I began taking pictures for a living in the middle of 2004 shortly after I bid farewell to my 13 year career in I.T. A lot has changed in the nine years I’ve been in the creative field — camera technology has improved by leaps and bounds, a far cry from the very first DSLR I owned, a Canon EOS 300D, and personal computers are now incredibly powerful and a lot more affordable than they ever were before. Yup, a lot has changed in 9 years but the one thing that has remained constant is that I work from home — I am my “own boss” as Butra Home Concept magazine put it.
Welcome to shimworld, the home of Jan Shim Photography. Everything to do with the final image — online and offline — happens here. This studio only handles archiving and editing work, no walk-in portrait or baby session like some of you might imagine. As my work mostly involves shooting at the client’s location, not much actual commercial photography goes on here. I do occasionally bring small items home to photograph when it’s a more practical option to do so.
The heart of studio is an ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus V GENE, unlocked Intel Core i7-3770K 4.6GHz liquid cooled by Corsair H80 cooler, Corsair Vengeance™ DDR3 OC Edition 1866MHz 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB, Crucial M4 128GB + 256GB SSDs housed in a SilverStone Fortress FT03 chassis. See comments on Facebook.It’s a cozy office just big enough to accommodate everything I need to run my photography business. Own boss also means doing everything from replying emails, marketing, quotation, invoicing, payment collection (when electronic transfer isn’t an option) by myself.
Two stacked SanDisk ImateMate USB 3.0 card readers to handle simultaneous Compact Flash cards downloads.Colour accuracy is a critical component of photography and owning a good quality IPS panel LCD monitor is only half equation. The other half lies in colour calibration to ensure colour reproduction, brightness levels are accurate and consistent.Although prints are not a core business I demand nothing less than high quality prints when I do need them. For that I trust my Canon PIXMA MG6370 printer to deliver vibrant and consistent quality every time. (click on image for more info)No mention of photo editing rig is complete without giving credit to the mouse that we hold and click countless times per day. My favourite are these — Razer Abyssus — one for the desktop and another attached to my Dell Studio 17 laptop.
It’s 11.30pm and in less than six hours I will be getting up to catch a flight to Singapore for the weekend. Is there a relevance to what this post is about? Absolutely not other than I had just received an email from the Editorial Assistant of Butra Home Concept Magazine and he attached a sneak copy of my interview for their June edition so instead of going to bed like I should, I thought I would post this up before I say goodbye to May 2013. So, here’s me stepping out of my comfort zone to be in front of the lens for a change. See you all in June! 🙂
SHIMWORLD 