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A couple of months ago I subscribed to the Early To Rise newsletter.

It seems to be interesting and useful – and also often full of marketing hype (which I also find interesting and useful).

This morning I found an e-mail in my inbox with the subject, “Early To Rise: Never Again Will We Offer This!”

The message opens like this:

Dear ETR reader,

“Are you crazy? You’re giving away $73,520 to each subscriber over five years! Stop selling this immediately or you’ll put us out of business!” That’s what ETR’s business manager Josh told me when he ran the numbers for ETR’s Lifetime VIP Club…

If you’re a student of marketing and advertising, like me, then you’ll recognise this type of headline. Now, I don’t know who used it first, but I’m guessing it’s fairly effective, or it wouldn’t still be doing the rounds after all these decades.

It’s natural to want to ‘talk up’ what you do. And you’ve got to grab your prospect’s attention. But to me, this opening just reeks of bullshittery.

I mean, seriously, why would the business manager be pissed off about the prospect of signing up a bunch of people for a $5000 product (an info product at that – sure, some of it is hard copy, but the margins are still pretty nice at $5k, don’t you think?).

And the $73,520 they’re "giving away" is of course in the form of money they’re ‘leaving on the table’ by not selling the individual program components for their ‘full price’. (Wow, what a lot of inverted commas! – All intended)

Anyway, as you know I’m always looking for the golden nugget in these stories – in this case it’s something like, "go easy on the bullshit!".

Have a nice day,
Steven

Technorati Tags: Bullshitting, honesty, marketing, truth in advertising

OK, last Wednesday I promised to reveal how to improve your photographs by understanding and exploiting a basic lighting law. And best of all, it’s free!

The law I’m referring to is about the size of the light source relative to the subject.

The bigger the light source, the softer the shadows.
And conversely, the smaller the light source, the harder the shadows.

How can you use this fact to improve your photographs?

The first thing to do is be aware of it – notice the lighting. Move things around or go to a different location if you need to.

But the main way to actually use this law is to make a rule of always photographing people (one of the most popular and common photographic
subjects) with large light sources.

Here are a few examples of easy to use, large light sources:

• An overcast sky (one of the best, because not only is it huge, it’s also still relatively bright)
• A window (still relatively large compared to someone’s head, they’re standing right next to it – yet also directional, which can provide a nice effect)
• A bright light (or lights) reflected against a white ceiling, or a white wall behind the photographer. A flash gun with an adjustable head is ideal for this technique because it provides substantially more illumination than, say, a desk lamp.

If you specifically want hard shadows (less flattering but sometimes interesting), you’ll be seeking out small, point sources of light – like the sun.

Bear in mind that if you use only the full sun to light a shot, you’ll need to sacrifice detail either in the sunlit areas (by exposing correctly for the shadows), or the shadows (by exposing for the sunny bits).

One more thing – remember to experiment with the direction of the light source. While lighting from the front and/or top is the Conventional method (and often gives the best or most appropriate results), interesting effects can be achieved by lighting from the sides, back, or underneath, too.

Technorati Tags: photography, photographic lighting

This is what we’re up against: Police enforce non-existent photography ban on NY public transport.

Well, not me personally, but some of my colleagues.

It’s awkward enough waving a big camera around in public without the police trying to stop you as well!

Shut up about yourself and put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

That’s it.

For those who haven’t figured it out, it can be hard to ‘get’. For those that have, it can become tedious reminding the other half – or even worse getting approached by all sorts of people who want to tell you all about themselves.

Think of all of the brochures, e-mails, and ads we see every day. They’re so keen to tell you about what THEY do, and what’s so good about THEM, that telling you how YOU are going to benefit is an afterthought, if it happens at all!

What’s put a bee in my proverbial headwear about this particular topic?

Well, as you may have guessed, I just got another such approach. It was from a (possibly young and inexperienced) individual, rather than a company who should have known better – so that mitigates things a *little* bit.

Here’s the letter (e-mail):

—-
23 February 2006

Hi Steven, my name is <name removed>,

I am a qualified photographer and make-up artist; I have assisted top New Zealand professional photographers and also worked in a Portrait studio and in photographic labs.

I also have good photoshop skills.

I am currently in Sydney but moving to Melbourne on the 6th of March to further my career in the photographic industry.

If you are interested and are in need of an employee or assistant who is friendly, enthusiastic, hardworking and experienced in the field.

Please email me and we can set up a time to meet. 

Attached is my CV.

