Aspiring Photographer: Photography Advice and Inspiration

Oh No! They Didn't Like My Work!

I have talked to so many photographers who were frustrated because a session didn't go the way they wanted it to. Heck, I still stress out over lots of my sessions -- did they like their photos, or are they instead telling everyone what a lousy photographer I am? Maybe the children didn't behave, making it impossible for you to get something good. Or maybe the parents just didn't like the photos, even though you thought you did a great job. Perhaps you just didn't do your best work that day. It happens to all of us.

These experiences can sting.  They can lower our self-confidence. They can even cause us to give up on our dream to pursue photography as a profession. I have seen and heard countless photographers drive themselves crazy over one session that went wrong. They ask everyone they know -- “aren't these photographs good? What are they thinking? Why don't they like them? Don't you think they're being unreasonable?“ And most people will just respond with what you want to hear. They'll tell you the photos are great, and that the client is just difficult or picky. But I think your clients have a right to walk away with photos they love. What I'd like to see you do is to take these incidents and turn them into learning experiences.  Not everyone is going to love your work every time. In fact, not everyone is even going to like YOU every time. Our personality can't possibly resonate with every single person with whom we might do business. 

I believe that if someone tells us they don't like the work we did for them, we need to hear what they've told us and take it to heart. If you get all worked up over why someone didn't like the results from one single session, you're not giving yourself the chance to grow as a photographer and a business person. Offer to do a re-shoot at no charge. It might be inconvenient, but  it'll give you the chance to turn around a bad situation. I have read and experienced first-hand that ultimately the best clients in any business are those who complained and then had someone go above and beyond expectations to solve their problem.

Here are several ways to prevent some possible problems:

• Avoid naptime. Schedule small children at the beginning of the morning when they are at their best. If your session time cuts into nap time, then you're inviting a breakdown (by the kid, by the mom, and maybe even by you!)
• Set priorities for the session. Do not assume what photos and groupings the client wants. Talk with the parents at the beginning of the session to clarify the goals of the session. Take the top priority shots first. Let them know that you'd like them to prioritize in case the child decides he or she has had enough before you have a chance to get to all the shots.
• Provide session guidelines ahead of time.
• Take a snack break. Not for you, but for the kids! Frequently, a little drink and some goldfish crackers can turn around a cranky kid and save the day.

Believe me, I know it's miserable when someone doesn't like your work. But the more experience you have, the less often it'll happen. It really is true.

Professional Photographer Magazine Cover Contest ::: Second Place Winner!

Here's a little background for how I created this image and then prepared it for the Professional Photographer Magazine cover contest. Amazingly, I came in second place out of over 5000 entries! Here's a link to the PDF of the article.

The past two years when the cover contest winners were revealed I read every single word in both those articles to learn what they were looking for. So when the contest came around this year I chose an image that met those requirements. The image needed to be perfectly in focus, and it needed to be vertical. Also, and very important, there needed to be room at the top of the image to put the magazine's masthead! When I looked through this year's entries, I couldn't believe how many gorgeous images there were that were horizontal! And there were some excellent vertical images that would have been ruined if the masthead had been placed over them. So my guess is that just by meeting those three basic requirements my image was way ahead of the game.

Below is an image of how I set up and lit this shot. Clearly I must have taken this shot at a different time since there are some other props in the scene, but otherwise everything is the same. Click on the image to see a larger size if you're having a hard time reading the red writing. The background is Tranquility from Orange Peel Backgrounds. I did some Photoshop work to remove the seam that splits this paper background into two sections. The floor is some cheap paneling from the home improvement store -- can't remember now if it was from Home Depot or Lowes. I got the molding from a store that sells used building materials and painted it white. I've been using those same pillows in lots of my images over the years. They have served me well!

This incredibly cute little boy was having a really tough day, and we later found out that he was sick. But his mom was super-awesome to work with, so we managed to pull through.

