During the Photographer’s section of the Designers Working With series, I asked Jon Boyes if he would describe an average day in the life of a photographer for us. To, well, you know, see how it compares with our day. Jon was snowed when I contacted him, but he graciously took the time to answer in detail. Now over to Jon …

A day in the life of Jon Boyes, Photographer

First off I have to say there’s no such thing as a typical day. 9-5 this is not. I suppose if you had to break it down you could split the days out shooting on location from the days in the office. So I will.

Typical shoot day:

Arrive at the location (recce’d beforehand if distance and budget allow) mega early. I’m a Virgo so everything has to run like clockwork or I blame myself! Here in the UK we have a motorway network that resembles a car park most of the time so I set off early. Even now I get that night before anxiety/excitement rush which means I sleep really light so its up at the crack of dawn and into the car (preloaded with all the grip and lighting the day before..!). Off onto the motorway network to the location. If it’s really miles away or the other end of the UK I travel down the day before and stay over.

I meet the assistant I’ve booked at the location (I use assistants near the location as long as I have the budget to do so) and await access or start looking at the day’s weather and where we’re going to shoot. I meet the client, and if it’s an ad shoot, the stylist, models, etc., all dive into the first setup. I like to be as hands-on as possible in the lighting department - I’m not a “you set it up while I have breakfast and I’ll push the button” guy at all.

If it’s an editorial job I’m normally solo so I meet the subject and we look for a good place to do the editorial portraits (a lot of my work). Then I’ll light the scene and get the subject to relax and off we go. Most editorial portraits are very time limited due to the diary of the subject, so I may have a 3-4 hour drive or an overnight stay for a 30 min slot. I think the average slot is around 40 mins with the longest being about 2 hours because it was going so well the subject just canceled a couple of meetings on the fly! The shortest was 5 minutes…..

After each setup on an ad shoot I will back everything up to a laptop and external drive off the cards before moving on. On a small editorial shoot I tend to swap cards frequently to spread the risk. I would never use one 8Gb card and put a whole shoot on it….!!

Pack up the gear, load the car, pay the assistant, set the satnav to “home” and start the drive back.

Typical non-shoot day:

Pretty hellish for a Virgo as they never or hardly ever turn out as planned! I’ll recount a typical day from last week.

I’d planned to master up some stock (I shoot a fair bit of stock and tend to do this in bursts of activity so I get a load of “negs” in the bag then systematically work through them between commissions). Got up about 7am and into the office with coffee (I drink far too much coffee) by 7.30am. Start up the computer. No Internet. Spend 20 mins troubleshooting until I realise that the DNS is down. Call the helpline (thankfully my ISP has great customer service) and get some new DNS IPs to enter in the router. Input these and all’s well. Download emails. I have 5 accounts. Get about 150 a day on each of which 145 is spam. Spam filter does its job but have to revisit the ’suspect spam’ folder. “Wow I won the Dutch lottery again…and hey, here’s a nice barrister from Lagos wanting to give me 20% of USD4.5m…….why do I bother to work….” :)

Time check. 8.15am. Open my main inbox and have a couple of emails to attend to. Have a list of finals that need to be prepared from a job shot a few weeks ago. Deadline has changed on this job and after not hearing form the agency for two weeks now they need to be done in 72hrs. Note to designers: please please try to give us notice - it takes time to produce the retouched finals!! (I do all my own retouching to get certain colour palettes and each image can take anything from 30 mins to 4 hours and more to master). There are 10 of them. Decide to start them this afternoon and push back tomorrow’s admin & stock tasks to later in the week. Still need to do stock this morning though, as I have a submission deadline to hit. Yes, juggling priorities when you’re a sole creative is a daily occurrence.

