Wootness | the blog of christine walsh-newton

You’ve just let me know that you are going to pursue photography on a more professional level.

So, this is where we sit down and chat, you and I. And we go over your performance so far and we talk about how you’re doing. And we decide what you need to improve on. And sometimes this doesn’t make you feel too good about things, but it gives you some direction, some goals, some ideas for improvement. It’s not meant to make you into a punching bag, but it’s also not meant to falsely give you hope.

So — your mission is this – be honest with yourself. VERY honest. And answer the following questions.

How many classes have you taken?

Are the classes in the type of photography that you intend on earning some money from? (for example – did you formally learn portrait photography or just take a class in how to use your camera better?)

Have you shown your work to other professionals and had them critique it for you?

Do you have the proper equipment for your venture?

Do you have backup equipment?

Do you have backup shooters in case you fall ill or are injured?

Have you procured the proper business licensure and/or vendor’s license?

Have you purchased business liability, indemnity and equipment coverage insurance?

Have you met with a CPA to implement your accounting procedures?

Have  you met with a lawyer to go over the legalities of your state as well draw up the basic contracts you will be using in your business?

Have you researched and implemented your product line and suppliers?

Have you become proficient in post processing software and techniques?

Have you written a business plan?

How do you plan to finance the first 6 months or more of your venture?

Is this making your head hurt? Do you think I’m being unfair and asking questions of you that are really intended for someone who has already been in business for a while?

AWWW – poor you. Go take some ibuprofen and suck it up.

These are only the beginning of the hard questions. I haven’t even scratched the surface. So many people think they can start out slow and gradually get their feet wet in business. If you are one of these people, you are wrong, very wrong.

If you can’t answer EVERY. SINGLE. QUESTION with a well thought-out answer, then STOP.

Do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200 and do not go into business.

Welcome to our first Thinkin’ Thursday. This is the day when we cut to the chase, put our feet up, sip on our favorite hot beverage and nosh on the topic du jour.

Everybody always has questions about low res files, putting files on Facebook, watermarks and clients who cut them off, etc, etc, etc.

We waste a LOT of time worrying about these matters. A lot.

You know what? Give it a rest. Just stop letting it be an issue.

Slap your watermark on your files, stick them on Facebook and go on with your life. So what if a client cuts your watermark off? You can rant and rave to your fellow photogs, send a carefully worded email to your client and the result will be the same; you will have bitched to your peers and come across as a bitch to your clients. You aren’t going to sue them and they wouldn’t have the money to settle with you if you did – so just get a grip. If you put your files on Facebook – they WILL be cropped, they WILL be printed out on home computers, and ….wait for it…they WILL BE SHARED.

Cha. Ching. That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?

You can probably assume that no reputable lab or kiosk will print out files with your watermark on them, but clients…? Give it a rest. It’s gonna be like knocking your head against a brick wall sometimes. Put a notice on the bottom of your invoices that your work is protected under copyright law and then let it be.

Quit wasting your breath and your precious time Facebook-stalking your clients looking for copied and cropped prints. The time you waste doing this is worth money – money that you will NEVER recoup. And all you will do is make a reputation for yourself as a whiny, money-grubbing person. I’m all about standing on principle, but sometimes it is a total losing battle. I think this is one of those times.

We just can’t always have it our way. If we put our files on the internet, we can’t control what happens to them. We can right-click protect, but they can still be screen-captured. So it boils down to this – you have two choices. Put your files out there – or don’t. Make your decision, do it, and shut up about it.

I was in the middle of writing this article about 6 hours ago, when I got a phone call that my 26-year-old son had collapsed at work. The squad had been called, and because the heart monitor showed an abnormality that indicated he was in the middle of having a heart attack, he was transported to a trauma emergency center about 25 miles north.

As I hit the highway, I was worried. No – I was scared to death. And I was kicking myself that I hadn’t talked to him since I saw him at his grandmother’s calling hours 2 weeks ago. Life had gotten in the way and I was attending to my own details and didn’t go out of my way to stay in contact like we had in the past.

