Not every picture can be taken during the “golden hours” for photography.  That’s basically an hour to three after sunrise and an hour or two before sunset.  Sometimes you might be with your kids at the Mill Creek Streamway outside of Kansas City and you just want to have a little fun with your camera.  Well, like the pictures below.

This was a horrible time for great portraits.  The sun was directly overhead and streaming through leaves and bridges and well, creating all kinds of bright light mixed with dark shadows.

How To Make This Picture
I took out my trusty Canon 5D Mark II (trust me, any Rebel or entry level Nikon could have done this as well) and I had my daughter pose at the edge of a shadowy area with the sun coming over her back shoulder.  See that way her hair is highlighted but her face is not.  Notice how bright the background is and how much darker her face is.  That’s a metering problem for your camera.

The best way around this is to zoom right in on her face and fill the whole frame with her face and focus.  Notice the exposure given in the bottom of your viewfinder.  In this case I was at ISO 500 (I wanted the background to be blown out to highlight her) and my camera’s meter said the exposure should be 1/400 at 4.0.  (I was using 4.0 because I wanted a limited depth of field.)  So I backed up a bit, turned my camera’s control dial to M for manual and then set the controls to 1/400 and 4.0.   Now no matter what the camera wanted to expose for with all that extra light coming in it would expose perfectly for her face.

Then I just took the pictures and encouraged her to be who she is…which is a goof.

To get better exposures for portraits outdoors in the middle of the day all you really need is a proper exposure reading for the most important part…in this case the face.  So get real close, see what the camera’s meter says and then adjust your camera manually.  It’s really not that difficult.  Try it and have some fun.  In the future we’ll talk about adding a little flash if you have one with you (including your pop up flash)…but not today.

Kaw Point in Kansas City, Kansas is where the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for four days in June of 1804.  Located at the nexus of the Mighty Missouri and the very end of the Kansas River (The Kaw) the view of downtown Kansas City, Missouri can be breathtaking.

This photo was made in April of 2013. The sky was very overcast and as darkness falls over the area it’s not the most comfortable park to be in without a number of people.  But during the day you can explore the views and imagine what the travelers with Lewis and Clark must of seen and imagined. While taking the picture my daughter and I even saw a beaver swimming up the Kaw.  I didn’t even know the Kansas River still had beaver.

This photo is for sale at: PhotoKansas Stock

How I Made This Picture
Making a picture like this, for me, is a several step process.  It begins with getting a great image with proper framing and proper exposure.  I simply used a telephoto lens to spot meter on the skyline.  I then set those meter readings in to the Manual setting on my camera at 800 ISO.  Setting my camera on a tripod was a must.  Then I set my auto bracketing for +2 / -2 and then took the three exposures.  I repeated this process about 4 times.  The first time was about 15 minutes before sunset.  Then about 5 minutes before sunset, 5 minutes after sunset and then 15 minutes after sunset.  (Naturally, I adjusted the meter readings for each sequence.)   This was the 5 minutes after sunset image.

I like it so much better than the other  images because I like the blue.  The cloud cover made for lousy daytime pictures (no drama in the sky) but added a nice glow to this picture, don’t you think?

Since I took these images in .RAW (a HUGE tip) I then took my favorite exposure, the one I actually set in Manual, and then post processed using Photoshop CS3.  In RAW I made three images using the same frame.

• I added some contrast and saturation to fit my taste and slightly brightened and then moved that image to Photoshop.
• From there I brightened even a little more and moved that image to PS.
• And lastly, I darkened quite a bit and moved that image to PS.

In Photoshop I then used layer masks to blend in what I liked and as far as highlights and shadows.  It’s more art than photography at that point.  But these are not complicated PS techniques and really shouldn’t scare any amateur photographer wanting to make an image like this.

Of course, this may be a little “over processed” for your tastes or maybe, just maybe, not quite enough.  That’s the beauty of photography.  Get 100 pros together and they’ll have pretty close to 100 different opinions.  Make what you like and customers will follow.  Not all.  But enough to make a living if that is what you desire.

