rickpaul's Blog

The Christmas season is in full swing, and business at Saguaro Shadows Photography is picking up!

This past weekend, we opened our home studio for family Christmas portraits. The weekend was quite successful, and we shot several family portraits:

We gained most of our clients through word of mouth, but also had some contacts from clients who found our website through Google. We have more Google clients lined up for this coming week, and a few Thanksgiving weekend. The Google AdWords campaign is definitely working!

Our Christmas portraits were shot with a 3 light setup. Two SB-800's shooting through umbrellas to the left and the right, and another SB-800 bouncing off the ceiling to open up the shadows a little in the background.

Although most of the image is a hand-painted background, the bookcase in the scene, and the presents are real. This gave the images a more realistic and 3-dimensional feel.

As well as taking Christmas portraits, we've also hooked up with a professional graphics designer to created custom Christmas card templates for us. Saguaro Shadows can now offer our customers a very unique, one of a kind Christmas card:

We worked a barter deal with the designer, so we now have several Christmas Card designs at a minimal cost to us.

By the way, if you're a reader of my blog, and a Facebook member, please become a fan of Saguaro Shadows!

Christmas is coming fast, and Saguaro Shadows Photography is ready!

We're opening our home studio this coming weekend for family Christmas portraits. The point of the effort is to draw in a lot of clients with 1 setup, and provide an inexpensive Christmas portrait they can use for presents for grandparents, or holiday Christmas cards.

We started by getting a high quality, hand-painted background from David Maheu. David creates among the best backgrounds on the planet. You can see the results in our first test shots with this background:

We already have some clients lined up, and will be trying to line up more in the coming week by word of mouth, Google Advertising, and our Facebook presence. By the way, if you're a reader of my blog, and a Facebook member, please become a fan of Saguaro Shadows!

As we move into the Fall season, several photographic marketing doors are opening. First and foremost is Christmas. Between now and the days before Christmas, if you visit your local mall, chances are they have a mall photography studio (e.g., "Picture People"). You'll notice on the weekends they are packed, all reservation slots are filled. Families are trying to get family portraits for Christmas cards, and prints for the grandparents. The trick for us, is to get the word out to these families that we can provide better family portraits, at rates as good or better than the mall photographers.

This year, Saguaro Shadows Photography has some unique marketing, beyond our normal, Google Adwords advertising.

First, we're using word of mouth. We're mentioning to all of our friends and extended contacts that will we be providing specials on family Christmas portraits this year. We spread the word far and wide. We'll be using the web in other ways, including our Facebook presence. More on Facebook in a later blog!

For more directing marketing, we have creating bookmark sized business cards. These high quality business cards have sample pictures on the front, and our information on the back:

This particular card we give out when our daughters attend birthday parties (and they go to a lot!). This card offers a "free" portrait session. We only give these cards out at occasions like this to try and draw in new business. One side benefit, is that at the birthday party, the card itself becomes a topic of conversation between other parents at the party, thus raising awareness of our services.

This year, we have a new bookmark design for Christmas:

The idea with this card is to generate interest in Christmas family photos. And here's our unique twist on marketing this year: We're going to give these cards away on Halloween! Not to every child, but to those families that come to door with small children who appear like possible photography clients.

Later in the year, I'll report back on our unique marketing efforts are working out.

By the way, if you're a reader of my blog, and a Facebook member, please become a fan of Saguaro Shadows!

When shooting a wedding, rarely does anything go as planned. But one thing you can usually count on is a cooperative bride, who is anxious to capture beautiful images of her wedding day.

I said "usually". Saguaro Shadows Photography just covered a wedding where this wasn't quite true. The bride was a little nervous about the wedding, and when it came time to shoot pre-wedding bridal shots, she changed her mind and didn't want any pictures before the ceremony!

What to do? Well, I spoke her with friends, and let them know this was OK, and it was her decision to make. I didn't try to pressure her at all. So after about 20 minutes, she changed her mind, and came out for some pictures. And we were able to capture some beautiful images:

In this image, the bride was leaning over a railing on the upper level of a patio, and I was down below on a lower patio. By the time we took the shot, it was nearly sunset and the sun had dropped behind the buildings behind the bride. The bride was illuminated with my Voice Activated Lightstand, which was held by my wife to camera right. Shot was taken at ISO 400, f/5.6 at 1/500th at 62mm with a Nikon 24-70 f/2.8. The SB-800 was in Manual. In post processing, I used Nik Color Efex Pro to add a little warmth to the light.

