was able to read from that and so the script being only so long we were able to adapt to lighting situations the other thing we decided to do was was opted for a psych which is short for cyclomatic and basically what it is and I'll roll some b roll over the top here but if you look at the studio what we've got is essentially just this big white wall then you know has to be repainted on occasion but this is really typical you know procedure for working when you want a white background on something particularly if you're shooting still images of people or portraits where you're using full-length images and whatnot of a person you have their feet and whatever it makes it easy to photoshop things out if you were going to go into a lot of post-production and we're not we're just doing video on something like this but it was it you know just a beautiful studio a lot of natural light wonderful views of New York City not that we were incorporating a lot of that shot but it really did make a difference in an impact on the situation and on the video we were creating and so you know i think the studio was exactly right for this project i think on a lot of video projects depending on what you're doing depending on what you're having the background you don't want your light to change like that but since we're working on a white backdrop and the natural light and being able to incorporate that was so important that was a big deal I did bring two artificial lights with me I brought to the the I can I think it's the model I be 500 or whatever and that's simply to just get rid of shadows in the face and use a little bit of fill light and make sure things are even doubt these two lights I like a lot because you can control the color temperature on and you condemn them and that makes things really easy because really all those lights are supposed to do is supplement the natural light you're already getting however in a room or in a studio when you have natural light the conditions will change on you during the day and these lights were absolutely perfect for that and at the same time being very minimal and very in you know a gear perspective so that was the first thing the other thing I want to talk about is just in general when we approach this I want to talk about a couple things that I think are really important and I want you to think about as a photographer that made this work really well that I wanted to that I learned from this and I will be the first to admit that you know we're all learning all the time and we get better you're only as good as your last shoot was not whether that stills whether it's video whatever that happens to be and so one of the things that I learned off the bat that was a pretty big deal is because i work for a museum and is a non-profit sometimes you're very constrained on budgets and i think a lot of you guys can identify with that because I mean who isn't constrained on a budget and when you are constrained on a budget that's not a bad thing because if you're able to just throw money at every situation you're not forced to be very creative sometimes and one of the things that are really like about restraints like that is sometimes you have to solve a problem particularly not a small shoot like this where there's really only three people in the room but you have to solve problems because you don't have that money to throw at it but one thing that I learned from this is I realized a couple days before we left that I did not have an assistant on this project and I started getting a little bit nervous about it because you know being in New York City and being in a situation that I'm not familiar with if anything goes wrong and you don't have an extra set of hands it could be very problematic and so I had made a couple suggestions to sobe how we were talking about very limited budget and she made a few calls called somebody who you know could do her a favor and we ended up getting a delightful surprise I got an assistant I never worked with before which I was a little nervous about but this kid blake wilson was amazing he lives in New York he does video work and he just like here's what a good assistant does they show up and they know how the production works on a number of levels and you don't really have to ask them to do very much they know what's coming up next and Blake is able to kind of grasp that concept and just move with it and so it's really important and if you're just starting out and you're starting to do professional work don't let that be a hindrance so to speak I think it's really important to get the right help and somebody who's really good as a production assistant just knows what to do they do this all the time Blake certainly does he's been on number sheets I've worked as a production assistant before on things and I have to remember that I would do the same thing anyway Blake was just fabulous and I really cannot say enough good stuff about him when we got up here on day one I went over B&H to pick up a teleprompter because we need a teleprompter for the project teleprompter that would hold an ipad still not a very inexpensive thing but what happened was I went out the night before i purchased the teleprompter brought it back to the hotel room and I opened it up that night just to make sure I kind of knew what was going on I wanted to look at the instruction sheet at least because this was making me nervous because you're walking into a situation with a piece of equipment you've never used before and even though it teleprompter is fairly simple it's going to run off of an iPad but still it is you know if you don't know what teleprompter is it sits in front of the camera glass and it projects the script up so the individual that you're filming can read the script their technique should be that they keep their eyes in the center of the lens and you know you don't know that they're reading it's what newscasters do and a lot of things and so anyway I picked up this teleprompter brought it back to the hotel open