Wootness | the blog of christine walsh-newton

Some people just can’t get past the whole gear thing. For a long time, I was tempted to do as a friend of mine does – cover up all the identifying marks on my camera with black electrical tape. You’d know I shot a Nikon, but that’s about it. For the past few years I’ve side-stepped questions about what camera body I shoot with. Well, the cat is about to be let out of the bag. The cameras I’ve been shooting with for the past 5 years have been Nikon D80s. <— plural of D80, and don’t try to put an apostrophe after the zero to make it plural, it doesn’t work that way.

Go ahead, I’ll pause while you laugh. And then I’ll laugh when you get all bug-eyed when I tell you I just earned a Master’s Degree from the PPA with every single image being made with a D80. The D80 was not manufactured after 2008. But, when I purchased them, they were $1000+ each and that’s not a small amount of money. I wrestled with upgrading, I wrestled with the price. And I wrestled with whether I really NEEDED a new camera. Or two. Because I constantly shoot with more than one camera at a time, I like my main bodies to match, so I upgrade both at once. Backups, not so much. They’re a backup for a reason.

It’s really easy to get all caught up in the hype over the new models and think you need the latest and greatest. If you really do need it, then that’s great, obviously you’ve reviewed your needs and compared it against the equipment you already have and the equipment available at the trade show you just attended. Oops, I mean, the equipment your favorite supplier carries.

For example – The D700 has been on my wish list for awhile. Mainly because it has better high ISO / low light handling capabilities. But, there’s been a couple of newer models hat have come out since I placed the D700 on the list, and honestly, my low light work has decreased significantly, so the need is not as great right now as it was before.

Maybe I’m more cautious because I’m older. Maybe I’m just more greedy with my money. Whatever the reason, I find the constant search for the holy grail of gear to be disconcerting. Your clients don’t care what gear you use. Your clients care that you deliver a quality product and the driving force behind that is your knowledge and skill level. Of course, if you’re shooting with a pinhole camera made out of a milk carton and duct tape, we’ll need to chat, but for the most part, I think everyone is operating with a decent camera body capable of capturing excellent images when used correctly. Even if it’s a Canon. 😉

For further reading, please review these past Wootness articles:

Don’t be a Gear Hound!

My Camera is Better than Your Camera. Not!

Oh good morning Wootness fans! Happy Groundhog Day! Phil did NOT see his shadow, so I guess that means we’ll have an early spring. Yeah, right. When I start relying on a rodent to forecast the weather, there’s issues at play.

So, today we’re gonna talk about shadows. Specifically, shadows from your clients that are cast onto your lovely photographic backgrounds. You SO have learned not to use bedsheets, right? No? Please back up and read THIS first.

OK, the rest of you, listen up. Take a good look at your client portraits. If the client casts a shadow on the background, they are TOO CLOSE to it. I’m not going to dig up an example of this on the internet, because it’s just not nice to use someone’s work as an example of what NOT to do – unless one of you dear readers would like to help out with an example (I’ll keep your name confidential), but anyway – I think we all know if we’re casting shadows or not. Please note that I am referring to shadows on the background behind the client, not shadows on the floor leading away from the client.

I’m telling you – the shadows will give you away as an amateur. There are various reasons as to WHY the shadows appear, and I’m sure that I’ll be hearing some of them in the comments shortly – but here’s the deal. Either you didn’t know that you should put your clients at least 6-8 feet in front of the background OR you know it and don’t care because you just don’t have that much room in front of your backgrounds to work with. So – to the former – I’m telling you to pull your clients out 6-8 feet (experiment with that, but that’s a general measurement to get you started) and to the latter – suck it up – if you don’t have the room to shoot with technical excellence, you need to find somewhere else to shoot. Do not force the issue and continue to churn out work with shadowy backgrounds because you’ve got your studio set up in the corner of your house or you made a bad decision to rent/lease/buy a space too small for your needs.