The location for the wedding was a restored guest ranch in Tucson, that included some wonderful adobe ruins:

This shot was taken with no artificial lighting, at f/8.0 at 1/125th. I don't usually use this kind of a "desaturation trick", but in this case, it was a good opportunity with her bright red rose bouquet. In post processing, a black and white mask was added with Nik Silver Efex Pro in Photoshop, and the flowers where painted out to let the color come through. The black and white layer was then lowered to an opacity of 77%.

For this wedding, I arrived several hours before the wedding, so I could get familiar with the location. This gave me plenty of time to location 3 or 4 good shooting locations on the property.

The lesson learned at this wedding is to be patient and go with the flow. Opportunities will always present themselves!

I've had a lot of questions recently concerning my marketing efforts for Saguaro Shadows Photography and my use of Google Adwords.

To recap, Google Adwords is Google's name of the advertising they run on their search engine. When you perform a search, paying clients advertisement run on the left hand side of the search engine.

AdWords uses keywords you define to determine when your add will pop up on a users screen. There are many factors that determine when, if, and how often your ad will pop up, but the keywords are, well..., the key!

Here is a list of my most popular keywords. These are keywords that generate at least one click-thru hit per month:

• Tucson Photographers
• Wedding Photography
• Senior Portraits
• Family Photography
• Portrait Photography
• Kids Photography
• Christmas Photography
• Children Photography

More complex phases, like "Tucson Wedding Photographer" are not working at all. My Adwords campagn is already targeted to Arizona customers, so this level of detail is probably not required

On side note, been reading my blog? If so, I'd like to hear from you! Please drop me a line and let me know what you like, or would like me to talk about in future blogs.

Just a few years ago, my printing was limited to finding the best lab I could for my prints. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to live near Colortek in Culver City, top lab who serviced top L.A. clients.

When I moved to Tucson, I found the lab Photographic Works to be very similar to Colortek in terms of services and quality.

But then I discovered the video tutorial from Luminous Landscape, From Camera to Print. In this video series, Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe introduce the viewer to the process of getting a good quality image out of the camera and onto a quality print. This video series is worth watching by any photographer serious about trying to print their own work.

Camera to Print convinced me to invest in an Epson 3800 printer. This outstanding 17" printer can produce prints up to 17"x22" in size. It has recently been replaced by the updated Epson 3880.

This printer has enabled me to produce high quality, fine art prints for my clients, at a lower cost than labs can, at equal or higher quality. By producing my own prints, I can control the quality and appearance of the final output.

A key component of producing your own prints is choosing a quality paper. There are hundreds of choices here. An excellent resource I have found is the company Shades of Paper. Shades of Paper provides an outstanding selection of fine photographic papers, printers,and supplies with excellent customer service.

The papers I have settled on for most of my work are the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta and Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl . But in the future, I will continue to evaluate other papers.

One way to start exploring paper choices to purchase a paper sampler pack. Most of the larger paper manufacturers offer such sampler packs.

The next step for my printing? Perhaps one of these!

Earlier this summer,Saguaro Shadows Photography was asked to help a friend with a wedding. The friend had been requested to shoot a wedding, and they had agreed. Our friend is an amateur, and asked for help. We went to the wedding intending to provide guidance on shot setup, posing, etc. We brought our cameras, just in case. We ended up needing them, and doing a lot more than originally planned...

...and learning some lessons along the way.

The primary photographer captured many good images during the course of the ceremony. But they also missed several key moments due to some very simple mistakes.

• Know your equipment - The primary photographer was not familiar enough with their equipment to understand the various modes and behavior of the camera. This led to incorrect settings at times, causing blurry pictures due to very slow shutter speeds. This is really no different than the old rule of never take a new piece of equipment out on an important shoot before you've tested it and know how to use it.
• Watch the settings - Photographer was not watching the aperture and shutter speed choices the camera was making, and did not recognize when the shutter speed was dropping too low. They were relying on the "scene" mode they had chosen to make the correct choices, which it was not.
• Watch your power - Photographer had spare batteries for the camera and flash, but they were not ready at hand. Also, they didn't recognize when the batteries were running low. This lead to shots being taken without the flash firing, again resulting in very slow shutter speeds and blurry images. They didn't realize how many flash shots they had taken prior to the ceremony. They could have used some of the downtime before the ceremony or right after the ceremony to change to fresh batteries for the next phase of the shoot.
• Watch your focus The primary photographer was using a lower end, competitor camera. Many of their shots were out of focus, and they should not have been. The photographer was not "chimping" enough to understand they were missing shots because of bad focus.
• Meet the client - The photographer knew one set of the parents, but had never met the bride and groom prior to the wedding. Getting to know the bride and groom prior to the week of the wedding will create a better and more trustful relationship. You'll be closer to being a friend of the family rather than just hired helped. We always schedule an engagement shoot with the couple weeks or months before the wedding, just so we can begin to establish that relationship.

