360Photography

From “The Figital Revolution”

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ed | zawadzki

I know what you are thinking — this snoot looks a little familiar, perhaps?

Well, it is — and it isn’t.

Actually, better lemme explain.
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Okay, long story short — and without going into too much detail:

Honl creates a line of snoots and gobos. Sells them independently. Signs with ExpoImaging as distributors. A falling out occurs. Honl back to independent. ExpoImaging releases new line of Rogue FlashBenders.

So now you know some backstory. And yeah, there is a certain level of familiarity involved. But they are different enough to make them of interest, so here goes.

Mounting Tension

There are a few differences between the Rogue FlashBenders and the Honl stuff. But for me the special sauce is in the way they designed their mounting system.

The speed strap is elasticized, and built into the snoot itself. It attaches with a nice (and consistent) amount of tension. The edges of the snoot attach with velcro, like so:

Advantages: Quick mounting, and the strap is always with the mod.

Disadvantages: You’re essentially gonna pay for a strap with each mod. Whereas you might be able to get by with, say, four mods and two straps otherwise.

Horses for courses. And depending on what configuration you end up with, one system might be priced better for you than the other.

One area in which Honl snoots do best the Rogues is in reversibility. Being able to choose which surface you want on the inside of a snoot means that you can alter the internal reflectance of the snoot — and thus the quickness of the fall-off at the edge of the beam.

Since the FlashBenders have a white interior, you are always going to get a wide feather to the edge of the snoot’s beam. You can see it what I am talking about in the photo directly above.

I make my homemade cardboard snoots reversible from end to end (black interiors one end, white on the other) just for that reason.

Get Bent

Conversely, the FlashBenders do add a feature over the Honl models in that they have an internal set of thick, diagonal wires. This allows a kind of “twisty-tie” capability in that you can lock it into just about any shape you want if using it as a bounce card.

Personally, I do very little (if any) bounce card-type lighting. But I know a number of you do shoot that way (receptions, parties, etc.) and it would seem to be more versatile for those folks.

The wires do add weight. Not an issue for just one or two units, but if you have a stack you could tell. Feels kinda like one of the X-Ray proof film bags back in the day. (They were, of course only X-ray proof until the opaque image they gave on the machine caused the operator to crank the volume up until your film glowed in the dark.)

There is a large and small version of the snoot / bouncer / bendy thing. There is also a straight bounce card/gobo version, which does have a black insert or a white backing for versatility.

More info / prices, etc., at ExpoImaging.

Strobist

Today, pro photographer and fellow Photocrati contributor Steve Buchanan offers some advice on marketing plans for your photography business. Steve is a commercial photographer in Maryland. His work can be seen at www.buchanan-studios.com.

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When is the last time you updated your marketing plan?

This is of course assuming you have a marketing plan. If you do – good for you. If not – get on it. I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as a model of small business marketing. I have definitely made my share of mistakes (and will hopefully continue to do so) but I have invested a lot of effort, time and even some money into learning about what works and what doesn’t.

I’m not here to tell you what will work for you and what won’t because those will be different for each photographer. Your particular market, the type of work you do and your geographic location all come into play when determining the right mix. The point I want to make is that all successful marketing campaigns have a few things in common.

1. They are planned and executed according to a plan. Failing to plan is the biggest single error photographers when it comes to marketing.

2. They are executed as campaigns – not discreet events. I’m regularly amazed at how many photographers try a marketing technique, don’t see results and abandon it relatively quickly.

3. They are consistent with the core values of the business.

Whether you shoot commercial or retail work, people, food, or weddings – you’ve got to market yourself in order to bring in new business. As of this writing the international economy, well, sucks. Things are looking better now than they have for a while but they’re still way down.  In times like these it’s easy to pull back on marketing expenses, after all, if the money’s not coming in, you can’t put it out again. While I’m not indifferent to the plight of small business owners, and I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to pay for and ad before their mortgage, cutting marketing budgets and efforts right now is a big mistake. Look at it this way. If you have a 10% market share of a million dollar market, you have sales of 0,000. If that market shrinks to 0,000 you need to increase your market share from 10% to 12.5% just to hold steady. That’s certainly not possible without marketing.

Writing a marketing plan is not an easy task and brining in outside professional help can be great. A marketing consultant can bring their expertise to yours and help you drill down through your business data. In the event you’re not able to afford or find a good marketing consultant there are a plethora of books and internet tutorials on writing marketing plans. Ask 100 different marketing experts how to write a marketing plan and you’ll get 100 different answers – but the basic concepts are the same.

1.  Establish your goals – these should be solid, measurable goals, ie increase sales to 0,000 or shoot 47 weddings this year.

2.  Establish a budget – usually a percentage of your monetary goal.  It will be different depending on your particular area of expertise, geographic area and your customer base. My personal marketing budget is 7 percent of intended sales for this year.

3.  Establish methods to reach your goals.  This is the meat of the plan and requires the most research. This includes the tools you’ll use as well as a schedule.

