I read a lot of books and they are not all about photography. I enjoy reading as much about business and it is here that I keep coming across ways to be more successful.

I have adapted some of what I am reading to photography. This is my attempt to help to get people to see we need to bring some balance into our business lives to achieve our goals over time.

Stanley in Burkina Faso, West Africa on assignment.

Where you focus  

Where you focus yourself is where your energy will go. This tends to be along your strengths.

• Comfort with Technology – In the days when we were processing film, there were many photographers who would love to take one negative and work on it forever.  Ansel Adams would fall more into this category.  He worked very hard to get the very last drop of detail out of the image.  Today PhotoShop or Lightroom is what can eat up all your time if you let it. It could also be being more comfortable with the camera and lights and therefore you shoot products because working with people distracts you too much from your comfort zone.
• Comfort with the subjects – There are many photographers who really enjoy how photography gives them access to people and places. They will spend as much time as possible letting the camera introduce them to people and less time with the camera. Some of these photographers really struggle with the technical things they could do with their camera and may just learn how to do shoot a certain way and repeat this. On the extreme of this may be someone like a school portrait photographer.  You don’t really have to know all the technical, just set it up the same way and it is your ability to get great expressions and knowing how to make people comfortable with the camera that sets you apart.
• Comfortable with your gut – You like responding to situations and just can sense the right thing to do in a certain situation.  This could be the war photographer who doesn’t necessarily like cover the death and destruction, but know they are good at making those photos that tell the story and can do so without loosing their life in foreign countries or in a war zone.

I have found a niché in multimedia.  (Photo by Ken Touchton)

What you develop as your niché

Photographers tend to play to their strengths and then work hard to develop them even more. Like a musician starts to play the piano due to an interest, then spend a lot of time taking private lessons and practicing to hone this skill.

Photographers need to spend time going to workshops with instructors who can help them develop the skills to rise to the top of the industry. Photographers will seek out mentors who they admire their work and can help coach them.

• Going with your gut (Kinaesthetic Knowledge) If you have an interest in war photography you may spend your time reading books on war photographers, wars and study politics and culture at levels very similar to the experts in these fields.  The reason you do this is you know that to survive you must know more than shutter speed and f/stops.  You need to understand the culture and know how to get around in situations that there are not manuals for, because it is new. You may reach out to The Dart Center which helps journalists deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  
• The empathetic photographer (Emotional Quotient) I have a close friend who has a special needs child and who has a heart for not just his child, but for all special needs people. This photographer goes to seminars, reads stories and today covers these subjects helping give a voice to the voiceless. 
• The Strategic Photographer (Intelligent Quotient) May be looking for ways to use their mind to use maybe more technological answer to situations.  They may use multimedia, panoramic, post production skills and other things that play to their intellect to help a client achieve their goals.  
• The Spiritual/Moral photographer (Spiritual Quotient) photographer lets their inner wisdom guide their compassion.  You see a lot of humanitarian photographers who are driven by doing the right thing. I think there is a difference between the empathetic photographer and the Spiritually guided photographer. Sometimes the spiritual minded photographer can lack some empathy just as sometimes the empathetic photographer can lack some pragmatic thought.

Stanley teaching in Kona, Hawaii. (Photo by Chris McCloud)

Moa Noble twirls the fire knife. It is part of the Samoan traditions in Hawaii. This is the photo I was showing the class how to make last February in Kona, Hawaii.

DANGER – Too Focused

When you only go to what you perceive as your strengths sometimes this is the same as being a child who just wants only ice cream or macaroni and cheese for every meal.  It is unhealthy. I suggest expanding your horizons.  Go to events, seminars, workshops, or take up a new hobby just to bring some fresh air into your life. The reason you want to do this is to access your untapped potential.

Focus Inward for a change

I have been on Weight Watchers and learned that when I stay with the plan I loose weight, when I depart from it I put it on. What is the core thing I have learned–tracking everything I eat and sticking to a prescribed number helps me take weight off.  If I go above that number too often I start to put weight on.  The numbers that Weight Watchers assigns to a person is based on their height, weight and activity level.

Photographers need to track what they do. It is when you take some time for self observation that you will notice you are spending a lot of time at the computer and no time meeting new people and growing your business. 

You should be able to take a calendar out and see where your time is going. If you want to be successful it will look like a good balanced meal.  If all you have is all steak and no vegetables you cannot sustain a healthy business.

How do you become successful?

