Today I am going to do a quick review of a new product Black River Imaging is offering and also chat about the importance of branding. I know a lot of you give (or sell) a CD of images to your clients. With the demand for CD’s from our clients its something you really have to offer in today’s digital age. I won’t get into the conversation about giving the CD or not in today’s post but want to talk for a minute about your image. We aren’t just in the photography business but really the image business and the image that we portray of ourself and the products we provide can be just as important as the work itself. I used to always tell people that when you sell a print you are not selling a 8×10 piece of paper. If you are there really is little value in that and you will probably be out of business soon. When I sell a 8×10 print I sell it at a certain cost because people are getting my expertise, they aren’t buying a piece of paper but a unique art piece that has actually been years in the making. All of my life experiences, schooling, workshops all make a difference in my work and that really is what people are buying.

So since we aren’t just selling products we also need to make sure that the presentation matches the brand of our business and shows our clients that they are buying a piece of art. If someone buys a CD of the images from you there are a lot of different ways you could deliver that to them. Throw the CD in a plain white envelope, a blank jewel case, a nice leather bound case, there are lots of options and we should all think about which option will match the brand of our business and the image we are trying to portray.

One new thing that has caught my attention lately is custom printed CD cases. I ordered a few of these recently from Black River Imaging and have to say they are a really great way to deliver your work. They offer a single or double CD case with an image printed that wraps around the cover and back of the case. This is a really great way to have your work stand out and make a big impact on your clients. Most of the time little things make a big impact on your clients. Another good thing about these is that you can design the photo to also include your own branding information, including things like your studio name on the spine of the CD holder and your logo on the back can be key to keeping your name in front of your clients at all times. I personally like to keep my branding on the back and don’t want it to take over the image but at the same time be large enough to notice it. Here is what I would normally do for a cover layout:

These CD holders wrap around the edge of the case so you have a totally seamless look to them and are coated with a semi-gloss coating so don’t attract any fingerprints or marks. After handling one for awhile, bending it and even throwing it around the studio it still looked brand new. The only bummer is these are just offered on photo paper, not canvas or other printing options. But if you are looking for something printed on a beautiful canvas to hold your prints they also offer print boxes. These also have a full wrap around image and are a very nice, custom way to present your images to your clients. One thing that I have offered in the past is a set of 100 printed 4×6 images in a nice keepsake box. For weddings or even portrait events my clients can pick their top 100 images and I have them custom printed, put the images in a custom box like this and you will make a definite impression on your clients. Here are a few images of the photo boxes and CD holders.

What do you use for CD holders or print boxes? Let us know in the comments below.

For more information on Black River Imaging check out their website at: http://www.blackriverimaging.com/

Being a photographer in today’s digital age mean much more than just shooting photos and printing them for your clients. Your marketing and branding are all such a big piece of your business and your brand really touches everything. From the little things like the envelopes you use to bigger things like your website and everything in between it all makes a huge difference in setting the tone of your business. One pretty big part of my business doing weddings and portraits is hosting my events online. You have to be able to showcase your work to your clients online and providing them with a website that matches the look and feel of your branding is key.

So today I am going to be doing a review on Collages.net. As a disclaimer they are a sponsor on this site, which has nothing to do with this review. As with all of my reviews I believe in bringing you all totally honest and straightforward feedback.

So first lets start with what Collages.net is and why I think a service like this is very important. At any event you can have hundreds of people who are all really your clients. The bridesmaids, groomsmen, aunts and uncles are all potential clients, not only to purchase photos but also for future business. So much of this business is word of mouth and you want to make sure that you WOW everyone during every step of the way. Most of the guests won’t see the beautiful album you create for your client or the amazing canvas you create for them, but they will look at the images online. So having a web provider that has a beautiful look and can incorporate your branding into is a very big part of your overall image.

So what exactly does Collages.net do? They really do more than just showcase a gallery of your photos. We can all do that ourselves fairly easy with Lightroom or many other products that let you put a quick web gallery up. Collages.net has a full shopping cart functionality so people can not only just order prints but at the same time customize them a bit by cropping the image or turning it to Black and White. And really one of the best part about their site is the order fulfillment.