4.  Establish systems and methods to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

I use a program on my Mac called Omni Outliner to keep track of my efforts. This program is great because I can essentially create an outline very easily add sub headings and break down larger tasks into smaller discreet tasks.  How do you eat and elephant?  One bite a time.

Of course writing the marketing plan is not enough, one must follow and execute it.  But this is the beauty of the plan. This business is usually very cyclical and inconsistent. With a well written plan and schedule in hand you can best utilize your down time.  If this week is slow get your newsletter articles written, start the printing on your postcards, shoot for your portfolio.  In other words, use your downtime and check those things off of your list.

DSLRBLOG – Photography Business Blog

A suburban community nestled between Baltimore and Washington DC, Howard County is not exactly known for its exotic location backdrops for shoots. But if you are a little creative, you can usually scrounge something up.

Such was the case for a recent HCAC shoot of classical guitarist Mark Edwards, for which we borrowed access to the courtyard of the Franciscan Friars in Ellicott City, MD.
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The Friars are caretakers of an actual relic — AKA, a part of a human body — a practice which is common in Europe but much less so in the United States. The Franciscan Friars’ Shrine of St. Anthony houses a relic from the saint of the same name.

The relic looks about as you would expect a centuries-old piece of human flesh to look, but the building itself is beautiful. It was designed after a similar structure in Assisi, Italy and is a great location, considering the relative homogeneity of the surrounding areas.

My standard M.O. for getting access to a neat area for a shoot is to call well in advance, compliment the heck out of the location, and be very flexible and deferential to their schedule.

I generally do not promise so beforehand, but afterwards I almost always email some images of the location itself and give the owners the rights to use them on the website, etc.

Some will chafe at the fact that I am giving away the use of photos, but I am also getting a great location for free. It’s a win/win, as we are both essentially getting something for next to nothing.

It’s also great karma. Thinking every transaction has to be of the monetary kind — not-so-great karma.

Expose for The Sky, Light for The Subject

For the shot at top I completely underexposed the shaded, interior hallway around Mark, dropping the exposure to just below that of the full-daylight sky and sunlit background.

That means going to a 250th of a second shutter speed right off the bat, to give myself a friendly aperture against which to light. The shutter speed gives you the aperture (adjust your aperture until you get the background tones you want). Then you match that exposure with your flash and you are good to go.

For these photos I was using one light — a Profoto B600 battery-powered flash in a Paul Buff PLM. I love the 64″ version. I cannot imagine the big one, as the middle-sized one I use is humongous.

It is similar in theory to the 60″ Photek Softlighter II (which I used here) but significantly more efficient due to its parabolic design.

Both of those light mods offer wonderful value for money — truly a poor man’s Octa, IMO. They both have some advantages over the other, but for less than 0 it is hard to go wrong either way. I am using both of them quite a bit lately, and hope to have a good comparison post up before long.

Give Yourself an Edge

So, why even use a PLM or Softlighter? Why not just a Zack Arias Special 60″ umbrella?

Simple — I love what that optional front panel does for me. It gives me a light source that has a flat front, and that means it has an edge you can feather.

Sometimes you want a big, bulbous light source to flood the area. And for that an umbrella is great. But the PLM, for instance can give you a beautiful, efficient, soft light source with an edge that you can use.

Take this shot, for example. See how the light falls off as it heads up the wall? That makes Mark pop a little more, and it is very difficult to do with an umbrella. You could flag it, I guess. But that would involve another stand, a big gobo and some clamps.

The outcropping on the wall also falls off a little differently than does the recessed wall in the back. I like that variety and texture.

Here is a side view of the light, and you can really see how the light falls off at the edges with the PLM/front diffusor combo.

For reference, Mark would be at the outcropping portion of the wall at left, and I would be shooting from camera right.

I nearly always shoot setup shots, and I usually learn something new from them. (And yes, I did use that gorgeous hallway in some of the other shots.)

In this case, you can see the hard tilt I have applied to the PLM. It’s such a big light source that I still get a nice wrap on the vertical axis on Mark, but I have a nice fall-off edge against which to work, too.

In this setup shot you can see an even harder vertical fall-off on the camera right side than the one on the left. The light is actually pointed away from the wall, but is still hitting near the bottom. And you can really see the edge happening as it goes up.

The other thing you can see is how cool it looks to drop a big light source into the middle of a frame. Say you were shooting a photo from the point of view of this setup shot, looking back into the hallway. The light would bathe down on the subject and fall off as it came towards you, making for a very 3-D look in that space.

If you needed detail in the shadows of the subject, it would be an easy fill with some ~2-stop down on-axis light. If you did not want to fill the walls at the edge of the frame, you could flag the fill light on the sides or use a gridded, on-camera flash to fill.

You may remember Mark from a previous post in which we blew out the background with a little high-speed, focal plane sync. That photo (here) was shot at this exact location and direction, yet looks totally different because the shallow depth of field melts the background detail away.

But we spent most of the time working with that big, 64-inch PLM. Paul Buff is still trying to keep up with demand — and with good reason. They are efficient, gorgeous and amazing value for .90, including the front diffusor.

Strobist