Take Your Child to Work Day
Today is Take Your Child to Work Day. As I was waking up this morning, I was excited to work with both of my parents today. In the morning I worked with my mom and with my dad in the afternoon. I already know what it is like to go on a photoshoot with my mom. Sometimes she hires me to assist her and she has taken lots of photos of my sisters and me. Being an assistant gave me an idea what it’s like to be a photographer, but today I learned even more. My dad is a tax accountant. I know he works long hours and he is very smart. I have gone with him to Bayer before, but today, I’m going to work with him from home.
This morning my mom took pictures of me and I took pictures of my mom. When it was my turn with the camera, I learned how to find a good location. I needed to stand on higher ground (she said I shouldn’t take a picture looking up a person’s nose!) and she needed the sunlight behind her. It was also fun giving her directions of what to do.
After our photoshoot we came home and started editing our photos. She showed me two programs, Lightroom and Photoshop, and she showed me many ways to edit photos in the two programs. My mom also told me about her two favorite presets. Presets are shortcuts that she uses to speed up her editing. After we finished editing our favorites in Lightroom, we picked three photos to edit in Photoshop. First we changed my smile in one photo, it was so cool! Below you can see that I liked my shoulders in the bottom right picture but I liked my smile better in the top right one. We combined them to get the big one on the left. Do you like them edited together also?
Next my mom showed me how she edits portraits. She showed me how to do different things like dodge and burn, smooth skin, sharpen our eyes and adjust colors. We edited the two photos below in Photoshop.
Once we finished editing we uploaded our photos to a gallery on the internet to get them ready to post on the blog. We used another program to put them into collages and we also made a title picture for the blog. Even though we spent a lot of time at the photo session, I was surprised that we spent a longer time on her computer, isn’t that funny?
Here are a couple more photos that I took of my mom.
My dad works at Bayer and usually once a week he works from home. Normally I would go with him to his work on Take Your Child to Work Day but this year I’m going to spend the afternoon with my dad working from home. We started our half day with going to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.
When we got home my dad showed me his emails, work calendar etc. He let me drive the mouse to look at different things that can be accessed from this computer. Then he talked about when and where the company started. Bayer was in what is now part of the German city Wuppertal in 1863. He showed me pictures he took when he visited 2 years ago. There is a cool “suspension railway” in this town that swings to the side when riding through a curve (sounds like something from Disney World!) You can see the original Bayer factory from this suspension railway on one side of the river Wupper and houses on the other side of the river. Nobody lives in those any more my dad was told when he toured Wupertal with a German colleague. Bayer bought all these houses to keep them empty just in case a chemical explosion would happen in the nearby factory.
My dad showed me a power point presentation on Bayer in the US – how many Bayer employees are in the US, in which states are the most, what were the sales in 2017, etc. My dad is a tax accountant so he tried to show me how those US sales are then captured on a tax return along with other income and deductions and how taxes are calculated on the net profit. We did these calculations as a math exercise. He also showed me various states’ tax returns and how each state gets to tax a piece of Bayer’s profits and that the size of the piece depends on how many Bayer employees and property Bayer has in each state. At the end we watched a video on Bayer’s website on digital farming in Brazil especially since Bayer is supposed to acquire the American seeds company Monsanto next month and half of Bayer’s business will be in crop science from now on.
