Who said that photographing is not hard work?

4:45am, the alarm clock goes off. I get off bed without making noise. My cell phone is the only source of light in the house. I want to make sure that I cause the least amount of disruption to John and Scarlett’s sleep.

Quietly, I get dress in the bathroom with the layers of cloths that I have previously separated. I quickly eat a yogurt or a bowl of cereal. Pick up my camera bag that has been packed the night before with clean equipment, charged batteries, and snacks for the day. At the door, I take my tripod and pair of hiking shoes on my fast and silent exit only 15 minutes after the annoying alarm clock insisting buzz woke me up.

I breathe the fresh cold air of early morning that slaps me in the face and finish waking me up. It is the beginning of another glorious photographing day.

In order to capture sunrise hues in the sky, photographers need to be at location at least 15 to 30 minutes before sunrise. This allows time to find your way around hiking trails, quick view of possible foregrounds, equipment set up and of course, registering dawn. When I don’t know the location, I sometimes will give up to 45 minutes before sunrise to scout the area for the best angles.

After sunrise shooting, I try to pick a place to seat with a nice view where I will have a snack and just relax. In my opinion sunrise shooting is the most stressful for me. I don’t know exactly why, it might be the arrival in the pitch-black environment, or the uncertainty of the colours on the sky, or just the tiredness of the early morning.

If I am close to home, I will normally go back mid-day to take a power nap and re-energize, but it is not always possible. Sometimes I spend the entire day out walking, discovering places, exploring new locations, searching for good photo opps, travelling from one place to another…

Then, comes the second highlight of the day, sunset. This is less stressful for me because I can see where I am going and also, estimate if the sky will collaborate or not. J It takes a lot of the pressure out. In addition, it is a lot easier to predict how much time of the good light I will have, as on sunrises these are all unknown.

 Well, I cannot forget the night photography. In many cases, shooting at night make scenes more interesting either because of the light or because there is not tons of tourists around! So, the day many times does not finish right after sunset for photographers.

If I have not been able to make my point yet that photography is a hard work, let’s look at the after shooting routine.

Once I arrive from the field, I download my images on my computer. Then I back up on my travel hard drive. This is a temporary back up until I do a mass back up on my 2 definite external hard drives.

These are just the first steps of my workflow! I still need to sort them all – I have different categories of sorting i.e. blog worth, competition worth, nice to keep for a future Photoshop creative attempt – Finally I start processing the images.

I end up working more hours a week than a regular 9 to 5 job. But the satisfaction of seeing each of the images finalized is incomparable. It is so magical!

Yes, being a photographer is hard work, but it is also a really rewarding one. So, next time that you see a photographer, make sure that you recognize their efforts., acknowledge their talent, praise their creation and most of all appreciate how much work it has been put in each of the images.

Photography is hard work, paid by the emotions that the captured images provoke into viewers. Make photographers rich by letting the pictures touch you!