FocalPower…the blog

Apparently San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing for a closure of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (the road that sweeps around the city on along the bay).  This closure would happen just for 4 hours during two Sundays this summer.  The San Francisco Chronoical is reporting on the Car-free parties planned for Embarcadero.

The idea by Newsom is to shut down a 6 mile stretch of the Embarcadero (San Francisco is essentially 7 miles by 7 miles in size) to cars on August 31st and September 14th.  Allowing only pedestrians and bicycles on the Embarcadero from from 9am to 1pm.  The idea is to have a roller skating area, bicycle training wheels area, and yoga classes held on the Embarcadero during the closure. The idea is for residents to partake of physical activity in a wide, open space not usually available in this section of San Francisco.

If this idea passes (there is considerable opposition by business along the Embarcadero concerned the closure will cut into their business during these two busy Sundays) it would make for some intersting photography during that 4 hour stretch.  I have images already be pre-visualized about a yoga class in the middle of this 3 lane road with the San Francisco Ferry Building or Finacial District buildings in the background.

Bay Area photographers should keep an eye on this story and be ready to photograph should this closure go through.  This is definately a photogrpahy opportunity you don’t want to miss.

(Photo Credit: MD111)

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the past day around Flickr, their API, and your privacy settings on your Flickr account thanks to a wonderful article by Jim Goldstein about How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale this Weekend.  Jim goes into great detail on his post, that is worth the read, to discuss how the privacy settings on your Flickr account are not being enforced by Flickr with regards to their API.  (the 120 comments on his posting, as of this posting, are also interesting to peruse).  Jim’s post also created a parallel discussion on Thomas Hawk’s blog posting.

What I find most surprising is how everyone seemed to loose site of the real issue here.  It’s not about a technical discussion on how Flickr should implement their API or each photographer’s opinion on how they license their work.  It’s about a large name in the photography (Flickr/Yahoo) and the fact that they don’t respect their customers enough to protect their work.  I can only image how this will propogate forward with the new arrangement between Flickr and Getty Images.  Will your “selection” by a Getty Editor to have your Flickr photos be licensed through Getty automatically change your Creative Commons licensed work to All Rights Reserved so Getty can make money off your work

If I’m using a service that claims to protect my work by allowing me to not let anyone but myself to download the images, then the service should do that.  In all access methods to the images.  When Flickr found out that this protection was not being extended to the API, they should have fixed it for the sake of their customers rather than ignore it for the sake of their API development community.  SmugMug had a similar security issue be raised in the recent past which they quickly fixed…this is how a responsible company should act toward their customers, maybe this is why SmugMug is actually turning a profit while Flickr never could?

(Note: I’m stopping short of talking about how I think Yahoo’s ownership and corporate problems might be related to the current state of Flickr and their customer focus.)

One of the frustrating points that the FocalPower team had with photo sharing/hosting was the the lack of focus on the photographer for the sake of the photo sharing/hosting provider. This has been one of the facets behind the FocalPower solution since the day we started building it.  We feel that control should be given back to the photographers.  If they photographer wants to protect their photo assets and legal rights, then the systems they use should help them in this cause, not hinder them.  Likewise, if the photographer is more concerned with their images being accessible to the larger audience to use under the Creative Common’s licensing, make it easy for the photographer to enable this and track the effect that this has.  Opening up your work to Creative Commons is done for a multiplicity of reasons, one of which is to help spread your brand…hence the with Attribution license.  I always found it shocking that Flickr allowed you to license your work this way but then let anyone take the work without providing you attribution…why couldn’t they provide that attribution for you?  Why make the photographer work harder?

These are some of the issues that we are working to address here at FocalPower.  So keep an eye out as we wrap up our development effort and move toward an open beta of our Photo Asset Management system later this year.

Update: Scott Bourne has a wonderful post on this topic over at the TWIP Blog.  A great view of this topic from a long time professional photographer.

Another topic that came out of the wedding album discussion with my photographer friend a few days ago was the DIY wedding album.  Since she is a photographer, she really wanted to put together the wedding album herself.  Thus, she looked for wedding photographers who would give her the negatives immediately after the big day and didn’t offer (or wouldn’t include) the album in their price.

During my friend’s wedding, there were a number of enthusiast and semi-professional photographers who were there with cameras in tow and taking pictures that the wedding photographers were not.  In the end, many pages of photos in my friends wedding album were taken not by the professional photographers she hired, but by the guests who were just doing what they love to do.  And at every wedding I go to, I continue to see more and more DSLR cameras of increasing quality snapping away.

The technology of photography is constantly forcing professional photographers to be nimble and adapt their business models in order to stay in business. Thus, with the rise of the enthusiast photographer and the continual price erosion of high quality DSLR cameras, I am wondering: are more wedding photographers seeing requests from clients for the negatives to do their own wedding album?

