Without a doubt, Norway is expensive. Once you've gotten over the initial shock of converting the prices from Kroner into Dollars and gasping with disbelief, then converting it once again just to be sure you didn't miss the decimal place, the concept of living here becomes an expensive normality that you just have to accept. Really, for some things it's not that bad compared to the San Juan Island, yet for others it is frightening. Here are some examples:
Milk (1 litre): $2.30
Cheese (480g, about 1lb): $7.54
Cider (0.5ml can): $5.85
Bacon (8 rashers/150g): $7.50
Here's the one that will make all the US readers cringe: $8.64 a gallon for gas. :(
I guess I have made my point: Norway is pricey. Which is why I question my intelligence for transporting all my photographic gear (strobes, soft boxes, stands.) here thinking I could find a small studio to rent and continue my portfolio development? It didn't take very long to figure out that this idea was unrealistic, even though I did find one Fashion Photographer who was willing to rent me his studio, and discovering the local photographic store had a studio in its basement. Aside from the high studio rental costs, the logistics of finding and organising models/make up artists seemed overwhelming. Everyone here speaks English, yet how to go about bringing everyone together? There was no Model Mayhem or One Model Place to trawl through for models and build contacts. I had done one studio shoot with a professional photographer back in April, this was perhaps just enough experience to set up on my own in the States, but here I was feeling more than a little out of my comfort zone.
So I hit the web and started looking for photographic training courses that I could go on outside of Norway. With extensive researching, I found three possible opportunities for learning more about fashion photography:
Up To Date Academy: Which offer two schools run at various dates during the year, a twelve day course and a more intensive five week course. The most attractive aspect of this school is that it is held in Milan, Italy. Unfortunately incorporating this into my tight work schedule was nigh on impossible.
London College of Communication: Offers a week long "Fashion Photography Practise" course in London, but the next class wasn't till March. Somehow I didn't think I was going to last that long at work without some sort of distraction outside of the office.
(Note: November at Sperry Drilling Services, Norway was absolutely horrendous. First official day in my new job and I walked into the 8am morning meeting at Conoco Phillips to be hit with a tool failure offshore. What that means is that the equipment down hole that is used to measure and evaluate the well bore stopped working, and therefore the drilling of the well has to be stopped until the equipment has been retrieved and replaced. Typically this can take anywhere up to 24 hours or even longer if we have no backup equipment available. A day of rig time equates to about $328,000! Yikes!
Okay, not a great start for the new boy in town but I managed to struggle through it. Alas, I had another tool failure on the third day, then on the fifth, then on the twelfth, fourteenth, and twenty second days. Total downtime attributable to Sperry was 13 DAYS!!!! Normally we measure downtime in hours, so having 316 hours downtime was truly exceptional and technically atrocious. To cut a long story short, we ultimately lost this contract to our competitor, Schlumberger.)
Bruce Smith Photography: I had talked on the phone to Bruce a while ago about attending one of his Fashion Workshops in London, the plan being to attend on my way home from Siberia one of those times. He runs workshops all around the world in Studio and Location Fashion Photography, with his base being in London, and as luck would have it he was having a class in a few days time. Thankfully, both my assigned rigs were in-between wells so I could easily take the time off from work and travel to the UK. A quick visit to Amazon got us (Liziee and Cameron were coming too) tickets and a car to London.
From talking to Bruce previously and watching a couple of his videos that show him at work I knew I was going into a high energy classroom. Bruce, without insulting him, is the classic stereotype of what we perceive a fashion photographer to be like. The constant banter of requests ("move your hand here, look to me, yes, yes, YES!"), the camera that never stops firing, the flamboyant gesturing... all this makes watching him work delightfully theatrical. Yet despite what you may think, all these clichéd actions really do work. Somewhere along the shoot, even when the model is visibly fed up and no longer responding, he pushes again and again and again until something magical happens: suddenly there is an invisible connection between model and photographer, and every shot seems to be perfect.
It's not the type of fashion photographer that I want to be, but his results speak for themselves, he produces beautiful work.
From the days when I used to race motorcycles, I am fond of Keith Code's financial analogy for riding motorcycles fast: "you have $1 of concentration and only so many ways to spend that dollar." This same can be said for my concentration in the studio. At the moment I am spending 95 cents in making sure I am taking pictures without cutting the models head/legs/arms off, or letting the camera fire without the flash, or just trying to remember to breathe! So far I finish a few minutes of shooting mentally exhausted, and I achieve nowhere near the level of communication that I want to have with the model. I need to build a lot more confidence before I actually can produce the results what I want. The ideas of the shapes I want to create usually evaporate after a few seconds into the session, as the model decides what she wants to do, how she wants to move, and we are lost down a road of random photographs hoping to catch something beautiful.
So despite my disappointment with not capturing the images that I wanted to, I did come away with a few images that I am pleased with. More than that, the class showed me how a "test shoot" should work, and gave me the insight and experience to perhaps handle that sort of day on my own. (Test shoot means when new models are hired by an agency they require photographs for their portfolio. As a newbie photographer you can do these shoots for free, thus you get studio experience and valuable exposure... assuming the model uses your images in her book!)
My opportunities for testing models here in Stavanger are pretty limited, so I am just going to have to attend more workshops and build my experience that way. Next up is the London College of Communication's five day workshop in March, which should give me a more academic style of workshop in fashion photography. Every workshop I attend I learn something new, and hopefully I can snatch back a few more cents of concentration.
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