I have the feeling that I’ve become a workaholic. I’ve been stringing together 55+ hour weeks, including a 63 hour week two weeks ago. I often get home around 10 pm or even later, but before you pity me, let me say that I really enjoy what I’m currently doing. I’ve learned so much during these summer weeks retouching beautifully engineered (German of course) cars and working in digital media. My photoshop abilities have definitely grown exponentially. Its a completely different environment than just simple image manipulation. We capture the images on a 45 mega pixel hassy tethered to a Macbook Pro. The files out of the camera are already about 250 Mb. After all the retouching is done, such as getting rid of reflections, and making sure that the body lines are visible, the files average about 1 GB. After the different colors are layed over the file can easily reach sizes of up to 4Gb before being downsized. The post processing is done on 2.5 quad G5’s with 4gb of ram and a 100 GB of storage, and two 23 inch apple cinema displays. One of the workstations is also hooked up to a 50inch touch screen plasma for color correction.

I’ve been finding this line of work very interesting and at times challenging, which is good because it keeps me on my toes. The Photoshop documents that we create can become very convoluted, often over 60 layers, so it keeps the mind sharp as well. The files sort of turn into 4 dimensional soduko puzzles, and it becomes a challenge to create that desired outcome within the corporate guidelines. Despite my great experience, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to do this sort of thing as a career. It’s a great job for one or two years perhaps but I don’t know how content I would be doing something like that for the rest of my life. Perhaps it could give me a way into marketing or advertising. The only other minor downside is that I hardly get any time to play guitar, or shoot photos, or to work out. I’ve been meaning to take some more black and white shots, but since I’ve been getting home when its already dark, I think I might have to settle for some night shots later this week. Perhaps downtown will have some interesting shots waiting for me to be uncovered. I’m sure they’re there. It’s more just a matter of finding or making the time and looking hard enough. But isn’t that always the case? :)