You can’t deliver quality work without the proper tools. You not only need to have the right camera, lenses, lights, triggers, modifiers, etc, but you must also have the right SPACE.

If you just can’t change the space you’re working with, you need to change the type of things you shoot. Ditch the full body family groups and stick to heads and shoulders only. By not insisting on the amount of room needed between you and the client for full(er) body images, you can pull your clients away from the background and closer to you and stick to head/shoulders/upper body shots.

Working within your limits, skill-wise, equipment-wise and space-wise is the mark of a professional or at least an aspiring professional. Please stop trying to do work that you are not fully prepared to do. The RIGHT way.

In the beginning, when the ink was still fresh on my business license, I used whatever lab was running a sale. I hadn’t yet run into quality, delivery or customer service issues. I was a happy little photographer bouncing from vendor to vendor, collecting my paper samples from each and keeping up with the constant barrage of sale emails in order to make sure I was ordering from the cheapest place.

Gradually I began to learn the minute details that set each lab apart.

Some had lousy customer service, some had cheaper 8x10s, but more expensive 16x20s. Some shipped Fedex, some UPS, and some USPS which meant I had to remember what days of the week each delivered and whether or not the delivery dude had the sense to tuck my delivery in the dry area of the front porch if I wasn’t home and the weather sucked.

Keeping up with the sales became time consuming and tedious and I found myself holding onto orders if there was no sale because I knew another one would come along shortly.

I didn’t have a solid, organized system, and at the end of the year, the accounting paperwork was a nightmare. I think I used 14 different labs my first year in business. My Quickbooks program couldn’t keep track of the constantly fluctuating COGs to my satisfaction. Suddenly, all the savings from bouncing around was eaten up by the administrative time spent on tracking the sales, learning everyone’s ordering system and trying to reconcile the accounting system.

Eventually I settled on one lab. And the reason was stupid. Because they had the quickest delivery. Suddenly my work flow slowed down to where I was ordering my items the day before they were promised. I knew they’d arrive the next day, so what was the problem?

The problem was that I was using a lab that enabled a downturn in my own customer service. I found myself scrambling at the last minute to do retouching and ordering when I should have had everything squared away at least a week earlier.

And then I began to think… I get angry when I see clients bounce from photographer to photographer, chasing the latest sale. I moan about the fact that there does not seem to be any customer loyalty these days. And then I stopped and thought about what I was doing. And I felt like a hypocrite.

So, I began a new search. I started all over. I’m in the middle of re-branding my studio and changing over my pricing, packages and product line to be more in line with that of a boutique studio (is that an over-used phrase, or what?) and a new system is required.

And I began to think again. About small businesses and local businesses. And how in this day and age, loyalty is important in an economy that’s about as supportive as my ex-husband. 😉

And suddenly the choice was clear. I have chosen my new lab based on the qualities that I hope my clients look for in me. I’m local. I offer personalized customer service. I’m not high volume, so I have the opportunity to spend time with my clients and offer them a much higher level of service than they would expect from a chain. My prices are a little higher than most photographers in my area for those very reasons, so the fact that the labs with those desired features had a little higher COGs was only to be expected.

I have chosen Buckeye Professional Imaging to be my primary lab. It is located in Canton, Ohio (just up the road) and I have been acquainted with the owner and a few of his staff for several years. I belong to an organization that uses Buckeye for all of their printing needs (and those needs are numerous), so I’ve had many opportunities to be impressed with their product line and high customer service. I’m very pleased to know that the person on the other end of the line has a familiar name and face.

I encourage you to re-evaluate WHY you use the lab you do. Perhaps everything is going swell and no change is needed, but it could be that there are better options out there for you. I especially encourage you to look to your local community and see what your options are closer to home.  This is truly a time when supporting your local business is important.

If you’ve not yet decided on a lab – check out Buckeye and order some FREE test prints at this link and tell them Wootness sent ya!

Disclaimer: Christine only recommends vendors based on personal experience and does not accept compensation of any type for a positive review or recommendation.