Kind Regards
<name removed>.
—-

What’s more, I got two copies, from different e-mail addresses, within two hours of each other. Which just adds to the whole vibe that this person is more concerned with what we (the multitude of recipients), can do for them; than what they can do for us.

Note also how I have to call them if I’m interested.

To this person’s credit, they have addressed me by name (rather than something hideous like ‘Dear sir/madam’). They do get one point for that.

Really, it’s not my plan for this blog to become a massive whinge forum for me. I’m just trying to help – although I suppose the irony is, if someone cared enough to read this, they probably already know marketing 101 🙂

In fact, next post, I’ll tell you about an approach that is still on my desk (not in the wastebasket) because it stood out for the right reasons.

Have a nice day!

At the end of 2003 I decided that I would make a fortune by writing and selling an e-book on ‘how to choose a digital camera’. After all, as a photographer, friends and acquaintances are always asking for my advice on this.

I spent a heap of time researching, writing and taking pictures for the thing, and got it online.

Guess how many I sold? Two. One in January 2004, and one in July 2005.

Why was it such a flop? I’m not sure. Plenty of people *are* making money with e-books, so somewhere along the line I guess I got something wrong.

Maybe it was my keyword research. Is ‘How to choose a digital camera’ an in-demand topic? My research suggested it was.

More likely it was the combination of

• Not getting serious about bringing traffic to the site
• Not effectively converting that traffic to sales

Anyway, the book is long out of date now and in need of some *serious* revision 🙂

What made me think of all this? I saw that Charles Wright wrote on his Bleeding Edge blog that he is trying to convince broadcatser (and keen photographer) Terry Lane to write an e-book about using (rather than choosing) digital cameras.

Maybe we could write one together?

Well, as you would expect, I suppose it’s a bit of both. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but let me explain…

Once you’ve been shooting full-time for a few years, lighting kind of becomes second nature. Actually that’s not quite true, but it’s difficult to explain (and probably a personal thing that varies from photographer to photographer – but I can only speak for myself).

I’ll try again… Although I think about lighting explicitly for every shoot (if not every photograph) that I do, the thinking is not exactly scientific.

I’m not too good at analogies, but I guess it’s like a master chef creating a new recipe: She instinctively knows how hot and how long she wants to sauté the onions, without having to think about what temperature they caramelize at, or whatever.

The thinking I do before lighting a shot (or when making decisions about the best ‘available light’ conditions for achieving the shot I am visualizing) is more about the kind of feel I want in the shot – which is determined by the ‘quality’ of the light – which is in turn determined by the size, shape, colour, and position of the source(s).

Confused?

The point is, there are as many different ways to light a photographic subjects as there are ways to skin the proverbial feline.

When I did my ‘apprenticeship’ as a photographic assistant in London, we shot a lot of room sets (fake home interiors). In order to make these look ‘natural’, we would often end up using a dozen lights of different types, mixing studio flash with tungsten (‘hot’) lighting.

Yet I now find that when I am photographing musicians or other ‘character’ portraits, I use only one light (yes, *one*).

Indeed, many (if not most) of the ‘beauty’ shots you see on the covers of the big fashion mags are photographed with one big light behind and slightly above the camera, and a plain white foam-board reflector just out of shot under the model’s chin.

This as good as completely eliminates any shadows, giving a soft, soft, light which is also very flattering to the complexion.

We’ll explore this in a bit more detail – including how to take advantage of a basic lighting ‘law’ for zero budget – in some future posts.

Technorati Tags: photographic, lighting, photography

OK, I’ve calmed down now…  

I’ve just had an extraordinary transaction (if you could call it that) with a young woman wanting to enter the world of modelling.

Now, because I ‘exist’ on the web, and have done for some time, I’m pretty easy to find when people are searching for “photographer Melbourne”, or whatever. So as you can imagine, apart from client enquiries (which I could always do with more of!), I get a fair few ‘cold contacts’ from people for all sorts of reasons:

• Students wanting work experience
• Assistants wanting work
• Beginning photographers wanting advice, and
• Aspiring models wanting to do a shoot on a ‘TFP’ or ‘TFCD’ basis

If you’re not involved in the modelling world, you will of course have no idea what TFP or TFCD mean. They stand for ‘Time For Prints’, or ‘Time For CD’, respectively. What this means is that a photographer, model, and often stylist, get together to create (hopefully) a masterpiece – and they all get each other’s services for free for the purposes of adding something good to their portfolio.