it up and it was missing parts it was just a you know unfortunate accident of packaging so to speak and so we were missing unfortunately some essential parts the ground glass that the thing reflects off of and we were missing the allen wrenches that actually piece this thing together so by the time I get back to my hotel room B&H is closed i'm starting to stress out a little bit so okay fine let's get some sleep we'll get up early we get there the next day pouring down snow the next morning I make it over to the studio I got there early and I usually like to get there an hour early just to make any arrangements that need to be made before anybody shows up so went ahead and was able to set up a lot of my lights and my stuff and then Blake showed up and I said I have an important errand for you to run anyway my point being is you have somebody who understands photography and understands equipment he was able to while I was able to continue setting up and meet sabiha he went back over to B&H was able to make the exchange we had to deal with him on the phone a little bit to make sure they knew he was coming and representing me and B&H couldn't have been cooler about the deal B&H if you're not familiar is the camera mothership in New York City and I've shopped with B&H online for years and when I come to New York I usually go over there just at least have a look around and they really are amazing their customer service was excellent and anyway but having that extra set of hands and somebody who knows how to go to a camera superstore make an exchange has done that before it's saved I mean if I hadn't had Blake on the job it would have ended up costing me a cup hours in time and you just can't do that and I say that because when you're working with people depends on who you're working with right so if you're working with talent that is our people who are actors or professional people who do voiceovers it's one thing because they have been on productions enough to know how that works when you're working with an art curator and I do not mean this to be insulting at all but you're dealing with somebody who just doesn't have a whole lot of professional experience within that so it's really important that when you're working with people like that that don't have that experience that you make it easy on them that you make things quick you don't make them sit around because what will happen is they'll lose energy or they'll get nervous about something and everything can change and that's not an insult on them and all that's just a fact of how it works and so having that help being able to send like over to do that and then when once he came back it's like I mean I never even had asked him to move a light if something's not right there's a weird shadow we're both looking at the screen he just goes up and fixes it and that is the mark of a real good assistant that's able to do those things and i really recommend i am certainly not above doing production assistant work and I do it every now and then if it's for the right people and if you've never done that I highly suggest you get on a job where you can do that just kind of learn that and learn how to anticipate stuff because it's all really important to how the shoot works out and how everything works and just to expand a little bit too when I was talking about working with non-professional talent and like i said i do not mean that for that to be an insult at all because it's not sabiha was excellent she picked up the technique of reading the teleprompter really quickly and so there's a lot of things that you know just went really naturally well but it is important that you're able to when you're on a shoot whether it's video are still or whatever you're doing a lot of your job as a photographer is making people feel comfortable and that is a true skill and because if the person that I'm working with it's not comfortable none of it's going to work the shot won't work and you know you're just dealing with that when you're dealing with professional Talent it's a different level that you're working with and they're going to get the shot right but you know when you're working with people who have talent in other areas it's more difficult to get it going but that's a real thing you have to be sensitive about and so a lot of time was spent making sure little things like you know a hair and makeup just are they comfortable and you got to make sure there's food there occasionally you can't work a whole day as we tend to do of an 8-hour shift and have people be uncomfortable so anyway what I'm saying is the last three days have gone extremely well and the studio was wonderful the little team that I was working with there were only three of us but we were really made a good match and a lot of that just happened to be luck it just kind of came together and I'm you know I wish I could say that about every job because some of them aren't quite like that but I think that you can maintain a level of consistency when you're dealing with shots if you can kind of think things through you can work with people and you can be somewhat flexible on the fly those are things that really helped a shot go well and the other thing too and this just comes with doing it over and over is just being extremely prepared I have gotten to a point now and I had to be on this trip where I used to like just have a bunch of gear and I throw it in a bag and inevitably I would forget CF cards ID forget SD cards and forget cables sometimes and you mess up enough on that and you learn that you need to get cable ties and bags and you need have everything put together and straightened away and the wonderful thing about it too is we live in a day and age where your cell phone has a camera on it so take lots of pictures of your stuff when you do a shoot before you tear down go ahead and I did this today go ahead and take a ton of pictures of your setup as many as you can because one of the things that you're going to do later on down the line is you're