Do you find yourself overwhelmed with ideas and thoughts about how to market, promote, organize, run, or otherwise manage your business?  Have you struggled to find a way to keep track of your thoughts or creative ideas because you forget about them?  If so, you may be a lot like me, and I’d like to share how I handle my overactive stream of consciousness thinking.

Several years ago, I was walking through an office store and I noticed that whiteboards were on sale.  At the time, I was a full-time student and saw the value of having my own whiteboard to work on while during homework and such.

So, fast forward a few years.  We move into our new studio last year and in December I decided to bring out the ‘ol whiteboard.  I cannot say enough about how much that little action of hanging a whiteboard has provided for us.

Here’s how I work it:
So, I’ll be sitting in my office working on something when I get an idea. Or, let’s say I’ve got something business related troubling me.  Or, I’m looking for a new idea for this years bridal shows.   I start by writing the subject of the exploration at the top of the whiteboard: whether it be a topic, or a question.  I then proceed to dump everything in my head onto that board.  I pace. I talk to myself. I write stuff on the board.  I have a 36″ x 48″ whiteboard to fill… so what do I do when it fills? Well, I take a picture of it.

One important note on the way my system works:  I never erase anything from the whiteboard until its been photographed. Including ideas that have been discounted.  I’ll indicate with an “x” or a strikethrough that its not a good idea. But, when I go back to review what we have discussed I want to be able to see the good ideas & the bad ones.  I have a visual memory of our discussion.

On my computer, I have a folder labeled “whiteboard” where I keep the pictures of our whiteboard sessions organized by date and subject. I have pulled them up and reviewed them several times, whenever a topic or discussion was rehashed.  Or, if I needed to simply reference something we had explored.

In the photograph I’ve included, the topic was: “What to we have & how are we using it?”  In other words, I wanted to explore how we were promoting our business,  where we could do better, and what was missing.  You can see that it is very stream of consciousness writing.  I scribble as I think.  Some of the things we use regularly, some we deemed to be ineffective.

All in all, the best thing about having a whiteboard is being able to explore concepts and new ideas from beginning to end and having a way to document them.  I call it “Whiteboard Marketing” because some of our greatest and most successful marketing ideas have been products of whiteboard thought sessions. It has saved us thousands in costly marketing errors and created thousands in the ability to see an idea all the way through.  I would encourage everyone to go forth and scribble!

Whiteboard Marketing is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum

Turning Your Wedding Imagery Into Art | The Dramatic First Dance

Through out the wedding day there are certain milestones that must be documented without fail, without deviance, without a doubt. These are the shots that you must perfect, nail down, secure, capture, whatever it takes just get them and everything else is icing on your wedding cake. Why are they so important? Because as a wedding photographer you are there to tell the story of the wedding day. If you miss these images you not only leave your clients story incomplete, but also you can bet your going to have an upset bride, or worse yet an upset MOB. You pick your poison, but I’d rather walk around the mountain if it means avoiding the bite of the Black Mamba.

What does this have to due with turning your wedding imagery into art you ask? Well when you know that you have certain images that you take at every wedding shouldn’t you have developed a certain style? Shouldn’t you have a particular set up? And if you do have a set up you use each and every time, are you happy with it? Could it use some refining? The truth is if your not pushing yourself how will you improve or perfect? We’ve all heard the old saying that, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Really all this is just a cop out to not push yourself to the next level. If this has been your motto, perhaps you could look at it from a different perspective. Maybe something like, “It ain’t broke, but how could I polish it?”

One area of my wedding photography that has evolved over the years is the way I approach the first dance. This isn’t to say that facial expression; eye contact or tears in the eyes are irrelevant, not at all. But wouldn’t it be great to capture those dramatic moments in dramatic lighting? After all, lighting is everything. Don’t believe me try photographing without it. The problem in creating dramatic light for the first dance is often time the venue’s lighting isn’t. Many times the venue’s lighting is quite flat or even worse, fluorescent. But lets just say that you’re shooting in a nice venue with decent lighting, beautiful chandeliers hanging all around as in the photo above. In this case one of the most effective ways I know to create dramatic lighting is to backlight.

Back lighting or lighting your subject from behind can do a few things, some good, some not so good, but when done properly it’s some of the most beautiful lighting I’ve seen. It’s dramatic, it’s colorful, it can create beautiful lens flare or horrible lens flare, and it creates long dramatic shadows across the dance floor and these shadows lead the viewer’s eyes to the subject. Backlighting can be accomplished using one light or several.

