Despite a sluggish economy, our wedding and portrait business is up this year. We have attacked each year with an updated strategy, and this year was no different. We revamped our price list and client presentation methods. The changes we made resulted in higher revenue per customer, and more customers. For example, in our wedding packages we produced a nice full color brochure, and laid out our packages top-down. Best package first. When we meet with potential wedding clients, we show them a short slide show movie of our work, generated with Animoto. From there, we run through a presentation of our packages, Best down to the most economical.
We have also expanded our business in Senior portraits:
This is a challenging area to break into in our area, because all the schools already have contracts with other photographers. Our selling point is don't sell senior portraits, but we sell senior experiences. We focus on areas, or activities of the senior's choice.
This senior selected our downtown area, and wanted a variety of locations and outfits.
Looking forward into the Fall, we are getting ready for the Holiday season already. We are going to kick off a holiday promotion in October. Our client base has grown enough that we should be able to keep our calendar full just with business from the existing base.
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Before the holidays, we ran a web special through Living Social. Living Social provides a means to reach hundrends, if not thousands of potential new customers in your area. This special resulted in our photographing over 31 family portraits during the holidays!
The Living Social ad not only resulted in directed sales to new customers, but it also raised awareness for our studio on the web, and we gained several more new customers are a result.
We are also started to receive referrals from our Living Social customers for new portrait sessions and weddings.
In the New Year, we also entered into agreement with a local, private race course to photograph their monthly vintage race series.
This race coverage has opened up a new area of photography for us, and provided us a new customer base. For this clientele, rather than albums or small prints, we're providing large canvas prints and custom prints of their pride and joys.
Since the New Year began, we can't help but feel the that the economy is improving. Our wedding books for 2011 are running well ahead of 2010, and our new customers seem to feel more comfortable in spending more on photography than they did in 2009 and 2010.
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Sometimes we need to add a little help to make everyone look their best. One problem that can be hard to correct is severe shine on the face. Unless you have a full time makeup artist with you to powder your clients faces, this is a problem you'll encounter from time to time!
We recently discovered an inexpensive plug-in that easily and magically takes care of this problem. The results are amazing!
Compare the two images closely, and you'll notice a subtle reduction in shine around the forehead, nose, chin, and cheeks.
Shine Off from Image Trends is a $49 Photoshop plug-in. It's available as a free trial. So go find a shot in your collection with a little shine and give it a try!
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We use them indoors as our studio lights behind an umbrella or soft box. At weddings or any shoot on the run, we always have one on a Voice Activated Lightstand
Nikon's Speedlights are powerful and versatile light sources, and with a little practice, you can achieve some amazing results!
There appears to be some confusion about the basic modes of the Speedlights and when to use them. I took the following the examples to try to explain. (please note I'm using a Nikon D3 which is capable of high-speed sync outdoors).
First, the basic "TTL" mode. This mode attempts to use the flash to balance the entire scene. This is a mode best used indoors, or a location where the natural lighting is even. Here's an example of what happens with TTL mode outdoors. This shoot is taken outdoors, with the subject in full shade, (85mm, Aperture Priority, f/2.0, 1/2000, SB-900 TTL EV 0):
Yuck! This is typical in what happens in TTL mode outdoors. For quick improvement, we can switch the Speedlight to the TTL-BL mode, which stands for Balanced Fill Flash. In this mode, the flash uses the camera's exposure information to try to provide a good balance between the foreground and background exposure. Here's the same shot again with the only change the switch to TTL BL mode (85mm, Aperture Priority, f/2.0, 1/1600, SB-900 TTL-BL EV 0)
Better! Without any other manual adjustments, the camera and speedlight gave us a pretty well balance image. We can further refine the image by adjusting the camera exposure bias or the flash bias. In this example, I've put the camera into Manual mode, so I have full control over the exposure of the background. Then I dialed the compensation on the SB-900 down EV -3.0. (85mm, Aperture Priority, f/2.0, 1/2500, SB-900 TTL-BL EV -3)
In this image, you can barely tell a flash was used at all, and you also get greater saturation in the background. It just provided gentle fill flash without providing that obvious punch of on-camera flash. A little greater refinement to EV -2.7 or -2.3 might suit individual tastes.
While I'm not trying to teach a complete tutorial on Nikon Speedlights, I am trying to encourage you to grab a friend, go outside, and give it a try!
