Enlightened Tripod 13

Maestro:

A master in any art

The “Enlightened Quote” …

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” Edward de Bono

The “Enlightened Business Plan”…

Marketing Framework

Knowing who you are, where you want to go, and how you are going to get there; are the basic steps for success. Having a “marketing framework” is essential for your journey.

Step 1

Product Identity – describe your product fully. Yes I know, you are photographers and you take pictures for clients. This is usually where 99% of all photographers stop, that is why there is a 95% failure rate in our industry. Are you high end, middle area, low end with your prices? Do you give complete service, partial service, low end service? Do you have a high profit margin, medium profit margin, or low profit margin? Are your images framed, on c.d., or finished in any way? Do you do wall portraits, packages, or all digital? You see my meaning here, be as specific as possible.

Step 2

Product Strategy – what is special about your work? What are the features and attributes of the product offered? How does the product rank for quality: premium, moderate, or economic?

Step 3 Benefits – what benefits does your client get by going to you or buying your product? What is special about you or your product? How does your product meet the needs of your clients?

Step 4

Price strategy – what are you going to charge? Long gone are the days that you can charge the going rate, today you need to analyze your costs and build in a profit. The key here is that you can go low profit - high volume, or low volume – high profit, or average profit – average volume. What the heck is average? I’ve written about pricing strategies before and there are many of them, we will cover this area in more depth in future issues, but for the time being you must look carefully at the time you spend doing your work and charging sufficient to cover your time and add your material. Here we are looking at a philosophy as opposed to a specific.

Step 5

Promotion strategy – what are the best ways to promote your product? This is highly dependent on your pricing strategy and the area of photography that you are in, but when you look at it the obvious will always come to the fore. The key is to get past the obvious and do what the others aren’t!

Placement Strategy – How are you going to distribute your product or in other words, what is your channel of distribution? This is not as elementary as you may think. If you do portraits will you work out of your apartment, basement, garage, studio, mall location? These all say a lot about your product. If you are a commercial photographer do you work out of your home, warehouse, loft, or downtown location? Do you work with stock agencies, or do you rep yourself? Or, do you commission a rep? In all forms of photography you could commission a rep. These are all very important elements to consider and must not be taken lightly.

Business Unit Strategy – Are you a low cost producer and to what segments? Or do you have a premium product differentiator producer and to what segment of the market. Finally, are you a niche market producer and to what focused segment? This needs to be determined, analyzed and thoughtfully considered. There is a place for all of these. The bottom line always is, how much money do you want to make and what type of lifestyle do you wish to enjoy?

Core Competency – what are the core competencies that you and your organization have? What are you really good at?

Competitive Advantage – what does your organization or style offer that is unique? What sets you apart from the others?

This all may seem over the top, but it really isn’t. Looking at these areas will put you in the top 5% of all photographers. You may think that you don’t have the time to do this, but failing to do so will be even more costly. I challenge you to look at these questions as soon as possible. Take it one step further and look at your top two competitors. By doing this you will be able to even further differentiate yourself and become more unique and offer your clients more. If you really want to make the most of this exercise, hire your top two competitors to take photographs of, or for you and experience first-hand what they are doing!

.The “Enlightened Technical Corner”…

Metering – the magic of reading light

What separates amateurs from true professional photographers?

Measuring light properly; capturing the nuances of light and the quality of light is the single most difficult and essential elements of photography. Today we are blessed and cursed with many metering options; including partial, evaluative zone or matrix, center-weighted and, spot metering. What is best? How do we choose? Understanding these, can improve your images and reduce your frustration.

There are two things to consider:

1. The quantity of light, and 2. The ambience you want to render.

Let’s look at the quantity of light first. Once again we have two variables:

A. Quantity (the amount of light falling on the subject)

Light is usually measured in two ways; incident, which is the light falling on the subject and reflective, where the light that is reflected from the subject is measured. The more light you have, the greater the degree of contrast you will face. In both digital and traditional cameras, the brightest light responds faster, causing the detail in brighter areas to be captured first. With digital cameras, light is measured at each pixel, and the amount of exposure that it can handle is determined by how large each photosite size is. Once it is full the site is said to be saturated which is the highest white level. Knowing this, the better quality camera you can buy, with larger recording capacity and size, you will get a more realistic recording and contrast range.

With film, the longer you expose the scene shadow detail is improved but at the expense of highlight detail. Although many photographers say that you need to “average” the scene, this still may not give you the desired exposure or resulting image that you want.

Determining the correct exposure is now confused by having to determine whether you use center-weighted, evaluative (average, partial, or multi-zone metering), or spot metering.

i. Center-weighted is only good when the key element of the image is in the middle of the picture – creatively, this usually spells disaster. The meter concentrates between 60 to 80 percent of the sensitivity towards the central part of the viewfinder. ii. Evaluative metering, depending on which mode you or the camera adopts, uses light information coming from the entire scene. Or, it will take variable points to take readings from. How they are combined/calculated deviates from camera to camera. The actual number of zones used varies wildly, from several to over a thousand. iii. Spot metering, on the other hand, measure a very small area of the scene, usually between 1 to 5 percent of the viewfinder area. This is usually in the middle, but some cameras allow you to vary the zone in the viewfinder for more flexibility.

Now the key to remember is that the meter is looking at everything as if it is 18% grey. So if you place the metering area over a highlight area, you will have a darker highlight then you wanted with a resulting loss of detail in the shadows. Conversely, if you place the metering area in the shadow area of the image you will then have a muddied or gray shadow detail and blown-out detail in the highlight area. So if you are looking for an average exposure range for the entire image you may look for an area that is closest to 18% gray and take a reading from that section.