going to forget how something was packed you're going to forget how something was set up you're going to forget how you solve some problem and you just might have the photograph in there of the last shoot where you remember how you did it if you don't have that photo sometimes you don't remember what you did and so that's a really important thing to do is to go write those things down and make sure you've got it so anyway on that is essentially how the week has gone and how the project is gone so far so in closing this has been a lot of fun it has been a pretty cool week and it what's kind of weird is you guys can probably tell on this is like when you're trying to document everything in a podcast that you do as well it becomes a little person and I hope that I've you know conveyed this pretty well what we'll do is we will revisit all this once i get back to Dallas once we get some of the project going and and the like and we'll look at some of the footage we've got and some of the things that we've done and I've believe it or not in a little spare time I've had since I've been here been able to do a little personal work and I think that's really important to especially if you're in a city like New York City or whether you're in London or whether it's Tokyo or Paris or what you know if you're going to a place that is so photogenic like that and so much fun to deal with I think it's really important to keep that personal work alive and sometimes it's hard because you know you get to the end of the day you're tired you're beat you're ready just to get some sleep and get on to the next day and even if you can make 10 15 minutes for that and get one or two shots do Instagram do Twitter whatever it is that you like to put images up I think that's really important so anyway right now I'm going to close this off the hotel room has been cramped but wonderful and I have this weird blurry street view behind me but this has been New York City and this has been a whole lot of fun and hope I can do it again one day very soon I was up here probably at six seven months ago so hopefully I'm on a cycle so we'll see so once again guys that's been the art of photography and thank you for watching we'll see you next time latereverybody welcome back to another episode of the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes in this episode tonight we are broadcasting live from New York City believe it or not it's probably not live as you're probably watching this but it's live as I'm making it if that makes any sense but basically if you haven't seen the last episode I wanted to do a small series of shows here because I had a big project that had been working on in New York that wrapped up today and I wanted to chronicle some of that and I wanted to talk about what goes into it some of the thoughts behind it and share this with you and a lot of times when I do projects you know you have non-disclosure agreements you're not really allowed to talk about the project when it's going on and this project is a little different and I am allowed to talk about so I thought it'd be a great thing to kind of chronic a little bit on the show now the downside to this is that when you're actually working you have very little time to actually capture behind the scenes so what I have done is we weren't shooting I have done some b-roll in some other video that we could talk about just because that's really all you have time for so I know it's not perfect but hopefully this will give you a little bit of behind the scenes and an insight into you know when you're working on a project like this how it goes and what goes on so anyway if you haven't seen the last episode that was part one and I did that back in dallas right before I left tonight I'm coming off of three days of shooting and the project if you haven't seen the last show or you're still unclear about what it is my day job I work for an art museum and we are producing a video project and a set of stills that are going to go along with an exhibition of Islamic art that we have coming to the museum and I have the complete honor and privilege of working with a curator who is an expert in Islamic art and her name is sabiha alchemy r and she has just been a complete delight and joy to work with and the one of the upsides to what it is that I do and the kinds of projects that have work on is I tend to work on a lot of art based projects which obviously comes with the territory of an art museum and I think one of the most enjoyable things out of that is just the the the kind of people yet to work with subby has one of those people who's absolutely brilliant and what she does and I want to share a little bit of this with you now she is a curator so she's going to bring an art spective along with a lot of this the project we're working on a lot of the job and so what we are creating is for the video component which is what we've been working on we are doing a series of videos that will play in the exhibition as you walk in to give you an introduction to the Islamic art that you're about to see now this is going on in dallas texas which is where I live and obviously Islamic art is a little bit of a foreign concept in Dallas so it's really important to be able to give people a little bit of an education into what they're about to look at the objects they're about to see and what brings the cohesive nature of the exhibition's a whole end so that more or less is the driving factor of what we're doing up here and you know it's been a lot of video work and I've done some still work around it i'm going to do some more stills in New York tomorrow in the morning and we have a meet up in the afternoon so by the time you see this will then the meetup and I hope I'm sure it will have been a lot of fun so anyway I want to talk about that and I want to talk about when you're shooting some of the things you want to keep in mind for those of you who are photographers which I assume if you're watching the show you probably are and some of the things