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Something I've learned, is that even with posed studio portraits, you always need to be ready for that special moment between family members. This was captured before I was really ready to shoot their portrait:
Not sure with children I could have arranged this shoot!
This shot was taken in a series of images with mother and daughter. I got some nice shots of the two of them, but this was a special moment when they thought I was taking a break:
The lesson here that I have learned is to never take my eye away from the camera during portrait sessions, even for an instant. You'll never know when might miss the shot!
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Photovision provides a Quarterly DVD that visits with professional photographers at work in their studios and in the field. The Photovision DVD's provide marketing and photography education from some of the best photographers in the business for a very affordable price.
Check out Photovision, and use the promo code PVFAN to subscribe for only $39.
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The summer Monsoon season provides excellent opportunities for spectacular sunsets. Unfortunately, even this time of year, it's pretty hit and miss. Sometimes there are too many clouds, or sometimes not at all! Yesterday I was lucky to get a classic monsoon sunset!
For sunsets out here, it's important to pick your spot early, and stay late! You'll never know what might develop early, or late after the sun has gone down. Yesterday, the clouds were quite dramatic, and things started to develop early:
As the sun went behind the clouds, things go really interesting:
As the sun set, there were too many clouds for any really nice shots, but it was fun to watch things develop, and just shoot for fun for a change!
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We start with importing all our images into Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom allows us to quickly import, tag, organize, and select our "winner" images. For many images, that's where it ends. Lightroom's basic editing capabilities provide all the editing the image needs.
But for images that need extra special care, we export to Photoshop. Once in Photoshop we have a variety of tools to choose from, depending on the need.
My sharpening tool of choice is Photokit Sharpener. Photokit provides an excellent sharpening tool for import sharpening, special targeted sharpening, and final output sharpening.
From there, I generally move to Nik Software's tools. I use Viveza 2 for targeted adjustments and Color Efex Pro for other adjustments.
The tool I turned to most often within Color Efex Pro is the darken/lighten center tool. This tool provides a dramatic improvement to most portraits, especially outdoor portraits.
Original Image:
After Darken/Lighten Center:
For skin retouching, we sometimes use Portraiture, or the Dynamic Skin Softener in Color Efex Pro. Both work well, but provide different results. Both need to be used lightly to not give obvious, plastic looking results!
That's about it for our major workflow tools!
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After a long string of baby boys, we finally got a baby girl!
We are now offering our new parents two baby photo plans. The first provides an infant shoot (under 6 weeks), a shoot at around 6 months, and a shoot at around 1 year. At the end of the year, we compile the best of the shots from the whole year into an album.
Our second baby plan option is the unlimited plan. For a fixed plan, we offer the parents the opportunity to book an appointment any time of the year, as many as they want. This provides the opportunity to capture images from occasions such as Halloween and Christmas.
The two plans provide two different price points for the parents to choose from. They also choose to just purchase one session at a time. But both of parents are far more attractive and most parents recognize the value we are providing them in these packages.
This young lady is on our unlimited plan, so you'll be seeing more images of her as the year goes on!
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Wedding bookings have been a little slow this Spring, but our family portrait and baby portrait business is picking up!
This 4 week old was one of the best little clients we've had. He was very sleepy and cooperative. We cranked out 8 different poses in 20 minutes, which is unusually fast! For this shot, we had a hard time convincing the parents what we were trying to achieve in the shot, but after we got it, it's been their favorite, and the favorite of the extended family.
When schedule an infant session, we always the parents to schedule the session when the baby is less than 6 weeks old. The younger, the better. We also advise them to pick a time when the baby would get ready for a nap. It's best if the baby is sleepy for the session, not hungry and cranky! We are always flexible when the appointment will take place to allow the parents some flexibility.
For this session, we planned in advance to do the entire shoot in black and white against a black background. We shared that vision with the parents, and they really liked it, too.
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We were contacted recently by our local middle school PTA to provide photographic coverage for their school events. They would like us to cover all the events at the end of this year, and start up again next year. They saw the work we had done for the middle school musical performance a few weeks ago, and liked the concept.
We are providing the school with a deal that we shoot all the events for no charge to the school and provide a kick back to the school based on a percentage of the sales. In return, the school is promoting Saguaro Shadows Photography at all their events and in their newsletters. This is providing us with a tremendous "free" marketing opportunity.
