Join the Detroit Professional Photographers Association (DPPA) or renew your DPPA membership, and you will receive a coupon for a free lay-flat photo book of any size from JD.

This is the perfect opportunity to try out our most popular lay-flat photo books – but more importantly – it is an encouragement to join an organization that represents some of the finest professional photographers in Michigan.

To get your free photo book, follow these steps

1. Fill out and send in a DPPA membership application online.

2. Once your membership is processed, you’ll receive an e-mail with your free coupon code.

3. Create your photo book in ROES or using our Simply Elegant software, include the code, and send us your order. In a few days you’ll receive your free photo book.

As much as I love Photoshop, I hate the fact that it has a million features I’ve paid for, but will never learn. That’s why I was excited to discover a quick and easy trick using the Feather Tool to create a soft focus around a person or an object in an image. This is especially cool if you’re starting with a totally sharp image, but want to soften the background.

Here’s how you do it.

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An article in the recent edition of Entrepreneur Magazine makes the argument that you can run a successful family business from home. If you have a home studio, it has some great tips for success.

While I don’t have any statistics to back it up, my guess is that we have equal numbers of professional photographers who work from home and have a separate studio. Both have their advantages: a home studio is a great way to get started, it keeps expenses low, and it allows parents to spend more time with their children. A separate studio has the advantage of seeming more “professional” to clients, and it forces you to divide your time between your work and your family.

But there is a hidden benefit to a home studio you may not realize.

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Here’s a great product you can offer your clients: a custom guest-book. Use it for:

• weddings
• senior graduations
• events

Each page template can be customized with your photography for a professional book not available in any store.

Create an entire guest book of sign-in pages, or include a sign-in page at the end of an album you’ve already designed.

These page templates are available in ROES under press-printed 11×8.5 Photobooks. The 11×8.5 landscape lay-flat book is our most popular size, and has the extra space required for hand writing names and addresses.

Customers who are referred to your business by their friends – word of mouth advertising – are more profitable over time than customers who found you through traditional marketing.

Intuitively, it makes sense: word-of-mouth is simple, virtually free, and it brings you great clients.

Now researchers have taken the time to study the monetary value of word of mouth (WOM) . They found that the average value of a referred customer is at least 16% higher than that of a non-referred customer.

Which raises the question, should you pay your customers (or your employees!) to refer you to their friends?

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For 2 weeks – August 9th thru August 23rd JD is offering a FREE Metallic Print upgrade on any large print.

Upgrading the right image to a metallic print can easily double or triple its perceived value. I know this from experience – I’ve seen them right here at the lab.

If you don’t already have one or more large metallic prints on display in your studio, this is the perfect opportunity. When you show a customer these striking prints on a wall, they will want one for their home.

If you’re looking for a way to differentiate yourself, consider this: customers will never see a metallic print at a “big box” discount store, and no website or magazine article can compare with the beauty of the finished product.

If you’re sending out a promotional email newsletter in August, this upgrade could be just the ticket to get new customers into the door.

To take advantage of this offer, order your print in ROES or LabPrints, then include the Promo Code EMAILMETAL when you place your order.

by Kirk Russell, 3lenses.com

Imagine the following: You’ve just created the perfect website. But as with many studios’ sites, at the end of the quarter, sales haven’t increased.

What happened? You created a beautiful site. It has galleries that feature your best images. Your web address is featured on all your marketing materials. You hire a company to register your web address with all the search engines, and to make sure your site will rank high enough to appear on the first page, if not the first one or two results of a search. And you get hits, a trickle at first, and then hundreds. You feel great. Your new marketing effort is a huge success!

It’s easy to explain. You got people interested in your photography, and then left them on their own to figure out how to buy it.

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