B. Contrast or dynamic range (the difference between light and dark, or the maximum and minimum measurable light intensities.)

Dynamic range is a hot topic these days and basically most digital cameras have a dynamic range of between 5 to 6 stops. This is dependent on whether you are shooting RAW or not in 16 bit mode (knowing that you are recording 12 bits in a 16 bit space.) The hot tip here is to capture your image as close to the right side of the histogram as possible without blowing out your highlights. This will minimize your signal to noise ratio, at the same time minimizing the posterization and noise in the dark areas of the image. Just remember that doing this will effectively lower your ISO rating. In contrast the higher ISO setting you use reduces the latitude recorded.

This is dramatically different from film “latitude”, which typically is 1 stop underexposed to 3 stops overexposed, giving a total range of 4 stops. Slide film, on the other hand is limited to approximately 1/3 of a stop either way. Film is reputed to handle the latitude better. With a higher ISO, negative film’s latitude increases.

2. The “Ambience” you wish to render. This is a highly subjective area, one that makes all photographers excited. The ability to create, capture, enhance the mood, moment, and feeling of an image. Art is in the eye of the beholder and you have total control in this department. My favourite saying to my students is that, “Rules are meant to be broken, as long as you know the rules.”

“Enlightened Marketing”

Marketing

Before we can get into a detailed description of how you are going to market your business, we need to define marketing and advertising. Too many people lump them in the same categories, or interchange them when, in fact, they are two uniquely different entities.

Marketing is the business of buying and selling a specified commodity or service. Taking the term a step further, it is the exchange of goods or services for an agreed upon sum of money. What is involved, is the promoting, selling, and distributing of your product or service.

By contrast, advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or service. The actual dictionary definition goes on to say that advertising occurs by means of paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media. I disagree with the limitations implied here because you can get a lot of advertising that you don’t have to pay for. Let’s just say that letting people know you are in business to provide a service or a product is the job of advertising.

So let’s focus on marketing.

Here are the first key ingredients for successful marketing:

1. Focus on SOLUTIONS.

a. All of your clients have a specific problem, and you need to provide them with a solution. For example, the problem is that the children are growing so fast, time is racing by, grandma hasn’t seen them for over a year, and they don’t have a current portrait of the family. The solution is that you create fabulous family portraits that will be cherished for generations. You now have to let them know; you let them know by advertising. The marketing is the process of thinking of all problems people have for which you can provide the solutions.

b. Many photographers, or businesses for that matter, market commodities, features, and processes, ones which matter for everyday life. People don’t care that you spend eighty hours a week in the wilds of the Amazon to capture the rare mating ritual of the Bumblebee Catfish. They want to know if you have the solution to their problem, or if you can come up with one.

2. Make good customer relations a priority in your business.

a. You must work out a system of the following essential details

i. How you are going to contact clients initially?

ii. What your goal is for first appointment?

iii. How will you greet them, for the first time?

iv. What is your meeting room going to look like? What style of decorations do you have?

v. Will you serve them anything?

vi. What type of printed materials will you provide them?

vii. On your second meeting, probably the photo session, what kind of ambience will you create?

viii. Do you use digital proofing and show them your work immediately?

ix. If not, do you set up an appointment right away for the first viewing or do you let them call you?

x. Do you call them to remind them of their appointment?

xi. Do you make an appointment for them to pick up their portraits or do you deliver them?

xii. What type of financial arrangements are you going to have?

xiii. How are you going to follow up after they have enjoyed the portraits for a period of time?

b. Having collected information from them, how often are you going to follow up after that?

Take the time now to answer the questions listed above. You might as well while the answers are still fresh in your mind.

3. Manage first impressions, because first impressions are lasting impressions. Often they are the only impression your prospective client will have. Everybody does judge a book by its cover. It’s very difficult to overcome a poorly managed first impression.

a. Often the telephone is the source of first impressions for many of your potential clients so you should give very careful consideration to how incoming calls are being handled by you and your staff. Many businesses lose a tremendous amount of business by bungling this first telephone contact. Consequently, I have devoted a large amount of time scripting how we handle our calls and later in the book I give you the full details.

b. Since the first impression also happens by the prospective customer walking in the door, you need to give thought to the specific procedure for meeting and greeting that person.

c. Whether your studio or office is in your home or at another location, I believe you need to give a great deal of attention to the store environment. The ambience and decorations make a huge difference to how people perceive you and your professionalism.

d. Just as important as environmental appearance is to first impressions is the personal appearance that a customer or prospects will deal with.

“Enlightened Living”

Melatonin

The hormone of darkness!

Why is melatonin, called the hormone of darkness?

Melatonin is called the hormone of darkness because it is produced by the pineal gland, only when it is dark. Also, it is the release of melatonin that causes drowsiness in the brain and regulates the circadian cycle – our biological clock.

As well, melatonin is a powerful antioxidant that has been shown to reduce the damage of carcinogens may reduce damage caused by Parkinson’s; helps prevent cardiac arrhythmia, and increase longevity. Some of the other areas that melatonin has been proven to help with are: sleep aid, learning, memory, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, fertility, headaches, depression, SAD, and jet-lag. The great thing found with melatonin is that it is practically nontoxic has almost no side effects. But make sure that you take the synthetic form of melatonin. The natural form is made from the pineal gland of animals and can be contaminated.

As mentioned, melatonin is great for jet lag, so for all of you travelling photographers this is something to research.

Yours in Health, Happiness, and Success

Your Friend

Chuck Groot BFA, F/PPABC, MPA