Submissions are still being accepted for the Sony World Photographer Awards, but with competition deadlines fast approaching the organization has just released a selection of preliminary ‘submission highlights’ for a little inspiration. See gallery
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Starting a photography business can be a very exciting yet scary thing. It’s exciting to share your talents with others, yet the business can be overwhelming!
By Sebastien Wiertz
If you’re at all like me when I started a photography business, you are worried that you won’t make any money. Taking pictures was so much fun, but would anyone pay for my work? With a lot of blind faith I jumped in and began working towards my dream. For me that meant many late nights and long weekends, shooting as much as I could and learning as I went along. Through years of growth, mistakes, and many successes, I learned so many things to share with you and help you to start your own business successfully.
Every business needs a solid foundation, so start there. Once you’ve got your feet off the ground, the business triangle will help you build a strong company.
Depending on where you live, you will need to be legally set up for business. Check with your city, town, state or province to find out what steps you need to take to be an official business. Learn if you need to pay sales tax. Work with a professional that can help you, like an accountant or attorney.
Once you are set up legally, you can also work through this checklist to get you started:
After you’ve set up your company, the business triangle is your next step. This business triangle was designed to help you get organized as you start and maintain a photography business. Each of the points represents a different area of your business. If you are weaker in one area, then your business (and the triangle) is in jeopardy of failing. Evaluate yourself with each point to see where your business needs to improve to be stronger. You can use a rating system of one through 10.
The first part of the business triangle is the center or the core. Like the core of the human body is important for wellness and function, the core of the business triangle (confidence) is important to your business.
Having confidence will help propel you forward on your journey. It can help you turn your stumbling blocks into stepping stones, and take you from one level to the next. If you feel that you’re confidence could use a boost, try a few of these tips.
The next part of the business triangle is products. This includes any business products such as your images and the items you sell to your clients, like prints or canvases.
Your images are your number one form of marketing. The better they are, the more clients will want them. This might mean taking classes or workshops and participating in forums to continually get better. Never stop improving your skills.
In addition to improving your photography skills, you also need to provide great products for your clients. Many clients want the digital files which are easy to provide and less hassle. However, there are some benefits to selling prints. One is that you have an opportunity to increase your overall sales. Also, having the actual prints in your client’s home can be great word of mouth marketing. Many photographers today are offering both prints and digital files.
Working in the products category of the business triangle also includes figuring out how to price your work. You want to take into consideration the following:
Carefully analyze each of these categories to come up with a solid pricing structure that will work for you.
Next on the business triangle is marketing. Even if you live in a saturated market, if you get your name and your work out there, you will find there is still a need for your photography.
There are three areas of marketing that you will want to focus on with your business; word of mouth, online and local marketing.
The best form of marketing is word of mouth. Because getting photographs taken is so personal, clients will not likely hire just anyone. Instead, they will hire someone who has been recommended by a friend, or someone with an established reputation. These recommendations are earned by creating experiences for your customers that are above and beyond what other photographers are doing.
The next form of marketing is online. In today’s world you need to have a strong online presence. Your clients will be looking for you through a website, blog, and social media. Make sure you are there so they can find you.
Getting into your local community is the last form of marketing. This can be one of the most rewarding ways to build your business. Look for companies in your area that you can partner with to help build both of your businesses. You can partner with any type of business; from dairy farms, to clothing boutiques, or real estate offices. Almost every company needs pictures for their marketing and they have clients that need you.
The last part of the business triangle is customer service. Creating excellent customer service is the best way to keep your clients around year after year.
The most important thing to remember when building and growing a business is to make your customers feel special. How your clients feel when they leave you will determine how much they will tell their friends and family about you. Those family and friends are tomorrow’s clients!
Use the following ideas to create a memorable experience for your clients that will keep them coming back for years to come:
One of my favorite sayings is: “luck favors the prepared”. Although it may seem scary to start a photography business, break down your tasks of getting set up legally, then follow the business triangle to continue to build a strong a solid business.
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The post The Foundations of Starting a Photography Business by Amy Fraughton appeared first on Digital Photography School.
