Going through a duldrum? Bored? Photographer’s block is very common. Make sure you’re always tuning and absorbing more and more everyday.

Where do you find your inspiration as many would ask me. I do a lot of things to keep me inspired.

• Watch movies. See the light in the movies. Recently saw movie In The Cut. The movie features tilt-shift effects as well as decent lighting.
• Flip through fashion magazines. Don’t buy those photographer magazines. They just make you want to buy more junk
• Paintings. Why reinvent the wheel. Go and learn the masters before you.
• Go on vacation. This is my favorite one. Go on vacation and bring a small camera along with you.
• Bring a camera with you everywhere for the next X days. Make it a habit to shoot and see light all the time.
• Visit an art museum. This is an obvious.
• Look for photography contests online. WPPI and your local PPA is very helpful.
• Break your routine for a day. Try to do everything different than you normally do. Flip your schedule backwards?
• The Internet. If you’re reading my blog you are most likely somewhat internet savvy. Finding this blog wasn’t so easy. Use a social bookmarking site and search to your hearts content and look for different views or images.
• Visit your local art/college library. If you’re near an art college or campus that is publicly funded you should be able to stroll into their library and just view some art/photography books that you haven’t been able to look at.
• Sketch or doodle.
• Start collecting an inspiration board. Take your favorite photos from magazines, etc and post them to your board. Try to mimic the style or lighting and give it your own twist.
• Find another hobby. Find and change your hat sometimes. Instead of putting on your photography hat find something else to do for a while.

President Elect Barack Obama has an official White House Photographer:  Pete Souza.  Ronald Reagan’s Former Photographer  has been tapped to work alongside with the press secretary.  Pete is a former photojournalist with lots of previous experience.  Pete has lots of credentials. According the aforementioned sources he worked for the Tribune and Sun Times and is currently the photography professor at University of Ohio.

Recently, Pete has shot an official portrait of President Elect Barack Obama.

More Links About Pete Souza:

NPPA Newsrelease

Huffington Post Blurb

The sky is falling? No sweat. Here’s some ideas to promote your business during a recession. A lot of photographers may scapegoat the economy as a means of relinquishing their responsibility for poor slumping sales.

Act Now! While Other Wedding Photographers Might be Hurting

Acting now might deliver that blowout punch to stand yourself out from the market. A lot of successful financial gurus advocate not following the herd/market trends.

Well that might make your job a little more difficult; I think this is the best time to act and gain the most market share or brand awareness in your company or wedding photography business.

Why? Well people are now hungry for cash. If you’re a wedding photographer cash flow is usually the highest during the fall and winter months; thats if you’re in the northern states like me. From my experience thus far it seems that people book weddings in the summer and finally pay all their bills up to you (whilst you’re happy and jollying your away to the bank) in the fall or winter.

Our busiest months seem to be the summer. So during this hard economic climate you might still  have all the cash left and a new year to plan out some goals for you to hit the ground running.

Why invest now? With the market facing many layoffs and a massive reduction and devaluation of prices in many sectors you may get the best deal when searching for services like advertising or internet marketing services.

Research Research Research!

Make sure you do your research. You might not be an advertising expert; but i might be of some help to you. Whilst looking to place an ad for your local magazine or website make sure you email them to see if they have an advertising representative. They will have a friendly person from your area connect and meet with you to see that they can provide you services.

What to do now after all my research?

After doing your research and meeting with ad reps and considering advertising avenues; weigh the risks and the potential of advertising. For some people advertising might not even be a good idea for you. I highly suggest you invest time in social media. Where it has it’s highest dollar for dollar value (its free; just requires some time).

Write some solid Goals for your Wedding Photography Business

Put some good solid sales goals in various categories and make sure you look at them everyday. In a previous article i discussed how to create solid business goals for wedding photography.

Hunt for Real Estate

While you can hunt for some prime real estate (at slashed prices!) you can now own/rent your dream wedding photography studio too.

These ideas will allow you to success and propel your wedding photography business during a recession.

Feel free to twitter at me at @chrisjlee . Just remind me that you’re a reader.
Check out my Michigan Wedding Photography website

With a fresh start and a new year (2009 baby!) make sure you hit the ground running with excellent goals and great ideas to grow and solidify for your business in order for it to be successful.

