Work Experience

In November, Kayleigh Innes, a media student at Stirling University got in touch with us about the possibility of doing work experience. We were more than happy to oblige and Kayleigh got to work with us on a whole bundle of different shoots.

I am a media student in Stirling. I had to do a work experience placement as part of my degree and as I have an interest in film and photography, one of my lecturers put me in touch with his former student, Hamish Cambell. He promised me that Hamish was very lovely and extremely talented. He assured me that I’d learn a lot from him, and I did!

The agreements of the work experience assignment was to find somewhere in the field you were interested in, and work there for a week before writing a nice big report. So, I met with Hamish in his Edinburgh office, where he introduced me to his assistant Matt and we discussed the placement. I was meant to pop in for an hour, and about four hours later I finally left. They told me all about the business and some of the clients they worked for. They showed me the software that they used, some of the work they had done, and by the end of it I was pretty much convinced that they had the best jobs, and I had landed the best work experience in the world.

I had arranged to come along with them on a variety of shoots over the course of a few weeks, to get an idea of what it is like to work as a commercial photographer. There was a full range of clients, from shooting baked goods for Scotmid and couches for Sterling Furniture, to shooting dozens of models for The Model Team in a nice big studio with a band of hairdressers, make-up artists, and stylists. The fact that each shoot was so different meant that I not only got to learn about the different lighting, backdrops and setups needed, but it meant I got to watch how Hamish adapted to working with different types of clients and scenarios.

I learned all kind of things, things that I had no intention of learning, and that I didn’t know even had to be learned.  For instance, I had no idea that there is a specific way to wrap lighting cables, but apparently so, and more importantly, I learned to always tape the wires down. They taught me practical things like how to set up a softbox, how to use bounce boards and what a catch light is. I learned about how the positioning of lights affects the subject; faster ways to edit photos; why you should always carry a secondary camera; and how to turn a client’s vision into an actual, tangible reality.

Honestly, my favourite thing was just getting to take part. The fact that Hamish and Matt included me in the shoots, trusted me to to help them, and taught me as we went along was a more valuable lesson than I think I could have ever learned in a lecture. They gave me great advice, and helped me improve, as a photographer and a person. From “don’t get upset if you have to change something and do it all over again” to “always shoot RAW”.

By Kayleigh Innes