As the morning progressed, a heart attack was ruled out and eventually the doctors concluded that too little sleep, not enough food, and not enough fluids has caused his body to rebel.

I dropped him off at home with a hug and a firm lecture to take better care of himself. The 3:30 AM video games and trying to work on 2 hours of sleep and no breakfast needed to stop.

As I drove away, I reflected on the hypocrisy that had just crossed my lips.

I am the one who gets up at 5 AM to start working and generally does not shut it down until midnight. I am the one who will only eat when a plate is placed in front of me. I am the one whose liquid intake consists of 95% coffee and only ingests water when taking ibuprofen. Where do I get off lecturing someone else on taking care of themselves?

Talk about a wake-up call.

So – today’s Wootness™ is that I learned a very important lesson, without losing someone close to me or causing my loved ones any pain. Yes, there were some VERY tense moments all around today, but we emerged unscathed. Next time we might not be so lucky. Here’s hoping there isn’t a next time.

Ladies (and gents), take care of yourselves. Photography may be a passion, but it isn’t your life. Truly. It isn’t. Don’t let your last hours on earth be ones you spent in front of a computer. Let them be ones you spent talking on the phone with someone you care about or just sitting quietly beside your spouse on the couch. Tell everyone you love that you do. Call your children. Call your parents.  Pull over and watch the sunset without dragging out the camera.

And when you wake up tomorrow, do it all over again.

I’m the queen of obsessive-compulsive organization, so hold onto your hats! My way may seem like overkill, but I can guarantee you that you will never lose another file AND you will never forget WHERE in the workflow process you are with a client.

When you first start into photography, you don’t realize how quickly gigs of storage space will be eaten up by files. The sheer number of files become overwhelming and lack of any kind of organizational system from the beginning will only lead to problems at some point in time. It’s best to get control of that in the beginning. AND it only makes sense to follow an organizational system that ties in nicely with your workflow.

DO NOT save your photo files on your desktop. ALWAYS keep the main copy in an external hard drive and then back them up to an additional external hard drive. At some point down the road, you may wish to transfer the files off the hard drive and onto DVD’s, but frankly, it’s a pain in the rear and takes up a bunch of time, so I’d be inclined to unplug those two hard drives from your system, label them both and put one in an office storage area and deliver the 2nd to an offsite storage area. Fire-proof storage is a must for at least one of these.

I’m going to explain MY organizational system to you. I’m not saying that this will be perfect for you or anyone else, but it’s a good place to start that you can tweak to suit your needs if you are currently without a system. If you have a system, but it’s not working that well, then maybe this will give you some ideas.

First off – I have one external hard drive for each calendar year. With the falling price of external storage, there’s no reason you can’t follow this system as well.

Each hard drive has 2 folders on it, for example, this year’s drive has:

2011 Digital Files

2011 Client Files

In this article, I will be discussing the 2011 Digital Files folder, only.

In this files, there are 12 sub folders, one for each month. I sort everything by date. Each client has  physical file folder, which is filed in my file cabinet by alphabetical order, and on the outside of the folder is noted the session date, so if I get into a situation where I have more than one session per year with the same client, I can easily find the master digital files for that session by checking my notes written on the file folder.

If you do not sort by date, don’t fear, you don’t have to change the way you do things, keep reading, because the rest of the system WILL work for you no matter which way you use it.

I use the Adobe Bridge default date naming scheme when downloading files, so my folder title looks like this: YYYYMMDD when the files finish downloading from Bride and then I append the client’s name to the file so that it looks like this: YYYYMMDD_LastName_FirstName

Here is what the folder looks like fully uncollapsed. I will explain each folder below.

After I upload the files to my hard drive via Bridge and Bridge makes the default file folder, I add the client name to the end of it.

Then I copy my RAW master copy (with all of the sub folders) into the client folder.