This post is by Ed Verosky whose new Macro Photography eBook is 53% off today only.
Close-up and macro photography continue to be popular with shooters of all levels. Practical applications include product detail shots, food photography, and technical illustration (see image below). But the fun and artistic motivations are undeniable; flowers, insects, creative abstract, and the excitement of discovering the hidden worlds found in everyday objects.
If you’ve been interested in doing some close-up and macro work, but don’t quite know how to get started, this article will show you how, without blowing your budget. Macro, in particular, is often accomplished with high-end specialty lenses and equipment, but there are ways to take impressive close-up and macro shots with little more than the gear you already have.
Food and recipe images are featured in editorial as well as event photography. Here, a close-up shot of this delicious-looking cupcake provides context for the macro shot that follows. This shows how the power of close-up and macro can draw the viewer in and capture the imagination.
Here are three of my favorite low-cost techniques detailed in my new eBook, Introduction to Close-Up & Macro Photography:
If you’d like to get started right away, this technique works great and requires no extra investment. All you need is a camera that uses interchangeable lenses (most DSLRs do). Just remove the lens from the camera and hold it backward against the lens mount to get a high degree of magnification. Any lens will do, but a normal lens, or the lens that came with your camera will probably work best (e.g. 50mm or the 18-55mm kit lens).
Although this is an effective solution, you should be aware that your camera and lens won’t be able to communicate with each other when using this technique. That means no f-stop adjustments or automatic focusing. Fortunately, focusing won’t be a problem using this technique, and you can preset your lens to a specific f-stop using the aperture-locking trick I’ll detail below.
Here are the steps for using this technique:
An 18-55mm lens held backward onto the camera’s lens mount.
You can also use an adapter called a reverse ring (or reversing ring) which will allow you to actually mount your lens onto your camera in the backward position. This inexpensive gadget (see image below) is made to screw onto the front of your lens, similar to a lens filter. The other side of the reversing ring fits onto your camera’s lens mount. Make sure to get a reversing ring that not only matches the filter size (thread diameter) of your lens, but also matches the lens mount of the type of camera you’re using.
Reverse (reversing) ring fits onto the front of this 18-55mm lens via the lens filter thread.
Whether you’re using the handheld reverse lens technique, or a reversing ring adapter, you can set a specific f-stop, even though your lens is not electronically coupled to your camera. This technique may not work with your particular camera and lens combination, but it works with all of the DSLRs that I’ve used:
Aperture locked-in at f/16 on this 85mm lens.
Other ways to get good close-up and macro shots on a budget include the use of lens coupling rings, diopters, and extension tubes. Here’s an overview:
A variation on the reverse lens technique is to use two lenses, connected front-to-front using another type of adapter called a coupling ring (below). In this case, one of the lenses is mounted to your camera normally, while the other is in the reverse orientation. The coupling ring features threading on both sides and fits on to the front of both lenses at the same time via the filter threads. Because coupling rings generally feature the same thread diameter on each side, the lenses you use with it will have to have the same filter diameter, or you’ll have to attach a step-up or step-down adapter to one or both lenses.
Coupling Ring: (A) 58mm diameter coupling ring. (B) Two lenses connected via the coupling ring. Either lens can be mounted to the camera.
Be aware that a heavy lens coupled to a camera-mounted lighter (or less solidly built) lens can result in damage to one or both lenses because of the weight and stress placed on their front ends. Also, your camera-mounted lens will maintain the electronic contact with your camera, but the reverse-coupled lens will not, so you’ll have nearly the same limitations as you would with a single reversed lens.
One of the easiest ways to magnify your subject is with a simple filter-like attachment called a diopter (below). You can think of a diopter as a magnifying glass for your lens. They’re very easy to use; just screw one or more diopters onto your lens just like you would with any lens filter. An inexpensive set of diopters (often available for under $ 15) will give you several magnification levels to choose from. You’ll have to move in very close to your subject to achieve focus, and optical quality won’t always be as good as some of the other options presented here, but you might be very pleased with the results. Because they don’t cost much, are easy to use, and take up very little room in your camera bag, you might consider a set. Make sure to purchase diopters that fit the filter thread diameter of the lens you’ll be using them with.
