Pro Photo Business Forum

As a wedding and portrait photographer, especially if you are just starting out, you want to make sure that you have a long tail.

Your tail is also your product line.  How many items do you offer to your clients?  For most wedding photographers, their tail consists of their time, an online gallery, and wedding albums.

Extend your product line, and watch your profits grow.  After all, your clients are talking with you because they want to spend money with you.  It is your job to continually be offering products until your client says “no”.

More than likely you are offering Engagement and Bridal sessions.  Do you offer a frame with each and every portrait you sell?

Do you offer three to four different lines of wedding albums?  One line of wedding album can be more expensive than the other.

Do you offer different finishing options for your finished portraits?

Do you offer studio versus outdoor portrait sessions?

When was the last time you offered a parent album to the Groom’s family, and not just the Bride’s family?

And, as an extreme way to extend your tail, you can offer honeymoon photography!  Make sure to attend one of our workshops if you are interested in learning more about how to get started with honeymoon photography.

Are you thinking about building your first photography studio?  One of the things that should be running through your head is how much it will cost you to keep the studio open every month, and additionally will the figure you come up with be less than what you make each month.

It’s a tough question to answer as you have no idea how much money you will be making once your studio doors open.  So, I would like to offer a different way for you to think.

Break things down into 16×20s.  Here at Solaris Studios, we sell our 16×20s for $500.  Knowing this, we ask ourselves how many 16×20 portraits do we need to sell each month to achieve our goals.

By thinking this way I find it keeps everything in perspective and much more manageable.  Our rent in our current location is $1500, or three 16×20s.

Knowing this, I make sure that all the wedding packages we sell come with a bridal and engagement session giving us at least two chances to sell each client a 16×20 portrait.

What new camera would you like to purchase?  How many 16×20s will you have to sell to achieve the camera?  How can you sell that many 16×20 portraits within one month?

Think in 16×20s.

I’ve been using ShootQ now for about two months, and I am absolutely hooked.

ShootQ is a tool made especially for photographers to manage their studio. It was created by photographers that know the difficulty of managing a studio while trying to concentrate on their core business of photography. It’s a web based system that works like a software program on a business computer. This system organizes work flow from the first client interest phone call all the way through until the customer receives the ordered photography and completes payment. It’s a great tool to have for any professional photographer and works very well for wedding events.

This studio management tool will be able to follow a client from their first phone call through their whole process of working with a particular photography studio. It allows the photographer to enter in information in one area instead of having interest books, appointment books, billing lists, and calendars to keep up with. ShootQ even sends reminders of when a customer needs to be billed which is an advantage from trying to remember or keep organized records on paper. A professional photographer can spend more of their time on what they do best, taking portraits of people.

The system gives reminders of what a photographer needs to do next, which is very helpful when trying to keep up with the wedding production and to keep the important client, the bride, content and feeling secure and informed.

With ShootQ, less time is spent on the administrative side.  Foe me, the studio management system acts as an extra employe. Furthermore, some photographers lose money by not billing on time or following up to receive earned payments. Cash flow is the name of the game, and ShootQ keeps me on track and allows me to see  a projected cash flow for the entire year.  My photography studio runs so smoothly using this tool that the photographer’s life will have more quality and their clients will feel as though they are working with a well managed business. Many photographers get work by way of word of mouth and having clients happy will prompt them to distribute a studio’s name.

Multiple members of The Pro Photo Business Forum are now using ShootQ, and we have begun a forum which will allow the sharing of custom workflows.  Come and join us!

The call for entries for the January PPBF Image Competition has ended as is now open for judging.  Please vote for your three favorite images now.  Judging will close on 1/14.  Vote here.

First place will be awarded a one year free membership to the PPBF, a $50 value.  Second and third place winners will be awarded a one month membership.  Once judging has closed, critiques will begin.

If the winner is already a paying member, then their current membership will be extended.

Thanks to all who entered, and good luck!

The PPBF Monthly Image Competition is free to all.  First place winners are always awarded a one-year $50 membership to the forum, and second and third place winners are awarded a one month membership.

Occasionally, some months offer different prizes from our sponsors, so it’s a good idea to check the forum to see what the prizes are.

Submitting your work to an image competition is a great tool to help you grow as an artist.  While understandably it can be a bit intimidating at first to present your work for the world to see with the full intention of having it reviewed and commented on.  However, the results can be quite rewarding when the comments received are made in a constructive manner by other professional photographers.

Enter your submissions today! You’ll be glad you did.

Are you interested in sponsoring our monthly image competitions?

Come one and all to the 2009 PPGH Christmas Black, White, and Red Gala is this weekend!

Come and celebrate with friends at the fabulous Hotel Derek, this Sunday!

Call the Hotel Derek for special room rates. 713-961-3000

RSVP on the PPGH Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?ei…903640&index=1

Visit the PPGH Website to purchase your ticket:
http://www.ppgh.org

It’s going to be a great time!