I move all of the RAW files from the main client folder into the RAW folder so that the main folder is clean and only has sub folders beneath it.

I then switch to the RAW folder and do my white balance synchronization through Adobe Raw. I always do this first, before I touch any files.

At this point, I’m eager to look through the files and see what I got and if any of the special shots I did worked out like I hoped. I always wind up playing around with a few files before I get to down to business. SO – after I get done messing around – I select all files created during this phase and move them into the 00 EDITS folder.

Back in the RAW folder, I cull down the shots to whatever number of proofs I have decided to give the clients. I select these shots using the LABEL feature of Adobe Bridge. When I have narrowed the files down to my final choices, I copy them into the 01 KEEPERS folder.

In the 01 KEEPERS folder, I:

Batch rename the files to either PROOF_XX or LASTNAME_XX (XX = consecutive 2 digit renumbering).

Do brightness, contrast, saturation tweaks & cropping in Adobe Raw

After all tweaks have been done, I do a batch processing, applying an action that I designed that duplicates the layer in Photoshop, adds Portraiture to the 2nd layer, then drops the opacity on that layer down to 50%. These files are saved in PSD format in the A – PSD folder

In the A – PSD folder, I apply a batch process to save the files in JPG format at a maximum size of 1000 x 1000 pixels for uploading to an  online gallery or 1500 x 1500 pixels for printing as 4×5 proofs (I crop to 4×5 format for proofing). I save these proof files to the B – JPG PROOFS folder.

At this point, the files are culled down and the proofs are done. They should be uploaded to a gallery or physical proofs should be ordered from your lab. If you do other types of proofing, adjust the sizes to fit your needs and save them in this same B – JPG PROOFS folder.

The next thing I do is format a few favorites for use on my blog. I use special borders and watermarks on my blog uploads. I save the final files in the 02 BLOG folder and upload to the blog.

Then, I format 1 or 2 sneak peeks for Facebook, add my watermark and save them to the 03 FACEBOOK folder. Then I upload them to Facebook and tag them as appropriate.

At some point in time, I will do a slide show for select clients. The IMAGES for the slide show go in 04 SLIDESHOW FILES. The slide show itself will go in the 2011 Client Files area. The ONLY thing that goes in the Digital Files section are images.

When ever the client makes their pose choices for their order, those RAW files get copied into the 01 – KEEPERS / C – CHOICES  / 1 – RAW folder. Full retouching is done to the files and saved as PSD in the 2 – PSD folder and final JPGs for ordering are rendered into the 3 – JPG folder.

If the client purchases story boards, albums or other designs that are not straight images, those files go in the 05 DESIGNS folder.

If at any time, the client needs a re-order or needs to order from a proof that they had not previously ordered from, you will easily be able to locate the files and take care of their requests.

Stay tuned, I’ll be back to talk about the Client Files area in the future.

 

 

 

Oh, looky there, as of 10/08/11 at 6 PM the Wootsite scored an 81! If you read this article at a later date, the score will hopefully have increased as I continue to work on the site. (I’ve been through this process before and I’m quite pleased that we’re at an 81 after only 34 days in existence!)

Now what does this mean?

If you’re like me, you find the whole Google-ranking thing a little mind-bending, you wonder what the heck this SEO stuff is all about and since when did Google case to be a search engine and become an analytic source???

These are the topics that many website owners deem important, but frankly, I didn’t become a photographer so I could learn how to code a website. I’m just a standard person who has found myself in need of some guidance to help my website play better with the WWW.

Well, for standard folks like myself, it means that you can plug your website information into this program and it will evaluate a variety of things and come up with a score for you. It will also tell you what areas you are doing well in and what areas you need to improve in. Of course, you will be given the opportunity to purchase some of the site’s SEO-increasing guidance and other things that sound like choices on a Chinese takeout menu, but there’s no obligation.

Earlier today, I ran my stats and came up with a 78. Some areas for improvement were noted and I made some changes and was able to bring the score up 3 points in less than an hour, so it works!

