I know this is obvious to most — the shift from physical delivery to electronic delivery continues its evolution at an exponential pace. For me, it’s not so much the shift itself, but the exponential nature of it. A recent research piece by The Outsell, cited that for “news right now” 57% of news users now go to digital sources. This compares to 33% a few years ago. Another finding is that “Readers report a 10 point drop in usage of the newspaper in just three years, and continuing plans to trim their newspaper habits.”

Again, nothing surprising about these statistics and the resulting trend, except for the speed of decay. If you are a photographer advertising in your local paper, you may think twice about it (although, I believe a small local journal has a greater chance of being read in paper form versus the Boston Globe or New York Times).

It is clear that a greater and greater percentage of the “grand” audience is looking to stay connected digitally — Facebook, Twitter, email marketing and blogs provide attractive alternatives to outbound marketing portals. To further this thought, Bob Lubell, Grand Lubell Photography, sent a long and interesting email that struck me in its simplicity but effectiveness.

There may be times during the year when we have a question to ask or an important item to tell you. Please let us know the best way to reach you by choosing from the list below:

Email
Home Phone
Cell Phone
Text Messaging
Twitter
Facebook

Don’t assume your client base wants their information delivered in a homogeneous fashion nor assume they want it delivered the same way they received it 18 months ago — ask the question.

As a final observation — just when you think you have the “tiger by the tail” and the “stars are aligning” — you should never lose sight of the inherent “cycle” of most everything in life. I was speaking to Phil Cantor, Phil Cantor Photography, this week about marketing from our studio management software platform and having the latest and greatest features and capabilities to electronically measure the effectiveness of an email campaign. Phil commented that “. . . this is all fine and good, but I am wondering about your label printing feature . . . ” because he wants to stand out from all the email marketing and spend a portion of his marketing investment in “snail mail.” This is a feature we have had for 10 years, and just when we thought it was becoming obsolete, it’s having a revival.

Tony and Diana Cooper of TLC Photography will kick off their professional photography workshop series on January 23 and 24, 2010 — just 4 weeks away. The first of a three part series will be the “Nitty Gritty Workflow Workshop” which will be hosted at their 3,200 sq. ft. studio.

The two-day seminar/workshop will highlight the “best practices” Tony and Diana have developed for their studio business over the last 15 years including, sales and marketing techniques and suggestions, the use of Lightroom to edit and prepare images, leveraging ProSelect to sell more images, your lab and developing a great working relationship and much more. A complete overview is provided here.

This is a great opportunity to (re)think and refine your photography workflow for 2010. Their studio is conveniently located only 50 miles from Washington DC and 15 miles from Hagerstown MD — so easy to get to. Registration for this first event is now open, so go ahead and sign up. Also look for TLC’s “Lighting Essentials Workshop” in February and the “Successful Senior!” workshop in March.

Tony and Diana use PhotoOne as their studio management software and will be highlighting some of the features as part of their presentation. If you are sponsoring an event, seminar, workshop please let us know and we will share it on our blog with other PhotoOne users. Happy New Year!

‘Tis the season to give and reflect on how thankful we are for our friends and family, clients and staff. All year, you’ve given your clients beautiful images for their homes and families. So how about a gift for you that may be the best gift you’ll receive in 2009.

Please join me and 27 other industry leading photographers for
The Joy to the World FREE Marketing Websummit on December 28, 2009. Registration link is here:

We’ll each share our best money-making ideas for your business in the New Year. From promotional ideas, to earning a larger investment from each wedding client, workflow improvements and more, you’ll learn so much in these 14 FREE hours to substantially grow your business in 2010. At the same time, we’ll be helping fund smiles for children in need of cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries through PPA Charities.
Want to know more?

Over 10,000 professional photographers registered for our Master Photographers Free Marketing Telesummit in September. You raved about how much you learned so we thought why not do it again to help you get off to a strong start in the New Year…and make it BIGGER and BETTER! This time, you can learn from Marcus Bell, Bruce Hudson, Sam Puc, Julia Woods, Kay Eskridge, Jerry Ghionis, Trey and Elizabeth Homan, Jennifer Turner, Alycia Alvarez, Scott Crosby, Will Crockett and more! The Joy to the World Websummit promises to provide you with serious money making ideas for your business.