that went right and what you can kind of go by and you know just talk about this project a little bit so that's what we're gonna do today in this show and again I have you know kind of created a makeshift studio out of a hotel room here and I noticed that there's not a lot of traffic on ninth Avenue behind me but anyway it is New York and I'm trying to have a little bit of fun with that so without further ado we're going to get in and get moving with this so here we go ok so the impetus for actually coming to New York to film this was mainly out of convenience the curator that when working with sabiha lives in New York and so for her it was really you know when you get into doing an exhibition particularly if you're a curator once she's in Dallas and we start setting up for that our time is really tight so it was really easy just to book three days off come up to New York you if you watch the last episode you saw the set up abroad which is very minimal and I think one of the interesting things about this and I talk in terms of how my career is gone and being able to be adept enough to do both stills and video I think it's really important now I haven't talked a lot about video work on this show and mainly because being the art of photography and mainly we discuss a lot of still work I think for those of you who are working photographers today this is just a fact of life that it's a merging of media and that sometimes were required to do both those things at once so you know in looking at this trip and how we were setting it up and how we were in set the whole project up the name of the show is newer and spelled nur and nor translated out of Arabic means light and it was really important and one of the deciding factors in the beginning that we incorporate light is a concept because it's a concept with the show and so one of the things that really wanted to do was work with natural light now if you guys have done video before it's a lot different in still because you do have that that commitment to time that comes into it a still image is just an image in a space and time you can use flash bulbs you can use you know whatever light you're presented with and with video you have time so it does change so one of things was conceivably difficult about this is that we rented a photography studio and not a sound stage to do this on but this was really important because in the wastes of behind I we're looking at this project is we you know the underlying thing here is light and we wanted to be able to use natural it you know situations from the Sun and so I ended up using a photo studio that is a really kind of downtown I guess 25th and studio called elk studios which I would highly recommend to anybody they were very affordable they were cheaper than the sound stage which just happened to be and it was just an amazing situation they have the entire 12th floor of a small building there's two studios there's a North studio and there's a South Street we opted for the South studio because it's got West light and south light the north space has offices and other things so you're going to be dealing with a lot of noise in that situation so we opted for the South studio and the light does change during the day so you can't just set up and expect to have the same results throughout the course of the day if you're doing still photography you certainly can do this but for video work it's a lot more difficult to deal with that there's also the element of Street noise that you happen to have if you're working on a sound stage that is actually optimized for video it's generally going to be soundproofed off in a lot of and the place that we were at today was not however with what we were working with she was working with a script we used a teleprompter and she was able to read from that and so the script being only so long we were able to adapt to lighting situations the other thing we decided to do was was opted for a psych which is short for cyclomatic and basically what it is and I'll roll some b roll over the top here but if you look at the studio what we've got is essentially just this big white wall then you know has to be repainted on occasion but this is really typical you know procedure for working when you want a white background on something particularly if you're shooting still images of people or portraits where you're using full-length images and whatnot of a person you have their feet and whatever it makes it easy to photoshop things out if you were going to go into a lot of post-production and we're not we're just doing video on something like this but it was it you know just a beautiful studio a lot of natural light wonderful views of New York City not that we were incorporating a lot of that shot but it really did make a difference in an impact on the situation and on the video we were creating and so you know i think the studio was exactly right for this project i think on a lot of video projects depending on what you're doing depending on what you're having the background you don't want your light to change like that but since we're working on a white backdrop and the natural light and being able to incorporate that was so important that was a big deal I did bring two artificial lights with me I brought to the the I can I think it's the model I be 500 or whatever and that's simply to just get rid of shadows in the face and use a little bit of fill light and make sure things are even doubt these two lights I like a lot because you can control the color temperature on and you condemn them and that makes things really easy because really all those lights are supposed to do is supplement the natural light you're already getting however in a room or in a studio when you have natural light the conditions will change on you during the day and these lights were absolutely perfect for that and at the same time being very minimal and very in you know a gear perspective so that was the first thing the other thing I want to talk about is just in general