Nikon D2X, 28-70 lens; f/9.5, 1/125th, ISO 100, Larson 4x6 softbox, Larson 42x72 soft white reflector, Photogenic Powerlight 1250DR

 

How to Become a Certified Professional Photographer

This is an updated version of a post I made earlier this year about becoming a Certified Professional Photographer (CPP). I recently put it together in video format and added more information. Certification is a more important way than ever to set yourself apart in this competitive industry.

 

Here are the links I mention in the video:

Professional Photographers of America (PPA)

Professional Photographic Certification Commission

Certify with Sandy

Photography by Barbara London, John Upton, Jim Stone

 

Personalized Photography Training | Colorado Photography Classes

I teach customized one-on-one photography classes and have created a short video describing a little more about the classes. A hands-on class is a great way to become comfortable with your digital SLR. I’ve taught beginners with absolutely no photography knowledge, and those who have a good grasp of their camera. We can also work on Photoshop or photography business-related topics if that’s what you need. I charge $125 for a two-hour class. You can reach me at MaryLynne@aol.com to set up a time for your training session.

Photographing Families Outdoors

I find photographing families outdoors to be one of the more difficult and intimidating lighting situations for me. In the studio I have total control, but outdoors there are a lot more variables going on. During most parts of the day, if you don't use a flash you end up with several problems. If the sun is high in the sky you run the risk of having raccoon eyes, which are dark sockets in people's eyes where the shadows land from the overhead sun. You also have the challenge of balancing the light on their faces with the light in the background. Frequently what ends up happening is that if you get the family's faces properly exposed, then the background is too bright, or the other way around. And when you add a flash, what frequently happens is that the family is properly exposed, and the background goes really, really dark.

So here is one method for using flash to light families outdoors. This article by Peter Friedman was just published on ShootSmarter.com, which is a really great site with terrific educational articles. You may find that you have to sign up with their site to read the article, but registration is free.

Photo Contest: PPA's Summer Shootout

If you are a member of PPA, here's a fun little summer contest you might want to enter. The great part is that it is quite affordable to enter. It's $5 to enter, and then $5/image up to 20 images max. There are even cash prizes awarded for  first, second and third places in 4 categories, and a grand prize of $1,000. I've entered 5 images so far and am going to dig around to see what else I might feel like entering.

• 3rd Place: $250
• 2nd Place: $500
• 1st Place: $750
• Grand Prize: $1,000

Here's one of my entries! One of the other nice things about this contest is that you can pay an additional $10 to have Master photographers critique your submission. This is a nice way to start to see if your image submissions are "merit-worthy" for further PPA competition.

So hop on over to http://www.ppa.com/competitions/summershootout and check it out for more information.

-- Mary Lynne

Still Time to Enter PPA's 2010 Print Competition!

One of the best ways to build your confidence as a photographer is to earn the right to slap "award-winning photographer" after your name. And having confidence in your work is half the battle, right? One of the most recognized and respected competitions is PPA's International Photographic Competition. The goal of entering PPA's annual competition is to receive what they call "merits." Earn enough merits and you become eligible to apply for various "degrees" bestowed by the organization. PPA also selects what they consider the best of the best for their Loan Collection and Showcase books.

Earning a merit requires submitting a print that is both technically sounds and artistically impactful (is that a word?). PPA's certified judges look for 12 elements in determining whether or not an image is merit-worthy. These elemments include impact, creativity, technical excellence, composition, lighting, style, print presentation, center of interest, subject matter, color balance, technique and story telling. 

You can enter four prints each year. Be sure to read their rules and submission requirements carefully. Besides making sure that the print meets those requirements, you are much more likely to succeed if your print does not take up the entire 16x20 space on the canvas (and by canvas I mean the whole 16x20 space, not canvas material). In other words, make the image a smaller part of the entire canvas and mat it in a way that enhances the image. 

I've entered competition quite a few times, and admit that it can be massively painful, but it can also be a total blast if you do well. A panel of judges sits at the front of the room as each print comes up, each judge enters his or her vote into a machine, and then the score is averaged and announced. My friends and I sit together while our prints come up before the judges, hold our breath while we wait for our scores, and either breathe a sigh of relief or a sigh of disappointment as each score is announced. Usually, you're either crying or grinning from ear-to-ear after it's all over.