All you need is a computer with an Internet connection to join us December 28 (and the latest version of Adobe Flash – it’s free, too). The Websummit will be available for 24 hours beginning at 12:01 CST on December 28. Listen to only those speakers you like best or watch all 28. You can start, stop and pause each speakers’ presentation to learn at your leisure within the 24 hour window. Simply REGISTER NOW for FREE

Peace, Love and Joy,
Sarah Petty
Owner, The Joy of Marketing and Sarah Petty Photography

P.S. If you’re not available on December 28, 2009 or want to get a head start on 2010 planning for your business, you can purchase the Adobe FLASH files of all 14 hours for $89 and receive access to the speaker presentations IMMEDIATELY. A pre-websummit special price of $59 is available until December 27. Just register before December 28, 2009, and you’ll receive this special offer!

P.P.S. The Joy of Marketing has partnered with PPA Charities to change the world – one smile at a time. Join us in raising funds for PPA’s charitable partner, Operation Smile, whose network of volunteers work worldwide to repair childhood facial deformities including cleft lips and cleft palates. Learn more here.

Happy Friday. We’ve had a busy week here at PhotoOne and can assume that our clients have as well, given the number of conversations we’ve had with many of you this week. Here are some quick snippets of the various discussions that took place — hopefully they’ll be thought-provoking or provide an “aha” moment.

Workshops in the New Year
Gary Box, of Box Portrait Gallery, and Tony Cooper, of TLC Photography, called this week to give us an update on their upcoming 2010 Workshops. As part of their presentations they will include PhotoOne and how they use our studio management software to leverage their workflow. We will be sending along promotional materials, demo cds, and a special offering for the events. If you are planning an event at your studio in 2010 and it includes PhotoOne, let us know now so we can get you on the calendar and send you marketing and promotional materials.

New Business Development
Kay Eskridge emailed this week to bounce a couple of ideas off of PhotoOne. She is busy building a new business and brand called Learn.Grow.Succeed – Education for Professional Photographers. Kay is developing “Best Practices” around the photography business and will share it as part of her webinars and speaking engagements.

If you happened to miss it, PhotoOne was a guest blogger on Skip Cohen’s MEI blog this week. The topic was SEO and how you might use certain tools to improve your standing with Google and the other search engines.

PhotoOne Development Suggestions
Wendy Rouleau added a great comment this week on our blog.

Thanks for your input…it is a great feature! For those of us “old timers” with P1, I am really wanting a way to import data that has been corrected. For example, I have over 13000 clients in P1. Once a year, we clean up our list and run it thru the NCOA system. This basically “fixes” all the addresses of those that have moved…it is great! My problem is getting this corrected info back into P1…we manually enter it. This past time we had over 700 changes! There has to be a better way!

Thanks for the great comment and we will get on it!

We also had a call from Dan Rother this week and he was looking for a finer parsing between his PhotoOne calendar(s) and his SmartPhone. Another great comment and we will get on it!

Six-Degrees of Seperation
I thought this was a funny coincidence. A friend of mine in Southern California sent me the following email yesterday. She knows that I’m in the photography software business and knew I would be interested in the fact that she received a promotional email from a photographer and took action.

” . . . literally, I wasn’t thinking about getting pics of the kids at all and it hadn’t even crossed my mind but I just got an email promotion. The promotion was for a discounted session and attractive pricing for any order from a studio that did my oldest daughter’s graduation pictures. Since I haven’t gotten a pic of all of them in about 4 yrs, I picked up the phone immediately when I opened it and made an appointment for when everyone is home for Thanksgiving . . .”

It turns out this Southern California photographer is a client of PhotoOne. Late yesterday afternoon, the connecting of the dots made me smile. Enjoy the weekend.

Brett Odgers is one of Sydney’s top photographers. Brett began his career in advertising and over the last twenty years has expanded his business to include a well-balanced mix of photographic offerings. Brett is married, has 3 children and is clearly very busy — so thanks, Brett for taking the time for this blog post.

How do you approach your photography business?

I have a reasonable mix of advertising, wedding, portraits, public speaking and workshops. I’ve been shooting for advertising clients for about 20 years and focusing on building the wedding and portrait side of my business over the last 8 years. With the current global economic downturn, it has proven to be a very good strategy. As the advertising opportunities dropped the wedding opportunities picked up. My current mix of photography gives me so many more options and the flexibility to better manage both my business and the constant fluctuations.

Over the course of your career, who has influenced your vision?

