Wootness | the blog of christine walsh-newton

Oh hey, it’s day 2!

Yay Amy!!

Major High-Wootness-Five to Amy Wolf Jones who let me know that she joined in and did all the activities of yesterday. Now that right there’s Wootness, I don’t care who you are.

Wootness challenge – take a photo of your office. Right now, Before you do anything else in the 61-derful challenge. Don’t move a thing. Take a few different angles. Hold onto them for safekeeping. 😉 Seriously. You’ll be utilizing these later.

Yes, these are the same instructions as yesterday. It is not a mistake. Every morning after a day in which I have you go through things on your desk for one of the assignments, we will take photos of the general condition of our offices. Trust me. You will be proud and amazed. Don’t skip this assignment.

Assignment? What assignment?

If you read through the articles I am writing for this 61-derful challenge, you will understand what the assignments are. Don’t make me hand-hold you through this. I won’t. In fact, I will refuse to. If you want to come along for the ride, come along. If you want to do the work, do the work. It makes no difference to me. I’ll be happy you joined me, but I won’t lose sleep if you don’t.

BANKING DAY!

Yep, this is the day when you gather up all of those stray checks, record them in your accounting program and take them down to your handy-dandy bank and deposit them. While you are there – get some spare deposit slips. When you get back to your office, fill in the new deposit slips with your account number so they are prepped. In this day and age, I run out of deposit slips way faster than I run out of checks. I am constantly putting off going to the bank because I was out of deposit slips and would have to go *IN* the bank. Yes, I’m that lazy. It is what it is. Instead of trying to change me – {face it – I’m 48 – I’m not gonna change!} – I adapted to my temperament. So, I know I hate going into a bank and prefer to do all of my banking in the drive through. Fine. Great. Now I just need to make sure that I always have the proper banking supplies on hand. Easy peasy.

EMAIL MANIA!

You know – it looks like we’ll have to pay this area a bit of attention. Every day – delete all non-essential email and unsubscribe from 5 vendors. I personally, would unsubscribe from B&H. Why? Because I am 100% loyal to them and buy all of my gear there except an occasional odd item from a trade show. I don’t spend my money when there is a sale, I spend my money when I have money and decide there is something I need.

WORK ON BACKLOG

Do 1/2 day of backlog. We talked about this yesterday.

SET A SHORT TERM GOAL

61 days is a really long time. I’d like you to set some short-term goals for yourself with an appropriate award for reaching the goal.

I am going to my state professional organization’s fall conference on November 12-14. I have arranged my  schedule so that a certain amount of workload will be handled and finished with before I leave town. I really despise having work hanging over my head while I am trying to take a break. I rarely take a vacation, so the annual fall conference and the annual convention each spring are what I consider my “vacations.”

So – this short term goal is a no-brainer and a necessity: Wipe out all backlog by 11/11/11.

Reward: Attending Conference. Duh!… uh…no. I’m going to go to this conference no matter what happens, so this is not a true reward.

Revised reward: Spending Thanksgiving Day weekend refurbishing my office. 🙂

Today I:

• Prepared bank deposit (bank only open until noon on Wednesday, so actual deposit will be made tomorrow)
• Attended webinar on internet marketing
• Cleared 25 emails out of inbox, unsubscribed from 5 lists
• Worked on backlog
• Designed and uploaded 2 Fan Club Freebies for upcoming weeks.

I think it’s time to slow down. Everybody needs to take a look at their numbers and truly examine their shooting style, as in, how many frames do you typically shoot during a session or a wedding?

I’m not sure that there’s any magic number. We all just need to stop taking advantage of the 7 fps burst mode in the cameras and chill out a bit. “Spray and Pray” is not a philosophy to shoot by.

One thing that I do to limit session files is to only use a 2G card in the camera for studio sessions. I can only get about 150 or so files on a card that size. Way more than enough for a typical 60-90 minute session.