I used my Canon 5D Mark II

Advice To Young Would Be Photographers
I had a high school student in here the other day who was asking me for advice as to how to become a professional photographer and what classes she should take.  She was planning on attending a four year state college here in the middle of the country.  My advice?  Get your degree in business and either a minor or secondary degree in photography.  So it takes you an extra year.  That’s fine.

But business needs to come first.  Listen, if you are wanting to become a professional photographer you are going to need business skills.  Accounting.  Managing.  Leading.  Marketing.  Leasing.  And it doesn’t end there.

You will be surprised a a pro shooter how little time you actually spend behind the camera.

Basic Photography Tips

• Never stop marketing.
• Facebook is your friend.  Share your client’s photos.  I believe word-0f-mouth is worth more than a high dollar charge for putting the pictures on their Facebook page.
• Charge a fair price for your customer…and you.  More about pricing in the future.
• Get good equipment as you can pay for it.
• Don’t go in to debt.  There is a debt threshold you should not pass to make sure you are not giving up your future.

Those are just a few basic tips.

Full Disclaimer
I never graduated from college and have never taken formal photography classes.  But I have developed a six figure photography income from never giving up and always being hungry to learn.

But here is a preview tip….

Take an extra battery!!!

This photo taken with my Samsung Galaxy S II with only slight editing.

ISO.

ISO is your camera’s film speed.  In other words, it’s the sensitivity to light setting on your camera.  A low ISO needs more light to expose the image properly than a high ISO.  Find the ISO setting on your camera.  It probably has a range of somewhere between 100 and 3200.  On really good (expensive) cameras it goes much higher.   The higher the ISO setting the less light the camera needs to make a proper exposure.

But there is a trade-off….especially in the lower end cameras.  The higher the ISO the lower the quality of the image.  Not a big deal or even noticeable on a small computer screen.  But when you print  you will notice a big difference in the quality.  The picture can take on “noise” and look “grainy”.  A portrait photographer, especially when using studio lights, will usually use the 100, 200 or in a pinch the 400 ISO setting on his/her camera.  Because they need high quality to sell to their clients.  But a sports photographer isn’t ever going to get to use 100 ISO when shooting indoor action sports.  Simply not possible.

Look at the picture of my daughter playing basketball this past Saturday.  She plays Special Olympics basketball and was bringing the ball down the court at a pretty good clip. Knowing that motion freezes at about a shutter speed of about 250 I set my aperture at 4.0 (the largest setting I had on my lens that I brought) and then just raised my ISO until I was getting about 1/250 of a second on the shutter speed with the available light.  In this case I was using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR Camera with EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM Lens.  The camera can go up to 6400 ISO.  But I seldom like to max out the ISO.  And while I didn’t keep all the EXIF data of my photos I can tell you I shot most of the game at 5000 ISO.

That’s a pretty high ISO.  Most entry level consumer digital SLR’s don’t go much past 3200…or sometimes even 1600.  So you can begin to see how difficult it can be to take good action shots of indoor sports without the better equipment.

Life isn’t fair.  I get it. 

Can you use motion blur to make better pictures?  Sure.

Look at the picture above.  Again, I cannot tell you the exacts because I’m just not Type A enough to always keep the exact data.  But my memory tells me most of these pictures of a local Pinewood Derby were shot at 2500 ISO.  Again, 4.0 was the f-stop.  Here I was looking to blur the cars while freezing the kids.  So I raised my ISO until I got to a shutter speed of about 90.  Sometimes I remember it was 125, depending.

Yes, I could have raised my ISO high enough to get to 1/250 or even 1/400 of a second but those pictures are boring.  I remember testing it and it just looked like the 4 cars had stopped on the track.

The point I’m trying to make is that motion blur in sports photography can be acceptable, even desirable for certain pictures.  So if your camera cannot quite freeze the action, how can you make the action part of the story?  There is always a way.  You just have to get up from your seat and figure it out by looking at the action from all angles.