Time check. 8.45am Hey we lost half an hour somewhere…..does that ever happen to you? Open Photoshop and call up the drive with images which I’ve developed but need retouching and keywording. Suddenly remember that I’ve not heard from a client who has a shoot day next week “on hold”. Nothing is ever permanently held until I get the confirmation of commission but the day is drawing near and I need to know what’s happening. Call their office number. They’re out. Call their mobile number. They’re on voicemail. Leave a message and then back it up with an email. Back to stock. Got a couple of layers going on the first image and the mail arrives. Pick up the post and sort through the letters and see one from my bank. What? What? I’ll need to ring them. I’m sure I canceled that service they’re about to take as a direct debit last year…!!! 20mins on hold later I get through. Sort the problem.

Time check 9.45am Well into the first image now and actually manage to get a good couple of hours uninterrupted retouching in until:

Time check 12pm Mobile rings. It’s a printing company I’ve never heard of. Apparently one of my clients has asked them to ring me to get some “large TIFF files” sent over as they are waiting to go to press with a couple of exhibition panels and the images they have are lo-res proofs only. I realise that this is a job I shot and delivered about 8 months ago so now it’s archived. Client can’t find the DVD with the master files so “can you send them over now”? Well, yes, I’d happily FTP over 5 x 60Mb TIFFs if I had the upload speed..!! :) No time for the mail so I convince them to let me send Q12 JPEGs for them to convert back to TIFF their end before the upsizing. Printer has no FTP details so I offer to upload to my server and send them an email with a link. Onto my database and find out which off line DVD/HDD has the 16bit master TIFFs. Retrieve those and for sake of speed spin them in off DVD. Convert them to 8bit and save out as Q12 JPEGs. Zip the files. Upload to my server. Email the printers…

Time check 12.30pm Grab some lunch and reply to a couple of personal emails. 1pm back to retouching in PS.

Time check 3pm Phone rings. Somebody trying to sell me ad space in a magazine I’ve never heard of. Obviously speaking from a script. Decline their offer graciously and get back to retouching. Phone rings again. It’s an inquiry about a possible shoot in Newcastle. The caller doesn’t have a very good brief but wants fairly accurate costs. This is not far removed from having a 1.2 Fiat and wanting to go 150mph. It’s not going to happen. I probe some more and get an idea of what the job is and the expected number of finals needed. I ask about the usage of the images. “Why do you need to know that?” the voice on the other end says. “So I can price the job including the license to use” I say. “Why do we need a license?” they say. “So I can grant you usage rights” I say. “Oh no, we need the copyright” they say. Sigh…….. I explain that I don’t surrender let alone sell my copyright and that perhaps I’m not the guy for them…… That’s 20 minutes of searching, probing, frantically hitting the buttons on my calculator while appearing to remain clam and collected on the phone all for nothing. I must remember to ask the right question right at the start….!!! Back to retouching.

Time check 4.30pm. I hear the email “bong” sound and can’t resist looking. It’s a mail from an existing client who wants me to estimate three very disparate jobs and can I do it by 6pm as she’s got to go to a meeting in London about the projects tomorrow and needs the figures. I drop everything and get my estimating hat on. Prepare three separate pdfs and mail them over. Time check 5.45pm……

I look at the computer and the poor lonely PS desktop. I look at the clock. Any ounce of creativity I had today has been well and truly drained away. I decide to retire gracefully to the kitchen and see if I have anything worth eating!

That was an early finish. I’m normally here until 8pm most nights and have gone longer when in the middle of a large project. I think it’s important to remember, especially when dealing with a sole creative, that their days are often spent juggling their creativity/admin/sales/debt collection/personal life and other tasks that would be farmed out to many individuals in a larger company!!

Jon Boyes | Advertising and Editorial Photographer
Jon Boyes

Thank you for taking the time out from your busy day Jon, it was greatly appreciated.

“Yes, juggling priorities when you’re a sole creative is a daily occurrence.” I’ll certainly agree with that statement - multi-tasking is a needed skill for anyone running their own business. And even though the skill-set is different (photography compared to design), the above pretty much describes how my average days evolves. Except for one thing, I see there’s no cat feeding ;-)

until the next
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