Coaching for the New and Emerging Photographer

I do my best writing in response to questions, so thanks for asking them.  This question just came up about how to compete with the photographers that are charging $9.99 for a sitting.

And this is my answer:

The people that are selling the $9.99 sessions are not your competition- they are competing with Walmart, Kmart and all the other discount photographers. Let the other guys have them. You don’t have time to photograph everyone and those people deserve to be photographed, so let those guys photograph them. Hardest lesson I ever learned: Not everyone it your client. The people that go there think they cannot afford anything else or do not value photography enough to spend money on it. They are not your clients.

Your clients spend money on things they value and one of the things they value are beautiful things, including beautiful portraits of the people that they love.

You are competing with other people that sell beautiful things that these people would also love to own, like furniture stores, cruises & home improvement people.

There are two business models for photography at which you can make money, high volume, low profit or high profit, low volume. Again, the big guys have the high volume, low profit model all locked up. They have million dollar ad budgets to reach their market. You will never be able to compete with them.

The high profit, low volume business model always has clients because there are a lot of those clients (because there are no million dollar ad campaigns targeting them) and providing them an experience with their portrait session is as important at the portraits themselves. These people go to hair stylists, nail salons, and get pedicures. They take their kids to dance, piano, and gymnastics. They value their families, though sometimes are guilty of spending money instead of spending time.

To attract them you need to change your language (I know, I didn’t believe it either, but it works). Professional photographers do not take pictures, they photograph. They capture images, they create portraits. Professional photographers do not shoot people, mount people or blow up people. They photography their subjects and they create beautiful wall portraits that are framed and protected to last forever, just like the finest art. Professional photographers do not do sittings for their customers, they create sessions with their clients. Professional photographers create relationships with their clients so that they can also create emotional bonds in the images they capture.

This isn’t a game of only a few clients with a bunch of people trying to get them away from you, it is a game of a ton of people that want great photography and don’t know where to get it. If you only get 1% of those people, you will be as successful as you want to be. That leaves 99% out there for other photographers.

Seriously take the time to do a simple business plan and figure out how much money you want to make. That will inform your actions going forward and it will also help you keep your focus when things get crazy or your attention wanders. Don’t stress over it, just make it a document that gives your business goals and structure.

Starting a photography business is always a challenge, with the most difficult challenge being “What do I charge?”. The retail business model dictates that we figure out our costs and then work the markup from that to get the retail price. However, that doesn’t work for photography and businesses that are time heavy. I’m attaching a blog post by Jody Otte on the formula that she bases her pricing policies on. Enjoy this blog post.

I was photographing at a winery last Saturday and was reminded of the technique of “dragging the shutter”. I had a lot of fun playing with it as the barrel room was dark with the only light coming from flames put on barrels.

To capture this image I put my camera on a tripod, set the aperture for 5.6, had my flash set to manual mode and then began my exposures at 30 second intervals until I liked the result.

What I got was the flash getting the correct exposure for the barrels and the pots and the “dragged” shutter adding in the color of the flames and the other ambient light.

This works when photographing anything stationary or people that can hold still. If the people move and your shutter is open very long, you will get “ghosting” in your images and it will not be crisp. However, there are times when the ghosting is fun to play with also.

Are you ready?  If it hasn’t happened and you are in business, just wait.

I just had a question from a photographer about how to do a session where some of the subjects in the image are in sharp focus and some are blurred, for example, at a wedding when the couple is kissing and the attendants are “rushing” them.  Below is my answer to her:

When you do this kind of session, you want to use your shutter speed to
cause the blur.  Set your f-stop to about f-10 or so and focus on the the still subjects (eyes if possible).   Put your camera on a tripod.  Set your shutter at 1 second and then bracket the shutter and the f-stop until you get the lighting and the depth of field you prefer- with the still subjects holding very still (anything under 30th of a second will show movement, so they almost need to hold their breath).  When you get the lighting you like, throw the moving subjects in there and tell them to move the way you want them to and go for it. (Basically, use the f-stop and no motion to get what you want in focus and the shutter speed to get what you want moving with swishes).

Another fun use for the tripod is to do “time exposures”.  Put your camera on a tripod at dusk- too dark for a flash to work, but still enough light so the camera can focus (or use a flash light, focus your camera and then turn the focus to manual so it won’t move).  You are going all manual for this game.  Set you f-stop for portraits at 5.6ish and landscapes at 22ish.  If your subject is alive, they will need to hold REALLY still, again, maybe even hold their breath.  Now set your shutter speed starting at 30th of a second and work your way down until your image becomes overexposed.  This will depend on the amount of ambient light in your image.  This always looks cool photographing down on a street with traffic at night.

Another cool thing to do is to have someone make shapes with a flashlight as they walk through your frame.  If you use a long enough exposure, the person with the flashlight will become invisible to the camera.

And, finally, use a flashlight to light a subject.  Have someone hold the flashlight on your subject and bracket your exposures until you get the effect you prefer.

So, get out your camera, flashlight and tripod and go play!

Technology is making photographers lazy.

When film was predominantly in use it was important to learn the rules of photography, good posing and lighting in order to get the majority of the creation of an image right “in camera”.  To do otherwise was to make an image, if salvageable, that would require a lot of skill and time to print or hand retouch with pencils or oils.

However, now it is easy for folks to either take enough images that they will eventually get a useable image (known as “Spray and Pray”) or to take it into a digital art program and put on filters and effects to make it “cool” while hoping to mask the lack of skill.

The mark of a good photographer is still their ability to get it right in the camera.  Beyond being a matter of pride, it is the way that the truely WOW photographs are created.  Though the average person may not be able to verbalize why the images are different, they will know they are.

Whether you are photographing in automatic, apeture preferred or shutter preferred mode, understanding how to assess a situation for where to take your light reading is important.

To understand where and why to take a light reading, you have to understand the difference between under-exposure and over-exposure and how they are recorded.  The further off your reading is, the less data is recorded.  When you are recording under-exposure (not enough light), the data will begin to recorded as dark and blacks the further off correct exposure you get.   When you record over-exposure, the data will begin to record as light and blank (meaning that it will not record any information, so you won’t be able to do anything at all with the image to change it) the further off the correct exposure you get.  If you have to choose, always choose to under-expose.  If you want to get fancy, take two exposures, 1) metering for the light area and 2) metering for the dark area- and sandwich them in PhotoShop.

So, here’s the deal- you are looking at a landscape and you see that the foreground is where the sunlight is and the background is not lit as well.  Expose correctly for the foreground.  To do this, put point your camera at the light spot and push the shutter button halfway down.   While holding the shutter halfway down, compose your shot and capture the image.

For more information on how your camera locks focus and exposure, check you manual.