The influences are broad and wide from old school painters to modern photographic masters. I love the craft of photography — creating an image in the camera and using beautiful light and composition to enhance the image. To put a finer point on those who have influenced me, here’s a brief list. Impressionists for their fleeting glimpses of scenes, Vincent Van Gogh for his passion and vision, Rembrandt for his lighting and touch with the common people, and Annie Leibovitz for her beautiful, elegant portraits. My advertising work heavily influences my portrait work — a clean, simple, single-minded message in each image. I am a hopeless romantic, so I am influenced by the wedding couples who only have eyes for each other — that kind of love, passion and intimacy influences my vision for their wedding day. I could go on and on. I find inspiration everywhere and love talking to other photographers about how they go about what they do. In my opinion, it’s all nourishment for the soul.

How has PhotoOne Software assisted you with daily studio management?

PhotoOne has given me a solid foundation for organizing my business. With so much daily information coming into my studio (and me), I find it difficult to keep up with every aspect of every client. PhotoOne is the brain centre of my studio — everyone who works here can use it and I can extract the right information I need at any time. Whether that’s a client appointment, purchasing information or a marketing campaign. For me the equity in my business is all here in this program — clients, systems, purchasing history, marketing campaigns and their success rate.

What other software apps do you use?

My other software programs are Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, ProSelect with the production module (this is the single greatest piece of software for a portrait photographer), Gary Fong’s software, Photojunction, MYOB as well as the general lifelines of email/web programs.

Tell us about one or two of your more memorable photo shoots.

I recently shot a celebrity wedding and that was quite a spectacle. There were famous faces, security guards shielding the paparazzi and an anxious magazine editor who had paid a lot of money for the exclusive. Oh!, and I had a bride and groom who wanted beautiful, natural, intimate images of their special wedding day — as if it was just a normal wedding day.

I’ll always remember the Seiko watch catalogue that required images of their watches on skydivers and whitewater rafters. I hired a skydiving school for the day and did a few tandem jumps while directing and shooting the ads. That was followed by whitewater rafting (in a very cold river in the middle of winter), and getting great shots of watches on wrists as we were going over the falls backwards. I ended up with a very happy client, a successful campaign and a really fun “day at the office.”

Here are some images provided by Brett.

The PPANE Convention 2009 begins in 2 days in Nashua, NH. This will be their 108th Convention (Wow!) and the theme this year is “Exceed Expectations”. They’ve put together a great speaker line up and have published a nice looking Convention Book which I have attached below.

A couple of notable speakers will be John Flaherty, discussing workflow including PhotoOne studio management software; and, Jill Sanders, speaking on her topic, “Strike a Pose.” Jill will also be speaking in September at the Burrell Color Imaging conference in Chicago.

PPANE has also put together a comprehensive list of vendors for the conference. They have four very full days of programming and will give attendees a head start on the autumn foliage season in New England. A super job by PPANE and the New England Institute of Professional Photography.

Here we are again, coming up on Labor Day and it’s starting to feel a little like fall in New England with temperatures dropping into the 40’s at night. With a short holiday week coming up I thought I would share with you a couple of fun, new things our clients are doing.

As I discussed in my last blog post this is a great time of year to explore new avenues and ideas for your business. Kay Eskridge is clearly ahead of the curve and has several new business enhancements up and running. Kay has run a successful portrait studio business in Phoenix, Arizona since 1986 and during that time she has created lots of energy with events like Birthdays Rock, Girls Night In, When I was one, two, three . . . and Paws for a Cause. When I spoke with her the other day she said that she has recently introduced two new websites in addition to her current site: Images by Kay.

Kay has put together a new site called Learn Grow Succeed to promote and develop opportunities for speaking engagements. Kay has often been involved in educational and motivational programming to photography associations across the country and it’s a good time in her career to reengage in something she enjoys — so Learn Grow Succeed acts as a virtual resume and aids in generating ideas. Kay will be speaking at the WPPI Road Trip in Dallas on the 28th of this month.

Kay has also decided to leverage her great studio with her new site Celebrate Sexy. Kay and her staff have created a comfortable studio environment in which to capture images of a woman’s more private personality.

I also spoke with Kash Johnson who, along with his wife Sherry, moved to a new home/studio about a year ago and have started offering underwater portraits to their clientele. Kash and Sherry own Classical Photography in Carrollton, Georgia.

Kash has been refining the process this summer and now has a pretty good handle on the technology. He’s using natural light in these shots and has enhanced it by covering the bottom of the pool with Mylar (just like the silver and gold balloons) to help reflect the light. Check out some of these images from their first session. Kash mentioned that he has some new shots to post from more recent sessions; so check back in in a week or so to see how the underwater technique is evolving.

