Irvine Portrait - Irvine Photography

http://photographyline1.blogspot.com/2010/04/10-tips-to-tell-you-how-to-start.html

Think about it, the mechanics that repair our cars don’t tell us what tools that they use. The chefs in the restaurants that we patronize don’t tell us what type of pots, pans or stoves that they use. In those businesses, it is already established what customers want and how best to give it to them. In other words, other businesses do a better job of understanding their ‘niche.’ In order to start a photography business that is consistently successful and growing, we must be clear on what niche we are offering and how to sell the benefits of our niche to the customers.

One of the obvious problems with this approach is our failure to recognize how it drastically cheapens the value of what we do as skilled photographers, in the eyes of the customers. Mistakenly, we want our customers (current and potential) to know that we can photograph anything - after all, we’re very versatile photographers! What the customers actually see is that we’re not “versatile photographers,” we’re just someone with a camera that’s available to take pictures when they call us. Serious photography customers (re: those that can afford to spend regularly) want to do business with specialists - photographers that know their photography niche.

Successful wedding photographers are clear on this, as an example of my point. Their ‘primary’ customer (usually the bride) has dreamed about her wedding day for most of her life. She isn’t looking for a vesatile photographer. She wants a “wedding photographer” that can make her ‘look’ as good, happy and beautiful as she has been in all of her lifelong dreams of ‘her day’ - her wedding day. There’s a special skill to this type of photography service. In fact, this niche has more to do with well developed ‘people skills,’ in my opinion. Successful wedding photographers that are clear on these nuances are more successful in business.

Do your research.

• Inventory Your Photo Collection - Take a look at your photo collections. Determine what it is that you 1.) shoot the most; 2.) shoot consistently well; and 3.) enjoy shooting. Identify your and categorize the photos into various niches, i.e. portraits, sports, glamor, pets, children, landscape, etc.
• Research The Photography Markets - Do internet searches using the words “photography niche.” Also, use the type of niche that you think your photos fit. For example, “event photography niche,” “wedding photography niche,” etc. Also, a good source to help identify some of the photo markets is “The Photographer’s Market.” This is a book that is published annually and claims to provide photo buying contacts and information. Online searches are the most useful, in my opinion. Books by author and photographer, Dan Heller are good places to get a better understanding of the vast world of photography, without all the ‘artsy-hype,’ in my opinion. He also has a very informative website - DanHeller.com
• Identify ‘Real’ Markets - Find out what type of photography (of your specialties) your customers currently are purchasing. What type of photography is selling? At some point, you’ll have to ‘balance’ the realities of the different niches. There can be some factors that aren’t consistent across all photography niches. For example, some niches require longer “workflow” (workflow is the post production process of taking photos) periods and tasks than others. Higher quality portraits normally require photo editing - which is time-consuming. Event photography requires the processing, packaging and delivering (presenting) of photos. True story: I went through my large photo collections and found that I had a very large number of outstandingly beautiful flowers. I can’t begin to tell you my disappointment when I found out that there is ‘virtually’ no market of photos of flowers - it seems that everybody has them already, everybody! Lesson learned - identify ‘real’ markets.      More>> See the 10 Tips for how to start a photography business

Carefully setting up FCP will avoid any problems

The explosive popularity of DSLR video has lead to a dramatic rise in the use of dual-system audio techniques, where audio is recorded separately from the video in order to get better quality sound than what be achieved in the camera itself. This has led many people to experience some subtleties in the way Final Cut Pro handles audio-only clips. We’ve written about this a couple of times (here and here) but it’s a popular topic and is worth repeating the main points. You can read the blogs referenced above for the background, but for now we’ll just summarize the steps. You will particularly want to pay attention to this if you are using audio-only tracks in your projects and you switch back and forth between projects that use an NTSC frame rate and those that don’t. Do not give in to the temptation to skip any of the steps below or will probably end up with sync drift.

• Don’t mix clips with NTSC frame rates (typically 23.98, 29.97 or 59.94 fps) and non-NTSC frame rates (typically 25, 30 or 50 fps
• Before you start your project, pick an Easy Setup that matches the frame rate of your clips. If you can’t find one that matches exactly, it’s good enough to pick one with the same NTSC properities as your clips. For example, for the Canon 5D Mark II at 30.00 fps, you could pick DV - PAL (which has a frame rate of 25 fps

Note: Singular Software, founded by CEO Bruce Sharpe produces tools for HD video and sound.  The website is at http://singularsoftware.com and his blog is located http://brucesharpe.blogspot.com/.

I think you’d be amazed to know that the third Thursday of every month photographers meet at the Irvine Fine Arts Center at 6:30 PM. 

 http://thephotoexchange.wordpress.com/

Gary and Suzette Amundson had a successful showing at the Tustin Art Walk, displaying their beautiful hand crafted dichroic glass pendants and other glass art. They had a pretty good turnout, with high interest from customers with the hand-cut pieces. Architectural glass was also of interest to many prospective customers.

http://www.exploremodeling.com/ContactDirectory/Default.aspx

This is a great searchable directory for models and actors looking for agencies.

Well, you won’t see me in the movie, but I’ll be the camera operator, photography director and post-production editor.

I am interested in working with both stills and HD video movies, trying to push the edge and create some beautiful stuff. It takes a cast and crew to make a movie and I’m interested in a small group of script writers, actors, set designers, makeup artists, associate photographers, sound engineers, production assistants, director assistants…anybody regardless of experience level. The main thing is making the product and being serious about doing it.

Please do contact me if you are interested in ANY of the roles mentioned and are willing to put in a little elbow grease to make something special.

Contact me via email vindog@photoshack.com

949/422-8371

vin

http://www.asmp.org/strictlybusiness/2009/04/not-working-enough/

Wonderful video about what works, what doen’t for a photographer’s website and book.

Open HD version: (sorry firefox users, doesn’t do HD if you aren’t on IE)

http://www.psd2html.com

This service takes your webpage design in a photoshop file and turns it into a fully functional and standards compliant CSS, xhtml or other.   I am pretty good with photoshop and basic html, but when it comes to CSS I’m out of my league.   This looks like a great solution.

http://photoslaves.com/?p=513

These images are pretty small, but in the coffee table book quite large and detailed plates look just amazing. Each shot is totally theatrical in nature, complex lighting and treatments, just amazing and thought provoking…and a little dark…

Fantastic photography and a well written article. I’ve had a chance to see the book with these plates, and the body of work is so large you could probably go through the book in a month if you put great effort into it, there’s so much to see and think about. Just beautiful, and a bit dark.

I notice that nearly all shots appear to be about the same “time” of day which adds to the spookiness; kind of like being in all places in that town at once.

There is a sadness to most shots that you want to get to the root of, to dig into and understand. Very powerful stuff!

PHOTOPUMPKIN.com : ” A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS “

This site has some wonderful photography, unusual and funky.

Check out Ron Radmer, whose specialty is equestrian and Western Living photography.

www.ronradmer.com

Radmer Photography - Theatrical & Event	Radmer Photography - Horses	Radmer Photography - Sports
Radmer Photography - Western

http://www.wildnatureimages.com/

I’ve admired Linnea’s portraiture work for some time now, particularly her maternity work.   Her experience as a commercial photographer will certainly lend artistic quality you won’t find in most photographers.  

 http://linnealenkus.com/blog/2008/02/29/celebrity-portraits-brooke-burke-and-david-charvet/