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Frederik Schindler
@frederikschindler
Best of the week 34 at #nomadict 2020
As a Director of Photography and shooting primarily commercials, music-videos, fiction and documentaries, my main focus and what I do everyday is related to the film industry. Nevertheless, photography has been a huge part of my life for many years. What I’ve learned over the years is that it is important to maintain your passion through doing personal projects.
It isn’t easy to find the right balance between work and personal projects, but it is utterly important. Sometimes I’m able to combine everything but that’s not often the case. Basically I always try to squeeze some little personal projects in between my work. For bigger personal projects I plan it like a work project, set a schedule etc. and it’s also blocked like a work project. When there is no really important inquiry I stick to my plan and sometimes cancel work projects for personal projects – always depending on the specific project and situation.
In addition to the value doing personal projects hold to me, I prioritize my family over anything else. Now that we got our second son it has become a little more difficult to give 100% to our family and work at the same time – I learned to separate it a bit more. Where I used to travel with my family when going on trips for work, I now try to travel for work without the family and fully focus on work to later have another trip with my focus on the family. My (older) son loves to travel; we did looong road trips with him. He also loves the mountains, snow and the outdoors in general. I am really looking forward to doing more trips with him and the whole family.
I do like venturing out alone as well, as I did when I took the winning shot for example. A friend of mine discovered a foxden near my hometown Berlin. The young foxes used to play in front of their den every morning and evening, so I decided to go there during blue hour, waiting in safe distance and maybe get the chance to snap a blue hour shot of one of them. After laying on the ground for a couple of minutes one little fox came out and checked the area around the den. He was there just for some seconds and this is literally the only photo I got, because he went back in the den and didn’t come out for the next hour. I guess he smelled me…
WINNING PHOTOGRAPH
BEST OF THE WEEK 34
Actually I thought the shot was not great and I got nothing special, so I didn’t edit the photo for a few weeks. But when I looked through my archives lately and did a quick first edit I discovered the potential of the photo and made the final edit. Really happy about the result now. The Raw was a bit brighter and didn’t have that much contrast. I worked with two main graduated filters; one to darken the lower right corner a little bit more and one to brighten up the left upper corner just a little bit. That gave the picture more contrast and depth. I also intensified the blue hour vibes around the fox while I adjusted the orange/red look of the fox itself with a mask. The overall edit is based on my own preset and style.
Even after more than 10 years I learn something new on every trip. I thought I know a lot about light, but through my trips to the outdoors in the past few years I experienced so many different light situations that I know much better now when I want to go somewhere, which light situation is worth waiting for etc. I also learned more about editing and style through constantly challenging myself to edit some photos every week. Consistency is key. And practice, practice, practice. In the end the worst situations or the situations where I’m under pressure to deliver a result have helped me to learn and develop the most. Staying nice, calm, with focus under pressure is damn hard.
"I genuinely believe that hard work and consistency will always beat talent."
Most of the time the most successful people are hard workers driven by their passion and ambition to achieve their dreams. Quite often we forget that the only way to achieve a goal is by putting the hard work first.
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