when we approach this I want to talk about a couple things that I think are really important and I want you to think about as a photographer that made this work really well that I wanted to that I learned from this and I will be the first to admit that you know we're all learning all the time and we get better you're only as good as your last shoot was not whether that stills whether it's video whatever that happens to be and so one of the things that I learned off the bat that was a pretty big deal is because i work for a museum and is a non-profit sometimes you're very constrained on budgets and i think a lot of you guys can identify with that because I mean who isn't constrained on a budget and when you are constrained on a budget that's not a bad thing because if you're able to just throw money at every situation you're not forced to be very creative sometimes and one of the things that are really like about restraints like that is sometimes you have to solve a problem particularly not a small shoot like this where there's really only three people in the room but you have to solve problems because you don't have that money to throw at it but one thing that I learned from this is I realized a couple days before we left that I did not have an assistant on this project and I started getting a little bit nervous about it because you know being in New York City and being in a situation that I'm not familiar with if anything goes wrong and you don't have an extra set of hands it could be very problematic and so I had made a couple suggestions to sobe how we were talking about very limited budget and she made a few calls called somebody who you know could do her a favor and we ended up getting a delightful surprise I got an assistant I never worked with before which I was a little nervous about but this kid blake wilson was amazing he lives in New York he does video work and he just like here's what a good assistant does they show up and they know how the production works on a number of levels and you don't really have to ask them to do very much they know what's coming up next and Blake is able to kind of grasp that concept and just move with it and so it's really important and if you're just starting out and you're starting to do professional work don't let that be a hindrance so to speak I think it's really important to get the right help and somebody who's really good as a production assistant just knows what to do they do this all the time Blake certainly does he's been on number sheets I've worked as a production assistant before on things and I have to remember that I would do the same thing anyway Blake was just fabulous and I really cannot say enough good stuff about him when we got up here on day one I went over B&H to pick up a teleprompter because we need a teleprompter for the project teleprompter that would hold an ipad still not a very inexpensive thing but what happened was I went out the night before i purchased the teleprompter brought it back to the hotel room and I opened it up that night just to make sure I kind of knew what was going on I wanted to look at the instruction sheet at least because this was making me nervous because you're walking into a situation with a piece of equipment you've never used before and even though it teleprompter is fairly simple it's going to run off of an iPad but still it is you know if you don't know what teleprompter is it sits in front of the camera glass and it projects the script up so the individual that you're filming can read the script their technique should be that they keep their eyes in the center of the lens and you know you don't know that they're reading it's what newscasters do and a lot of things and so anyway I picked up this teleprompter brought it back to the hotel open it up and it was missing parts it was just a you know unfortunate accident of packaging so to speak and so we were missing unfortunately some essential parts the ground glass that the thing reflects off of and we were missing the allen wrenches that actually piece this thing together so by the time I get back to my hotel room B&H is closed i'm starting to stress out a little bit so okay fine let's get some sleep we'll get up early we get there the next day pouring down snow the next morning I make it over to the studio I got there early and I usually like to get there an hour early just to make any arrangements that need to be made before anybody shows up so went ahead and was able to set up a lot of my lights and my stuff and then Blake showed up and I said I have an important errand for you to run anyway my point being is you have somebody who understands photography and understands equipment he was able to while I was able to continue setting up and meet sabiha he went back over to B&H was able to make the exchange we had to deal with him on the phone a little bit to make sure they knew he was coming and representing me and B&H couldn't have been cooler about the deal B&H if you're not familiar is the camera mothership in New York City and I've shopped with B&H online for years and when I come to New York I usually go over there just at least have a look around and they really are amazing their customer service was excellent and anyway but having that extra set of hands and somebody who knows how to go to a camera superstore make an exchange has done that before it's saved I mean if I hadn't had Blake on the job it would have ended up costing me a cup hours in time and you just can't do that and I say that because when you're working with people depends on who you're working with right so if you're working with talent that is our people who are actors or professional people who do voiceovers it's one thing because they have been on productions enough to know how that works when you're working with an art curator and I do not mean this to be insulting at all but you're dealing with somebody who just doesn't have a whole lot of professional experience within that so it's really important that when you're