Exposure is key when it comes to back lighting. While silhouettes are nice, I like to see some detail in the faces of my bride and groom. To accomplish this you need to balance your strobe with the ambient light, or you can use a second on camera strobe dialed down as fill. But for now lets stick to a one light setup.

Controlling your lighting using one strobe. This is pretty easy, if you’ve done a few weddings you will find that you have particular settings that your always using during the reception or at least within a narrow range of those settings. I’ve found for the most part that I’m shooting at an ISO of around 1200 to 2000 with an aperture of F2.8 to F5.6 for nighttime receptions. My shutter speed will vary from 1/10^th sec to 1/60^th depending on the available light and the look I’m after. The beauty of this is that once you have your basic settings you will be able to control your fill simply by adjusting your shutter speed, while your strobe will remain constant as long as you don’t adjust your ISO or aperture.

You will hear a lot about modern strobes being TTL, ETTL, or I-TTL. My experience has shown these automated “SMART” settings to be unreliable at best and detrimental to creative lighting. The solution I use is to shoot in manual, always. The perks for this is longer battery life because I’ve set my strobe to either 1/8 or 1/16 power and sometimes even to 1/32. I know with these settings my strobes will last 3 to 4 hours on a single set of rechargeables.

Position is key and slight adjustments to positioning will yield quite different results.  You will find yourself constantly moving, twisting, stretching or bobbing to get just the right angle and height for an effective backlit image. In the image above I positioned my strobe directly behind the couple at seven feet high. This meant that I had to squat down slightly to block the light source behind the head of the bride. I wanted the light to be as close too visible as possible without showing. This would ensure the most amount of rim light around hers and the groom’s heads. My ambient light was underexposed about 1 ½ to 2 stops so that I would have detail but not silhouette. What you don’t see is my assistant holding the light, but you don’t need an assistant to pull this off, a light stand placed strategically will suffice, but using an assistant that knows by hand signals where to be is invaluable and if needed they can make adjustments to your power out put without interrupting your work flow.

Remember, backlighting isn’t the only trick in your bag, but for the first dance it sure is a crowd pleaser.

Tech Data: Canon EOS 5D, 17-35 2.8L, Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2, ISO 1250, 1/50 @ f-3.5, Canon 580 EX II off camera set on manual @ 1/16^th power.

Next Time: Taking Your Wedding Imagery to the Next Level – “Romantic Portraits”

Turning Your Wedding Imagery Into Art | The Dramatic First Dance is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum

You need to set a good foundation before you start to attract prospects to your front door. Before you place your first ad announcing your services, or even if you are already advertising, you must have in place a system to track the results of your advertising, otherwise you could be throwing your money away.

You must be able to calculate if your actions are efficient or not.  When people say their advertising is working, they generally just know that they are receiving calls and booking weddings.  You must know more than this.

You must know if your marketing is efficient or not.  The best way to give yourself the answer to this question is through the use of statistics. As a business owner that wants to succeed, you have a responsibility to track the statistics of your business. Through marketing you begin to attract individuals to your business. These individuals are inquiries. Where did your inquiries find your contact information?  How many of your inquiries did you convert into consultations? How many of these consultations did you convert into paying customers? Out of these paying customers, how many of these paying customers have done business with you a second time?

The answers to these questions will show you where you’re the least efficient. If you see that you’re only converting 10% of the inquiries you receive into consultations, and 90% of the consultations you have are converted into paying customers, then you know you must change the language you use when answering your phone or replying to people inquiring about your services via e-mail.

Tracking each and every inquiry will also tell you where your paid advertising is failing or succeeding.  For instance, I know that the advertising I paid for in Premier Bride Magazine did very well for me.  That’s one of my images on cover displayed to the left.

You don’t need to really focus on the ads that are doing the best, until you have addressed the ones that are doing the worst.  Your goal should be to find out the “cost per lead” for each of the ads you have purchased. For example, if you paid $1000 for an ad somewhere, and you received 10 phone calls from that ad, your cost per lead is $100. Being able to find your cost per lead for each of your paid ads is essential to becoming more efficient.  This information will allow you to make educated decisions when the contracts for your current ads expire.  You will know which ads to keep, and which to drop.

Or you may decide to change the language in one ad to see if you can create different results.  Or you may decide to take the money from one ad and use it to increase the size of another ad.  But if you don’t have a system in place that allows you to track your cost per lead, then you’re just shooting in the dark, and wasting your money and time, and that’s inefficient.

Tracking your results will help to keep you on track.

Tracking Your Results is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum