Step One – Friends are the foundation of your business

No, CLIENTS are the foundation of your business. Many of you may not have a lot, or any, friends that need wedding or portrait photography. I do believe that being friends with other photographers is hugely beneficial because it opens opportunities to learn, grow, and gain experience, but do not expect that a large portion of your work will be from other photographers. Your best clients will come from vendor referrals, if you can get them. You need to knock on a lot of doors, make friends with venue coordinators, florists, DJ’s, and every other vendor in your area.

Step Two – Go Ahead, Step Out In Faith, You Can Do It

David says you don’t need much equipment and you can probably borrow what you don’t have. The truth is that you do need a certain minimum of equipment if you are going to make sure that you capture every moment of the most important day in somebody’s life. You need to have at least two camera bodies and a variety of lenses to make sure you can capture the right shots. What if you drop and break a body or lens? What if you have a mechanical failure? What if something else goes horribly wrong? Equipment is not just an investment, it is insurance to make sure you can do what you were hired to do.

Step Three  – Service is your true value. It is the way forward in the industry & you were created for it.

Providing service is certainly the key to customer satisfaction and I don’t think David really make any real point in his section on this except to shoot for the sake of art and not care if you get paid or not. There is certainly a truth buried in there that you do not have to be a great photographer, you just have to be good enough to deliver what your clients want. Secondly, you are selling yourself and how you treat your customers that often is more important than the product itself.

Step Four – Use the hourglass approach

David suggests you offer free service to 100 people and try to get 10 jobs. Once the jobs start coming in, you start charging for it. I can’t begin to disagree with this enough. If you shoot for free, your clients will put zero value on your work. Those free clients are not going to refer high dollar clients to you because they will not value you at all. A quick check of Craigslist will show dozens of “professional wedding photographers” in almost every major city offering complete wedding packages for $500 or less. The only clients that are going to call those photographers are ones that have to because of their budget and they fully understand that their expectations are going to be inline with what they are paying. The act of giving your work away is not going to make your phone magically start to ring with paying jobs.

Step Five – Get your photos organized, edited, and safely shared, It’s not magic, it’s workflow

Talk about a wild over-simplification here. David says to import your images into Lightroom, use automatic settings, and then your his own Lightroom preset to create great images. Lightroom is a great tool and it is my tool of choice for editing weddings, but I would never simply import, use auto-tone, run a single preset, and export the finished images. Every image should be checked for color balance, sharpness, focus, exposure, cropping, framing, awkward faces, and much more. Simply running them through a set of presets is not doing any justice to your work or to your clients. Here is a link some of David Jay’s wedding photos, you might want to check these out before taking his advice on this topic.

Step Six – Honestly and authentically you. Market your brand proactively for the best first impressions

I absolutely agree that you should be honest and authentic. However, David says you should also be cute, well dressed, and talk about your dog. David does make some good points about important pieces to have on your website like your phone number, your prices, and a video. Having a little promo video is really a good idea as it can give your potential client some insight into what you are like and how you work. David also goes into a lot of detail about using Facebook, and when done correctly, I do agree that Facebook is a great marketing tool.

Step Seven – They pay you to be prepared. Get ready

This is probably the best set of information in David’s guide. You should have checklists, you need to have your gear ready, you need to have backup equipment (or as David suggests, friends with equipment that will gladly let you use their gear)…and of course, you need to buy David’s website tools to create a custom website for your customer. Ok, I am on board with almost all of that but I have yet to have a couple that wanted their own website for their wedding even if I was giving it to them for free.

Step Eight – It’s your time, Get in the game

I can’t actually fathom that David would suggest shooting a wedding with no experience. A wedding has a flow to it, it has a cast of characters, it has a specific timing. If you don’t fully understand the nuances that are involved you will not be ready. You absolutely need experience with weddings, and a good number of them too, before you try to be the main photographer for such a special event. You should intern with existing wedding photographers, work up to being a second shooter, and then work into getting to be the primary while an experienced photographer is your second. Would you like to have a doctor that has never practiced an operation before doing a surgery on you? A auto mechanic doing your car’s brakes who is “just winging it”. If you wouldn’t trust an inexperienced person to handle your important work, why would you think it is ok to risk someone’s wedding photos? To even suggest that you should just shoot as many pictures as possible and hope for a few good ones is simply ludicrous.

Step Nine – Your clients want you, not your prints

Yes, you do need to understand what you are selling and often we are not selling prints anymore but what we are selling are memories. If you cannot capture the essence and spirit of the event, and if you can’t freeze those important moments in time that people will treasure for the rest of their lives, than you shouldn’t be doing it. David does suggest that one of the best products to sell is a customized website, using the products that he sells, again along with a $29 a year recurring fee for hosting their images…surely all of your clients will pay you for many years to come to have their images online.

Step Ten – Let client demand decide, price step

Just follow David’s simple tips and be making $120,000 a year in your third year of business. You built a huge demand for your free wedding services and now its time to get rich. Forget about vendor relationships, advertising, marketing, just build up demand by not charging, then start charging and you are all set. I’m sorry folks, if it was this easy, we would all be rich.

What’s not in David’s Guide

What is not in David’s guide…in a word…reality. Let’s face some facts here, not everyone is going to make it as a wedding photographer. I am not trying to blow anyone’s dreams or aspirations here but the harsh fact is that not everybody has what it takes. First off, you need to be a good photographer and this means having both creative and technical skills and that is just not everyone’s skill set. I know extremely creative and artistic people who simply can’t take a good photo and I know highly skilled technical photographers with no creative ability to get great shots. Secondly, you have to be good at business. The business of photography requires scheduling, meetings, accounting, planning, time management, and many other real business skills. Again, not everyone is cut out to run their own business. You will likely spend 90% of your time running your business than actually shooting and this is a harsh reality that people like David will never tell you about because its not exciting, its not sexy, and its not going to motivate you.

If you want to have a successful photography business you need to understand that it is going to take a lot more than a cool website and some basic equipment.

One last point, to address Gary’s post, I may not be a hot, fabulous woman, but I do love my LensSkins on my 70-200!

Show Host: Kerry Garrison

Sponsors:

• GoPro
• Blackbelt Lighting

Sponsor: GoPro

Show Host: Kerry Garrison

Host: Kerry Garrison

GoCast Sponsor: http://gopro.com

Special thanks to our sponsor: GoPro

Host: Kerry Garrison

Special thanks to our sponsor GoPro

Host: Kerry Garrison

Solution In Search Of A Problem?

As I discussed Square with photographers across the country, many thought they already had the payment problem licked. Some had credit card terminals, some used PayPal’s Virtual Terminal, and others, including myself, simply sent PayPal invoices which can then be paid via a credit/debit card. The problem with most of these is the cost. Having an actual terminal or PayPal’s virtual terminal usually involved some monthly fee with PayPal being $30/month ($360/year). Sending PayPal invoices has no monthly fee and is simply a 5% charge.

Square initially started off pretty similar to these other services but has continued to improve both the services and the pricing. As of the time of this writing there is no setup charge, no monthly fee and the charge is 2.75% – 3.75% (see sidenote). So right off the bat, using Square can really add up in savings by not having to pay monthly charges and being able to keep more of your money.

Square’s Service Rates

How Square Works

The Square app is available for Android and iOS devices (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and the app is available for free via the Android Market and iTunes Store. With just the app itself (and registering on the http://squareup.com website) you can start taking credit card payments by keying in the credit card number, expiration date, dollar amount, and zip code. The next step asks for the buyers signature which they do with their finger on your device. The final step is to send the buyer either an SMS or email receipt. The entire process only takes a few seconds. The interesting thing here is that even if you are accepting cash/check payments, you can enter the information into the Square app, it can calculate how much change to give, and still send the buyer an email receipt.  For service related companies (like photographers), you can go into the settings and enable “Tips”. This way to buyer has to opportunity to add a tip to the amount just like you can do in a restaurant. As your client is filling out their information, the fact that the tip option is there may encourage them to use it. The Squareup.com website allows easy access to all of your transactions and deposits with the ability to download as a spreadsheet. Hopefully some future options might include an easy way to import into QuickBooks.