By limiting the files, I limit the amount of post-processing work. I typically weed sessions down to 25-45 of the absolute best shots. By weeding through dozens of similar shots because I pressed the shutter 5 or 6 times instead of once or twice, I’m just wasting my own time. My typical session results in 80-100 images.

For weddings, I shoot anywhere from 600-900 shots during an 8 hour day. That includes my second shooter, who only shoots if there is a balcony at the wedding site. Other than that – he’s my equipment mule. My wedding packages contain 200-400 proofs, depending on the package purchased.

The most shots I shoot is when I’m doing a theatre production. I run 3 cameras during the course of a 2 hour show and end up with about 1300 shots. I *REALLY* need to get a handle on that one, huh?

So – take a little time to review your shooting habits and really LOOK at what you’re shooting. If you see tons of repeats and very similar shots, you need to ease up on that shutter button, MKAY?

Welcome to Day 1. Heh heh heh.

Wootness challenge – take a photo of your office. Right now, Before you do anything in the 61-derful challenge. Don’t move a thing. Take a few different angles. Hold onto them for safekeeping. 😉 Seriously. You’ll be utilizing these later.

MAIL CALL!

OK – here’s the deal. There’s crap all over your desk and some of it is time-sensitive. As in, it should have been mailed last week. Find every single mailable item that should be mailed, shipped or delivered in some manner and put it in a pile. Take each item individually and  put it in an envelope and add postage. I’m just talking about things that are danged near ready to go out. Things you can grab and take to the post office.

If you have to print out invoices and find boxes and crap like that – forget it for now. I just want you to grab the stuff that you can take care of in less than 5 minutes.

Load it all in your car and drive down to the post office and take care of it. While you are there, grab some Priority mail envelopes and purchase a few priority mail stamps to take care of future emergencies. Running through the postal drive through in the alley sure beats standing in a line of 13 people inside.

EMAIL MANIA!

After you’ve done that go through your email inbox and delete every email that is not from a client or a peer or contains a digital receipt. You may even want to take the drastic step of unsubscribing to an email list. In fact, yes, that’s a good idea. Right now, pick 5 emails to unsubscribe from. Come on – I’m not asking for your first born child. You regularly delete a lot of these emails without looking at them anyway, so do the prudent thing and unsubscribe. If you’re that interested in what’s going on, you can always travel over to their WWW site and take a look.

WORK ON BACKLOG

OK, let’s be honest, in all those leaning tower of craps on your desk is legitimate work that needs done. Starting now, devote 1/2 of your working day to clearing out your backlog. I don’t care if it’s retouching or placing orders or designing wedding albums. Just do it. Do the oldest job first and work your way down through the list until you’re caught up. Please tell me you have a list. If you don’t, lie. I’ve had a long day.

Today I:

• Mailed 2 very important items.
• Wrote 7 advance articles for wootness.net
• Cleared ~300 emails out of inbox
• Portrait session & viewing session & sneak peek to client.

Here’s the plan.

I have committed to streamlining, upgrading, and Super-Powering my photography studio to a better place by December 31, 2011.

Are you in a rut?

Each day, for the next 61 days I will do something to improve my business. Think “Extreme Makeover” for a photography studio. But in business and office organization instead of furniture and ceiling fans.

Have you gotten hopelessly behind over the summer and you’re barely treading water?

Join me in my journey. Either follow-along and cheer me on or join me in the journey. Each day I will report on the activity for that day, so that if you wish, you can follow along one day behind. Work for you?

Do you need an enthusiasm transfusion?

Keep track of the journey by selecting “61-derful” in the main menu.

Heeeyah!

What, pray tell, is a Gumby?

I just made this up, but I’m gonna keep on using it. A Gumby is a person who bends.

Specific examples of being a Gumby:

Waiving a session fee because the client doesn’t have the money at the moment in order to book their session with you.

Giving free items because the client can’t afford you

Giving discounts because the client complains about your prices

Shooting during days/hours you prefer to not to because your client can’t make it during any other day or time.

