Professional Photo Lab and Photo Printing Blog

This is a guest contribution by Georgia McCabe: Georgia spent 30 years as a Sr. Executive in the computer and photo industry at IBM, Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm. As a driving force in conceiving and executing breakthrough approaches to the photo printing, sharing and delivery market place, she literally “changed the rules” for a category undergoing massive technological change and re-invention. She is a certified social media strategist, and is a market and branding consultant helping businesses utilize the tools and power of social networking. Georgia McCabe

Wasn’t digital photography supposed to be easier, cheaper and offer tremendous new capabilities? With more and more professional photographers longing to go back and shoot a roll of film, or looking for customers who appreciate and value a high quality photograph, sometimes I wonder how all that hope and change is working out and whether the promise of digital was perhaps just a fleeting mirage.

To be sure, eliminating the cost of film and the delay of processing from a professional photo lab were big attractions for professional digital photography, but even the most accomplished professional photographers among us have to admit that they constantly glance at the full color display conveniently located on the  digital camera back in order to confirm success. I have often wondered when experienced professional photographers will begin showing up in emergency rooms around the country, exhibiting a new and perplexing medical condition named something like PWFS, short for “photographer wrist fatigue syndrome,” which after extensive research will be found to be caused by pressing the shutter release and quickly yet subconsciously tilting the camera down to glance at the display back.

Up to now, if you wanted to go farther with an integrated digital photography concept, you needed to lug cables, adapters and laptop computers along on a serious shoot…and also have a second degree in computer sciences from MIT! Even with all that accomplished, tethered to your advanced and high tech setup, you began to feel like an old hard hat deep sea diver, tied to your life support by a cable with your feet and creative mobility limited by what feel like lead filled boots!

I am often disheartened by the perception that in today’s world of high quality digital photography, even with all of it’s tremendous technological capability and promise, George Eastman’s famous mantra of “you push the button…we do the rest” has been relegated to “you push the button and then you figure out the rest!” Recently, however, I have seen some real and encouraging signs of digital hope and change…and they are coming from, of all places, the consumer camera phone market.  You don’t have to be a great technical visionary to see where all of this can go. At your next “event” setting, simply glance over your shoulder at the guests who are hijacking your pose, but are doing it with modern, integrated and wireless Android or Apple Smart Phones. With a few additional keystrokes on their devices (not really that easy since they don’t type well with their thumbs), their pictures can be made available to literally everyone in the room, of for that matter, anyone in the entire world, within just a few seconds.

My optimism is further bolstered by some recent developments, including a very interesting blog by Jesse Rosten, a digitally advanced professional photographer who has done some very creative integration of his own using a DSLR, an iPad and EyeFi cards (full article).

If you don’t feel that you have Jesse’s level of expertise, fear not, use a little imagination and check out how others are working in the consumer market to effortlessly merge the capabilities of wireless smart devices with the entire world of digital photography (here). To be sure, we’re not there yet, but just imagine being on a shoot in world with ubiquitous wireless broadband and a DSLR cameras that has wireless communications capability right “out of the box”…all of it seamlessly and automatically integrated for us with Apple like precision. It will happen and sooner than we all think.

With a little luck, and a lot of help, soon we will all be confirming, once again, that Eastman really understood a lot more about consumer behavior than we give him credit for!

Summer is the time to move your school business forward by reinforcing existing contacts and by making new contacts.  Because this is the time of year when employees step into new positions, your point of contact may change.   So be sure to determine who your contact is and reinforce that relationship via mail, email or a personal visit.  Bringing small gifts of cookies or a small personalized product like a mug, etc. can go a long way!

Offer a variety of products that are new and compelling.  People are looking for things that are different than the ordinary school package.  Key chains, mouse pads, dry erase boards, mugs, etc. create add-on sales opportunities.  Be sure to include images of the products in your promotional materials, as well as providing samples to your key contacts to show off before picture day.

Offering a variety of techniques and poses allows you to differentiate yourself and build your average check:

• Sepia, black and white, color and tinting can be set up as actions, which only take seconds to process, and can add dollars to your bottom line.
• Photograph two frames per child and then crop to create a total of 4 images to select from.
• Photograph with different poses than the classic direct front head and shoulders image.

Yes, this is a little more work, but you cannot get complacent in this competitive industry or your business will die a slow death.

