Like many necessary tasks, uploading your photos to your blog can be tedious: after a while, all that resizing, tagging, and watermarking gets old.
But there are lots of ways to make this process more efficient, and one of my favorites involves making your watermark a custom brush. [click to continue…]
Branding is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit in the photography community, but what does it really mean for your business?
Generally when people think of branding, they think of creating a great logo, website, or business card. These are all parts of a successful brand strategy, but they aren’t the whole picture. If you aren’t implementing these aspects in the right way, your brand isn’t having the impact that it could.
A brand isn’t pretty decoration, it’s a pattern of behavior. It’s the way a person feels about a product or service. This feeling about you, and your business, influences their purchasing decisions. It determines whether or not they trust you and, ultimately, whether or not they hire you. For most photographers, you are your brand. Everything you do, from how you respond to inquiries to how you act at a photo shoot, communicates the character of your brand. So how can you get the most out of your brand?
Be consistent
Building a brand means being visually consistent. You should have the same logo on your website, your printed materials, your business cards, on everything. It takes people several impressions before they remember something, and seeing the same logo repeatedly builds recognition. This is why Nike is able to use their swoosh graphic without the name – after years of seeing the logo, you don’t need to see the name anymore to know that it’s Nike. If a client is looking at several photographers, they should be able to tell which material is yours at a glance. Every impression the client has from you should reinforce your brand. When they pick up your business card and go to your website, it should be immediately obvious that those two things belong to the same person. Make sure everything that you put out there reflects your brand.
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In this economy, it’s hard to turn down any paid work. But sometimes saying no can be the best thing for your creative vision and your business. So why should you say no to a job?
It’s not your subject.
Shooting every job that comes up may seem like a great way to get experience, and when you’re first starting out that may be the way to go. If you are trying to establish a business, though, it’s beneficial to narrow your focus. Know what you do, and what you don’t do, and spend time gaining experience in that specific area. This way you can be great at portraiture, instead of just good at portraiture, and landscapes, and product photography, etc. Also, know your career goals and only take jobs that help those goals. Spending time, money, and resources shooting something that doesn’t help your business doesn’t make sense.
While I mostly work as a wedding and portrait photographer, shooting on assignment for newspapers has been a great way to pick up additional work and add variety to what I shoot. I’ve been able to shoot everything from Judo demonstrations to Thai food by working with newspapers.
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