Same as the answer to how do you play at Carnegie Hall–Practice, Practice, Practice.  My sister-in-law is Pam Goldsmith.  She is one of the top violists in the world. She sits first chair in the studio musicians group of Los Angeles.  What this means is she plays on most of the recorded music for Hollywood productions.

These are the highest paid group of studio musicians in the world. When they record the music for a movie they hire this group for a good reason.  They play everything for the first time they see it and 90% of the time that is the last time they play it. They record them sight reading most all the movie scores.  It would cost too much to practice a few times and then play it.

Since I grew up playing the trumpet I was blown away at this. I didn’t realize when you master the instrument at the highest level you can play a piece of music that no one has ever played before the first time as if you had been playing it for a lifetime.

How do they do it? When they are not performing they are practicing.

I too must perform on this level every day with my photography. I get one shot. I don’t make a photo of someone and we evaluate it and then I try it a few time over and over till I get it right.  How do I do that? I practice everyday taking pictures and looking without my camera. When I pick up my camera I seldom think about what I am doing to make a photo–I just do.

I have seen some pie charts lately on forums and blogs about how much time a professional photographer spends doing different things to run their business.  I thought about what I am doing and believe this is pretty close to what I do in the chart above.

In some ways I see some of these overlapping and not as clean delineations. For example I see blogging as much a part of “Marketing” and “Learning/Workshops” as something totally independent for the others. 

Stanley shooting an assignment. (photo by: Knolan Benfield)

Shooting

I may actually shoot even less than 10% of the time, but this is close.  When I first started doing this full-time I was lucky if this were even 1%.

When I was on staff I shot a little more percentage wise, but even as a staff photographer there were a lot of other responsibilities.

Even when I look at my time doing what many consider what a photographer does it is broken down into different parts.

I may shoot for a day with a client and then have to spend a full day or more ingesting the images, culling the take, editing the picks, converting them from RAW to JPEGs and then delivering the images. Often after booking the job and before I show up there are a lot of pre-production things you need to be involved in. You need to charge batteries, sometimes scout the location, line up assistants, talk the the client to coordinate and many other things to be sure the shoot is a success.

Estimates

When someone has contacted you for a photo shoot one of the first things is collecting all the information you can to encapsulate the clients expectations. After you have all this information you are going to need to prepare an estimate.

I write down all the hard costs that I can think of for the project. I think of all the time I will need to complete the project.  This is figured on how long it could take and not on if everything goes well. I try to under promise and over deliver.

After I know the costs of the project and what time I have involved I then start my estimates with the Cost-of-doing-business.  These are all the costs to just have your doors open for business that you must spread over all your jobs to recover.

After adding all this together I then compare this to what is the going rate.  While I could do a job for $1,000 why would you price it at this when the going rate is more like $5,000?  On the same note, if the going rate is $1,000 and my figure is $5,000 this has to somehow be justified.

The last part of writing an estimate is putting myself in the place of the client and creating the verbiage that will help them understand the bottom line and why I am the best for the job.

Book Keeping

I spend a lot of time invoicing, tracking my expenses, following up on outstanding bills, getting 1099 forms from assistants, providing 1099 information to clients and the list goes on and on.

I have bills, healthcare and taxes to pay. Knowing the IRS can call you in and want to see your books will cause you to spend time doing this or paying someone to do it for you.

Stanley teaching. (by Dennis Fahringer)

Educating Clients

I am often spending time helping clients understand why a certain treatment will help them achieve their goal. Sometimes I am having to put together examples of my work for other clients or from my portfolio to help them see what I am proposing.

In this industry seeing is believing and talking is cheap. 

Sometimes I have to find contrasting examples to make my points.

Often clients do not really know what they want and you are problem solving and proposing possibilities in order to get them to tell you if you are on the right track or not.

The best scenario is for the client to invite you into the process before they are making the decision to use a photographer. I do this for many of my clients.

Surprising to me I have found myself talking myself out of shooting a job because that wasn’t the best thing for the client.

Portfolio Development

I really think you need to go and work on your own personal projects to create the material to show to clients and attract clients to what you enjoy doing the most.

What you often find is that clients may not hire you to do what you are showing, but hire you because you are showing them it. They may want to do something like what you want to do and because they feel good about your work will hire you to shoot other things in hopes that by bringing you in they might somehow get their bosses to see your portfolio pieces and want to do it as well.

Learning/Workshops

This really overlaps with Portfolio Development. I must keep current with the latest gear, software and techniques to see what things I can do to improve what I am doing now or even to do new things all together.

I enjoy being inspired by other people’s work and then I also need hands on workshop time with some of the new software.