There are still some areas of improvement needed for the Wootsite; there are too many photos on the site, which may lead to slow loading and the site has less than a year left before the domain name needs renewed. Longer registrations speak well for websites for some reason. Now, I’ve decided to ignore both of these – yes, I have a number of photographs on the site and although they are huge in number, they are not huge in size, so slow loading should not be an issue. Secondly, I did just register the domain for a year. It’s not like I’m going to let it expire.

Now these are just two of several improvements noted in my website report – so you will get some good feedback from this free service. To gain a better perspective of what information is contained in the report – view a sample report here.

There’s also a number of other services available, if you have a blog for your website, then be sure and run it through Blog.Grader.com. There are also graders for your Twitter account, Facebook page and several other utilities that look useful.

Check out the entire suite of applications at Grader.com.

 

I was perusing WTD this morning and found this strip that went along with today’s topic. Enjoy!

So, when we last talked, our little photographer “friend” had spent an entire wedding being in our way, holding things up, interfering and then posted hundred of photos on Facebook. (If you missed Part 1, please click HERE).

So, now what?

Well, now we backtrack and review what happened and what we, as photographers could have done to prevent the situations that occurred.

First of all – prior to the wedding, as in MONTHS prior,  specifically, when you first contract with the bride and groom, you should ask them to appoint a liaison to assist during the formals.

Generally, I ask that the liaison be familiar with both the wedding party AND the family members. Most often, for me, a combination of the best man and the maid of honor as a team will fulfill this role nicely.

The liaison is the person that will go hunt down Aunt Betty when it’s time do do the bride’s side of the family and she can’t be found.

The liaison will be the person who corrals the junior groom and the ring bearer and keeps them from crawling in the grass before the bridal party photos are done.

The liaison is the person who you will go to and say “I’m sorry – but that fellow there with the camera is getting in my way” and they will politely and discretely ask Uncle Bob to kindly wait until later to take his photos. (NOTE: Do NOT be an ass when making this request!)

You need to have the bride and groom appoint someone for this very important job. The person appointed needs to be apprised of the appointment and in agreement with it.

If you explain to the bride and groom that you need the freedom and time to create the perfect wedding portraits for them they will understand and comply. After all, they are paying (or should be) a substantial portion of their wedding budget to you for just this purpose.

Do NOT – I repeat – DO NOT pull the “I am the hired photographer” card on the wedding day. Yes, you are the hired photographer and should be the only professional photographer shooting on the wedding day and you should have a portion of your wedding contract that addresses that. These terms should be spelled out IN ADVANCE.

The wedding day is not about you. It’s about the bride and groom. You are HIRED HELP.

OUCH!

It’s true. You are there to do a job as smoothly and as professionally as possible. Throwing a tantrum is unprofessional, causes unnecessary drama, takes the attention from the bride and groom and erupts the smooth flow of Wedding Wootness.

This is not the time to decide that things are not going well and insist that announcements be made from the front of the church demanding that all cameras be turned off. Hello? This is the digital age. Everyone will have a camera or a cell phone. Deal with it. You are a professional and this should not bother you. If it does, quit shooting weddings until you grow up or become more confident in your work.

One simple thing that you can suggest to your bride and groom is to place a line in their wedding program that says:

We wish for you to enjoy and participate fully in our wedding ceremony. We ask that you refrain from taking photographs during this time.

See? How simple is that?

OK – so this addressed the ceremony.

Next up : Formals.

I suggest this approach:

Ask everyone to wait until you get your photo and then take a moment and let others get their shot. Just explain simply that you need everyone to look at you for the official shot, so if everyone waits for a moment while you do that, then you’ll give a moment for others to take their photos. Just go ahead and add an additional 20 minutes into your time for formals. Sometimes there won’t be that many people and you won’t need it. Sometimes the bride and groom will decide that they don’t want to give an additional 20 minutes to this portion of the events and will have their liaison charged with telling folks to not take photos. Either way – you are the good guy. You do NOT want to be the bad guy on a wedding day in front of 200 strangers. You just don’t.

