Learn how to get the attention of more people and motivate them to contact you NOW!

JDPI will sponsor a series of five free Webinars each Monday at 1pm EST beginning August 9th and running through September 6th. These Webinars will be taught by Kirk Russell from 3Lenses.com, a professional photographer and expert in studio marketing.

If you’re looking for answers and specifics you’ll want to attend one or more of these Webinars:

• Seniors - August 9th
• Sports - August 16th
• Dance and Pre-School - August 23rd
• Families - August 30th
• Weddings - September 6th

Click on any of the dates above to reserve your seat today.

Each 60-minute webinar will teach you the nuts and bolts techniques that work, like how to segment the market with pricing, products, and session types to appeal to a broader group of clients. You’ll learn what you can do right now to get attention and motivate people to have a portrait made. Kirk will also examine some success stories, and even efforts that were not as successful, and WHY.

The goal here is to have you leave with solid information for getting your studio on track into the future and learn powerful rules of marketing that will apply to every studio.

What you will learn

• How to use New Marketing to attract the right clients
• What products and services people want TODAY
• How to price and sell products with higher profits.

As Kirk says, “Misery has enough company. Dare to be successful.” If you are ready to turbocharge your marketing efforts, this series of Webinars will work for you.

Kirk Russell, 3Lenses.com

The photographic industry is in the midst of a serious growth crisis. Even before the housing crisis, recession, and market crash, studios were booking fewer appointments, and clients seemed to be more price-sensitive.

Old-school solutions such as advertising more promotions or new flavor-of-the-month fads such as displaying images on boutique, graphic-enhanced web site and brochures, or using pretty delivery boxes won’t attract people who find most of today’s portrait studios outdated, unresponsive, and over-priced.

There is a parallel between today’s photo industry and the current housing market and auto industry. Luckily, we can learn from them and consequently avoid a similar fate.

Here’s the comparisons:

(more…)

Chase Jarvis is a professional photographer focusing on commercial print and video assignments. Recently, he took the time to create a video that describes step-by-step his process for storing and archiving images. It’s worth the 10 minutes to watch.

Three important points Chase makes are:

• Keep a clean copy of your original images. The moment you’re finished shooting, create a backup. These are your original RAW or JPG images. Never change them.

• Make redundant backups. The time to make your first backup is while you’re copying images off the cards. Depending on a single hard drive at any point in your workflow is a recipe for disaster. Hard drives will fail (trust me, it eventually happens to everyone).

• Keep your backups separate. A backup drive next to a PC is only slightly better than no backup at all. You should have 2 duplicate backup drives, with one stored away from your studio.

While most of us cannot afford to duplicate Chase’s collection of top-of-the-line servers and hard drives, any backup and storage solution should cover all the major points he makes. A quick glance over at Amazon shows top-rated 2 terabyte external drives going for $129, so you cannot afford NOT to make backups.

Update

Here’s a collection of videos from several world-famous photographers showing their workflows.

JD Photo Imaging will hold a “Raw Image Processing and Adobe Lightroom” workshop Monday, August 2nd from 10am until 2pm at JD Photo Imaging on Corunna Road in Flint. Cost is $59 per person preregistration or $79 on the day of the workshop, which includes a catered lunch and $20 lab credit to test what you’ve learned. You can pre-pay by credit card or charge your lab account by calling 810-239-8671.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get the best color from your camera, or if you’re considering changing over to a RAW workflow, this class is for you.

During the class we will cover:

(more…)

Michelle Bogre, a photographer, college professor and lawyer, has started an excellent website called TheCopyrightCorner.org. In it she plainly and simply spells out the rules of copyright for professional photographers. My favorite page on the site answers the question “I am a photographer, so if I own copyright in my photograph, can I do anything with my photograph?”

You should check out the answer. Interesting reading.

Other topics she covers:

• Basics - what copyright is
• Getting Started - get it, keep it
• Register Your Stuff - Reasons and Rationale
• Fair Use - the guidelines

It will take you about 15 minutes to read them all, but you will be much more educated about copyright issues in the end.

Links to the ROES, LabPrints, and ImageQuix training videos are now available on the training center page on our website.

These 3-5 minutes videos teach you all the basics you need to know to get up and running with the software.

Over the next few months, we will be releasing additional videos recorded from our training classes that will teach more in-depth topics.

During his “Earn $100,000 a Year from Portrait Directories” workshop, Chris Wunder recommended LumaPix FotoFusion Extreme to quickly and easily create church directories or any book that combines images and data.