Writing about indoor sports photography can be an endless subject.  Look for me to stay with this theme for a few more days.  I can think of two topics I’d like to go in to in more depth right now;

1. How To Use Flash For Indoor Sports Photography
2. How Your Angle Minimizes Motion Blur When Photographing Action

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 Thinking about making photography a profession?

Facebook is perfect for photographers.  I like it better than twitter or any of the other social media sites.  Wondering how I use Facebook to market my photography?  Glad you asked.  It’s really not all that complicated.  It just takes diligence, structured creativity and persistence.  All marketing takes persistence.

Paying for Advertising on Facebook
I seldom pay for advertising on Facebook.  That’s not say that I haven’t and that I won’t.  I just don’t believe it’s consistently necessary.  Facebook is visual.  Photography is visual.  It’s the perfect match.  The really great thing about advertising on Facebook is that it can be extremely targeted.  Even more so than on Google.  (I prefer Google for pay-for click advertising, by the way.)

If you are just getting started with your photography business or are currently strapped for marketing cash, I would suggest not buying the advertising on Facebook just yet.

Linking or Posting…or Both?
I see a lot of Facebook business pages that do a lot of posting and almost no linking.   I see just the opposite, too.  I find that Facebook is the perfect compliment to my web/blog site and Facebook stands alone well, as well.  Using a website in concert with your facebook page will accomplish far more than twice as much.  Trust me.   On our Portraits Today Studios facebook page you will see we do both.  See the snapshot below.

As a matter of marketing policy we try to post at least one picture and one link back to our website each day.  I like one of our posts to be before noon and the other in the late afternoon.  And every once in a while I’ll try to make a post in the later evening, say around 8:00 or 9:00 pm to catch an entirely different crowd.

Posting Pictures
I know many photographers go nuts at the idea of allowing a picture of theirs to be used without additional compensation.  But we here at PTS like to post one (or two or three) of a customer’s photos so that they will feel special, get excited, tag their photos (which helps them to remember us!) and to share their experience with their friends.  Now, the pictures are always ones they have already paid for.  All we do is reduce them in size and add our advertising watermark so that potential customers will know who we are.  Last month in January we had 4 new customers come in to our studios because of the pictures they saw on Facebook.  Think about that.  In a slow month by simply taking a few extra minutes after a shoot to post a few pictures we earned eternal goodwill and 4 new customers!

Sharing Links
Sharing links back to our website helps to keep our website hits up.  Some people bookmark our website.  Some people just follow us by email. And some just follow us on Facebook.  A few even watch all of’em.  Keeping your website hopping is great for a lot of reasons.  We’ll write about that more in the future.  But if you have a good looking website that is easy to navigate and sells your potential customers well, you want to keep driving people there over and over and over.

We use StatCounter to monitor our website activity.  I actually like it better than Google Analytics.  Below is a snapshot of a very recent “Came From” page.  Note the Facebook referrals!

Tidbits Here and There
The other thing to do with your Facebook page is to give yourself away.  To engage with your readers.  If they write something to you, respond!!!!  Start any conversation you can.  Note on the Facebook snapshot above that the entry regarding ISO gave a little knowledge and linked back to our website.  A little of each!  Look around our Facebook page to see some of the engaging we have done.  Be yourself and you will develop a following that appreciates you, your work and your style. 

Building Your Facebook Followers
We don’t spend too much time begging people to follow us.  Just about everything we do is a soft sell. But building your following is always crucial.  Sure, we’d like to have more followers.  Who wouldn’t?  But treating customers right is the best way to do it.  This post isn’t so much about flashy techniques to increase your followers.  It’s about marketing to the followers you have. 

Reviews
We do ask for reviews.  We ask in an email that we send out that allows people to view their pictures online.  Not everyone will, but hey, everyone is busy.  If they are following and sharing and coming in every 6 months to a year how much more can we ask them to do?  LOL.  Happily, we’ve never had a negative review on our Facebook page…or anywhere else for that matter.  But how you handle one will be crucial.  I have a colleague who had a negative review. She addressed it immediately and was polite and understanding.  I saw it live on her photography Facebook page and was impressed with how she handled it.  You know what? She had a potential customer book an appointment the next day saying how impressed she was with the way the review was handled.