Diopters: (A) This set of Vivitar diopters was purchased for under $ 15. (B) The “10X Macro” diopter mounts just like a lens filter onto this 18-55mm kit lens.
Finally, my favorite solution for macro on a budget; extension tubes. Your lens mounts to one end of an extension tube, while the other end of the tube mounts directly to your camera’s lens mount. Extension tubes effectively increase the focal length of your lens without adding any glass elements that might reduce optical quality. By doing so, your lens will be able to focus on small objects, at very close distances.
While a good set of extension tubes is going to cost significantly more than a cheap set of diopters, it’s still a bargain compared to an actual macro lens. Some sets feature manufacturer-specific electronic connectors that allow the camera and lens to communicate normally; this allows for aperture and focus control. Plus, your single set of extension tubes will work with all of your lenses; there’s no need for rings or adapters of different sizes for each lens diameter. Extension tubes can be purchased as a set with different lengths for varying degrees of magnification. The tubes can also be combined (stacked) for increased magnification as shown below.
Extension Tubes: (A) Three extension tubes (13mm, 21mm, and 31mm) stacked onto an 18-55mm lens. (B) Set of extension tubes. (C) 50mm lens mounted onto all three extension tubes which are mounted onto a DSLR.
The combination of colors, detail and depth-of-field of this photo, featuring a pollen covered anther of a flower, could have only been captured through macro photography. Extreme close-up and macro give you the opportunity to find amazing beauty in places your eyes might otherwise miss.
In this article, I’ve only provided a small sampling of the many ways to achieve quality close-up and macro images. I encourage you to explore the possibilities using one or more of these techniques, and to consider learning about other types of macro gear and lenses. The world of close-up and macro just might become your next photography obsession!
Get more great Macro Photography Tips from Ed by picking his new Close Up and Macro photography eBook with a 53% discount – today only.
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In an earlier post I shared a set of some images of street art, also often referred to as graffiti.
If you live an urban area or any city, than likely you have some of this type of art nearby. Graffiti artists range from ones who just seems to do vandalism, to other who are highly talented and skilled artists.
Your job in this week’s photograph challenge is to seek out some street art in your area and photograph it in a manner fitting for the artwork. That could mean some grungy post-processing, a funky filter over the lens, or whatever creative idea you can come up with.
Let’s see a few more examples of graffiti street art:
By Rob Schofield
By Pedro Ribeiro Simões
By Brent Pearson
By Charlón
By Jason Taellious
Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge. Sometimes it takes a while for an image to appear so be patient and try not to post the same image twice.
By Professor Bop
By Brent Pearson
By mamasuco ……un peu absent
By Keoni Cabral
By badjonni
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The post Weekly Photography Challenge – Graffiti Street Art by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.
It’s that time of year where we at dPS kick off our annual 12 days of Christmas campaign!
This is the fifth time we’ve run this and this year we’ve got our biggest deals yet!
Here’s how it works.
Every day between now and Christmas we have put together a fantastic deal on some photography training products.
In the coming 12 days you’ll see some of our own dPS eBooks at discounts we’ve never offered before as well as some deals from other photography sites that we’ve negotiated on your behalf.
Deals this year are as high as 88% off.
Each deal only lasts for 24 hours so you’ll need to be quick!
To get notified of each deal as soon as it goes live simply subscribe via email here:
Don’t worry we keep your email completely private and you can unsubscribe at any point if you find the deals are too many!
We’ll also be updating the deals here on the blog and on our Facebook page.
Our first deal goes out to those who are subscribed in the next 24 hours so keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget you only get 24 hours to grab each one!
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“Success is a poor teacher. We learn the most about ourselves when we fail, so don’t be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process of success. You cannot have success without failure.” – Rich Dad, Robert Kiyosaki
I was at a high-pressure shoot recently, and one of my clients was watching me make adjustments to my camera and lighting. They commented, “How do you remember all that stuff? You make it all look so effortless.”. The truth is that after thousands of photo shoots it has become second nature, but this wasn’t always the case.
I broke a wedding.