Arguably the model is the most ‘commodified’ in this agreement, simply because there are so many aspiring models out there, and if the photographer and stylist are good enough to make the model look good, why should they do it for free? Anyway, it’s a feeling many photographers can relate to as well; figuring how to stand out from the crowd when you’re starting out can be a big stress.

So back to the story…

Back in December I got an e-mail from this young woman (let’s call her ‘Melissa’), introducing herself and wondering if I’d like to do a TFCD shoot.

I replied that I may be, and asked her to send a picture of herself – which she did.

This is when things started to get weird.

Four days after she sent me her photo, I got the introductory e-mail again. You can imagine how this looked to me – like I was being spammed along with every other photographer in Melbourne and she had forgotten that she had even contacted me. Not a good look!

Now get this… after I mentioned this to Melissa (in the nicest possible way), and she apologised, I got another introductory e-mail, this time two weeks later. I guess alarm bells should have rung by this time, but (for better or worse) I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt 🙂  So I agreed to doing a shoot (if only to stop her from e-mailing me!)

The next few exchanges were relatively normal, while we agreed on some details about the style of the shoot, and confirmed a date.

Five days after we confirmed the date, I got six e-mails from Melissa (three of which were in the space of three minutes). And guess what – one of these e-mails was to ask about a date for the shoot!

By now I was getting a bit crazy but persisted because I am such a nice guy (I really am, I swear).

After a few more exchanges, we managed to confirm everything again (or so I thought), including a make-up artist.

But guess what? A week later I got another e-mail asking a whole bunch of questions we had already discussed – so I replied, explaining this.

Let’s see, what happened next… oh yeah, next I got an e-mail from Melissa asking if I had ‘any references from models’ who I have shot with. Now the question in itself is perfectly reasonable – since Melissa is pretty young and doesn’t know me from a bar of proverbial surfactant. But the timing, as you can see, was pretty poor. The right time to ask for references would be at the very start of our discussions, when we were both deciding if we wanted to proceed. The wrong time was after everything was already confirmed.

Anyway, I obliged with the contact details for three models I have worked with recently (two of which were for magazine shoots).

(We’re nearly at the end of the story – you’ve read this far, don’t give up on me now)

Two hours after I sent the references, I got an e-mail from Melissa saying that due to ‘personal circumstances’ she was ‘unable to do our shoot and at this stage’… ‘not in a position to reschedule’.

OK, that’s cool, I thought – whatever. As you can imagine I was actually somewhat relieved that it was all over!

I was wrong… four days later, Melissa sent me an e-mail, making no reference to her cancellation, but saying ‘I got some great references from you, and I am willing to reschedule a shoot if your (sic) happy to’

Well that was the last straw for me, and I (not too harshly, I hope) explained how this all looked to me, and that she had blown it. And of course I wished her luck with her modelling.

And to give Melissa some credit, she replied gracefully.

— THE END — (phew!)

Looking back on this, I guess it’s possible that this girl had bipolar or something, in which case I feel bad… however –

Good stories always have a moral, so here goes:

The moral(s):

• Respect people’s time and mental energy, especially if you’re asking them for a favour
• Think before you press ‘send’

There is probably a moral in there somewhere about the way I dealt with this, too. If you know what it is, please do let me know :-/

Technorati Tags: modelling, model, manners, psycho

I’ve been dabbling with blogging since 2002, but until now never quite had the… discipline to (a) post regularly and (b) muck around with the damn thing enough to get it looking the way I want.

Well, that’s all about to change 🙂

For now I’m just using a nasty Blogger template (apologies to Douglas Bowman) until I get the time to tweak it to match the rest of the site and encompass some useful functionality for you.

So why did I finally decide to get serious about blogging?

The evidence has become overwhelming that it’s a good idea!

Here’s why:

• It’s an easy way for YOU to learn about commercial photography from ‘behind the camera’ (or whatever it is you came here to learn) without giving ME anything (like your e-mail address). All you need to do is either drop by at the website or subscribe to the feed with your favourite feed reader.
• It’s a quick and convenient way for ME to keep clients, friends, and whoever, informed about what I am doing, what’s happening, and what I think about it all (just in case you care – which you obviously do, or you wouldn’t be here!)
• It’s dead easy! I got this thing set up in, like, 10 minutes. OK, so it doesn’t look very impressive yet, but I decided not to let perfection get in the way of going ahead with something useful.

Anyway, that’s plenty for a first post! I hope my insights will be of some interest or use to you. Of course I welcome your comments here on the blog or privately by e-mail. My contact details are elsewhere on my website (well, I can’t make it too easy for you, can I).

Cheers,
Steven