In all things people, your customers, want to be treated with respect.  I firmly believe 99% of the people out there don’t mind paying a fair price for a good product.  So if you get a negative review, how would you want to be handled?

For that matter do you want to be spammed continually by the Facebook pages you “Like”?  No.  So don’t spam your followers. Show them your work.  Remind them of your website.   Ask them to join your email list.  Offer free advice on getting ready for portraits (or something).  And engage them any chance you get.  When they like you they will share you.  It’s really that simple.

1. Cash is King. – You need to know how to make money last.  Not having credit debt will keep your monthly expenses down.  Knowing that you have until 29 days past the due date to get the creditors you do have paid without having any negative credit report impact can help you to prioritize in those tough spots.  But avoid credit.  Hoard cash.  Start small and build big.  Some of each job goes to better, more professional equipment and some goes to a cash reserve.  Not trying to go all “Dave Ramsey” on you here, but I’ve done it both ways.  Cash is better than credit.  Every time.
2. You don’t need professional equipment. – You can put up with the snickers from the pro photographer snobs.  Don’t buy the $4,900 camera body when the $900 body will let you do 90% of what you want to do until you’ve saved enough cash to get that better camera body later.  But I would get professional glass as soon as I could afford it with cash.  The Canon L lenses are just killer and noticeably better.  Better glass before better camera body.  Cash before both!
3. You DO NEED two cameras! – Don’t get caught at [private]a job with a camera malfunction that stops your business in it’s tracks.  Word will spread fast.  Your confidence will be shattered. Your client will be cheated.  Again, I’d rather have two $900 Canon 60Ds than only one EOS-1D.  You’re asking for trouble!
4. Separate your money. – How can you know if you are making a profit or not if you don’t have separate accounts?  This is the most basic form of accounting.  Seriously, I was young and stupid and ran my business out of my personal account for nearly two years.  Silly!  I was stealing from my business.  This should be fairly obvious, but needs to be said over and over.
5. Marketing isn’t just necessary, it’s EVERYTHING! – I cannot count high enough to list the fantastic photographers out there whose businesses have crashed and burned because no one knew who they were or that they even existed.  A mediocre to good photographer can out-earn the best artist in your city if you market, market and market some more.  Make sure people know you are out there.  Never stop.  Figure out some way to spend a minimum of 5% of your earnings on marketing every month.  10% would be better.
6. Know YOUR style. – You never stop developing and morphing your style.  That’s part of being a professional photographer, right?  You want to keep learning and changing, I get it.  I do.  But know who you are and what you do.  Don’t take jobs you won’t fit.  Know your style and what you can do.  Your customers will get better service and a better product.  That will make them happy.  Hopefully happy enough to talk and talk and talk about your business.

This is by no means everything you need to know to start a photography business.  We hope to teach you more here on these pages as time goes by.  And we plan on going in to great detail.

There is one thing I would tell you, however.  Sometimes you just have to go for it!  I wouldn’t violate all 6 of these rules.  But if I needed to violate one to get a second camera body on finance terms I would probably do it.  (And in fact, I have.  It was a no interest for 6  months credit card.  I just made six equal payments that got it paid off before the interest kicked in…retroactively.)    Just know that the more of these rules you violate, the more you have a Risky Business.

And that doesn’t always turn out with a Princeton education and a beautiful girl.  [/private]

The Green Box – This is the simplest setting.  The camera does everything.  Literally just about everything except aim and pull it’s own trigger.  It sets the shutter speed, the aperture and the film speed.

The “P” – Program mode.  The camera operates much the same as with the Green Box.  The main difference is you get to set the ISO (film speed).

Av – On the Canon the Aperture priority is “Av” and on Nikon and most other cameras it’s just simply the “A”.  To learn more about what the Aperture priority can do for you just follow this:  Aperture Controls Depth of Field.  When you can learn to control depth of field you can really take control of what your pictures will look like…before you hit the shutter.

