For this sample, the first thing I needed to do for each photo was take them. I became familiar with the Canon 5D Mark III and external flash attachment if indoors, which is arguably the most important part of my job: knowing the equipment. After being told a location and a time, I get into my car and drive. Not all assignments for Longwood are on their campus. For the high ropes, I needed to travel to Hampden Sydney College where I met up with members of an outdoor club to hike up into the forested parts of the College's property.
Sometimes my job requires me to look the part. At the LCVA gala, I needed to wear dress clothes but still needed to wear clothing that wouldn't sweat through while working or impair my arm flexibility. When an event is huge or performative, being settle is crucial. Sometimes the reason is to maintain the atmosphere of the event, other times it is because you might alert your subjects they are being photographed and ruin the quality of the image.
After an event is done, I travel back to my house where I import all the images I've taken for the night and sort them into their own separate folders. To maintain order, I cycle out photos from events every two months before they start overwhelming the storage on the computer and make the file section look disorganized. After uploading the photos I open Adobe Bridge to separate the best photos from the worst. I determine this based off of technical errors in the image or subject error where the subject doesn't fit the standard of a good image, usually because of faces being drawn to undistinguished positions.
Once all the photos are separated into good and bad, I transfer the good ones over to Adobe Lightroom. Anywhere between 25 and 500 photos can be edited per event, So most of my job consists of me editing each photo. Longwood does not mind being creative, as long as it isn't black or white or overly edited. For the Theatre photos below I actually used a film preset to give the show new colors and fade them from being too candid. My preferred type of photo is usually artsy, and Longwood doesn't mind at all.
After each photo si edited, it is ready to import them to Zenfolio (or Longwood Photo Archive as many people know it as). From here I choose a folder I believe the photos belong in and upload them. Just in case I'm mistaken about an events folder location, after every upload I send a link to my boss, Courtney Vogel. This is just so she is aware of all the locations of the folders.
After this the event is completely done and covered. I will sometimes see my photos appear 2-8 weeks after I first covered it. This is because the extension of my department frames out a semester to a years worth of content to publish for advertising and social media.