There are local state and regional competitions where you can sit and watch the judging and sometimes earn merits, and there is also the international competition where you send the prints directly to PPA. Even those prints that earn merits at the regional level must be sent on it to PPA by the deadline for the merits to count. 

Deadlines and fees for this year's competition are below:

1. $95.00 for PPA members received by 5:00 PM on  April 30, 2010
2. $155.00 for PPA members received after 5:00 PM on April 30, 2010 but before 5:00 PM on  May 21, 2010.
3. $160.00 for all non-members received by 5:00 PM on April 30, 2010.
4. $220.00 for all non-members received after 5:00 PM on April 30, 2010 but before 5:00 PM on  May 21, 2010.

Thanks to my photographer-friend David Bailey for alerting me that the deadline was so close! I have four prints I need to get out the door ASAP!

Should I Shoot Raw or JPG?

By default, our digital SLR's capture a jpeg or JPG file. This file captures the exposure and color as you set them. If you overexpose the image, your file will be overexposed. If you underexpose the image, your file will be overexposed. Set the wrong white balance? Again, your color is going to be off. Sure, you can fix some of these problems in Photoshop by fiddling with the levels, curves and color balance. If your image if overexposed, though, you're pretty much out of luck since the highlights go to pure white and there's no getting that back in Photoshop. Lots of photographers compensate for the bad color and exposure by converting the image to black and white, and making that file available unavailable in color. Not the best solution.

If you change your capture mode to capture RAW and JPG both, then you still have that JPG file, but you now also have a file that contains a whole lot more data, and gives you the flexibility to fix a range of exposure and color problems. One challenge of shooting RAW is that these files take a whole lot more space, eating up your compact flash cards and hard drives much more quickly. The other challenge is learning how to work with yet another piece of software to manipulate the RAW files. The standard for RAW manipulation is Adobe Lightroom.

I have shot lots of JPG files over the years, occasionally capturing RAW files for a while because everyone says you have to do it, but I always went back to my JPG files because even with all the instruction I couldn't get RAW to work for me. And while you hear a lot of people say "I'm just not a computer person," that's just not me. I AM a computer person, but I still couldn't get it right. I faced the frustration that every time I would pull up the RAW images in Lightroom, they would look great for half a second, then all of a sudden look terrible -- nowhere close to the mostly accurate capture I could see on the back of my camera. Despite all my questions at seminars and in the online forums, no one could tell me why this was happening. They would give me some ambiguous answer about how RAW captures so much data, and that I needed to tell it how it should look. But I already had, and had a perfect JPG file to prove it! So I dug and dug and eventually found out that my problem seemed to be more specific to Nikon cameras. Apparently, all those people I'd been asking must have been Canon users, because they weren't seeing the shift. If you have a Nikon camera and have tried RAW and experienced the same problems, here's how to fix it. Go into "Develop" and scroll down to where it says "Camera Calibration." By default, it will be set to Adobe Standard. Click on that and you'll see profiles for your specific camera. Change to the profile for your camera (In my case it says "Camera D2X Mode 1"), and see if that makes it better. If it does, then you can sync all the photos in your catalog to that setting. There is probably a way in Lightroom to set the camera profile as a default, but I haven't spent the time to figure that out yet.

The other issue I was having was that even after saving the changes I made to the raw file, it still didn't pull up correctly on my MacBook Pro laptop. My color settings were all messed up. I finally had to admit that you really can't work on files on that machine, and you really need a desktop with a monitor that doesn't change its appearance when you move it. I'm now working on our iMac, and the photos I send out of Lightroom and finish retouching in Photoshop now come back from the lab with no suprises. I use Millers and their printing is fantastic and always consistent. I haven't always experienced that with other labs I've tried, so I stick with Millers. 

So, once you're using RAW, you can fix those little overexposure problems (as long as they're not too extreme) and get your color more accurate. You don't have to throw out that otherwise perfect image that is otherwise just a little overexposed.

I am finally a RAW convert and it makes me very happy.