Write out on one piece of papers all the things you’d like to do: Upgrade more equipment, reduce debt on loans, look for a possible studio space, find a new office manager, hire more photographers, save enough to attend WPPI 2010, etc.

Make SMART Wedding Photography Goals

On another sheet of paper try to refine your goals and only keep the goals that you see are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based goals (SMART). This should eliminate a plethora of stuff from your first piece of paper.

Minimus Maximus

We’re not all perfect. Create goals in mind where you have a reasonable minimum goal and optimal goal. Goals don’t need to be absolute. Example: I would like to book 5000 Weddings this year. While 4000 Will be my minimum.

Push and Push Hard and Lesser (When Needed)

Humans will are (mostly) lazy. Face it we’re not all built like Michael Phelps. Try hard to push yourself to the limit when you’re energy and focus is at its potential. When needed and when you might be at your lowest energy (Toward the end of the wedding season) try to focus on goals that require less output.

Stick to your goals (to somewhere)

After that make sure you tape it to a place where you can see them everyday: Treadmill, Bathroom Mirror, Computer monitor, Bedroom Ceiling (You’re a creative one! Think of something).

Goal Making Creating Categories

Make sure you cover all the categories you need for your wedding photography business. Some categories you might need would be:
Artistic/Photography, Financial, Advertising/Marketing, Website (Wedding Photography), Equipment, etc. Make sure that your categories don’t merge and are specific but flexible enough.

Focus

Make sure you refine your focus. Don’t make too many unattainable lofty goals. Stick to the SMART Acronym . Make sure you make a plan on your calendar to revisit your wedding photography business goals after a number of days (30 days, 90 days).

After the 90 days make sure you see where you are on track. If needed revisit them and tweak them or make them even more inspiring if needed.

This will be all you need to make 2009 a record making year! (Yes even despite the economic turmoil, multiple wars and the like)

Feel free to twitter at me or email me any questions or suggestions if needed so: @chrisjlee

A plethora of wedding photographers nowadays are dealt with the responsibility to manage and maintain content for their website. If you’re very internet savvy i suggest you go down this route. If you’re not very savvy i would suggest hiring some good help from your local area businesses who might offer SEO services.

Google in their most recent blog offered a free starter guide (pdf) containing a comprehensive guide on best website management practices for your website to optimize for their SERP (Search engine landing pages).

The guide might require you to a little webpage HTML know-how as well a good understanding on how to update your pages manually through notepad or other IDE’s like Dreamweaver, Coda, etc.

Some Quick tips include:

1. Provide good accurate titles for your webpage.
2. Use breadcrumbs
3. How to create good practices for anchor text
4. Utilizing heading tags correctly
5. How to market and promote your website effectively

Heres a list of blogs that I follow of Off Camera Lighting Geniouses and Creative Dynamos that are in Wedding Photography now:

1. Neil Van Neilkerk - He knows his stuff. Straight from South Africa he has extensive experience and has been writing at his website planet neil for a long time even before the whole strobist.com boom.
2. Bruce Dorn - Bruce primarily blogs about gadgets and fun trinkets but he does speak of lighting often. He always talks about cinematic type of lighting. He is a master at lights.
3. David Ziser - He blogs at digital pro talk. His blog is excellant its always on schedule and he blogs everyday about something particular.
4. David Williams - I’ve learned from him and have personally attended his seminars. He’s brutally honest and very helpful. His seminars are great he tries to show you a more wholistic approach to photography by drawing influences from art history and portraiture.

Wedding photographers now have a elephantine predicament with digital photography: How do you store all those photos?!

Here are some suggestions:

1. External Hard Drives
2. Online Storage
3. DAM Expert - Hire a digital asset management expert

Here are some real world solutions.

• Create a Workflow where you copy the DVD twice. One in a lightsafe box and another possibly in a fireproof safe or safebox at the bank
• Get a hard drive that mirrors your hard drives as they’re being created. This is usually called a RAID Array. They come in 4 configurations. Not tech savvy? Hire a IT Tech to help you.
• Buy multiple hard drives. Manually make sure they’re on different hard drives
• Upload your photos onto the internet. I highly suggest SmugMug.