Tv – On the Canon this is the Shutter priority.  Why?  I really don’t have any idea.  Don’t really even care.    But I can tell you that on most other cameras the shutter priority is “S”, which makes a lot more sense.  Shutter priority is important when you are consciously trying to freeze or blur motion.

A quick note about the aperture priority and shutter priority settings.  When you set one, the camera automatically sets the other to assure proper exposure.  In other words, if you set the aperture priority to f8.0 to have a pretty deep depth of field the camera will measure the light, taking into account the f8.0 and ISO, and then set the shutter priority.

M – Manual mode.  You have complete control over the shutter speed and aperture.  Now, that doesn’t mean the pictures will come out correctly unless you’ve used a light meter to be sure your settings are correct.  We use the “M” mode in our studios since we can control the light output to match our needs.

As a matter of discussion, when we’re in our studios we shoot nearly exclusively on the “M” mode.  But when I walk out the door with my camera to take pictures professionally or otherwise, I use the aperture priority at least 90% of the time.  When I control depth of field I control how a picture will look.

Hope that helps.

I was re-reading Truett Cathy’s How Did You Do It, Truett?  and I thought I would share with you his Eleven Do’s and Don’ts of Proven Success.

1. Don’t be burdened with personal debt.
   • Car payment
   • House payment
   • Establish a nest egg
   • Live simple
2. Start early as a teenager.  Concentrate on what brings you happiness in your career. Have a tremendous “want to” – determination.
3. Sacrifice material things.  Reward yourself later.
4. Shortcut to success:  Observe what is working in the lives of others.  Teenagers, observe mature individuals.
5. Don’t try to please all people.
6. Set priorities in the property order.
7. Expand cautiously. Grow your business cautiously.
8. Franchising may or may not be good for your particular business.  Use it cautiously.
9. Be prepared for disappointments.  Many successful individuals experience failure.
10. Be kind to people.  Courtesy is very cheap but brings great dividends.
11. Invite God to be involved in every decision.  (abbreviated)

I’m a huge believer in following successful people’s business patterns.  I encourage you to read and read and read and to look for the commonalities and how those principles could be weaved in to your business practices.  Building a photography business, after all, is at it’s core a business.  It’s a fun and great business.  But it is a business.

One of the first things you need to do, however, is to make sure your camera bag has some basic necessities.  No, your sales person wasn’t just trying to run up your ticket price.   They were trying to save you from yourself! 

Lowepro Edit 110 Camcorder and Camera Bag

Lowepro Slingshot 200 All Weather Backpack (Black)

An Extra Battery – No matter what your camera bag should always have an extra battery, fully charged.  Batteries can flake out at any time.  And the more flash you use or the more focusing you have to do the quicker that battery will wear out.  Do yourself a favor and put one in your bag.  Charger, too, if you will be traveling.

An Extra Memory Card – We love SanDisk memory cards here at Populist Photography.  No matter how big of a memory card you have you’ll want to have a couple.  You will always take more pictures than you had planned with a digital camera.  It’s just so easy.  And did you know cards can go bad?  They can corrupt or worse, just quit working at any time.  Have an extra card.  I guarantee within 6 months you’ll be glad you did.

SanDisk 8GB Extreme SDHC Class 10 High Performance Memory Card (SDSDX3-008G-P31)

SanDisk 16GB 60MB/s Extreme Compact Flash Card SDCFX-016G-A61 (US Retail Package)

UV Filter – Okay, so this isn’t for the bag as much as it is the camera’s lens.  But you need a UV filter for your lens for protection.  The filter will keep dust and minor (or worse) scratches away from our lens.  I’ve even dropped my camera and the filter shattered but the lens was protected!!!!   To replace the filter was about $50.00.  To replace the professional lens?  Oy.

Lens Cleaning Cloth – You need something to clean your lens (or lens filter) with that won’t smudge or scratch the glass.  It’s just a few bucks.

For my personal bag I also like to keep a few cards and a pen handy as well as a my user’s manual that came with the camera.  You never know when you might need to know something unusual pretty quickly.  Anything else you can think of?