Why am I always checking and rechecking exposure? Because I broke someone’s wedding. Yep, broke it.
The wedding was ten years BD (before digital) and very early in my career. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t realize the flash tube on my external flash was only emitting about 1/4 of its power and, as a result, I underexposed all the images by three to four stops. They could not be salvaged. I only managed to get one useable frame.
At the time, I just wanted to crawl into a hole and stay there, but this nightmare scenario defined the style of fill flash lighting I still use today.
I also developed a pre-shoot protocol that ensured I would never have this kind of disaster again. I always test all my equipment before a shoot and check and recheck exposure as I’m shooting.
“Fears are nothing more than a state of mind. Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.” – Napoleon Hill
If I had not experienced this crushing blow early in my career, I might have become more slap dash as a photographer and prone to more failures, steering my career to go in another direction.
By Trevor Dennis
Why do I always use a light meter? Because I ruined the shot of my life by looking at my camera screen for the exposure and my hair light ended up being three stops over exposed. That shot should have stopped traffic. Instead, I lost a client.
Why do I back up twice while I’m shooting? Because an assistant (accidentally) dumped an entire shoot into the trash. I’m still in need of therapy over that one.
I’m proud to admit that I have failed spectacularly on countless occasions.
The aftermath was always the same. I’d have a complete meltdown and become a bit tired and emotional. I’d then spend a week at home curled up in the fetal position watching entire seasons of One Tree Hill and consuming my body weight in Nutella.
By Janine
As painful as each failure is, I learned something new each time, and I never made those mistakes again. They became burned into my brain.
“Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails toward success.” – Charles Kettering
You need to go out and fail, time and time again. Get up, cry for a bit, learn, grow, and move on.
At the time, these failures were devastating but I now know that my spectacular failures and toughest moments have been my greatest teachers and have molded me into the photographer that I am today.
I’m also proud to be part of a massive club of spectacular failures who have all gone on to achieve remarkable success.
Here are a few of my favorites:
And one of my all time stories of how failure led to success is Apple founder, Steve Jobs. He was devastated after being removed from the company he started. Years later in a commencement speech at Stanford University he reflected:
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
When he returned to Apple, he created some of the most iconic products in the world, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and he went on to become one of the richest men in the world.
“Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill
Have you experienced any spectacular failures, and what have you learned from them? What are your strategies for coping with failure? I’d love to hear from you.
Gina is the author of four dPS eBooks including:
You can buy one for $ 19.99 or grab the whole bundle for only $ 49.99 (save 38%) from any of the links above.
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The World Photography Organization has announced its judges for the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards. Photo editors from major publications around the world make up the judging committee. The competition is open to youth, amateurs and pros alike and is accepting entries until early January. The organization has also released a selection of standout submissions. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Organizers of a worldwide competition for scientific photography are calling for entries for the International Images for Science competition. Photographers are encouraged to submit visually exciting and revealing pictures of objects and concepts relating to all areas of science. The competition, which is run by the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), is free to enter, and this year will be accepting work from members and non-members alike for the first time. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Earlier I shared a set of frosty images to get you in the wintery mood.
Now it’s the time for the weekly photography challenge, so it’s your turn to get out and shoot winter. Since winter means different things and looks different depending on where in the world you live – this challenge is about winter and what it means to you.
If you’re in the northern hemisphere that might mean:
Here are some examples:
By @Doug88888
By Sharon Mollerus
By Mathias Erhart
By Samuel John
By Alexey Kljatov
By dorena-wm
By dorena-wm
If you are in the southern hemisphere or close to the equator (as I am currently writing this from warm and sunny Nicaragua where I’m living and working for two months) that might mean the beach, sand and sun.
Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge.
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About a week ago we posted the interview with the first winner of the Defrozo Photography Contest 2014. Today, we’re glad to introduce you to Kristina Zvinakeviciute, a photographer from Manchester, UK who won the Staff Pick Award in the photo contest held by Defrozo. Learn more about Kristina and her unique approach to photography inspired by the Renaissance art Continue Reading
The post Kristina Zvinakeviciute: Winnner of Defrozo Portrait Photography Contest 2014 appeared first on Photodoto.