Bending your policies just this once.

Arranging special pricing for a service that was not on your pricing menu because you decided it wasn’t a service you wanted to provide in the first place.

Arranging special pricing because of promises of additional future business.

Deviating from any policy or pricing for anything but a super-special client who has already proven their loyalty to you.

I recently had a conversation with a photographer who was asking for advice about a situation where a client walked out of his office in tears because she was upset that a portrait she wanted was $100 and she felt that was higher than she wanted to spend. The photographer in question was torn over this situation and was considering just giving the client the print she wanted.

My objective advice was to refrain from giving away the print.

First of all, I believe that giving away your work sends a message to your clients that you don’t value your work. And if YOU don’t value it, why in the heck would they?

Secondly, giving away the print would have sent the message that a few tears is all it takes to get free stuff. I think this client would employ that tactic in the future, as well, and this photographer would have created a PITA client of his very own. It’s bad enough that we get them off the street, don’t start creating them.

Thirdly, I think this client would probably pass the word to her friends that they should use this photographer and then complain about the prices so that they can get free stuff, too.

Why in the heck would we just give something to someone because we felt bad for them?

I don’t go in a boutique shop at the mall and cry because I can’t afford the $169 jeans that are really cute. OK, well maybe I do, but the sales clerk certainly doesn’t feel bad for me and put the jeans in a bag for free and send me on my merry little way. That would just be stupid.

So why do photographers seriously contemplate doing a similarly stupid thing?

Awhile back, I sat in a board meeting of a non-profit organization and listened in horrified amusement as a letter was read from a disgruntled former organization member. The member was not renewing their membership and stipulated why. We weren’t doing anything wrong, we just changed and improved a facet of the organization and this member was not fond of the change. Because of this letter, a motion was made and passed the re-introduced the phased-out component back into the organization’s operations. Because of ONE person. I later wondered how many other times this organization jumped because of one person.

How often do YOU jump for one person?

If you have an occasional person trying to get you to change your policies, please resist, Do not be a Gumby. Your policies are in place for a reason.

Equally important are your prices. Remember setting those? Remember what a pain in the ass it was to figure out your pricing and all of your packages and collections? You kept working on them and giving them to other people to critique until they were tired of giving you input and just wanted you to be done with it, already. You got everything perfectly the way you wanted it and your “happy price” was set.

And now, someone comes along and whines a little bit and you’re handing out discounts and bonuses all over the place.

Give me a freaking break.

Grow a backbone and stick to your policies and your prices. You are running a business, not a charity.

So, I’m checking my blog updates to Facebook and I see the above. WHAT???

Last week I wrote an article about how to syndicate your blog posts and save yourself some time through the usage of Networked Blogs, but now I need to revamp that advice a bit. NetworkedBlogs (NB) continues to be a viable way to get your blog out there to readers, but as far as posting your updates to Facebook, it’s beginning to suck eggs. HARD.

Facebook, in all it’s ever-changing glory, now lumps NB posts together like the above example. Instead of lumping together MATCHING posts (I have 3 pages updated with posts) it lumps together ALL NB posts.

I went ahead and clicked on the “see 20 more posts” area and in the list were my 3 posts from this morning, 3 posts from yesterday morning and 17 posts from other people on my friends list. Yes, it seems that Facebook also can’t add.

Now, I don’t want my posts lumped in with everyone else’s, so I’m scrambling for a way to get my posts on the news feed in a manner that will actually facilitate readership. I don’t know about you – but I’m not inclined to click on the “see 20 more posts” area. I have nearly 1000 friends on my news feed and that’s just too much to deal with. I imagine that other FB users feel the same way.

For a few days I’d noticed that my NB posts were not receiving very many “impressions” and that the site itself was not receiving very many referrer links from FaceBook.

I decided to try some manual link posting while I figured out the issue.