Blogging

Today you need to interact with your audience as much as possible. People hire the last guy they can remember.

Blogging helps me be in front of clients and potential clients.

Blogging also helps to differentiate you from others.

This is like how a series of photos will help you more than one photograph. Every one has at least one photo in them that could win awards, but consistently showing a variety of work shows you can deliver all the time.

The way blogging helps differentiate you is showing your expertise. When it comes down to it people are hiring you as a problem solver more than a photographer. Talking about how you solved a problem and then showing the images demonstrates your problem solving ability. Showing a portfolio of images shows you make pretty pictures.

Marketing

If people just would call me and I was booked for the rest of my life then I wouldn’t have to do marketing.

No matter what business you are in you have to find those clients who want to hire you.

I think in many ways photography is more difficult to market than food, healthcare or housing. Photography to a certain extent more of a luxury than a necessity. If it were a necessity then you are marketing to everyone and then just trying to explain why to pick you over another grocery store.

Most people own cameras and will most likely take their own photos to use before they take the next step of hiring a photographer.  Getting people to want to hire you over them doing it themselves requires you to prove your value.

Even if you were selling widgets the numbers would be similar.  For every 1,000 companies you contact only about 100 of them will be impressed enough to take a second look at you.

Of those 100 companies that think they are interested only 10 will hire you for the job.

In this business of photography very few of those 10 that hired you will hire you again repeatedly.

If you are a wedding photographer your hope for the client is they only hire you once to shoot their wedding.

Unless your client has an ongoing need for photography like supplying a website with fresh material or a publication you will only be hire occasionally by them. 

A very successful corporate photographer will shoot maybe 100 days a year. If 8 of those 10 clients hire you only 1 time a year and the other 2 hire you maybe 3 times a year you will start to see the reason why you spend a lot of time marketing.

There is no formula except that you will spend a lot of time finding people to hire you.

You can have the Captions display by default or give the option for the viewer to click on them and make them show in the far right hand corner.

My last post let you create titles that will float over the images in the lower third of the slide. You could have this title stay up for as long as you want while the slides changed under it.

This blog post will help you know how to use the Caption tool.

Captions that are embedded in your photos IPTC information can easily be shown in the slide show of SoundSlides. Basically there are two options. You can show them by default or make it an option that the viewer can click to view a caption.

In the template settings of SoundSlides you have two things that you can check. You can have a menu for showing the captions in the footer of the slide show and you can have the captions show by default.

If it is important that everyone see the captions then choose the default to show them. Sometimes you want the audience to be able to interact and choose to see them after they watch the show for more information.  This might be why you have “Show Captions” menu item in the footer to give the audience an option to see them.

You can modify or create the caption under the menu item “Slide Info” and “Details.”  SoundSlides will import your caption from your IPTC field if one exists.

You may want to modify your caption after you have already imported images into SoundSlides.  Just to the tab menu item “Slide Info” and the sub-tab item of Details to then modify the text.

You can modify the appearance of the caption in 5 ways: 1) font, 2) size of font, 3) color of text, 4) color of background, & 5) opacity of background.

You will want to play with the appearance of the captions. You can modify type of font, size, color and opacity. Remember this will affect the entire slideshow captions.  You are not changing individual appearance from slide to slide.

You can clear all the imported captions quickly if you like

HTML support

You can style your captions using HTML tags. Supported tags include b, i, u, font, br and a.

Turning the slide into a link

In addition to adding HTML links, you can also add code that will turn the slide itself into a link. By adding the following to your caption, you would make your image link to http://soundslides.com: [clickimagelink]http://soundslides.com[/clickimagelink]

By adding the following to your caption, you would make your image link to http://soundslides.com and open the link in a new window:
[clickimagelink_new]http://soundslides.com[/clickimagelink_new]

Check out this example

http://www.stanleylearystoryteller.com/Impact360/_files/iframe.html

Captions are just another tool that you can use to help communicate your message to the audience. Take a look at the SlideShow I did here on community service project. I made the captions an option just so you could see how they look by default.  I used the default setting for the text size and colors.

Summary

Learn all you can do with a software even if you choose not to use a particular tool, because you may want to use it later for a client or know what it does before you invest in another software package.  I am surprised as to how often people buy another software to do what their present software can do, but they failed to read the manual and master it before jumping to something new.

http://www.stanleylearystoryteller.com/Yucatan/_files/iframe.html

In my last blog post I talked about how to use SoundSlides.  Here I just want to show how to use the lower thirds title tool.