Every once and a while I find a link on Twitter that really gets my attention.  However, by the time I read the story I had found, I had long lost the post on twitter that referred me to the story in the first place, so I am not really sure of who to thank for the link.

At any rate, if you are a small business owner like I am, you will enjoy watching this story.

It’s not a matter of if, but when.  There is never a good time for your hard drive to fail, especially your primary drive that you store all your weddings on.

That’s what happened to me last week, and I didn’t lose one image.

A back up system is a must when you are a wedding photographer.  The images you create can never be recreated.  I truly feel the images I create are worth so much more than I charge for them.  So it is very important to have a rock solid backup plan.

I’d like to share with you the structure of my back up system before the crash, and how I have now changed my system after the crash.

First, we’re going to refer to this crash as “The Big Crash of 09”.  It was quite scary when it happened.  All of the sudden my hard drive that I store all of my wedding images on would not mount.  Even after transferring the hard drive to all the different computers in the studio, it still would not mount.  And after a call to tech support, it was quickly determined that the drive had failed.

My network of computers are all Apple, and Apple has a backup system called Time Machine which backs up all new information every hour on the hour.  It really gives you a nice warm and fuzzy feeling.  But when it comes time to retrieve that information, you have doubts as to how well the software has been working.  You begin to question if the software has been working at all.

With each wedding I photograph, I make a back up of all the images I have created to DVD.  I then edit those images down to the ones I want my customers to see, and then I back up those images to DVD.  But how do you know that you have backed everything up?  Even though my routine is very strict, you always have a nagging feeling that you may have missed something.

I was lucky this time, and everything had been saved using Time Machine onto a very large eight terabyte external drive called a Drobo.

Before the recession started, I had one person working with me in the studio, and because of this fact I had all of the studio images stored on a server for central access.  But now that I am working by myself, I find that I really am no longer in need of a server, so I have now changed my backup system, which has added one more layer of redundancy.

Attached to my primary workstation, I have now added two external one terabyte drives, and one eight terabyte Drobo.  Inside the workstation are two 500 gig drives.

So, now when I bring my exposed cards in from a wedding my routine works like this.  First, I download the images to one of the external one terabyte drives.  I then back up the raw captures onto DVD.  The second external one terabyte dive is my back up drive, and is an exact mirror of the first external one terabyte drive.  I accomplish this mirror using Carbon Copy Cloner.

As I have said, there are two internal drives as well.  One is my startup drive, and the second is a mirror of the startup drive, again using Carbon Copy Cloner.  This way, if the startup drive fails, I can still operate the computer and album production can continue while I wait for a replacement drive to be installed.

All four of these drives, the two internal 500 gig drives, and the two external one terabyte drives are all backed up ever hour onto the eight terabyte Drobo.

This then is the most solid backup system I have ever created for myself.  A double layer of redundancy.

If this is your first ime here, then welcome! I’m so proud of this site and its members!

My name is Aric Hoek, and I have been a professional photographer all my life. 100% of my income has been, and always will be from photography. I’m the host of The Pro Photo Business Forum.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love talking about the business of wedding photography to just about anyone that will listen, so the creation of the Pro Photo Business Forum was a very natural progression for me.

You’re either the type of person that likes to hang out in forums, or you aren’t. There isn’t much in between. If you like forums, then you are going to notice one fundamental difference when you visit the home page of the Pro Photo Business Forum. The difference you see is in what’s NOT there. You don’t see a listing of recent posts. You don’t see forum statistics. You don’t see a listing of members. You don’t see calendars.

What you do see is information that can help photographers, which is what this community is all about. What you do see is a blog, created by the members of the forum. And we’re not just talking about how to take great photographs, but we are talking about the things that really matter to professional photographers. We’re talking about the business of photography.  We’re talking about the bottom line.

Would you like to join us? Would you like to contribute to our blog as a PPBF Contributing Writer?

We’re looking for experienced photographers to help contribute to our new experiment. In return for two scheduled blog entries a month, PPBF Contributing Writers receive the following:

1. Free access to the Pro Photo Business Forum.
2. Recognition on the PPBF homepage.
3. A link to your homepage from the PPBF homepage.
4. A link to your homepage in the signature of your articles.
5. Access to a privte staff forum on the PPBF.
6. Profile page with a listing of all your articles.

Contact us today if you are interested in filling the a position. Currently we have five contributing writers. My goal is an ambitious fifteen. With fifteen Contributing Writers, each writing two articles, the blog will have fresh information for it’s readers every day of the month!

Come and join the ride! Contact us today!

You’ll never be the same. You’ll be better!

For most photographer’s, their website is their primary tool for attracting new business. To help members improve their businesses and websites, we have a special forum dedicated to website reviews. However, the reviews that are given are based on the site’s ability to generate new business for the studio and not how esthetically pleasing the images are. When I give a review of a site, I like to create a five minute screen captured walk through. Here’s a fun example.