Business

I am a bartender. After 15 years of slinging drinks it’s still hard to come out and admit that shooting isn't what I do full time. The path I've taken has been a twisted, gnarled, winding thing fraught with frustration and surprise. I've been shooting for 11 years and I never expected to still be behind a bar. But, such is life! I’m here to talk about dealing with that gut-wrenching feeling that comes along with any artist who hasn’t quite made it: shame.

Your “About Me” page; let’s talk about it. This is perhaps one of the single most important pages on your website, and surprisingly it is also probably the most neglected and poorly presented page on most websites. How does yours stack up?

Social currency is an exceedingly important metric when it comes to promoting your brand. Your likes, followers, pins, and posts all say a lot about your success, and the more engagement on your social platforms, the more likely you are to pull in clients. But how do you maximize engagement and get the most people to see your content? While there is no perfect answer, there are a few things you can do to optimize your social media strategy.

When I saw this wedding shoot I was stunned into silence for a few moments. I really didn't know what to think of it! In my mind, when I think of wedding photography, I think of a world of immaculate white dresses, expensive shoes, thoughtful furnishings and of course, smiling wedding couples and their guests.

When building a successful photography business, there is no aspect more crucial than a client meeting. This is your chance to represent the very best of your brand, while putting a face to the person behind the camera. For many photographers, the decisive face-to-face meeting can be an intimidating challenge. For others, it is their opportunity to shine and demonstrate how personable they are. Whether your are a wedding photographer or a commercial photographer, there are many techniques that can make your meeting a success.

We photographers are notorious for having terrible websites. Hiring a professional web designer isn’t always in the budget so sometimes you have to figure out how to do it by yourself. Here are a few tips that most people completely overlook when building their own website.

Photographer Jason Lanier is on a mission to end discrimination against the small business photographer. As seen in the video above, he and his group were confronted multiple times while attempting to do a shoot. In the first location they are asked to leave the premise altogether. In the second they were asked to "make it look less commercial" by getting rid of a strobe. In both instances they weren't interfering with any event around them nor were they disturbing the public and only had a single portable strobe setup. Lanier notes a growing trend to neglect and discriminate against the small business photographer.

Many photographers use the word “make” to describe their process of photography. “I made these images,” you might hear a professional say describing his work. The layman phrase, “take pictures” or “capture photographs” evokes a feeling that the photographer did not put any work into the image, that they simply pointed the camera and the photo just came to be. Any creative medium takes skill and I’m not here to argue the artistic validity of a photograph over a painting or sculpture. But a somewhat fatal flaw of the digital age is the ease of which photography can be transferred, saved, downloaded, and reproduced in comparison to that of physical artistry.

I was originally going to call this article "five things I learned from coffee with John Schell" but in typical Schell fashion, our meet up involved Pho which doesn't mix too well with coffee. The former Fstoppers writer and current Los Angeles-based photographer has had one of the quickest rises to popularity that I've seen in photography in quite some time. His identifiable style and consistent stream of quality work have made him an extremely identifiable brand that has grown a 20,000 plus Instagram following in a fairly short amount of time. Here are five things I learned about Schell, his work, and his journey to photography.

This month I'll be traveling to 5 European cities with Vincent Laforet to shoot and edit video for him as part of Project AIR, his new night aerial stills project. We have been working hard to offer something pretty unique – a totally free, direct first hand social event open to anyone who is interested in photography, video or the creative process, where we can share skills, technique and project support for your own projects as a result of what we’ve learnt with AIR. If you live in London, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris or Venice, we are throwing the doors open to you all.

May is upon us, wedding photographers. Its the beginning of the season and we need to prepare ourselves for the long haul. Sure, we could brushing up on lighting techniques, talk about new lenses, buy faster cards, or argue about presets, but what we really need to think about are the intangible must-haves. The greens socks, my friends. That's right, I said socks.

Behind The Glass recently spoke with Andy Baker, SVP/Group Creative Director at the National Geographic Channels, and he dispensed some incredibly valuable information on how to make sure clients see the work you are putting out. Andy is in charge of hiring many freelancers for National Geographics creative projects so this is the best inside scoop you can get.

Who are you? Ok, now who are you? You know that name you've decided to call yourself and now have x amount of people calling you that? How often have you stopped to think about how important your social media name — your brand — is? It's something that, many times, I myself have come to revamp, change the style of, market differently, and so on.

On April 21 Google officially launched an important new algorithm which prioritizes "mobile ready" websites over those which are only formatted for desktops. The consequence, of course, is if you have a website that's not mobile ready, you should be prepared to see a dramatic drop in your search engine optimized (SEO) traffic. For many of us, as photographers, we also manage our own websites and find that SEO traffic is very important in getting our product out to a potential customer.

Post-Production and Retouching is just as much an integral part of creating a great image or series of images as pre-production and the actual shoot, especially when you are shooting for a client and not just for yourself. Each genre of imagery, advertising, beauty, fashion, etc. has a slightly different set of rules and parameters when it comes to retouching. In this tutorial we will look at the complete start to finish of a fashion editorial image. Last week I posted the complete gear list for this exact shoot. This week we will look at the first part of retouching, including cleaning up our white seamless and correcting distractions in our image.

