This is part two of The Photo Life Blog Series, True Life: I’m Married to My Business Partner. This series explores how husband and wife photography teams find success when their business and personal lives collide. Dave and I have been working together for five years now. Initially, it was hard and some days it still is, but I don’t think we would have it any other way. Erin Youngren wrote an excellent post last week about how they function best by using what she termed “closed systems” in which each person has their own tasks independent of the other person. We do this to an extent (and after their article we are exploring what additional systems we can “close”), however we have found that having
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Defining Unique Roles in Our Business (and Marriage!)
This is part one in The Photo Life Blog Series, True Life: I’m Married to My Business Partner. This series will explore how husband and wife photography teams find success when their business and personal lives collide. Jeff and I are big believers in closed systems. By sticking to this kind of internal organization within our business, we’ve been able to avoid contention and frustration on several levels – business and personal. What do I mean by closed systems? A closed system means that our roles in the business are completely separate from each other, and we don’t have to rely or wait on each other to get a job done. For example, I am in charge of the blog for our business, so that
Brain Dump- Clearing the Clutter to Think Clearer
Years ago I found myself sitting at a conference listening to the speakers who had amazing ideas and instead of soaking up these great ideas, I was thinking about every small tasks I had to accomplish immediately when I got home. I was listening to their big business ideas, I was taking notes but somehow it wasn’t all getting through, it wasn’t sticking. The things they were saying had my gears turning, but my brain couldn’t organize these ideas quickly enough to formulate an execution plan. I was instead, creating more mess for my brain to filter. It was feeling like it needed a really long vacation not 100 more “to do’s” rolling around. On the plane home I decided to try something. I took
Choosing Images to Deliver to Wedding Photography Clients
In selecting images for delivery to the client, we want to make sure we’re delivering enough images to tell the story of the wedding day while making sure that we’re not overwhelming the client with too many images. The purpose of this article is to provide a few objective guidelines to help with the very subjective image selection process of the wedding photography workflow. In general, we should be aiming for around 800-1200 per wedding, but there is no magic number and each wedding will have unique circumstances. Overall Guidelines The overarching question you should be asking yourself as you go through the images is the following: “What is the purpose of this image?” Each image needs to have a purpose. It needs to portray
Questions to Ask When Developing an Associate Photography Brand
Though our wedding photography business has always been a boutique studio, over the last two years, we made a decision to build and develop associate photographers. We looked at this as a market opportunity as we continued to grow our business – especially in our home market. We wanted to offer a service line that would be accessible to more clients, while adding to our bottom line as a business. Since this is such a common subject of discussion, I thought it might be helpful to break down some of the important questions we had to answer when diving into this new area of business. Here are a few of the steps we took as we learned the best way to bring on Associate photographers.
The Youngren’s Wedding Photography Schedule
There’s nothing better than a stress-free wedding day when everything runs on time, people are ready to take pictures when you need them, and you have creative freedom to do your job well. Can I get a ‘fo-sho’ from my wedding peeps out there? And you know what the best part is? There’s a lot that you can do as a photographer to make sure that these kinds of wedding days happen more often than not, which is a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. In fact, the photographer and the wedding coordinator have the most control over how a wedding day is run, which means two things: 1) You get to create the best photography schedule to help make you successful 2) You
Tip of the Week with Sara France
Portable Portfolios Do you book jobs while you’re on the road? Find out how Sara uses new technology to keep her images handy! Video Produced by Cinematic Studios. Sara France is an international, award-winning wedding and commercial photographer based in Southern California. (Sara France Photography) Her images have been featured in numerous regional and national publications, including Ceremony Magazine, Modern Bride, San Diego Style Weddings, and San Diego Bride & Groom, and the cover of Studio Photography.
Tip of the week with Jules Bianchi
Staying on Schedule and Keeping it Cool How do you make sure everything stays on schedule on the wedding day? Jules Bianchi shares some jewels on how to keep it cool – especially when things don’t go according to plan. Jules of Jules Bianchi Photography has led seminars at Pictage Partner Conference for the past 3 years along with workshops at the Digital Wedding Forum Convention in Las Vegas in 2006. She also started up Jules Cafe, where she helps out numerous other photographers with mentoring and hot tips. Jules is our Los Angeles PUG leader and has been featured in prestigious magazines such as Los Angeles Wedding Magazine, Bride and Bloom, the Knot, Your Wedding Day and Ceremony. Video Produced by Cinematic Studios.
Ask & Learn Wednesday with Sara France!
Session Topic: “Work From Anywhere: Building a Remote Control Business” Sara will touch on her proven techniques for creating and maintaining a successful remote controlled business. Wouldn’t it be great to have the ability to generate income from where ever you happen to be on the planet? Sara will answer questions on how utilizing todays technologies will help you become more efficient, more flexible, and profitable. Looking at how businesses might evolve in the future Sara will introduce you to emerging technologies that relate to the non-location based photographer. She will also talk about web-based services, social networking, utilizing devices, software, and more. Bio: Sara France Sara France is an international, award-winning wedding and commercial photographer based in Southern California. Her images have been featured
Ask & Learn Today with Kevin Swan
Session Topic: Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Today’s world is complicated; with input coming from email, voicemail, text-messages, IMs, the mail, or in person. We’re no longer living in an age where work and personal lives are defined. Kevin will give details on how to implement David Allen’s GTD (Get Things Done) system which allows you to focus and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do!) at any moment. He will explain how to capture anything and everything that has your attention; define actionable items into concrete next steps and how to organize reminders and information in a streamlined way. Bio: Kevin has a bizarre and eclectic history; a professional actor in Seattle, he assisted Adobe in the