When we realized the primary photography was struggling, along we making suggestions on how to fix their problems, we pulled out our equipment and start shooting side by side.

In the end, there were enough good pictures from the primary photographer and our own to salvage the shoot and avoid a disaster. But proper planning and understanding of the equipment could have avoided any lost opportunities.

Following our wedding shoot in Huntsville, Alabama, our family took a much needed vacation to DisneyWorld. We had a nice time, and even got a few nice pictures with our vacation camera, a Nikon D70s.

After the vacation, it was time for Saguaro Shadows Photography to get back to work with another destination wedding. This was a destination wedding with a twist. Located in Newport Beach, California, this wedding was entirely held on a yacht!

Destination weddings require extra planning, but a wedding on board a yacht created even more challenges! No running out to the car to grab a piece of equipment! Also, the yacht did not allow any tripods, lightstands or monopods. Even though this was a very large yacht, space was still cramped.

Good news was the wedding took place under a white awning on the upper deck, and below deck, the other levels all had low white ceilings. This created ideal conditions for using the Gary Fong Lightsphere.

We also planned the wedding timing with the bride to accommodate afternoon shots outdoors, and sunset shots in the evening

Sunset shots are tricky. For this shot, I figured out the sunset exposure and dialed in some compensation, then adjusted the fill on the SB-800 to light up the couple.

This wedding turned out well, and the couple was very pleased with our work. This wedding is also leading to work in the future for us, from Tucson guests who were at the wedding.

Everyone has used a search engine like Google and see the advertisements that come up at the top of the page, and along the sides. On Google, this is part of a service they offer called "AdWords".

When you sign up with Google to use AdWords, you enter criteria for your ad, such as target market area (e.g., your city), and your budget for each month. You are only charge when someone clicks on your ad.

When you get more advanced at using AdWords, you can target the ads at specific things, like Christmas or Weddings.

I signed up for Google AdWords back in February, and for many months wondered if it was working for me. I had a few inquiries the first few months, but not a lot of jobs coming from Adwords.

That has all started to turn around the last few weeks. Recently, I have had 3 wedding inquiries and 2 portrait inquires through AdWords. Business is definitely picking up! Based on the recent success, I will probably increase my limited budget on AdWords up a bit. This will help the ads to run more often during the month.

I will post an update later in the year to let you know how the ad campagn is doing!

Back in May of this year, Saguaro Shadows Photography traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to shoot a wedding.

Traveling such a distance for a wedding required a lot of preplanning and thought. What equipment to bring? What to leave behind? Based on the restrictions of air travel, both my wife and I carried a camera bag as carry-on baggage. We were able to get a ThinkTank Airport Antidote, and a ThinkTank Urban Disguise 60 on-board. Between these two bags, we were able to get all the camera bodies, lenses, speedlights, MacBook Pro, and other goodies we needed. Although Airport Security kind of freaked out when they scanned the SD-9 battery pack for the SB-900!

Here's the basics of what I took on this trip:

• Nikon D3 Body
• Nikon D200 Body
• 24-70 f/2.8
• 70-200 f/2.8
• 105 f/28 Micro
• 18-35 f/3.5-4.5
• Three SB-800's, one SB-900, and SU-800 Commander.
• Monopod and shoot-thru umbrella as a "voice activated lightstand"
• Lots of CF Memory cards, and a portable hard drive to back everything up

For this wedding, the bride wanted complete coverage of all the events on Friday, and the wedding Saturday. Between my wife and myself, we covered it all.

One of the challenges of this wedding was a non traditional location. Rather than a church, this wedding was held in a hotel ballroom. This had one advantage in that most of the events took place all in the hotel, where we were staying also. The challenge of this hotel was finding good shooting locations. Although the hotel was very nice, and it's garden area had been set up for weddings, the orientation of the hotel meant the garden was in full-sun from early morning until very late afternoon. And it was a full sun, blue sky day!

But we did work around this and found locations to shoot in, and still keep the bride comfortable before the wedding. After the wedding, we waited until nearly dusk to shoot more images outside. By this time, the hotel building was providing some shade.

On the wedding night, after all the events, I backed every CF card up onto my MacBook Pro, and a portable hard drive. Thus I had 3 separate copies of every image. I separated all 3 copies and carried them in separate bags with me on the way back to Tucson. Upon return to Tucson, I copied all the images onto my primary computer, which has dual hard drives that are mirror images of each other.

Following this wedding, we had weeks of post-processing and down-selecting the best images for the bride and groom. We just recently finished creating an 80-page AsukaBook for the couple, and are waiting on their final approval to order the book.

Next time: Family Vacation and another destination wedding!