Please note that PhotoOne will be closing at 2:00 pm EDT on Friday and will be closed on Labor Day. If you have an emergency situation, with your studio management software, please call and we will get back to you in a timely fashion. All other technical support, customer relationship and sales requests will be responded to on Tuesday when we reopen at 9:00 EDT. Enjoy your weekend and I hope you get some great weather, a little BBQ and a couple of laughs before the kids start back to school – for real!

Joy Taubner is a Eugene, Oregon based photographer who recently joined our family of loyal PhotoOne users. Connect with her through her Facebook profile and or her blog.

Curious to know more about her and her work, we sent her a short list of questions. These were her responses:

a) Who or what do you photograph the most?

I am a children, baby and maternity photographer

b) Over the course of your career, who has influenced your vision?

Sarah Petty. I love how she is able to capture the spirt of families and children whether she is in her studio or in the field. Sarah inspires me with her photograph and marketing.

c) How has PhotoOne Software helped your business?

I am new and still learning the program. I love having all of my invoices, email, and client information all in one place.

d) What other software apps do you use?

Lightroom, Photoshop, Quickbooks, TalaPhoto

e) Tell us about one of your memorable photo shoots.

When I was new to my business, I had a little 4 year boy who would not cooperate at all. He kept running all over my home base studio. To make matters worse, his mother would not or could not control him. All of a sudden, in a flash he managed to open my front door and take off running down the street. It was frightening. His mom ran after him and caught him just before he ran into the street. She brought him back and continued the session. Needless to say in spite of the drama, we got some great shots. In hindsight it was quite funny but in the moment it was heart stopping. I now lock the door so we have no more escapees.

We met John and Tammy Flaherty, of Diamond Photo Design, at a recent PPA-sponsored Super Monday workshop that they led.  The topic of the one-day workshop was John and Tammy’’s photography workflow, including the use of Adobe Lightroom, LabPrints and Adobe Photoshop. John and Tammy also depend on PhotoOne to manage their studio.

We sat down with them to ask them a few questions about their thriving Billerica, Massachusetts wedding and portrait photography business.

a) Who or what do you photograph the most?
Tammy and I have been photographing weddings and children’s portraits since 1994.  Our business is 90% weddings and 20% portraits.  If you do the math it means we work 110% of the time.  Weddings have been something that came naturally to us as a couple and we have found great success so we are happy to let other photographers do all the school photography as we enjoy the weddings and portraits.

b) Over the course of your career, who has influenced your vision?
We are seminar junkies.  We love photography and we love photographers.  We attend every WPPI, PPA and local convention.  We learn so much from watching seminars that we pick and apply only pieces of techniques from every photographer we meet. The most influential photographer we have studied with would have to be Jerry Ghionis.  While there are a hundred photographers that have helped me in my career, Jerry has helped us see things we never were able to capture in the past.

c) How has PhotoOne Software helped your business?
PhotoOne software has helped us keep our sanity!  Back 12 years ago, we were a high volume studio with 10 people.  Photographers and videographers all needed to be organized and calendars needed to be setup for everyone.  PhotoOne was the answer.  Now we have raised our prices and lowered our blood pressure with just us as the photographers.  PhotoOne is great for small and large studios.  We use the same PhotoOne processes to run our studio today. We organize all our wedding clients, orders, payments and schedules the same way we always have.

d) What other software apps do you use?
Our main photography software application is LabPrints.  Most photographers would say Photoshop, but I think Photoshop is where I loose money!  I hate Photoshop,  no wait,  I love Photoshop… I love Photoshop for my playtime but LabPrints makes us money!  LabPrints is an all in one application that allows us to do presentation sales, design albums, connect with our professional lab and set up online storefronts all in one program. Once we make the sale with LabPrints, we go right to PhotoOne to keep track of the orders.

e)  Tell us about one of your memorable photo shoots.
The most recent memorable photo shoot was a nice wedding in Boston.  The whole day was going perfect until the limo broke down in the middle of the city. I just happened to be a few cars behind the limo and pulled over to check if all was OK.  The bride and groom jumped into my car with champagne in hand and we drove them to the park for their portrait session. I was the hero of the day… lots to be said for being in the right place at the right time! We even received a$100 tip and a nice bottle of wine every time they visted us to finalize the albums and pickup prints.

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