Fatbardha Salihu
P h o t o g r a p h y
4th January 2021
Alex - Fresh Digi
We had the opportunity to have a talk given to use from Alex who owns his own rental company called Fresh Digi.
Background information
Alex was someone who did not take the traditional route into Photography such as going to university. At 19 years of age he started in the industry and has been working for 12 years. His role plays an important part in all aspects of photography. Alex works as a digital technician.
For Alex it all began at the age of 19, he loved taking pictures. He bought the magazines such as GQ, Men’s Health and others and sent emails to a number of photographers he found from them. In the emails he would mention how he is a 19-year-old interested in photography, would comment on one of their images and ask them if they need any help. At the start he would get one reply from ten people that he emailed although he did not give up, he was persistent. Alex began working as an intern assisting at jobs whether that was just sweeping the floors or making the coffee. With every job he learned something new from different photographers. An example of what he learned where things such as what different lights are used for and other pieces of kit. Six months later he started getting paid jobs from photographers and then two years later he was receiving jobs as an assigned assistant. His first few roles were handling the computer setting up the lighting alongside the digital part. Fast forward a few years he was working solemnly as a digital technician. In 2012, during the Adidas Global World Cup campaign Alex was booked as an assistant and then was told he was supposed to be working as the digital technician instead on very short notice although as he had a lot of experience, he managed to do the job successfully. It was after that job he realised that he wanted to focus on being a digital technician.
His job role includes working:
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On commercial and editorial e.g.: magazines photoshoots, movie posters and TV shows
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Handling technical stuff like cameras, showing the photographer the camera, and all the custom menus the camera has as they may be using that camera for first time, the equipment all comes from rental companies
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Tethering camera to Capture one, the standard software, and working on that
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Organises images into folders with correct names, editing images slightly on Capture One alongside the photographer making sure they look they want the images to look
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Processes images and delivers them into different formats such as tiffs, jpegs or certain sizes for web and delivers multiple hard drives to clients/photographer depending on the job
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Other parts of Alex's role as a digital technician include making sure that all the elements that they need are captured nothing is missing .
This is an image taken from Alex's website of what the equipment he uses look like. There are multiple sizes of screens as they are for different people in the photoshoots such as Photographer, Art Director and the Digital Technician which would be at the main station.
This image shows a few images of equipment Alex has on his website for anyone who wants to rent them alongside many other technical equipment such as laptops, cameras ,lenses and batteries.
Capture one is a Photography software Alex talks about and how it is it is the industry standard software. He mentions how this is due to Capture One having a better and sophisticated way for organising files. I learned that Capture One also has a function within it called Capture pilot which allows you to send images to multiple iPads at the same time in comparison to Lightroom which does not have that function. It also formats images from one file to another such as raw file to jpeg at a much faster speed compared to Lightroom. He mentions how learning how to use Capture One gives you an advantage.
Other advice he gave us as students is to build connections early. One way to do this is by emailing photographers now during this situation explaining to them how we are students looking to work with them when possible and asking them what skills to learn and what their expectations are. This way when jobs are available photographers will have us in mind and will maybe contact us to work with them.Our emails we send need to be approached personably so they know we particularly like such and such job they did and ask how did you do that , building a relationship through talking to them about their work and asking them questions. One day when the time comes and things get back to normal a bit more there's a job that fits they will already have us in mind.
Above are some examples of the work Alex worked on , such as photoshoots for the GQ magazine and advert for Molton Brown company.
This talk was very interesting, to know more about different routes there are to working in the Photography field apart from being a photographer or a lighting assistant. This has made me more confident knowing that there is something out there for everyone in the world of working in Photography.
If you want to rent any equipment or simply find out more about Alex his details are below:
Website: https://freshdigi.co.uk/
All images are screenshots from the Industry Talk presentation or otherwise have the links to the website where they are from.