And now – on to the reception.

At this point, I personally don’t care what other photographers do. The place is overrun with people and I’m shooting around guests constantly, so what’s another camera or two to shoot around? I have no specific advice for the special dancing portion because I have an off-camera flash system down to a science with my assistant. There is nothing anyone else can do to get in my way or mess up my photos during this time. Perhaps it’s because this is not an part of the festivities that amateurs feel the need to record as much, or perhaps it’s because most folks tend to stand back from the dance floor during this time and I don’t. Whatever the situation, I don’t have issues during this time.

The only thing I do differently during receptions is this – I get with the DJ and I ask how he/she announces the cake cutting. Some have the annoying habit of telling all the guests to grab their cameras and gather around the cake table. I do not ask them NOT to do this – I just ask them  what they do. If this is what they do – I tell them I want to get a few posed shots first, so if they could wait until I give them the “high sign” to make their announcement, that would be cool.

Let’s stop for a minute – your DJs are probably the best friends you could make at a reception. I always find the DJ first and check in with them and see what their schedule is. They are in charge of the reception – you are not – BUT – if you make nice – they will be more than happy to tell you when they are going to do the next event and how long of a break you have in between events for battery changing, bathroom breaks, etc.

So – back to the cake cutting – I ask for a moment to do some posed shots with the bride and groom. I do that. Then I teach the bride and groom how to cut their bites out of the cake and have the caterer bring them a single plate to hold this portion. Don’t ask me why – EVERYONE needs this instruction and the caterers NEVER have a plate there for the bride and groom. Anyway – the bride and groom prep – and I ask them if they are going to smash the cake in each others’ faces. if they are, I ask them to do a nice shot first for me. After that, I don’t care what they do.

Then I signal to the DJ that I am done and that he/she can announce the cake cutting is beginning. I grab a few more candid shots, but by that point, I have my “money shots” and I’m already in place and everyone else has to find a spot around me – I’ve got the best location now.

See? Easy peasy!

*whew!*

I’m stopping here – this topic has gotten out of control and needs to continue on to part 3 – but let me make this VERY IMPORTANT POINT… if you haven’t figured out the common denominator here, it’s this – I solve these problems in advance. I know they will happen and I make a plan to deter and minimize them so that on the wedding day, I can happily go about my work without too much problem. Yes, things will happen. We can’t foresee everything, but the major problems have been minimized and the wedding day should proceed fairly smoothly.

 

Yup – I jumped on the Groupon bandwagon. Sort of.

Last September I ran an ad for a 1 hour session and 3 digital files for a ridiculously low price. I already had a headshot special for 1 hour and 2 files, so I based the price on that and then discounted it 50%. Mistake #1.

My already low prices, discounted even further did not give an excellent “perceived value.”

I had done oodles of study on photographers who had used Groupon and thought I did a good job of determining what was done right and wrong. I did. Sort of.

I learned that I needed to place a “cap” on sales or else I was going to wind up with thousands of deals purchased that there was no way in heck I had enough time to fufill. Or so I thought. I put the cap at 200 and did all kinds of wonderful math in my head at what I would do with the money from the 200 sales that I was sure to get.

When it was all said and done, I had 24 sales.

OK, I could deal with that. I only knew 1 of the purchasers, so that meant that 23 brand new clients would be walking through my door.

One of the main problems with my particular situation is that I am located 45 minutes south of the metro area I advertised in. Groupon did not have a metro area for my city…err….town…err..village.

So – if someone that far away was going to buy my deal, it meant that they were a bargain-hunter. They didn’t come to me because they had heard of me. In fact, only 3 of the session-buyers actually looked at my website prior to making their purchase.

