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Guess The Job

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Guessing a job based on its description is a game used for helping people learn English or just for fun.

Can you guess this job based on this real description:

• Repetitive and frequent standing, seeing, sitting, walking, and driving up to eight hours per day.

• Holding five pounds in one hand for five minutes.

• Repetitive hand and arm movements needed to type and write.

• Occasional bending, stooping, squatting, lifting, twisting and carrying are necessary to perform job functions.
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Toronto Film Festival 2020 Review

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Most of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is being held online due to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There are in-person screenings at a few temporary drive-ins in downtown Toronto and at the indoor theatres in the TIFF building.

I spent one day at the film festival yesterday and that was, according to TIFF, one day too many. No photographers or TV are allowed this year. Reporters are also not allowed at any location.

Opening Night with No Openings

If your organization or business was facing its worst year due to the pandemic, would you want free publicity to help mitigate the situation? If your event was open to the public, was funded by all three levels of government and was held at some government-owned properties, would you feel somewhat obligated to allow news coverage?

Not the Toronto Film Festival.
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Photography Speedometer

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Does a camera have a speedometer?

I received a request a few days ago to photograph a Toronto conference later this month. The event organizer said they expected the photographer to deliver a minimum of 125 pictures per hour. Huh?
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Photography By The Minute

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Someone emailed earlier this week to say they needed a photographer to cover a business workshop in Toronto. Seven guest speakers will each be giving a presentation and then there will be a panel discussion with all seven.

The event wanted pictures of just the panel discussion because it’ll be the only time that all seven speakers are onstage together. The panel discussion is expected to last an hour depending on how many questions are asked by the audience.

The event person said they needed “only a few” photos of each speaker, the overall stage and the audience. They asked for a quote for “just 15 minutes of your time.”

Where to begin?
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Professional Conference Photography

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A request came in this week for conference photography. This Toronto conference required the photographer to be onsite at an airport hotel for about 20 hours over two days. It seemed to be a routine event so I quoted my usual $1,800 per day or $3,600 for two days.

They turned me down. [Update: this conference, scheduled for late March, was cancelled due to the pandemic.]

I checked the hotel’s web site for the cost of its lowest priced coffee-break catering service for events ($18 per person). The conference web site showed that at least 245 people had registered. These numbers suggested that my $1,800 per day was about forty per cent the cost of a single coffee break ($4,400). Or to rephrase that, my two-day quote was $3,600 and the event’s estimated total cost for coffee and cookies was at least $17,000.
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By The Hour

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Another basketball photo because I seem to shoot a lot of basketball. This fisheye photo was shot mostly to amuse myself while waiting for the game to start.

Imagine if a restaurant charged for its meals based only on the time it takes to prepare the food. What if clothes were priced based only on the time it took to sew that piece of clothing? How about a grocery store that priced by the hour? For example, you get all the groceries you can grab for a rate of, say, $200/hour.
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Mugshot or Business Portrait

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A moment from the pre-game activities at a Toronto Raptors game a few days ago. The photo was taken with a 12mm fisheye lens and has nothing to do with this post.

Today I received a request from a small company to do a group photo. They wrote that their staff has changed and they needed an updated group photo of their seven employees.

The email said the group must be posed in a single row, everyone evenly spaced apart and no one overlapping the person next to them.
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