For me I also like to have an online company that also can handle the printing and do a great job. When a order from a client is placed it can go directly to collages professional lab “Collages color” where they print and send everything off directly to your consumer. You can choose to have them sent to you if you need to re-package with your branded studio packaging but I always prefer to have them handle everything. That is part of what makes this service so great, you can be out doing what you should be… shooting more photos all while your event site is selling images and taking full control of the entire order from start to finish. You do pay for this service, a fee is charged per order but in my mind it is so worth it. One order that a client makes can take up a lot of your valuable time, you have to take the order, find the files and prep them, submit to your lab, get them back, invoice them, collect payment and then package and mail it off. All of this sometimes for a $30 order can be very time consuming. So why not just have collages.net do all of the fulfillment and save you a ton of time.

Collages.net also offers a wide spread range of products from proof books to album designs, so it makes their service really a one stop shop for you. Once your order is uploaded you have access to many different products like albums, books and cards. You also have access to the guest book for your event which will show you the email address for everyone that has logged into the event. This is good to have for your future marketing so you can continue a relationship with everyone from the wedding. They also have reporting you can do on the traffic of the event so you can get a view of how many people are visiting your events in certain timeframes.

Now that you know a little about Collages.net and the services they offer here are some of my other thoughts about their services. You can also view more info about their services online here: Collages.net services

They have a few different monthly plans that are very affordable and a yearly plan that really is your best option. With the yearly plan you pay $599 for the year and can upload as many events as you need. You also pay a smaller amount for your service fee (which is 9% of your online orders) and get a $250 product credit to use towards their products. Overall I definitely recommend them if you are looking for someone to host your weddings and portrait events online.

Also check out this video walkthrough showcasing some of the features and customization of the event websites:

Collages.net Premium Websites from Collages.net on Vimeo.

Yep, you read the title right, I was hacked! It amazes me that there are so many people out there spending their time just to be destructive and harmful. I wonder if these people put their efforts into anything good what might be able to come out of it, but that’s an entirely different topic. On Friday little old digitalphotobuzz.com was hacked into. It looks like this was actually a pretty big hack that someone did to a lot of sites hosted on Network Solutions and GoDaddys servers, it seems like there could easily have been thousands of website effected. Some people (and from what I can gather only a few people) that came to our site on Friday or Saturday morning were redirected to another site that was one of those fake PC scan sites. The website pretends it is performing a scan of your website and that you have a virus and need to download something to “fix” it. Well the fix is a virus and that is the main goal of them getting you to their site. Thankfully I found out about this right away and after many hours of going through all of the files of the website got everything removed and back to normal mid Saturday morning. I am sorry for the inconvenience it caused any of you and hope that nobody downloaded the files from that website and got a virus.

Going through the process did teach me a few things about security and some things that can apply to a lot of you. Since I know a lot of you use wordpress for your photography blogs (the same platform that this website runs off) I wanted to share a few thoughts with you and some suggestions on how to prevent your site from being hacked. It seems that hackers are getting better and better every day so we really need to have a schedule to make sure our blogs are safe and also backed up. Here are some tips I have learned from this whole experience that can help us all keep our wordpress blogs safe and secure.

Always watch your website – I always have a habit of checking my website while I am on the go. With my iPhone I tend to check my website to make sure it’s up and running at least a few times a day when I am idle for a second. Thankfully this really helped out this time, I noticed late Friday that when going to my site it took me to another site that Safari blocked as a virus site. It came up fine a few minutes later from my computer but still had me interested to see what was going on. After awhile of searching I found the problem and a few hours later was virus free. If you don’t check your site that often it could be days, weeks or months before you find out the problem is there and can be harder to fix and more people impacted which is going to be bad for your brand.

Backup, Backup, Backup – Just like your clients photos or anything digital remember to backup your blog. With a wordpress blog there are actually two things you should have a backup of. The main files and your database. Backing up your main files is easy, just login to your FTP account and drag and drop your files on to a folder on your computer. Make sure that folder is backed up also though. To backup your database there are a few ways to do this. The easiest I have found is a wordpress plug in that will back it up automatically and send you the file in an email. The plug-in is called Wordpress Database Backup. I have been backing up my site pretty regularly over the last year so it really put me at ease when these problems started coming up the other day.

Always upgrade wordpress – If you are like me you login to wordpress to create a new post and see that friendly message at the top, Upgrade to Wordpress v.3.xxx. I see it and think when I have a little more time I will upgrade and normally that little more time never comes and I never upgrade. Well never is a stretch, but I normally wait for months before upgrading. That is one of the biggest holes you can have for your blog to get hacked. There are always security holes hackers are looking to exploit and a lot of these exploits are fixed with the most recent version of wordpress (until the hackers figure out a way around the new fix).

