Last week we had another guest speaker on Skype.We had an Ex-course student Sophie Abbott who now works as a retoucher for Boohoo talk to us about her career. She talked to us about interview skills and to imagine being the interviewer, put ourselves in their shoes. How would we want someone to stand out and then do it yourself.
Always try in an interview to have both a digital and paper copy of an images you want to look prepared and also helps in case of any coffee spill mishaps! It also helps as usually she says that there can be two interviewers so helps that they can both have a copy to view, instead of an awkward wait while one finishes looking. And always keep it relevant which led to her CV… She says how she got told like we did to make this creative looking one that is all bright and out there. But in the real world she says it did not get looked at. She changed hers to a standard one and started actually getting responses back and taken more seriously.
She said we need to be confident in what we do know and learn what we don’t. Always save in RAW files and Jpeg if you can, no one wants sending a massive RAW file or can even open it. Save work ideally as TIFFs and try send them as that as well. Jpegs are ok but the Tiff is what is the preferred format to send work in as or save as.
Some of the last advice was to always try stay interested in your work and make use of the studios we have. Keep a story to your work don’t leave it without a narrative. Now that Sophie is out in the industry all she does is retouching and now wishes she had access to the studio as much as we do now. That we will never have the same resources freely available to us as we do now. And to constantly keep on top of social media as that is where it is at now. We must keep linked in with the work we want to take part in ad what interests us so we always know what is happening.
I found her talk very interesting. She has been in our shoes as a student worried what the next step will be. She sat where we did wondering where we go from the brick wall we often hit with our work. And that to me helped here was someone who has really been there and done that.
Kira Beresford photography 