Figure 1

When you are using SoundSlides pick the Audio tab and then under that click on the Lower Thirds tab as you see in Figure 1.

You then just type in the Name field what you want in large type and then in the Title field will all be smaller under the name. The In Point field says where the title starts and the duration how long it is up.  You can see in the example in Figure 2 how the top line becomes the Title on the left.

Figure 2

I hope you also just enjoy watching two SoundSlide shows I did when I was in the Yucatan covering Roswell Presbyterian Church’s mission work there.

http://www.stanleylearystoryteller.com/Becanchen/_files/iframe.html

I walked around for a while with Justin Veneman while he was shooting in Fort Worth, Texas. I enjoyed shadowing Justin. (Nikon D3S, ISO 12,800, f/5.6, 1/250, 28-300mm)

Shadow

When you ask a photographer if you can shadow them or they offer you need to understand etiquette of the role. You are there to observe. Your role is not to be shooting, because when you ae shooting you are no longer observing.

You may help a photographer by asking if you can carry anything. You can also help by letting them know if a flash isn’t working, but whenever you do this you need to do so discretely. I would whisper rather than pointing this out in front of a client.

In general you are to stay out of the way and take this time to watch how the photographer works. It is best if you schedule time later to ask the photographer questions rather than during the photo shoot. Carry a small notepad and write down questions you have that you can go over at a later time.

A photographer has a great deal on their mind and many responsibilities when they are working. Respect their role and when you offer help pay close attention to if just the offer of helping is being a nuisance.

One of my good friends is Bill Bangham who likes to shoot with his Leica. He likes to be as invisible as possible when he shoots. (Nikon D3S, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/640, 28-300mm)

Photo Assistant

A good photo assistant anticipates the needs of the photographer. There are many people in the industry who would prefer this role over being the photographer.

The primary role of the photo assistant is to lighten the load of the photographer. Photo assistants do not shoot. They help by being a Sherpa, extra set of eyes, runner, and anything else the photographer needs during a photo shoot.

The assistant is primarily responsible for all the equipment. They need to unpack and repack the camera bags, lighting kits, cables, computers and everything needed for the photo assignment.

Photo assistants helping in getting model releases on many jobs.

Photo assistants role is to tell the photographer when something is not working. A flash can fail and the assistant must tell the photographer.

Scott Kelby waits for a good moment during the cattle drive in the Fort Worth Stockyards. I think it is cool he is using the same camera and lens I like to use and after talking with Scott he had similar reason for choosing it. It gives a good range, so less changing of lenses and it is sharp. (Nikon D3S, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/500, 28-300mm)

Second Shooter

A second shooter often serves as a photo assistant who shoots photos.
Second shooters generally do not own the copyright to the photos. You will see second shooters used in weddings and events primarily.

The second shooter compliments the photographer. Most of the time you are not shooting the same things, but sometimes on very critical shots the photographer may ask the second shooter to shoot the exact same shot because this will serve as an emergency backup.

Second photographers never hand out their business cards or talk to the photographers client about doing work on the side. This is not just wrong if this is discovered you are doing this you may be blackballed in the industry.

If a client asks you directly, always reply that if they need help in the future to contact the photographer and he/she can reach you.

A student gets Scott Kelby to review his work at the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference.  This is another great way to learn. Show your wok and get it critiqued. (Nikon D3S, ISO 12,800, f/5.6, 1/250, 28-300mm)

Assistant

You can also just be a general assistant. The major difference between the photo assistant is most assistants do not know photography well enough to do this role. However, a good assistant can be just as valuable to a photographer.

Like a good host you make sure the client is comfortable and the photographer is serviced as well. You may handle model releases, help get snacks or lunch for the crew. You may run errands like picking up props, picking up clients or talent.

I like to use assistants who just understand good hospitality. My favorite assistants can talk with a client to keep them from distracting me when I am trying to solve problems that arise. Great assistants are gifted in knowing when to jump in and when to stay out.

You may have gifts already that could make you valuable to a photographer. In any of these roles you will be able to observe and learn. Almost every successful photographer has done one if not all of these roles before they became a full time professional photographer.

After watching my friend Jim Veneman pull out his Nikon Coolpix P7000 and get some shots, I had to get one myself. (Nikon D3S, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/1250, 28-300mm)

Most all of my friends who are full time pros enjoy working with other professional photographers occassionally in one of these roles. The reason is simple, they like learning something new.

They learn how another photographer works and they learn about the other roles. I am a better photographer today because I have learned how to better work with my team. I am also sure that I could still do a better job and always like learning from other photographers.