So far, we've covered a few events for them, including a drama performance. Our most exciting opportunity is coming up soon, when we'll be shooting a school dance. We're going to cover that like a wedding reception, and setup a "photo booth" to take pictures of the kids as they please. Should be a fun time!
It is pleasure to work with such nice young people, and a good chance for us to donate our services.
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The lighting conditions were stressful for any camera. I doubt anything less than a D3/D3s/D700 could handle the extreme lighting conditions. Our initial setup was Auto ISO, with a minimum Shutter speed of 1/200 and Aperture Priority set at f/4 or f/5.6 most of the time. The lighting situation pretty much made this so the ISO was the only parameter varying. ISO was ranging from 500 clear to 3200, 5000, and even Hi2 at times.
The extreme contrast between light and dark made matrix metering totally unusable. Even with exposure compensation dialed in, the situation was constantly changing, and the matrix meter was often fooled. It wanted to make those black backgrounds of the set neutral gray, and was thus over exposing the actors by 2 stops or more. Since this was a real time, fast moving show, manual exposure was not a good option. Switching to Spot meter with a -0.7 compensation, and always metering on someone's face, rendered the best, consistent exposure results.
It was a pleasure to work with such talented young people, and a good chance for us to donate our services.
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One trick to making self-portraits easier is to not relay on the camera's self timer. This only gives you one take, and you need to keep getting up to reset the camera and take another shot.
Instead, I took advantage of the interval timer within Nikon's Capture Control Pro. By connecting the camera to my laptop and running Capture Control Pro, I was able to set the interval time to take any number of pictures I wanted with a set interval between them. I found that shooting 5 images 8 seconds apart worked well. Gave my family enough time to reset between shots, if they realized they blinked or were looking away.
We also used the time to capture just images of our daughters:
And an updated shot of just Margaret and I to use on our webpage and facebook site:
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Working two weddings in one weekend took a little advanced planning. We had to make sure we understood the timing and details for both weddings, and keep all the family names straight! We also had to plan out the equipment carefully. Before we left for the first event, we made sure we had a plan for recharging all of our batteries, and offloading images onto our computer storage system. It even made planning our off-hours correctly to make sure we were going to have enough time to rest between events, and eat so we could keep our energy up!
The wedding on Sunday was a particularly fun event to photograph. A lovely bride in a wonderful location with lots of photographic locations:
Shooting two weddings in 1 weekend definitely gave us a chance to reflect on how we were handling the shoot and look at some lessons learned. The primary lesson was we need to be more forward in communicating the shoot timeline for the wedding day not only to the bride and groom, but the whole wedding party. The rehearsal, which we usually attend, is the perfect opportunity to communicate this to everyone so we get the maximum cooperate on the wedding day.
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We have increased our marketing efforts beyond Google AdWords, and it has already started to help. We signed up with an internet referral service, and almost immediately we booked two more weddings for the year, and a senior portrait. Each wedding and Portrait we are covering these days is leading to more and more interest in our service.
We also started a referral discount for our clients. For our better clients, we give them a "Thank You" card, which explains the program. It provides them a credit back with us for every booked client they refer to us. We have just started this program, so we'll have to wait to see how it pays back.
At the start of 2010, we re-designed our wedding packages. We created more value and variety in each of the packages as they progress up in price. The approach is meant to draw the clients into desiring the features of each package, so hopefully they will purchase a package at least one step above what they have been planning.
We have also started including features that most brides have not considered or seen before. One example is using shots from an engagement session to assemble a custom Guest Book for the wedding. We use Asuka Books to create a 7 or 8-inch book of 20-30 pages in length. The book includes 1 image on every other page, leaving lots of white space for guests to sign. So far, brides are loving this idea. All the brides we have discussed this idea with have purchased the Guest Book.
We have expanded our product offerings into new areas, such as jewelry:
Our jewelry is high quality, sterling silver. All our customers are very impressed with this product, and we expect it to be popular with our family clients. We have ceased providing any "discounts" for our services. Instead of discounts, we are providing incentives to encourage a more desirable client response. For example, we offer to throw in the engagement session if they book with us within 1 week after the initial interview. This provides the couple an incentive to make a decision and book with us quickly
. As we learn more, we are getting more advanced in our marketing techniques, and the results are already starting to show
Stay tuned for an update later in the year to hear how some of our other efforts are paying off!
Please visit us on Twitter, ("shadowsphoto") our company blog, and on Facebook
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