Change your password – I have to admit this used to be another thing I really was bad at. I would set one password and leave it there for a long time. Now I am changing the password pretty often and using a password generator to create a very strong password. As a side note if you don’t have any password managers for your computer check out 1password. It keeps track of all your passwords and can create really strong passwords for you. They also have an iPhone and iPad app available which I highly recommend.

Keep your plugins up to date – Another security hole is outdated plugins. This is something I used to put off also, I would see the indicator there was an update for a plugin but never thought it to be too important to update so put it off for another day. Hackers know plugins that have holes and will exploit them, keeping your plugins updated can help keep them at bay.

There are many other more technical things you can do to your web permissions and protecting certain files and folders on your site but the tips above should be a good starting point to keep you (and me) much more safe and secure.

Going forward I have learned a lot and now have regular maintenance and updates scheduled in my calendar every week to prevent this from happening again. I hope this doesn’t happen to any of you, and remember to always be weary of links or websites that don’t look like they should. There are too many people out there on the web trying to cause havoc and unfortunately we have to be extremely cautious online.

This post is sponsored by Collages.net

One of the best things about WPPI sometimes is not the speakers (even though those are good) or even the parties (pretty fun as well) but the people that you just randomly meet. There are always some great conversations I have in line at Starbucks or waiting to hear a speaker, and these little conversations can be so inspiring.

A few people I met that are really doing some great things for photographers are the owners of Snapknot. It was great to see two people starting a business with such a drive and focus on creating a great product. They were at WPPI to just meet new photographers and talk with them about what they can do to make thier product better. If you haven’t heard of them yet, check out their website at: http://www.snapknot.com you can sign up for a free account so go and try them out! Here is a little more about their company.

1) What is Snapknot?

SnapKnot allows engaged couples to search for wedding photographers by location and budget range, and compare visual styles side-by-side.

We currently have over 530 wedding photographers in 200 cities listed worldwide (160 US & 40 international) and the listings keep growing every day.

Photographers can create both Free and Premium listings (http://snapknot.com/features).

2) What makes SnapKnot different?

We focus solely on the photographers and their work. Wedding photography is the one thing you will keep from your wedding day years later, so it is very important to get a photographer whose work you are happy with. It’s easy, fast, fun, and free for brides to find photographers to contact without wandering through a bloated site filled with all manner of vendors, advertisements, and unrelated information that distracts from the sole purpose of the site – connecting you with the perfect wedding photographer.

3) How does SnapKnot benefit couples?

1) SnapKnot is very easy to use.

2) It saves time – couples only visit photographers’ websites after they know that a) they like their style, b) they are within their budget, and c) they cater to their location. No more endless Google searches.

3) It is free to contact and book photographers whom couples are interested in (SnapKnot does not receive any form of booking commission).

4) We also think it’s pretty fun to use! It’s always a pleasure to look through the many high-quality portfolios up on SnapKnot.

Because of the reasons above, we believe that SnapKnot helps make an otherwise stressful process much more pleasant for brides.

4) What do we hope to accomplish with Snapknot?

The site launched just two months ago on February 15th of this year and has already experienced tremendous growth: We currently have over 530 wedding photographers listed. We hope to have over 1000 by the summer, which we certainly believe is an achievable goal. Based on the positive feedback we’ve heard from photographers and brides so far, we feel we can be successful.

Currently we are focusing on developing relationships with several key people in the industry to help get word out about SnapKnot.

We simply hope to keep growing and hearing more success stories of couples connecting with wedding photographers through SnapKnot!

Time for another Q and A session from our readers. I love it when you send in questions on twitter and want to always answer your questions. That’s why this site exists to help each other be better photographers. Some of these were sent in awhile back so apologies for taking so long to get these answered, i’ll be faster in the future! Continue to tweet me questions!

First question from auramckay
Is there a way to display RGB values instead of % under the histogram in Develop module in Lightroom?
Unfortunately no, the RGB vales that we are used to in Photoshop and other programs are a 0-255 scale that is based on 8-bit files.
There are only 256 levels in each of the channels for an 8 bit file but 16 bit color has 65536 levels per channel. Because of this
Lightroom choose to use a 0.0 to 100.0 percentage scale, which with 0.1 accuracy gives use 1000 levels of color. If you did want to try and find a close
color in RGB values I did find a conversion chat that was created. This won’t be exact but should be close to the RGB values.

