A Year in the Life: In Which Grant Guest Blogs Somewhere Else and Jaime Shows Us His Neighbourhood

Grant Harder:

Just when I was starting to feel the pressure of not having a job coming up… a little something came my way. Brian Morgan, AD at The Walrus, got in touch to shoot a job this week. You have to love returning clients.

Now that I’m getting a little busier and that I seem to be shooting more digitally, I maxed out storage space on both my desktop computer and my main external hard drive in the same day. There is nothing enjoyable about purchasing hard drives. I’m not that interested in gear to begin with but I would much rather buy a lens or put money towards a new laptop. Even a C-stand would give me more enjoyment than 2 Terabytes of hard drive space.

I picked up my prints from The Lab to send out east to be framed for the Flash Forward Festival in October. Three of my prints will be included in the show. You can see a list of the others involved and get all the info here. I hope I have enough air miles to get myself back to Ontario. Besides the festival, Jaime and I need to put our heads together and figure out how to fill the HMAb void next month, once our year is up. That alone is worth a trip to Toronto.

I’ll be stepping up my blogging presence next week as a guest blogger for the News Photographers Association of Canada. I’ll be checking in everyday for five days. I don’t know what the content will be just yet and it may cover some of the things I have talked about on this blog in the past. I’m not exactly a news photographer, at least not in the more traditional and obvious sense. I have some trouble with labels but I may occasionally fall into the social documentarian category. Regardless, I am happy to take part. There have been some heavy hitting guests in the past and I encourage you to dig through the site to have a look around.

As most of us do, I have been accumulating random images during my day-to-day goings-on. I spent time editing those images down to a low-resolution stock submission for Masterfile. I’m not quite at the point where I can spend money on producing stock so I need to rely on my life to help with providing content. This probably isn’t targeted enough to get consistent sales but it is a place to start. Here’s a little sampler of what I sent in:

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Jaime Hogge:

It’s been a long week and I’m tired. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just feels like a long week and/or that I’m 80 years old. I took a couple days off, so to speak, to spend with a close friend who was in town from BC; perhaps our adventures are contributing to the fatigued spacey feeling. It’s also been a very busy week in photoland, so let’s get to it.

I’ve been in full-on Toronto Life mode since last post, something that looks to be continuing through next week as well. My main priority right now has been the food guide, which is going pretty well so far. Lots of phone calls and running around, but it keeps things interesting and it’s always neat to discover places in your own backyard. This would probably be more interesting if I had some horror stories to tell, but really, outside of it being super gross and hot outside and me not having AC in the family car, it’s been good. I am slowly but surely running out of hard drive space as always, but things have gone relatively smoothly thus far with the project, so I’m hoping that trend continues.

I’ve also been trying to schedule a few things for the next couple weeks including a couple personal shoots, as well as some portraits for Toronto Life. I’ve reacquainted myself with my old friend Google Calendar and figured out how to sync it to my crappy phone calendar. I’m usually pretty good at keeping a schedule in my head but this makes things much easier… When I remember to update it of course. I want something like iCal, but that can work both online and offline (so it can sync to my phone) and runs automatically when I start up my machine, without being annoying. What the hell am I talking about? See I’m out there this week.

Anyways, next week, I’ve got a couple of portraits (on white, a current theme for me it seems) upcoming for Toronto Life that I’m looking forward to, then it’s back to food guidin’. Speaking of guidin’, the Toronto Life shopping guide is in stores now, here’s a couple places from my hood:

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The Year in the Life Project follows two junior shooters through their weekly adventures, trying to make a go of it, in the world of commercial photography.