WOMEN'S MONTH 2014 PORTRAIT # 1: Faith Solomon Helps People Have Better Stories

BY ERIKA

It is never easy going for a job interview, not the first time and not any time thereafter, even if you have done it a dozen times before.

And with the current job scarcity and large numbers of people applying for the same positions, how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you prevent your nervousness from destroying your chance to make the right impression?

Faith Solomon of Intelligent Placement in Gordons Bay’s can help.

PREPARE AND GAIN KNOWLEDGE

Faith’s mission is to make it easier, particularly for first-time job seekers, to be better prepared and to know what to expect from that dreaded job interview.

While her objective is to contribute to the success of the business that is hiring new people by matching  the right person to the right position, she is sees it as her mission to also assist work seekers, both experienced and those new to the world of work,  to achieve their career goals.

The Intelligent Placement team pays a lot of attention to fine tuning job seekers’ CVs, cover letters and honing their interviewing and networking skills to start building their career path.

Instead of only assisting people answering her ads, Faith actively invests in the Helderberg community by regularly presenting interview skills workshops free of charge to underprivileged young people.

She also hosts a 15 minute programme called Your Brilliant Career on Paarl’s local radio station, Radio KC during which she shares her knowledge about building a career rather than just finding a job and offers advice on how to search for work and how to market oneself during an interview

FAITH'S STORY

Faith was born in Boksburg, Gauteng but grew up and completed her schooling at La Rochelle Girls High in Paarl. 

“My parents sacrificed many things to afford me an education, she explains, “In many respects this has shaped my personality.

“I am tenacious in achieving success in all aspects of my life. I live by a philosophy of integrity and honesty and I get excited about empowering people and particularly, the youth to achieve their dreams.

“I want to give people a chance to have better stories.“

INTELLIGENT PLACEMENT'S STORY

Faith, who is married and has two young children, completed her International Travel and Tourism course in 1999 with a fully sponsored bursary.  

She started her own career working in the hospitality industry including in niche market hotels in Franschoek, then as a tour operator until she joined  the reservations department of Relais & Chateaux, Grande Roche.

 “Throughout my career I have been involved with training and development and later I branched out into recruitment and project management, still in the hospitality industry, for about five years before I was retrenched and I was forced to become a business owner.  

“After a day of crying and feeling that the world has come to an end, I did the normal thing of updating my CV and starting the work seeking process. But I just could not get myself to apply for any of the positions,” she recalls.

“I came to the conclusion that the time has finally arrived for me to do what I had wanted to do on so many occasions before - become an entrepreneur! “

This was June 2013 and by August of that year, Intelligent Placement was up and running and Faith needed a professional portrait and images for her website. 

That is when we met this dynamic woman with the big heart for her community!

So when we decided to tell the stories of some of the remarkable women in the Helderberg area for Women’s Month 2014, Faith was first on our list.

Thank you Faith for bringing knowledge and with it hope, to young people in our community. 

FLASHBACK # 9: Of marine mammals and mid-winter magic

BY ERIKA

Today being the winter solstice, we celebrated the first tiny step towards summer with a gloriously bright and sunny day in the Western Cape.

Martin and I packed a lunch and headed towards the outlook at Steenbras River where we sunned ourselves like dassies while watching enormous waves break over the rocks.

And then from Kogelberg-side they came, a shoal of dolphins at least a kilometre and a half long, swimming towards Koei en Kalf near Gordons Bay.

What a privilege to see a sight as beautiful as this so close to home!

It reminded me of this lovely image Martin took near Granger Bay on an assignment for Sanlam a few years ago.

He was out on a boat to photograph marine mammologist Meredith Thornton when they saw the dolphins right next to them.

No one can blame him when for a while there, his focus became these incredible animals rather the subject of the assignment.

Meredith Thornton, marine mammologist counting
dolphins in Granger Bay, Cape Town

BIZ PORTRAIT PARTY - Professional portrait shoot with a difference

By Martin Van Niekerk

We recently participated in a really enjoyable project. In fact it didn't feel like work at all!

The Biz Portrait Party was organised by in-bound marketing expert Bettina Horvath of My Biz Performs at The Workshop Space in Main Road, Somerset West to encourage business and professional people to invest in good quality and appropriate professional portraits for social media. 

While professional make-up artist, Candice Harker, was plying her trade and I was photographing the nine dynamic and beautiful business women one at a time, Bettina lead an informal discussion and question-and-answer session on the role of images in social media.

All the while we were treated to good coffee and eats. A party indeed!

What our clients said:

Bettina Horvath in Google+: 

Last week I organised the Biz Portrait Party with +Martin van Niekerk photography - the results are outstanding! It is so worthwhile to have a professional photoshoot done for online images, wouldn't you agree when you see these pics? 

