A place for you to learn, get inspired, and keep up to date with all things SmugMug and photography
"My style is very interactive. I am talkative, funny, interested, silly, loud at times, and from the instant I meet a new client I treat them like an old friend. There is no awkwardness, no breaking the ice. I jump right in and start playing peek-a-boo with their kids and asking them about their childbirth stories. I love people. I love hearing about them, their family, their job, their life. I want them to be comfortable enough to relax and show me who they are in the course of our shoot.”
We don’t mean those jorts you wear. We’re talking about your photographic style. Customers have a certain style in mind when searching for a photographer, so it's important to make sure you’re expressing a style that's true to you.
When describing your style, think about the following:
The one word common to each of those questions is you. People hire you for you: your personality, your expertise, your demeanor, your creative vision. Identifying your style will help you establish your brand and your business model. It will help you understand who your customers will be, or who you want them to be, and will help you to establish your place in the market. Your style leads to creating your brand.
Admirers have called Andi Grant’s work "traditional," a label that used to amuse her until she began to grasp the implicit compliment. "It’s interesting because I don’t come from a classical photography background," she said. "Now I want to be considered timeless. My images are very clear—sharp, well-exposed images that are not over-manipulated. Very organic. People see that and like it." –Andi Grant
You’ll find inspiration in all kinds of places: in art, from other photographers, in magazines and books, in the way you decorate your home and office. What speaks to you the most; what inspires you to try something new?
Look at the work of others, try to understand how they achieved the result, think about situations where the technique would be appropriate, and if it’s something that you would like to emulate.
What kind of customer do you enjoy working with? Are you more comfortable with the formal family portrait, or a play day in the park? Do you prefer dramatically lit studio portraits, or edgy outdoor backlighting? Are you the master of the speedlight?
Make sure prospective customers understand what you offer. You can’t be everything for everyone, and that’s alright. Hone in on your style, attract the customers that dig your style, and create the best experience possible for them, and for you.
Make sure your style is clearly reflected in your portfolio, in your website, and in your messaging so prospective customers can get a good sense of you, your work, and whether or not you’re a good fit for their needs. Identifying your style will help you build your brand.
Have you ever wondered what else you could be doing to get more sales for your landscape photography? Our friend Varina Patel has offered us great info about how to mix business and photography when you’re out and about. Here's what she says about keeping the customer at the forefront of your mind the next time you're out shooting.
You never know what a buyer will want—and each buyer is different. But, over the past several years, we’ve learned a few things about maximizing the potential of our portfolios. Here are a few tips for making sales.
When we’re in the field, we usually find that a composition works best in either horizontal or vertical orientation. But in most cases, after capturing the most visually appealing image, we’ll work to find another shot that works with the camera turned 90 degrees. Why? Because sometimes the buyer needs an image that works in a particular orientation. Are they looking for a collection of calendar images? They’ll probably need horizontal images. Photos for a magazine? They’ll need a vertical shot to grace the cover
Since you never know who might want to purchase your images in the future, you can’t know which orientation will work best for their needs. Shoot in both orientations, and you’ll be ready no matter what they ask for.
Not too long ago, Jay sold a shot of Cedar Falls (titled, The Looking Glass) as part of a collection of fine-art images. He has many shots of waterfalls, and it wasn’t one of his favorites. The image lacks the vibrant colors or grand vistas you typically find in Jay’s more popular landscape photographs. When the client asked about waterfalls, his first instinct was to send them samples of the most popular waterfall images in his portfolio. One of the first shots he sent was Arizona Dreaming, this brilliantly colorful “icon shot” from Havasu Falls in Arizona.
But the client passed on all those brilliant-color and famous locations. Instead, she chose the quieter image…one he’d never sold before. He was curious about her choice, and he asked her about it. The answer was simple: she wanted images of local places, no matter how ordinary they looked in comparison with those famous, iconic locations.
When you approach a potential buyer, make sure you have plenty of local images. Colorful photographs capture the eye of the viewer, but familiar places capture their hearts.
When you present your images for sale, consider using gallery features that allow you to group your images into categories based upon similarities. For example, I have a gallery that’s dedicated only to black-and-white images and another that’s just for mountains. You can set up a gallery for images with a dominant blue-color theme or for photographs from a specific location. Your options are wide open.
SmugMug’s smart galleries feature lets you use keywords to create collections so potential buyers view images with shared characteristics. When a buyer wants more than one image, they often have a theme in mind. One buyer asked me for 30 detail shots she could sell as a wallpaper collection. Another wanted several waterfall photographs for decorating a newly opened hospital. In Cleveland, a buyer wanted images of local parks and iconic locations for the walls in an office building.
As you build your portfolio, keep an eye out for images that work well together, and be sure to present them as potential groupings.