Everyone's been there. A friend of a friend asks you to take their family portrait, a cousin wants you to shoot their wedding, a local business would really like some event photos — but nobody has a budget. Working for free is something every working professional gets faced with frequently. In this video Ted Forbes from The Art of Photography talks about the pros and cons of free work.

Dana Pennington is a Los Angeles-based Fashion photographer. He recently moved to become a permanent resident in Los Angeles, from his home town Denver, Colorado. I had the chance to sit down with Pennington during my first trip to L.A., over the past weekend, and talk to him about his journey into the fashion photography industry.

Well it has been a rollercoaster for the team over at Photoflex, makers of some of my favorite studio lighting accessories. First, they pulled what many thought was an April fools joke by announcing that they were closing their doors as of late March 31st. Then, they sent out a press release stating they had to close their business due to "health issues" as well as the increasingly competitive market (cough cough cheap knock-off photo accessories flooding the market). Well, it looks like they have some life left in them after all and I couldn't be happier for their team.

When you’re first starting out as a professional photographer, nothing seems quite as sexy as getting your first traveling gig. Initially, it's a status symbol — an illustrious validation of your success. Eventually though, that quick hop to New York or jaunt to Cozumel becomes less revered. In fact, for many photographers these trips can be downright nerve-wracking. The reason for this is simple: Gear. Don’t be mistaken, there is still the appeal of being the confident traveling photographer reading some Tom Robbins in the terminal with your feet resting on your roller bag while waiting...

A gut-wrenching mobile video clip depicting South Carolina police officer Michael Slager killing Walter Scott went viral earlier this month. The bystander behind the footage, Feidin Santana, has partnered with celebrity publicity agency Markson Sparks to license the footage, causing a stir among those who claim he's profiting from a death.

The saga continues. Remember that story we posted at the beginning of the year about the newlyweds who were suing their wedding photographer over a wedding album cover? How would you feel if we told you that the photographer has struck back with a suit of her own against the couple for damages associated with defamation of character and reputation for upwards of $1,000,000?

We’re all working hard. We all shoot as much as we can — a lot of it for free or little pay. We do our studies or go to work and try our best to stay in shape and take care of ourselves. There are a lot of hard-working people in the world. But most are quite lazy inhabitants of this planet; and odds are that you’re one of them.

LinkedIn has announced its acquisition of Lynda.com, a popular online education platform that teaches technology skills such as how to use Photoshop or how to code in Java or use CSS. The $1.5 billion move will enable the company to offer a broad range of education services as it transitions from simply identifying skills needed for a position to also offering ways to gain those skills quickly and efficiently from with a trusted and proven method.

Some of you thought that my post last week about photography accessories brand Photoflex suddenly closing its doors without warning after 30 years of business was a possible April Fools' joke. I wouldn't blame you since it seemed to be annouced late in the day prior to April 1st and they seemed to be a fully-functioning business right up until the final moments. I did email Photoflex to inquire about more information and they did just send back the following press release:

I will soon be releasing a start-to-finish retouching tutorial video here at Fstoppers on my most recent fashion editorial photoshoot. But before I do, I wanted to start warming our readers up with a complete gear list. In this article, I share with you everything I used on my shoot, the breakdown of costs, and where to find all the gear and extras: from the Profoto Strobe all the way down to the gaffer tape.

A photography business requires many things to nurture long-term success, not least of which are determination and business prowess. But after years in the game, can being a successful photographer serve as adequate training for starting another business altogether?

Let's face it; the industry is changing. Art directors and potential clients are not looking to simply hire a photographer anymore. They do not care about your lighting, your gear, or even your previous clients. So what do they care about then? Photographer John Keatley sits down with artist rep Maren Levinson at Redeye to discuss the future of photography, and there is a very good chance you are not going to like what she has to say.

As the photography industry continues to grow, so does the amount of different mediums for education. From tutorial based websites, to tutorial DVDs, to workshops and even websites like Fstoppers here, there are multiple ways you can find new techniques and grow your craft. And maybe this year, is the year you truly take advantage of them.

Cloud Spot was created by full-time photographers who were tired of the available options for photo delivery. Nothing before truly placed the photographer's brand first and cut precious time off of their workflow. The goal was to beautifully display images in a branded and modern gallery, be super fast and easy for the photographer to share, and allow clients to easily download images sent directly in an email and/or in the galleries. After using Cloud Spot for the past few months, I can say that they've succeeded.

Fellow Fstoppers instructor Erik Valind and I, Monte Isom, have come up with a contest that offers the whole package to aspiring and working photographers. In my class I'll be teaching how to break into the advertising business and land those large budget jobs to make photography a career instead of just a hobby. Erik will be teaching a class about controlling light with speedlights, where you'll learn to maximize natural light as well as how to light on small to medium budget productions.