 The end result: Nine professional portraits 

 The Biz Portrait Party in full swing

GOING FOR A PROFESSIONAL PORTRAIT SHOOT? 15 guidelines for great images

We have moved! You will now find this blog post on our new blog on our website. Just follow this link:

PROFESSIONAL PORTRAITS: 15 Guidelines for Great Images

SO, WHICH WAY WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO FACE? 5 facts about a portrait sitting your (conscious) mind was unaware of

‘So which way would you like me to face?’

A question every photographer about to shoot a professional portrait, is asked as soon as the model arrives in the studio.

The problem is that there is no simple answer to this seemingly simple question. Should the photographer:

• Position the client according to the lighting configuration he or she has set up to achieve a particular outcome or because the location demands it?
• Accommodate the client’s preference for a particular side? People often feel they have a good side that looks better on a photo.
• Take into account facial features that might make the image less aesthetically pleasing e.g. turning the model’s head so that a larger eye is further away from the camera?
• Listen to what neuro-anatomists and cognitive psychologists tell us about portraits?

What your subconscious knew but did not tell your conscious mind 

Here are 5 interesting facts about portraits that you probably don’t know. At least not your conscious mind but if you had to dig up some old photographs, you see that your subconscious had known a thing or two all along.

1. Most of the time we choose to be photographed with the left side of our face, facing the camera. Why? Not because of any cosmetic or physical attributes that we favour but because the left side of our faces show more emotion than the right and we are hard-wired to experience intense emotional responses more aesthetically pleasing. According to a study published in Experimental Brain Research the left side of the face shows more muscle movement in response to emotions. That is because the right cerebral hemisphere tends to be more involved in the perception and production of emotion than the left.1) And more emotion makes for better portraits, the theory goes.

2. The left-side bias has been known to naturalists and artists for a very long time. The theory of that which we seem to instinctively know about portraits, has been the topic of neuro-anatomy and art theory for hundreds of years. It was Darwin who first observed that the two sides of the face do not move and express emotion in the same way. His observations have since been confirmed by experimental and physiological studies. 2) For example in their study Turning the left cheek, researchers McManus and Humphrey indicate that 60 % of portraits painted since the 16th century show the left side of the sitter’s face. 3) We seem to prefer seeing and rendering a person’s more emotional side in a painted portrait. And the same goes for photographs.

3. But not always! We seem to have a different face bias for self-portraits depending on whether we are artists or non-artists. According to Bruno and Bartomini’s surveys of art books and exhibitions, show the majority of artists featuring the right side when composing a self-portrait, a phenomenon that is considered an art convention. Historically, painting or drawing a self-portrait required working of your own image reflected in a mirror. This method reverses the image you work from hence the right side bias. Nowadays artists most probably work from photographs which in the long is bound run to change the self-portrait posing conventions taught at art school. 4) This is what neuropsychologists Nicola Bruno and Marco Bertamini found when they observed people using smart phones to take ‘selfies’. Non-artists prefer the left side more often than the right even if you have to contort your body to get the shot. 5)

 4. Portrait type, social position and career choice also influence our choice of left or right facing portraits. When we are posing for a more informal family portrait when go for the more emotionally expressive left side. 2) But there are times when the sitter prefers to not show their softer, sensitive sides. It might be for reasons of status, for professional reasons or as a result of convention. Several studies have shown that natural scientists, chemists and engineers tend to show their less emotional right side ‘more in keeping with the stereotyped pose of a professional rationalist’. 3) Academics in the human sciences e.g. language and psychology departments tend to show the left side of the face probably feeling more comfortable showing their most emotional aspect to the world, unlike the engineers who want to ‘appear more rational and suggests that these hard scientists seek to display themselves to the world as the unemotional clichés of popular myth’. 3)

5. Sex may also help determine the cheek of choice - Male academics in the Churches tend to prefer showing the right cheek while female academics tend to show the left cheek more often. It is possible that the observed biases were the result of ingrained cultural and stereotypical gender roles depicting women as more emotional than men 2)

References:

1. Show Off the Left Side of Your Face for Better, More Emotive Pictures
2. How Academics Face the World: A Study of 5829 Homepage Pictures (2012)
3. Turning the Left Cheek
4. Turning the Other Cheek: Profile Direction in Self-Portraiture
5. Self-Portraits: Smartphones Reveala Side Bias in Non-Artists
6. Posing Intellectuals: Academic Profile Pictures Reveal More than You Think

STEAMPUNK IN STELLENBOSCH - Land n Sand Digital Magazine Ed 3 Sept/Oct 2013

Steampunk in Stellenbosch Land n Sand Sept / Oct 2013