working with people like that that don't have that experience that you make it easy on them that you make things quick you don't make them sit around because what will happen is they'll lose energy or they'll get nervous about something and everything can change and that's not an insult on them and all that's just a fact of how it works and so having that help being able to send like over to do that and then when once he came back it's like I mean I never even had asked him to move a light if something's not right there's a weird shadow we're both looking at the screen he just goes up and fixes it and that is the mark of a real good assistant that's able to do those things and i really recommend i am certainly not above doing production assistant work and I do it every now and then if it's for the right people and if you've never done that I highly suggest you get on a job where you can do that just kind of learn that and learn how to anticipate stuff because it's all really important to how the shoot works out and how everything works and just to expand a little bit too when I was talking about working with non-professional talent and like i said i do not mean that for that to be an insult at all because it's not sabiha was excellent she picked up the technique of reading the teleprompter really quickly and so there's a lot of things that you know just went really naturally well but it is important that you're able to when you're on a shoot whether it's video are still or whatever you're doing a lot of your job as a photographer is making people feel comfortable and that is a true skill and because if the person that I'm working with it's not comfortable none of it's going to work the shot won't work and you know you're just dealing with that when you're dealing with professional Talent it's a different level that you're working with and they're going to get the shot right but you know when you're working with people who have talent in other areas it's more difficult to get it going but that's a real thing you have to be sensitive about and so a lot of time was spent making sure little things like you know a hair and makeup just are they comfortable and you got to make sure there's food there occasionally you can't work a whole day as we tend to do of an 8-hour shift and have people be uncomfortable so anyway what I'm saying is the last three days have gone extremely well and the studio was wonderful the little team that I was working with there were only three of us but we were really made a good match and a lot of that just happened to be luck it just kind of came together and I'm you know I wish I could say that about every job because some of them aren't quite like that but I think that you can maintain a level of consistency when you're dealing with shots if you can kind of think things through you can work with people and you can be somewhat flexible on the fly those are things that really helped a shot go well and the other thing too and this just comes with doing it over and over is just being extremely prepared I have gotten to a point now and I had to be on this trip where I used to like just have a bunch of gear and I throw it in a bag and inevitably I would forget CF cards ID forget SD cards and forget cables sometimes and you mess up enough on that and you learn that you need to get cable ties and bags and you need have everything put together and straightened away and the wonderful thing about it too is we live in a day and age where your cell phone has a camera on it so take lots of pictures of your stuff when you do a shoot before you tear down go ahead and I did this today go ahead and take a ton of pictures of your setup as many as you can because one of the things that you're going to do later on down the line is you're going to forget how something was packed you're going to forget how something was set up you're going to forget how you solve some problem and you just might have the photograph in there of the last shoot where you remember how you did it if you don't have that photo sometimes you don't remember what you did and so that's a really important thing to do is to go write those things down and make sure you've got it so anyway on that is essentially how the week has gone and how the project is gone so far so in closing this has been a lot of fun it has been a pretty cool week and it what's kind of weird is you guys can probably tell on this is like when you're trying to document everything in a podcast that you do as well it becomes a little person and I hope that I've you know conveyed this pretty well what we'll do is we will revisit all this once i get back to Dallas once we get some of the project going and and the like and we'll look at some of the footage we've got and some of the things that we've done and I've believe it or not in a little spare time I've had since I've been here been able to do a little personal work and I think that's really important to especially if you're in a city like New York City or whether you're in London or whether it's Tokyo or Paris or what you know if you're going to a place that is so photogenic like that and so much fun to deal with I think it's really important to keep that personal work alive and sometimes it's hard because you know you get to the end of the day you're tired you're beat you're ready just to get some sleep and get on to the next day and even if you can make 10 15 minutes for that and get one or two shots do Instagram do Twitter whatever it is that you like to put images up I think that's really important so anyway right now I'm going to close this off the hotel room has been cramped but wonderful and I have this weird blurry street view behind me but this has been New York City and this has been a whole lot of fun and hope I can do it again one day very soon I was up here probably at six seven months ago so hopefully I'm on a cycle so we'll see so once again guys that's been the art of photography and thank you for watching we'll see you next time later\n"