I went to Malaga…
Been rather eventful few weeks, after coming back from a 5-day content creation trip to Malaga, I came home with a new sense of energy and drive.
Whilst travelling over the last few years, I have often really missed being at home and spending time with people at home. I landed back home after a successful 2 days of gathering content to a huge drive and want to go and get everything done.
My sole reason for going to Malaga was to find out what it’s like to travel with my equipment and also to try experiencing working with models who do not speak fluent English. It’s a skill in itself to be able to take great photos of models and bring out the best in them, but to go to another country and meet people who barely speak any English and manage to get good shots with them is another task altogether.
I haven’t as of yet put the video together and done all the editing, but I have planned for later on this week to do it all but here is a little recap of what I did whilst I was out there…
Check out my Malaga Vlog Here:
Product Planner:
I recently bought a product planner. I am terrible at keeping myself focused on one goal or ticking off a list of important things that need to be done. I decided to buy it to see if I could organise my life better to make sure I wasn’t sitting at home every day just watching videos and doing work when I needed to.
I haven’t taken the self-employed path to just charge more for my time and do less when I want to. I have done it to see if I can maximise my potential as a human being and eventually do something big to make a difference in the world. A weakness of mine is self-organisation, I am great at being in charge of a team and achieving a target, but when it came to myself I never truly has a path or a way to achieve my goal, it was always about just doing what I could do there and then to achieve something. So being at home I could now focus myself and regular have a list of big – small tasks to get done over the week so that I can see that I am moving forward.
The productivity planner itself has a really interesting technique that I had heard of before but didn’t really know how it works. It basically breaks down your tasks into 25min sections. The aim of it is that you have up to 5 x 25min sessions to complete the task, with scheduled 5 min breaks in-between each session. This way you keep productive but also give yourself regular chances to get up and walk or stop staring at your screen for so long. It’s called the Pomodoro technique and so far, when I have used it I have been very productive.
I may not always stick so true to the 25 min rule, as for instance an important photo shoot or video shoot my take me 2-3 hours then adding travel on top, you can’t really record that accurately, but what I can do is make that my main goal for the day, then off a list of smaller tasks that I can get done and record the time frame in which it has taken me to get done.
It will take me a long time to adopt this method into a full-time daily thing as I am a tad forgetful and often get so excited about doing certain things that I put it off until I find time to write in it.
Photoshoot Day:
So Wednesday and Thursday for me were all about getting everything sorted at home to make a nice clean place for me to work from and for Jade to come home to. I also had a list of emails and editing to get done so over those two days I got loads done and felt so much better within myself. Friday came and I had arranged a shoot with the lovely Sophie Austin at Ripped Gym in Basildon.
This was a chance for me to achieve a few things with my time:
A:- to get some new advertising images.
B:- to test and film a video of Sophie with my new camera
C:- shoot with someone with a high following again to hopefully give myself the chance to boost my following and gain some new clients.
The shoot went incredibly well and by the responses that Sophie and I received on Instagram, I think we did a good job.
Here is a link to the video for you to check out.
P.s I would love to know what you think about it.
Also, I put together a few of the edited images here for you to see.
I get a lot of happiness from working with new clients and being able to give them something that they haven’t had or seen before. Also from this shoot which I did at my OWN expense, I have hopefully managed to land myself some work with other local businesses to help advertise their brands so was 100% worth me doing.
Not everyone will get the opportunity to be able to work with people with large followings as you do have to spend a bit of time working up to being able to shoot with them but when you do get the chance, I hope it works out for you as well as it has done for me.
Moving forward into this week, I am planning on getting a lot of my editing done and getting up straight with everything. You may think that being a photographer, you’ll be photographing every day, but realistically I think I will end up with around 80-120 photoshoots over the entire year, that would entire roughly 50-100 days worth of editing plus advertising/ accounting/ Planning/ running the business. If I sit around and think of what I could be doing, I will never turn those moments from what I could do’s into what I have done. Take every opportunity you can to make things happen.
FEB 3rd 2018
Photography Meet Up:
I am planning over the next few days to post a free meet up to allow people to come along and meet other photographers & videographers as well as models and people who are interested in meeting like-minded people to make more shots and opportunities happen.
Most likely in Crawley, but will plan a location in the next day or two…
If you would be interested in coming to my meet up contact me:
Ben@benmarkphotography.com
