Alumni Session 2

Jon Adams:

The first speaker was Jon Adams, who talked to us about the arts council. The chat was a bit confusing and didn’t really have a focus. He basically explained that his dad was a military photographer and that’s how he got interested in photography, although he studies palaeontology. The Arts council is where you can receive funding for your projects. You submit a proposal, including a budget, and then if you’ve writing a convincing enough proposal you can receive the money you have asked for. This is obviously fantastic information, but I feel like they should have told us about this in the first year, not the last semester of the last year. The process takes about 6 weeks, so if we were to apply today, in 6 weeks time a lot of the project would have already been finished.

Lauri Holford:

Lauri is a digital retoucher for Urban Outfitters. He graduated in 2012 and very quickly got the job. A digital retouchers job includes things like post production editing for the online content, going to shoots and preparing & styling the shoot and models. He assists photographers regularly, he is responsible for the online visual merchandising (where everything goes on the site) and retouching the catalogue images. He listed the ordering:

1.      Shoot

2.      Post production editing

3.      Colour matching

4.      Uploading/organising the site categories

5.      Maintaining consistency on the website

6.      Ongoing amendments to images on site

He showed us quite a few different photos where he had to edit the colours, the models’ skin tone or shorten the jeans slightly. He got into this job because at University, he played around with photoshop quite a bit. For his final project he used retouching and realised he wanted to continue in this direction. He started to apply for jobs in March and applied for just about anything. He got contacted by Urban Outfitters and had a few interviews and was successful.

Darryl Snow:

Darryl is an architectural photographer at Foxtons. In the second year he decided that he wanted to be an architectural photography. He applied at Foxtons and first had a phone interview, then a group, then another phone interview and finally an interview with the manager. He calls himself a protographer, meaning he isn’t just a photographer, but is also responsible for drawing a floorplan of the property, and other architectural things.

He really enjoys his job and says it’s a great way to get his work out as it’s advertised on or in a monthly magazine, the Foxtons website, a brochure, screens etc. He had to teach himself quite a bit of photoshop skills, one of which was adding blue skies to cloudy images.

Davina Wilby:

Davina started off with an art foundation course and then decided to study photography. On the course she started to think about a teaching job. While studying she worked at Goodwin printing and started to get valuable contacts. One day someone from Fareham college told her about a teaching job available teaching an adult class. That’s how her career started. She had to apply for a PGCE so she could continue in teaching. At the moment she is teaching at a college and loves it. To the side she still works on her own photography and explained that being a teacher doesn’t mean you can’t continue your hobbies.