Would you be surprised if I told you that giclée canvas prints are some of our biggest sellers? There’s just nothing like a really BIG print that makes a statement or ties a room together. In most cases, I don’t get to see a print after it’s hung, so it was a real treat to be able to see this one in its place of honor over the fireplace. This canvas print is hanging in a beautifully decorated home near Atlanta, Ga.. The colors in the room were actually chosen to match the print—the entire room is coordinated to match the colors in the photograph. I wish I could give you a tour of the whole house, which is a work of art itself.
Canvas prints are more expensive—especially really big ones—but most people hang them without a frame since they stand alone so well. They avoid the expense of matting and framing, making the price much easier to swallow.
Offer your prints for sale on canvas at the largest size available. A photo printed at that size packs a whole lot of punch!
The simple formula for profitability is revenue - expense = profit. But if success were that easy, why do most new small businesses fail? And what more should you be thinking about when starting your new photography business?
First off, where will your revenue come from? For photographers this is typically from one or both of two sources:
And secondly, where will your profit come from? There are many pricing models available to photographers, but these are two of the most popular:
Whether you decide to use a cost-plus pricing model or a strategic pricing model based on the value of your service, you need to have a good understanding of your actual costs of doing business. This is more than an hourly rate or the cost of the products you’ll provide.
Consider the following:
Hot tip: The National Press Photographers Association has a handy cost calculator that might help you figure out your cost of doing business.
How you value your work is more than material cost and time spent, it’s about the time, experience, and artistry it takes to capture the images uniquely as you and only you can. If customers could take the photos themselves, they wouldn't be hiring you.
Every business owner will battle pricing pressure at some point. It can come from price wars with a competitor or a persistent customer who won't buy anything without a discount. That being said, starting low is bad for business.
Low prices set low expectations from your clients. If you’re a cheap photographer, clients might immediately question your reliability or the quality of your work.
Being “cheap” also means you can’t afford to invest in your business or use more effective marketing strategies like coupons and special sales. These tools are invaluable for creating urgency and closing sales. Also, placing a fair (higher) monetary value on your work will inspire confidence in yourself and your clients.
"Moms and young kids out of college are opening up shop down the street. The new freelancer charging $50 per session has taken some of my clientele," Susan Sidoriak of Silverbox Creative Studio said. “Yet I have raised my prices throughout the recession, and the economy hasn’t really hit my business." Sidoriak got a bit of pushback when she raised her prices on 4×6 and 5×7 holiday photos last fall, but not one customer jumped ship.
SmugMug's pricing tool allows you to create different pricelists for different products and event types: weddings versus senior photos, limited-edition prints versus stock photos, etc. You can then apply each pricelist to galleries or individual photos.
Every new SmugMug Pro should set up pricing. You’ll have some important decisions to make:
Offer clients discounts with a built-in coupon tool to sweeten the deal. Who doesn’t love a sale? Incentivize your customers to make their purchase quickly by setting expiration dates on your coupons.
“Print credits are vital to my business model,” said Meghan MacAskill of Wild Bloom Studio. “[I noticed] that many clients weren’t actually pulling the trigger and getting prints. I decided to model photo sessions differently and include a print credit in every package to guide clients into purchasing prints. It has been very successful, and SmugMug's coupon feature is vital for it to work without me filling those orders myself.”
Packages are also a popular tool for school and sport photographers. With packages, you can bundle a set of prints together for a single price, creating a value incentive for your customer...and a simpler buying experience.
Printmarks allow you to “sign” prints and photo downloads. They can be used as an artist's signature, to add value to a print product, or as advertising, which then allows you to offer the product at a reduced price compared to a non-printmarked version.
Pick the strategy—or mix and match several—that makes the most sense for your business!
This tip is brought to you by cabbey, landscape and fine-art photographer, and one of SmugMug's backend engineers. He's usually up to his elbows in the code that sends your orders to the labs and your profits to the bank, but now he's sharing some tips for photographers who want to be sure they’re getting the best possible prints.
Let's say you take a picture of your son and the camera does everything perfectly in terms of white balance and exposure. You made sure the image was properly exposed, something akin to the image on the left below.
Next, you downloaded that image and loaded it onto your computer. But your computer's monitor isn’t calibrated, so your photo suddenly looks too red and too bright, like the middle image below.
To correct this, you fixed it in Photoshop until it looked like the original image. When you were done, you uploaded it to SmugMug and ordered a print, then received something that looks dark and weirdly tinted green:
They didn't! The problem is that monitors are generally made for office tasks, not photography. Manufacturers give you the brightest display possible with the punchiest red they can produce.
As a result, any time you process your photos on an uncalibrated display, you're making your image considerably darker and turning down the red cast, skewing everything toward cyan. The third image above is what your finished photo actually looks like, and the lab faithfully printed what you sent them.
By calibrating your monitor, you'll get better prints and happier customers without having to fall back on SmugMug's 100% print guarantee. The top three correctable problems that land on our help desk are
We have a great help page about return rates that shows what gets returned and why. The top six reasons are all solvable by using a properly color-managed workflow.
Exactly how you do it depends on what gear you buy. There are a number of different choices, but the leaders of the pack are Datacolor's Spyder and X-Rite's lines.