Backing up immediately

I like backing images immediately. After shooting a wedding make sure you burn and copy all your photos onto a dvd. DVD’s nowadays are very cheap and can be a good way to back up your files initially.

Backup onto another hard drive. Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays. Some even come with built in RAID abilities. Which means if one of your hard drives fail you can just swap it out with another one.

Worried about Fire, Viruses or Theft? Find Another Space

Worried about fireproofing? Even if you do backup all your files with dvd it doesn’t mean that your place is fireproof. Heres some ideas:

1. Buy a Fireproof Safe - Purchase a safe and place your hard drives or dvds into that safe. But you could imagine eventuall you’d run out of space. This might be the best solution if you’re just starting.
2. Bank - rent a safe keeping box at the bank and store your dvd’s as well as important business assets there.
3. Online - Online is always another great option here.

Online Services

Smugmug is an excellent option. Smugmug allows unlimited storage as well as allows you to sell photos online through their website. Just purchase the account and there are many options that they provide to upload your photos: Lightroom, Browser Uploading, etc.

Mozy is an online backup service. You download their software and it automatically backup areas of your computer. The service is pretty  transparent. I’ve never really actually tried it but their services are pretty affordable.

Carbonite is another online service that mirrors your computer data. It requires installing client software as well. Backups are scheduled automatically and are pretty transparent.

If you’re a smart photographer you should avoid the lines and shop online. There are actually some excellant deals at some of the online retailers like: adorama.com & amazon.com

Today would be a good day to stock up on external harddrives.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday. Happy holidays!

Google has taken the responsibility to archive and publish online all the photos shot by Life Magazine photographers. This is a tremendous and huge project.
I’m excited to see the results of this. Google hopes to translate this into 16 different langauges and who knows what they’re going to do to it next. Google has already archived a lot of texts and books that are currently fair use.

Source

Social Networking is a big thing nowadays if you’re targeting Millennial (or Gen-Y) couples, Bridimus rexes and Groom-asauruses.

In this series of blog postings I will provide you free advice on marketing strategies with facebook.

• Part 1: Why you Wedding Photographers should be on Facebook
• Part 2: Building your Network
• Part 3: Facebook Marketing Strategies
• Part 4: Brand Identity and Brand Management

In part 3 we will explore the importance of how facebook can be the best free tool for you to find the right and perfect client for you.

1. Network. Old school networking in person never changed when transcended into online social networks. Just make sure you don’t come off the get go to try to sell. Remember online communities and online social networks always have etiquette. Always observe a community or group first and see how they interact (do your research!!!!!). Some things you can do: Post and comment on photos. Offer
2. Pimp your profile: Add some facebook applications that will adorn and display your favorite photos. Which leads me to the next point:
3. Start a conversation: Create some sexy photos (Not that kind of photos; you perv!) with couples or the type of photos that you’re so passionate for. The photos that make you excited to that you became a wedding photographer.
4. Wall Posting: Find whatever reason you can to post onto other people’s walls. Try to connect with people when they’re at their most happiest point of their life: Comment on status messages conveying or exuding their extreme happiness, Birthdays, Anniversaries, engagements etc.
5. Be patient: Social networking and social media is not something you can produce ROI on instantly. But this is free. The only thing you are spending is your time. Time is essentially something you have to commit to.
6. Have fun: Be yourself, and be expressive. You’re pretty much doing this to make friends. This will drive your word of mouth marketing.
7. Keep updated: Use facebook apps to host and update your network with new and fresh wedding photos. Make sure you keep your facebook status updated as well.
8. Twitter: Use twitter to update your facebook status. If you don’t know about twitter please visit http://www.twitter.com . There are zounds of awesome photographers . I will discuss Twitter in some next social marketing series.
9. Add friends: add more friends as you go along. I would suggest meeting people in person and then adding them. You have to remember about etiquette. Most people won’t add you unless you’ve got a reason.
10. Go do it now. That’s it for now. Go out and do what i’ve told you to.