Be sure to offer retouching for an additional price.   Different levels are a good way to approach this: Basic (light blemishes,) moderate (light blemishes, scars, tone,) and extensive (braces removal, teeth whitening and more.)

Make money while you are out on another job – offer “after sale” opportunities via hhimagehost.com!  Here you can offer additional products as well as a-la-carte prints.  Use email or skinny minis to direct people to your branded storefront.

If you aren’t shooting schools, think about it.  Schools offer a serious income stream and it isn’t as complicated as one might imagine.  Contact the experts at H&H to learn how you can go about getting into the school segment of the photographic industry!

Jeff Edwards, of Jeff Edwards Studio in Milwaukee, WI, was here at H&H last week, helping teach our School Boot Camp classes.  He is a 33 year veteran in the school picture business. Jeff started his career working for a large senior contract studio. In 1987, he opened his own studio with two locations and a color lab which he later sold in 1997.  After moving to the Kansas City area, he began working for Interstate Studio & Publishing, becoming their National Sales Manager.  He has also consulted for Jostens and Herff Jones.  He currently lives in the Milwaukee area and owns Jeff Edwards Studio, a full service photography studio.

Since we had him in the University, we asked him to do a video blog post for us.  We asked him to break down some of the important skills needed by school photographers.  Thanks Jeff!

We had several entries in our Dog Days of Summer photography contest, and the expert panel of judges (H&H employees) have finished judging.  Believe it or not, we had a TIE!  First, the runners up:

photo by Kim Sparks

photo by Liz Chivvis

photo by Fritz Geil

photo by Kim Sparks

And the two winning images, both submitted by the same photographer:

photo by Fritz Geil

photo by Fritz Geil

Thank you for playing along.  Fritz, enjoy your two free dog tags!

I was recently asked in the context of photography what was the one thing that I could not live without.

As I thought about it, I realized that it would be very difficult to narrow this down to just one item. In actuality there were several different areas that in each, there was a piece of hardware, software, or tool that I would not want to be a photographer and not have.

The more I thought about this, the more I thought it would be a good challenge to analyze in the following areas, what things I could not live without. The areas that I considered are the following:

• camera gear (things other than lens and camera body)
• computer hardware
• computer software

So, for this blog post, I thought I would talk about just one of my favorite, can’t live without, photographic things.

Adobe Bridge CS5

I use Adobe Bridge for so many different things.

First – probably the use most people think of:  I use it to browse through and look at my images.

There are so many ways that I can look at my images; in the content tab looking at thumbnails, and I can also see a larger version in the Preview tab if I wish.

I can view them in a Full Screen Preview mode by pressing on the space bar. Then I use my arrow keys to navigate through the folder.

I can use the Review Mode to quickly edit down images (Command/Ctrl B) by pressing the down arrow, I am unselecting the image.

I can also do a very quick slide show by pressing Command/Ctrl L, and adjust the slide show settings by pressing shift Command/Ctrl L.

In any of these viewing environments, I can add rating meta-data to help sort these images later, either by adding a 1-5 star rating, or a color code.

I also can use Adobe Bridge to select a range of images either Raw or Jpg’s and using Adobe Camera Raw, do batch corrections to the images. I can do color/density corrections, cropping, remove camera sensor dirt, sharpen, remove noise, apply lens profile corrections. The big advantage of doing these types of corrections in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, is that the corrections are non-destructive. I can always undo the correction without damaging my original image.

I can also batch rename images in Adobe Bridge. I can drag the images into the sequence that I want them to appear, and use bridge to append a sequential number to the beginning of the file name to keep the images in that sequence. A new feature in the Batch Rename dialog in CS5 is the ability to do a “String Substitution”. For example if I have a series of images named BSkeie###.jpg and I want to remove the BSkeie part of the file names and replace it with Bentley, I use the String Substitution and tell it to find BSkeie and replace with Bentley.  Very fast and easy!

A new feature that I am really excited about is the Export Tab. On this tab I can set up different export critera. Information like the destination where the exported files are to be saved and setting up different Image Size exports. I can save several of these different exports in the Export tab, then drag the images I want to apply the specific criteria to, and then press the export arrow and have the selection I selected applied, and then saved out to the specified destination.

I have set these up for several different exports for web previews, proof prints, or medium resolution files.

There is also the ability to have exports that will save your images directly to your Flicker or Facebook pages.

There are many many more things that can be done using Adobe Bridge, but as the song goes, “these are a few of my favorite things”