FocalPower…the blog

While cleaning up the stacks of papers from my desk today, I came across an article from the New York Times that intrigued me.  It appears that in certain metro areas, some architectural photographers have expanded to a new set of clients. Picture, Picture on the Wall talks about a growing trend of some upper scale home owners having custom photography created of their homes; almost like a Architectural Digest photo shoot minus the publication.  For some homeowners, they have photos taken of their vacation homes for display at the non-vacation homes or work.  Others, seem to enjoy displaying the photos of their homes in their homes.

I found this an interesting targeted vertical market for some photographers to cater to.  If you have experience capturing architecture, why not leverage it in a new way?  Marketing this type of service as a high end service to a high end clientele is important.  You want to remove the C and B clients from the A clients as soon as possible.

Of course, being a photographer in the right market helps.  Offering this service in New York City, San Francisco, Miami, or Los Angeles and you can build a nice little revenue stream to feed into your business river.  Offering this in Nashville, San Antonio, Milwaukee, or Los Alamos most likely isn’t going to be worth the business investement.  However, keeping your eye out for new focused vertical markets is smart regardless of your locale.

Today I came across a technology news article that probably slipped past most photographers.  This morning I read about how Comcast announced a usage cap to their broadband user policy.  This usage cap will limit Comcast broadband subscribers to 250 Gigabytes of usage per month.  As a Comcast user this really caught my attention, but should also catch the attention of all broadband users such as home office workers or photographers.  This trend started back in May when Sprint limiting their “unlimited 3G broadband” service.  And many people believe the trend will ripple through the rest of the broadband providers.

The impact of this on photographers will be a hit to your business bottom line.  Depending on how many photos you upload or transmit over the internet to customers every month, you’re business costs for broadband service could be going up over time.  And that’s before considering the future that video will have for photographers.

In addition, the online backup solution previously mentioned will be much more difficult to use.   The issue with these services is always performing the initial backup of all your data.  When that data is 100’s of Gigabytes or multiple Terabytes of data, having a monthly cap of 250 Gigabytes means that the initial backup could take months or cost you extra fees.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned by Comcast is what affect this usage cap will have on the pricing of their broadband offerings.  If they are now limiting their unlimited bandwidth, I image many customers will be expecting to pay less for the capped service. But will Camcast and other broadband providers who cap their usage agree?

Last weekend at WordCamp San Francisco, I had an interesting discussion with a fellow blogger who was suffering from a common issue.  He was in the process of migrating his blog from one blogging service to another and was stuck when it came to his photos.  This is a perfect example of not only how having a separate photo hosting service would have made his life easier, but also an example of why photographs need to have their metadata populated.

This particular blogger had used the local photo storing feature of his blogging services (a services I had never heard of before).  Now that he was trying to migrate his blog to WordPress his migration was delayed because he couldn’t get his photos out of the old blogging platform and those photos were critical to his blog.  This is a classic example of where proprietary features of a poorly designed service often lock in users.  With our connected world, abstraction is our friend.  Having the key pieces of content in systems designed for each piece of content would have saved this blogger a lot of time.  If he had his photos hosted separate from his blog, he would already be running on WordPress and be a much happy blogger.

Luckily for the this particular blogger, he still had local copies of all his photos.  Unfortunately for him, he didn’t that them well organized or tagged with metadata.  All the text describing the photos (i.e., captions, descriptions) was entered into his old blogging system separate from the actual photos.  If he had at least put that text into the photo’s meta data, he would at least have been able to re-upload them to a new photo hosting service and have all the photo descriptions automatically pulled out of the photos.  It would have been a bit more work for him, but less work than he is now facing.

What can Photographers (as well as other bloggers) learn from this experience?

First, have a work flow for dealing with your photos.  This is quite obvious for most photographers, but maybe not as obvious for bloggers.  Have a consistent and documented way of dealing with your photos helps to ensure you don’t miss key steps as well as ensures you’re growing collection of photos is well organized and consistent.  Nothing is worse than having a collection of 10,000 photos and then not be able to find the one photo a customer asks for.

Second, take advantage of meta data.  Meta data is simply data about data.  It’s another layer of data about your photography.  IPTC photo metadata is an established standard of meta data fields that are used to describe nearly all aspects of a photo.  Not just describing what the photo contains, but also when it was created, who created it, and what license legally protects the photo.  Just about every major photo editing software package supports IPTC metadata and allows you to edit it.  Wether you are a photographer or a blogger, you should be adding in basic meta data about your photos as part of your work flow.  When you upload those photos to a photo sharing service, that meta data should be automatically extracted and made available to you.  Ideally that meta data should be automatically displayed along with your photos, ideally in a configurable manner where you can choose which data to display along with the photo.

So, by documenting your work flow, adhering to it consistently and using the IPTC metadata fields as part of your work flow, photographers can prevent themselves from facing the same portability issue that the afore mentioned blogger faced.  Keeping the meta data about your photos in your master copy of the photos enables you to capitalize on new advancements in the the industry, such as new standards conforming platforms and services, with minimal additional work.

The most competitive segment of the photography industry has to be wedding photographers.  Not only are you under pressure to capture a once-in-a-lifetime day for a couple, but you have to differentiate yourself against a growing and crowded market.  Networking and coming up with new services are key to keeping yourself fresh and your business growing.

Sometimes, if your business is not just limited to weddings, you can leverage images from one side of your business in the other.  As an example, check Mark Zanzig’s post about a beautiful idea to enhance a multi cultural wedding that happened to come his way. This was a great chance for him to sell some of his travel photography for use during a wedding celebration.

One can easily take this type of thinking to the next level and start to market your stock images for similar use through your established wedding network (i.e., planners, florists, caterers).  With the increased pressure on the engaged couple to have to a wedding that is unique from all their friends, what better way than to use blown up photos of where they are going on their honeymoon or where the got engaged during their celebration.

It’s an interesting way to put a new twist on your wedding photography offerings.

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.