This seems like a natural evolution of the business trends that have been occurring.  But I would love to hear from some professional wedding photographers to see if this is the case.

There is still huge value that professional wedding photographers offer in both photographing the day as well as album design.  The trick for wedding photographers is to make sure their clients don’t forget this value.

A few days ago I was talking with a fellow photographer and we some how ended up on the topic of wedding albums.  We were comparing notes on how the different photographs that we had at each of our weddings handled the album sale after the wedding.  It was quite surprising the stark differences that each photographer used and the result that this had on the incremental revenue gained from the sale of an album.

The general trend amongst most professional wedding photographers is to offer multiple packages that the prospective couple could choose from.  The two main variables that are involved with sizing these packages is the number of hours spent photographing the wedding and the number of album pages that are included .  Including some album pages in the package is the first step to a successful wedding album sales after the big day.

The second step to a successful wedding album sale is selling the couple on the wedding album vision.  Regardless of what it says on our business cards, we are all sales people first and foremost.   Helping the happy couple have a complete memory of their big day is the value they will get out of their wedding album.  The trick is to be energetic and positive while showing them the vision of a complete album that is more than what their package contains.

I learned this trick from the wedding photographer who my wife and I hired for our wedding.   He knew I was a photographer and so was a bit more open on sharing before, during, and after our wedding.  This, coupled with my business sense from selling technology for years, allowed me to pickup on his highly refined sales process for the album.  His process was getting the couple emotionally attached to a vision and then enabling them to make an emotional decision on the wedding album.

Within a week or two of the wedding, he had scheduled a time for my wife and I to come back in to his studio and review the photos.  He had all the keeper photos from our wedding available as 4×6 prints.  All he asked was that we spend 30 minutes or so flipping through all the photos and making two piles:  likes and dislikes.  Then, we were scheduled to come back in within a week to “layout” our album.

When we arrived for the layout session, he had already taken our pile of likes and laid out the ideal wedding album from our big day using these photos.  He sat us down to review the layout with us and show us the options and alternative photos that could be used in certain spots.  Page by page, we saw our wedding day come to life before our very eyes.  Seeing moments of the wedding that we had not observed or had missed during the day itself.  When we reached the last page, it felt like we had experienced the whole wedding day for the first time.  This was the emotional hook.

The photo package that we had purchased included 12 album pages.  Laid out on the table in front of us was almost 30 album pages.  The additional cost for the ideal wedding album was easily a couple thousand dollars.  I could see that most couples at this point would just go with the photographer’s ideal layout and happily pay the additional money.  But my sales instincts kicked into high gear and allowed me to realize what had just happened.  After discussing it over with my wife (who hadn’t realized what just happened even though she has worked in retail sales for years), we went for the ideal wedding album.  We were very happy with our decision.  And the photographer had successfully upsold another client.

The lesson to be learned here for all photographers is to project a positive energetic feeling about the photos every time you interact with your customers. This positive energy will wash away the small flaws that we, with our photographer’s critical eye, always see and sometimes focus on to our detriment.   And this positive energy will not only transfer to the client but also stick in their mind.  You then need to have a sales process in place that times up selling during the most emotional interaction with your client.  This sales skill is not an easy one to learn, but can be learned by everyone who is willing to try.  In the end, you will end up with more business per client and a more successful photography business.

Eventually, you too can retire early to your well earned beach house…just like our wedding photographer did.

Last weekend was the opening weekend for Chihuly at the de Young here in San Francisco.  A huge exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s work at the de Young Museum.

Thanks to the de Young’s policy of allowing photography in the museum (just no flashes nor tripods), this exhibit makes a wonderful photo opportunity; and a great exercise in practicing your low light photography skills.  All of the exhibits are light to showcase the magic of the glass work of Chihuly.  So you will have to have a steady hand a fast camera.

The exhibit runs from June 14th through September 28th and tickets are $15 (which also gives you access to the rest of the de Young museum).  If you are in San Francisco during this period, take advantage of this photo op!

Last week I came across this interesting photo project (thanks to Guy Kawasaki for originally tweeting this!).  The essence of the project was a photo of a various families from around the world showing the food they eat in an week along with how much this food costs (converted to USD).  Unfortuantely, there isn’t any information provided about the background of the project other than it was posted in November of 2007.

I found this project rather intersting from two aspects.  First, the photographic aspect of documenting a family with their weekly food.  It’s more than just the food that they have laid out around them.  It’s the way each family presents themselves along with their food.  And not to mention the interesting aspect of comparing the part of each family’s home that they are sharing with you in that photo.

The second aspect is the social differences in food consumption and cost.  Taking the cost off the table, what does the food that each family presents tell you about their current living situation and lifestyle?  What about the relationship of their food to themselves?

An interesting and insightful project.  What would your family photo look like?