Here are the results of  the difference between posting a blog link manually vs. automatically:

I’m using the Shareaholic plugin (my sites are all WordPress based) for ease in reader sharing, so for the present time, I’m going to use that to “share” my posts on each of my Facebook pages. I could hand post each link manually, but this plugin allows me to post a link to any of the pages I administer in just a few clicks instead of going through the whole copy/paste routine, so for now, it’s efficient enough.

So – the search continues for a plugin that will automate the linking of my daily blog posts to social media sites. In the past, I’ve also tried using the Wordbooker plugin, but I ran into the same issue as the NB issue, so for now, I guess manually “sharing” the posts on Facebook will have to suffice. I also use NB to update Twitter and that is not an issue, so I’ll leave the Twitter updating alone.

My goal in using a plugin to automatically update social media is so that some of the mundane drudge tasks are automated and not wasting my time. I presently write my articles in advance and schedule them to post each morning at 6AM. Then, if a plugin automatically updates Social Media, I don’t have to worry about doing it. This way, I can stay out of the office for the weekend or go on vacation and the blog will continue to operate seamlessly and y’all will not have a clue that I’m sitting in a hot tub somewhere.

So, for now, I’m back to doing social media updates manually in order for them to be seen. I’ll continue researching the issue and I’ll keep you abreast of what I find. If any readers find a viable solution, please let me know and I’ll share the Wootness! with everyone else.

The last few weeks of Photography 102 class I’ve been customizing the lessons and homework a bit. I asked each student 3 questions:

What have we learned that you found particularly pleasing? Perhaps it was something you really enjoyed or found that you had a knack with.

What have we learned that you didn’t care for? Something that you don’t like and you know you still need some work on.

What haven’t we learned that you would like to cover?

Questions 1 and 2 were then used to create homework assignments specific to each student. I have a small class, so this works out well.

I think it’s important to work on skills that we aren’t that great on and by combining photography that we like with photography we don’t like, perhaps it makes the assignments more palatable.

When is the last time that we purposefully shot something we weren’t that good at? Or something that we didn’t really like? It’s real easy to get caught up in only shooting what we like and calling that our “style,” while ignoring the skills improvement opportunity elsewhere. Don’t sit back and relax because you’ve got one skill nailed. Nail them all. One at a time. It will take a while to do it, but this should be your goal.

Personally, shooting at a 3:1 ratio is a challenge for me. Not because I can’t do it – I can nail the light arrangement and settings, but to me, my instinct is to start adding in reflectors and bounce that lovely soft light all around until the client is practically flat lit, thereby destroying the light ratio and the shadowing and depth it creates. So, I’ve been forcing myself to adhere to classic lighting setups more often.

Okay, that’s your little nugget of thought-provocation for the day.

Have a good one. And go nail something. 😉

Back in the day, I would have said something about answering machine messages, but I guess those aren’t big sellers any more.

I’ve called quite a few photographers and have had the opportunity to listen to a variety of voice mail greetings. Sometimes it’s VERY hard to understand what the greeting says. I called someone recently who had a message that was so fast that I only understood the word “photography.” If it weren’t for that,  I wouldn’t have been sure that I had the right number.

Sometimes your voice mail greeting is the first impression that a potential client has of you. You certainly don’t want that impression to be “I have no idea what they just said.”

Here’s a simple guide to writing a voice mail message:

1. Greet your caller: “Hello!”

2. Identify yourself: “This is Mary from ABC Photography.”

3. Short message: “I’m  not available at the moment.”

4. Tell them what to do: “Please leave your name and number and I will contact you soon.”

5. Buh bye: “Thank you for calling.”

There…  5 easy tidbits to write. You don’t have to be creative to write a simple and effective greeting. Now, practice it a few times and make sure you talk slower than normal conversation. It may sound too slow to you, but trust me, you will be understood better if you slow down.

Record your message and ask a few friends to call your number and listen to your message and let you know if they could understand it.

Well done!