In general, you'll need a colorimeter or spectrophotometer (fancy words, but they basically mean a special device you can put on your screen and plug in to a USB port) and a piece of software that usually comes bundled with it. The software will put your monitor through its paces while you have the meter on it, then it uses that information to build an output profile for your screen.
With that resulting profile, any software that cares about a properly color-managed workflow can properly display accurate colors on your screen. Since monitors' color accuracy varies over the lifetime of the display, it's important to update the profile periodically, at least every month or two. Most of the above programs will remind you when it's time to re-profile your display.
You can also get a calibration print with SmugMug. With that in hand, you can bring the calibration image up in your editor of choice and see how much closer a calibrated workflow makes it look on your monitor. The closer it is, the closer your images will be when you're editing them.
Portfolio and Pro account holders can always print through Bay Photo, WHCC, or Loxley Colour, whose color-correction services are always done by hand. It costs a little more, but it can save you time at your desk, or headaches if you don't feel like fiddling with your computer.
You can find this option when editing your pricelists.
Most operating systems have an "eyeball" calibration you can do that will at least get you started. They aren't as accurate, and they depend on your eyes making decisions, so be aware that this may not work for everyone.
On a Mac, use Spotlight to launch Display Calibrator Assistant. Once it opens, just follow the steps.
On Windows, search in the control panel for "display calibration" and, again, follow the steps.
The best way to guarantee a smooth photo shoot is to talk to your clients, both in and outside the studio. We asked some of our top pros what they do to put their customers at ease, to get beautiful portraits worthy of the annual holiday card, and to make clients happy enough to tell their friends and families.
Here’s what they said:
As a professional, it’s imperative to set expectations about what you will do, how you do it, when you’ll do it, and what will be delivered. Show your client samples of your work (print samples, too), walk them through the experience, and describe how you will work; tell them exactly when they should expect to see proofs and check to be sure if they have any time-sensitive deadlines—like holiday cards—for the photos. The more expectations you set, the less room there will be for frustration…on either end.
People love to talk about themselves, and asking questions about them, their families, and their relationship can open them up and get them to relax. Be an active listener and be prepared to ask questions about things they just told you. They’ll know you’re listening and that you’re genuinely interested, which builds great rapport (and trust!).
Your clients are not always models! Show them what to do rather than tell them what to do. It’s much easier to have them mimic a pose you’re doing than to parse your words and move at the same time. After a while, it’ll become totally natural.
Say this, even if they’re not getting the pose right. Always be positive and try to channel any frustration into a bit of levity. Switch it up, shake it off, try something new. Don’t forget, this might be routine for you but it’s a special, forever moment for them. You’re a professional and can make anything work.
Setting expectations is one thing, but having their products ready ahead of time is another. Whenever possible, underpromise and overdeliver. After all, everyone is thrilled when they get orders or proofs ahead of time, but no one tolerates anything late.
Special thanks to pros Nick, Tomasz, Steve, and Alastair for these great tips.
No sales? Hard time snagging clients? Your deep-discount pricing could be hurting your reputation. It's not uncommon to offer your services at a cut-rate discount with the hope you'll snap up eager bargain hunters. But is this the right approach?
Successful pros agree that raising your pricing may not necessarily scare away potential clients; in fact, it can do you some good.
"Cheap" sets bad expectations for your clients. If you're a cheap photographer, clients wonder how you're cutting costs so much and if it's worth it for them to take the risk. They question your ability to manage expectations and communicate with them. Will you effectively guide them through an important experience, or will you simply fire a few snaps, hand over some digital files, and call it a day?
"Cheap" makes it look as though you don't think you're any good. Any business owner who doesn't think their brand's the best is probably in the wrong field.
Right about now you're probably worried about scaring away clients by being too expensive. How do your clients know what "expensive" really is? It's all about pricing and a concept called anchoring—meaning they have to compare the value of something new with something familiar. In layman’s terms, clients will be able to better grasp the value of your work by judging their interaction with you.
Here are some tips to help you prove your work is worth every penny:
Just because you should be paid fairly for your work doesn't mean you can't cut clients a break, or even do the "free" thing once in a while. Samples are a great way to give clients a taste of what you do without giving away the farm. Some ideas of how to work this into your business plan:
On SmugMug, it's easy to offer a few deep discounts by creating a custom coupon to hand out. There are five different types, ensuring you can keep changing it up and keeping things relevant.
The reason most photography businesses don't survive is because their owners didn't properly calculate their costs. And as the old adage goes, time is money. Don't forget that your time and expertise are more precious than replaceable objects like paper and gear; you can hire assistants, but they aren't you.
Here are our suggested guidelines for calculating your costs:
Don't be afraid to charge a fair price for your work. By understanding your costs and charging more, you're sending a stronger message to your clients and ensuring they value you, too.
If you're already in business and think your prices need an adjustment, remember that it's simple to adjust your pricing using SmugMug’s pricelists.
