Strictly Business Blog

Your website is your most important marketing tool. Are you investing in it (both in money and thought) to make it the best it can possibly be? Too often photographers try to cut corners and save money on their sites, but if you have to limit your budget, this is not the place to trim. While simple and clean websites are preferred by buyers of all stripes (stock or assignment) that kind of design sensibility…

I decided to do my first website partly because my studio manager at the time was getting a bit bored, and I thought doing it might engage him. So I said, “Let’s do a website.” He said, “Great! …What’s a website?” And I said, “I don’t know.” Back then no one really knew. There was no way everyone did it, because pretty much no one had done it. So we had to think about what we wanted…

If your studio were to catch fire right now, would your digital photos be safe? Many photographers make the mistake of backing up to two separate hard drives, only to leave both hard drives sitting on their desk. This protects against a hard drive failure, but does nothing to protect against fire, flood or theft. To ensure you’re adequately protected, store your files in at least two physical locations. One option is to rotate a…

Have you ever seen a vertical TV?  I haven’t, but I wonder with the hybrid cameras that look like still cameras and shoot video, will we all be turning our TV’s on end? The point is that just because the camera shoots video, doesn’t mean the operator will be thinking like a video shooter.  As one who still shoots in both mediums – still photography and video – I have to turn a switch in…

After shooting digitally for many years, many photographers have amassed prodigious collections of digital photos, often surpassing 100,000 or 200,000 images. These photographers now find themselves struggling to organize, manage and backup this immense image library effectively. Unless you’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in an enterprise-level asset management system and server system, you’re likely to find any database program slow, unwieldy and crash-prone. All-in-one applications like Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture begin to…

If you’re looking for a way to produce a simple audio slide show (stills combined with either music or an ambient sound/interview track) that is fairly straightforward and does not require extensive training, look into a program called SoundSlides.  Labeling itself as “Ridiculously Simple Storytelling,” it is just that.  I have been producing multimedia for three years now, and for the first two and a half I produced everything in SoundSlides.  With it I was…