Day 6: Stress

Today we hit the ground running, yet again. No more client meetings, just brainstorming and shooting. We regrouped today into bigger groups and split up the work. We separated it so that everyone was Art Director for one shoot, and everyone is photographer for one shoot. Me and the other person are now leading one group each; and within those groups we’ve split up the workload. It was by far the most stressful day yet, and had the heaviest workload. I learned a lot about leadership today. I learned what things are necessary and should be pushed, and what should be left as is. In leadership, one must pick their battles. I did not have trouble with this today; my team is great and has been a blessing to work with. With the amount of work we have had to work through I have learned a lot, even without having to go through some of the harder parts of leadership. There were a lot of situations that could have gone very badly today if I had not pushed for certain things, and backed off of others. Tomorrow we finish our last five photo shoots, then after editing them all we get a few days of rest before starting in on some other projects. But before that my other group also has our nature walk proposal, which is also a pretty big project.

After dinner tonight a bunch of us played dodge ball with several of the staffers here on campus. It was exactly what I needed after the long day. The local handyman Emmanuel, from Switzerland, made it much more exciting. He was by far the best one out of all of us. There is usually a dodge ball club that meets on Thursday nights but tonight it was pretty low key. After playing around for a couple hours I made myself a nice cup of Earl Grey and just relaxed for about twenty minutes. After that I headed down to “The Dungeon”, which is what we call the room we’ve been working in while we’re here. My nights mostly consist of editing for now, but I’m not complaining. It’s good work. I enjoy it.

I really have had a wonderful time here. It’s a lot of hard work, but in the end hard work is what I enjoy the most. I think that partly comes from my upbringing. Granted, I wasn’t raised with a camera in my hand, but hard work has never been something I’ve shied away from. It’s both a blessing and a curse. If I’m not busy, with work or school, I kind of go crazy. I can’t handle inactivity. If I’m not doing something productive I feel like I’m useless. So the work here has been very rewarding, but also very tiring.