All of my dreams of upselling were dashed. Two clients wound up purchasing a disc of selected shots. None of the rest opted into any of the upsells I offered,

Two of the client sessions resulted in competition-level prints for 2011. One made it into the PPA Loan Collection and the other made it into the PPA Showcase Collection. OK, that’s some serious Wootness!™, but not enough to have made the venture worthwhile.

Several of the sessions were very nice, I had fun with ALL of them, but I did grab hold of a couple of doozies.

One session was for a young girl (under the age of 10). Her mother brought her in for modeling headshots and in the course of the session decided that she wanted me to do topless photographs, a la Annie Leibovitz. We had a serious discussion about the definition of child pornography. She was not a happy camper.

Another session was with a couple who was fun, but the wife would NOT take the gum out of her mouth. Of course, when they viewed the proofs, the husband jumped all over me about the white spot on his wife’s mouth in all of the photos and demanded the final files be retouched.

Several of the sessions were canceled, rescheduled, canceled, rescheduled… you get the picture.

All in all, it was a pain in the ass. I didn’t even bother adding up the hours I worked on those sessions and figuring out the net profit from them, because I knew I didn’t even break even and didn’t want yet another reason to kick myself over this mis-adventure.

The old saying is true – if it seems too good to be real – it probably is. The next time you think of some plan that is going to make money hand over fist – ask your BFF to slap that idea right out of your head. Or come to Ohio and I’ll do it for you.

NOTE: I hesitate to say “Don’t Use Groupon” because I know that there are some photographers out there who have made it work for them. I will say that my location had a LOT to do with why not many were sold and the caliber of most of the clients I did get. Tread carefully and do your homework.

 

Oh yeah – here’s a cuss word  you haven’t seen before….the simple truth of why this article warrants such language is because your fearless leader of Wootness!™, the woman who sticks you in a corner with a dunce hat on and isn’t afraid to rub your nose in your mistakes is a total freaking idiot!

Yes, this article will be all about how *I*, in all my bright shining brilliance, lost this entire website in one push of the “enter” button.

I guess the details aren’t that important, but it boils down to the fact that I spent almost a month writing more than I have ever written in a similar time period in my life. I had a HUGE collection of articles and had tweaked the website settings until they were perfect. All day, this past Sunday, I was in sick with a head cold/flu and could not do anything but lay in bed with the laptop – so I put the time to good use and decided to upgrade to a new website template. I had already planned on doing it and had made the announcement here – and being in bed for an entire day allowed me about 14 straight hours to work on the new site and tweak the heck out of it.

About 9:30 pm, after having worked since 5 AM on the project, I installed a new plug-in. And the site disappeared. Totally. All that was left was the “Hello World” default post that comes with all brand new WordPress installations. Somehow the plug-in wound up re-installing a brand new blog OVER Wootness!™.

O.M.G!

I felt violently ill. I already felt ill, but this was much much worse.

I raced to my little private Facebook page I share with some photog buddies and cried out for help. And do you know that the response was? Well, it was nothing less than I deserved. After finding out that I had failed to back the site up at all, I was heckled.

Fortunately, my web hosting company has 24/7 support chat and I had them restore the site from their last backup which was just prior to the melt down.

All was good – but man did that give me a scare.

I administer 5 websites and this was the only one without a backup. I have NEVER had a site crash before this. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve NEVER had to restore a site using a backup. For some reason, I kept putting the Wootness!™ backup on the back burner.

So – for every site and blog you have, implement a backup schedule. I prefer to do mine daily, since I usually post on a daily basis.

And – maintain an OFFSITE backup. As in – do not backup your website to your laptop or desktop. Or if you do, at least have a backup to your backup in some offline storage area.

Which brings me to this nifty little trick:

If you are using a WordPress based site, there is a plugin called Backup to Dropbox. You can schedule your site to be backed up to your account at Dropbox, which is a free account that will give you 2 gigs of storage space. That’s plenty of room for a site backup.

Here’s a referral link – if you open up a free Dropbox account using my link, we will both get an extra 250 meg of space.

So yeah, do as I say and not as I do.

Geesh!