Several photographers asked if we would hold a followup FotoFusion class, so here it is.

Bob Winkler from LumaPix will present a “Building Books with LumaPix” workshop Tuesday, April 13 from 9am until 4pm at JD Photo Imaging on Corunna Road in Flint. Cost is $20 per person or $30 per studio, which includes a catered lunch and snacks. You can pre-pay by credit card or charge your lab account by calling 810-239-8671.

During this class, Bob will cover:

• Installation & features
• Products you can make (directories, books, albums, pages, etc.)
• How to quickly lay out a page (templates or freehand)
• How to easily build a book with text and images

By the end of the class, you will be able to create an entire photo book with images and data ready to send to JD for printing. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to the class.

Bob Winkler is a professional trainer for LumaPix, so you can be sure this will be a information-packed day of training. Even if you didn’t attend Chris Wunder’s class, if you need a tool to quickly and easily create page layouts, you cannot afford to miss it.

The folks over at PhotoArgus.com have collected several “cheat sheets” made by professional photographers that show the effects of different lighting setups in a studio.

These cards cover everything from portrait lighting to light falloff to minimum hand-held shutter speeds to the “rule of thirds“.

Several of the sheets are produced under the Creative Commons license, which means you are free to print them for personal use only. Others are for sale by the photographers who created them for between $1 and $12 dollars.

I’m sure 99% of you already know all this stuff, but they might be helpful to bring someone new at your studio up to speed. Enjoy.

The 2010 Detroit Professional Photographer’s Folio Competition will be held at the DPPA’s April 20th meeting. The rules for the competition are the same as last year:

• Open to DPPA members only.
• Folios will be judged in four categories – wedding, senior, portrait, and illustrative. You can enter one folio in each category.
• One or two photographers from a studio can enter a single folio in each of the four categories, but you cannot enter both as a single photographer and as part of a team in the same category.
• Each folio must include 5-12 images from the same session, not including the base/background image.
• Finished prints must be 10×20” mounted on matte board, with any studio identification (like a logo) covered. You should tape your business card on the back of the folio, and submit it before 7:00pm the night of the competition.
• Note their must be at least three entrants in a category to qualify for an award.

Remember, when it comes to any competition: the biggest winners don’t bring home ribbons – they are the ones who become better photographers for trying. In other words, to compete is to win.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at 810-239-8671 or e-mail me at tom@jdphotoimaging.com.

Tom Hicks
DPPA Print Competition Chair

I read an interesting article online entitled “The Lazy Rule of Thirds” by fashion photographer Jake Garn. He argues that the “rule of thirds” we’ve all been taught in photography is really just a shortcut to take photographs that follow the Golden Ratio.

Stick with me.

Over 2,500 years ago mathematicians figured out that if you drew a rectangle or a curve where the ratio of the height to the width was approximately 1.6, it just looked better. Without going into all the math, it turns out that nature uses this same ratio too: everything from flower petals to the branching of veins inside your body follows this pattern. Artists started using the Golden Ratio, and evidence of it is found in the Greek Parthanon, works by Leonardo Da Vinci, and even paintings by Salvador Dali.

Notice in the image above, if you draw a successive series of curves based on the Golden Ratio, the bigger rectangle on the left is approximately two-thirds of the total area. The logic is that instead of trying to teach us knuckleheads the Golden Ratio in Beginning Photography 101 class, the teachers simplified it into the Rule of Thirds.

Think this doesn’t work? After I read Jake’s article, I found a transparent .PNG file of the curve online (you don’t even want to know why it is called the Fibonacci spiral), copied it to my desktop, and opened it in Photoshop. Then I found a really nice image done by the folks over at Classic Concepts Studio in Durand, and dragged the curve on top of the image as a new layer. I resized the spiral by dragging the corner with the shift key held down so it wouldn’t lose proportion, rotated it, mirrored it, and colored it with a red stroke.

This is the result.

I always knew I really liked this image, but I never knew why. Now I’m going back over other images and dropping the spiral on top. I can’t say every good image matches perfectly, but I can say that the bad ones don’t even come close.

If I were making an image for a competition, I’d have this spiral file saved on my hard drive and use it to help me with composition and cropping. It might just be the secret ingredient I needed to create the perfect award-winning image.

Do you have any images to share that match up with the Golden Ratio? Send them to me as a 250×200px 72dpi JPG and I’ll post them here.