Today was my last day with NME. My main mission for the day was to search the Press Association’s online archive for pictures of musicians. I was given a list of people to search for (quite an extensive list, about 40-50, only a handful of which had already been found) and was allowed to use my best judgement to choose a suitable picture. I was only allowed to use images from the Press Association since they were free and we’d have to pay for others. My research was destined for the NME website, for a lyric rating section. It took most of the day to do this, as after I had downloaded all of the images, I had to resize them all to 600px in height, and quite a few of them also needed some serious colour balancing. I was a little baffled at how bad the levels were on images downloaded from a photo agency.
For the last hour or so of my day, I returned some prints to their homes in archival cabinets in the office (not the same as the archives I went to yesterday) and also had a look through some for my own amusement. Whilst doing this, I asked Zoe some questions about the company, and although I’m sure I forgot to ask her some really important things, I found everything she had to say very interesting.
NME does not seem to have any strictly NME photographers; they appear to be mostly freelance but doing a large amount of their work for NME. This is good, because it means the photographers can do other things outside of NME and not just be tied to one company. There is apparently a team of around 20-25 photographers they use frequently, some of which are best suited to studio work and others better for live shoots. As of about four years ago, NME’s photographers went 100% digital. I was a little saddened to hear this, as at present I can’t see a way out of film. Zoe said that very occasionally a photographer will ask to use film, but it is completely off their own back if they do: they have to get it processed and scanned themselves and send the files to the picture desk, in the same time allocated to digital. I also asked about how much the photographers have to do with their images after a shoot, and the answer is basically nothing – their responsibilities end when they have come to the end of a shoot and send off the images. Everything else, such as colour balancing, dust removal, editing down, etc is done by the picture desk.
I also asked Zoe about how she ended up with her job at NME. Her exact words were, “Working really fucking hard”, which differs from most other stories I have heard. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art, and from there she found herself in and out of a variety of jobs, including photo agencies and print labs. After a number of years of hard graft, she finally got the job at NME of Deputy Picture Editor, although I daresay this may not be the position at which she started in the company. I frequently hear other people spouting extravagant but uninspiring stories, shrugging off their success as “luck” and “constant badgering”, which is ultimately quite disheartening for someone like me (a soon-to-be graduate with no idea where they want to be or how to get there). It was a little more encouraging to hear Zoe’s story, giving some credibility to the idea that effort does lead to some sort of reward.
I was actually really gutted to be leaving today; four days was not long enough. I had only just started settling into the environment, and I also think everyone else had taken the same amount of time to become accustomed to my presence in the office. I don’t feel like I’ve had a chance to prove myself. I have learnt things about the approach to working for a magazine and what it involves for the picture desk, but I didn’t get to see the other side and experience anything with the photographers, which is a great shame. I also think that I would have settled in more quickly and interacted more if I had been at a computer actually on the picture desk with the others, but because I was slightly detached from them it was difficult to get into any proper conversations with them. I appreciate everything they did for me, but can’t help feeling that they could have given me more to do, and also given me some more interesting things to do rather than just the things they didn’t want to do.
All that said though, I did enjoy my time at NME. And at no point did I have to make tea for anyone other than myself – in fact, I had people offer to make me tea. So it wasn’t all bad.
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