To make the data entry process faster, as well as saving you 1% and 15 cents off the transaction, Square provides a credit card reader in the form of a small gadget that plugs into your smart phone. From a technical point of view, this is where things get interesting. The device plugs into the headset port on your phone and not the USB port. There are actually several really good reasons for this technical decision. First off, smart phones don’t generally support USB Host Mode (I said this was technical) so a phone cannot connect to USB devices such as USB cameras or hard drives. Secondly, Square would have to write a handful of different drivers and maintain them across different operating system updates. A headphone jack is completely universal and doesn’t require any drivers to use it. All the app has to do is listen on the audio port and the Square Reader simply “plays†what it finds on the card for the app to deal with. This means that Square can come out with support for virtually any smart phone including Palm and Blackberry devices without any additional hardware considerations.

The reason why there are lower charges when using the card reader is that swiping the card means the buyer physically had the card present and the seller can verify the ID of the buyer, this greatly reduces the chance of fraud and chargebacks.

What About Payments?

First off, you do not need any special merchant account, any checking or savings account will do, you simply verify your bank account and routing number with Square so they can make direct deposits to your account. There are also no limits on how many transactions or value of transactions you can do.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a caveat here because there is, and it can be an important one to some people. Square will deposit the first $1,000 per 7 day cycle to your account within 24-36 hours of the transaction. For many people, this is going to be just fine. However, if you do more than $1,000 per week, Square will hold anything over that initial $1,000 for 30 days in case of chargebacks. If this is going to present a problem for you in terms of cash flow, you can contact Square and they will ask you for some typical business related information to help prove you are a legitimate business and can adjust that restriction for you.

Does it Work As Promised

This week I was on the road at WPPI in Las Vegas and the Northern Light Convention in Minnesota. At both of these events I had some of the products I sell over at http://blackbeltlighting.com and wanted to be able to accept credit cards from the show floors. Throughout these events, Square worked flawlessly allowing me to close sales I might not have otherwise got because people could easily user their credit/debit cards.

An interesting side note to this is that I signed up for the service just prior to leaving on the trip and did not have time to receive my free card reader so initially I had to key in the transaction manually. The app worked great and only took a few moments per transaction. I also noticed several other people using Square around the show such as Scott Robert Lim.

When I got to Minnesota for the Northern Light Convention, Square had send enough of the Square readers to the convention for every attendee to get one in their shwag bag. The upside to this is that now I will have two readers so I can have two transactions going (assuming I have a second smart phone) at the same time.

Should You Go Square?

If you want to easily take credit/debit cards I am struggling with a reason why you wouldn’t want to use Square. It’s easy, simple, and cheaper than any other service I know of.  Even if you aren’t sure if any client will ever pay you with a credit card, you still might as well sign up and get your card reader just in case. Since it costs you nothing to sign up, and there is no monthly fee, simply throw the reader in your camera bag, purse, or laptop case so you always have it available. Convinced? Go sign up for free at http://squareup.com.

Disclosure: I did not accept any compensation of any kind for this endorsement. My opinion is based entirely on my own experience using the service.

This week Kerry and David discuss a variety of topics including lighting, business, marketing, and staying in touch with your clients.Show Links

David Ziser
http://digitalprotalk.com

Matt McGraw

http://www.mattmcgrawphotography.com/home.html

Worldwide Photography Webcast
http://kppablog.blogspot.com

Discount code for David’s Captured by the Light Tour: cbldpt10
http://capturedbythelight2010.com

Show Host

Kerry Garrison
http://kerrygarrison.com

To enter to win a copy of Gary’s book, you need to follow these instructions:

Go to Gary’s blog site at: http://garyfong1.xanga.com/

You may need to go back a little bit, but you need to find the answer to the question “What animal makes a good pet”

Send your answer to contest@cameradojo.com with the subject “Gary Fong Contest”. We will pull several names on Jan 15th 2010.

Be sure and check out all of Gary’s products at http://garyfonginc.com/

Show Host

Kerry Garrison
http://kerrygarrison.com Twitter Facebook FriendFeed

This podcast is also available on iTunes.

Jim provides some good insight into current purchasing trends that Pictage is seeing and talks about how to incorporate this information into your business.

Jim also discusses some of the changes going on with Pictage and the upcoming Pictage PartnerCon.

Pictage: http://pictage.com

PartnerCon: http://pro.pictage.com/community/ppc/neworleans/

Show Host

Kerry Garrison
http://kerrygarrison.com Twitter Facebook FriendFeed

This podcast is also available on iTunes.