A question from INFOTOGRAPHER
How do you add watermark/logos on LR? in Batches
Check out post from yesterday that answers this Lightroom 3 watermark feature

A question from DawnwlKhl27
I just started my biz part time in Aug. For me it’s just hard getting my name out there on such a small budget
Honestly this is the hardest part about starting your business but in today’s day and age there are many things available to you for Free! This is a pretty big topic and i’ll give you just a few quick pointers. First your work is the key, before getting your name out there go over all of your marketing material (business cards, portfolios, website, etc…) and make sure that everything has a consistent feel to it and also all of the images really match your style and the type of clients you are trying to attract. Know what defines you and your photography and be able to articulate that to people in a few quick minutes. Have a few things that set you apart from the rest of the crowd.

Once you have that all set you are ready to start to get the word out there. With little to no budget the best place to start is your family and friends. Make sure they all know what you are doing and again what sets you apart. Talk to them about your business as you would a potential client. Get them excited about what you are doing and make sure pass the word on to potential clients for you. Start to build a list of people in your circle of influence. Organize their names and contact info in a list. You want to reach out to these people at least on a quarterly basic with some type of communication. It can be a quick email newsletter to let them know of any new products you are offering or specials. There are a lot of companies that do email marketing with easy to use templates and most of them are free for small lists. I currently use www.madmimi.com and have been very happy with their service. Constantly reach out to those in your circle and provide them with information that not only sells your service but can be of use to them. Inform them of things in the photo industry that they will benefit from like how to dress for a portrait session. The more useful the newsletter compared to just about you the more they will continue to read it.

Also setup a facebook fan page and invite all of your friends to become a fan. Facebook is a huge way of reaching and keeping in constant connection with people. I add most of my clients to my Facebook page and are always continuing to work on our relationships. Your clients need constant care and nurturing just like any relationship. Keep working on taking the best care of them and keeping in contact with them and your business will start to grow.

Question from rkzphotography
at the start of my photog business, which canon camera is a good one to invest in?
Gear is the most commonly asked question I get asked. While I think the gear does not make the photographer at all for certain type of photography like weddings good gear can definitely help out. I wrote a post awhile back showcasing some of the gear we use for weddings. You can read it here: Wedding photography gear 101. Personally I am a big fan of full frame cameras and absolutely love my Canon 5d. It is the first digital camera I have used (since the 10d came out) and really loved the quality. The skin tones are beautiful and the depth of tones that you get with the full frame compared to a crop sensor is just so much better. It’s not really a starter camera and more expensive than the bottom of the line Canon’s but I believe worth every penny.

Opening yourself up to new things

Sometimes I find it really interesting the journey life can take you on when you start to open yourself up to new opportunities. I know that change and new things can be hard to take on sometimes. We all get in our comfort zone and it’s hard to leave that place where we feel comfortable and take on something new. But when you open yourself up to new things you will be amazed how much you will grow.

As an artist I constantly get inspired to create new things. Sometimes it might just be creating a new type of image, doing something I have never done photographically. Sometimes it might be starting a new venture like this website was. My normal routine would be to get inspired start planning things out and then a little bit of doubt would come in and make me put the project on the side for awhile. After a few weeks it would be out of my mind and I would be on to the next thing.

Last year I finally came to the conclusion that failure really doesn’t matter. What other people think of me doesn’t matter and that fear and doubt shouldn’t make decisions for me. I told myself that if I got a vision to do something I would see it through completely. There have been a lot of things I have been doing this past year that all haven’t worked out the way I might have thought from the start but have been such an amazing experience so far. This website actually just began as an idea I had to give people that took my workshops a place to go and get some additional information. I thought I could add a tutorial a week and just give them something to keep growing after taking a workshop. After the first few weeks though other people found the site and I started getting more and more traffic from all over the web. I started posting more and more articles and more people kept coming. It turned into something so much larger than I would have ever imagined and I have some really good things to come later on for this site.

Another thing that I started a long time ago was writing a few different books. Even after graduating with a photography degree I still have always loved to continue growing my photography and love reading photo books. Some books I would go through quickly and feel there were a lot of things missing from the book or I just couldn’t connect to the book for whatever reason. I thought I could do something better and always had a few ideas in the back of my mind. But then the memories of english 101 and other writing classes came into my mind and killed those book dreams. I had never really enjoyed any writing classes in school, I would always rather be out with my camera taking photos. If you would have told me years ago that I would have been writing a book I would have told you that you were crazy. But that started to change a few years ago as I started more and more blogging for my photography website. I realized that I did really enjoy writing as long as it was writing about what my passion was. So I picked back up a few small book ideas on photography and have been slowly working on them the last few months. I don’t expect anything to be done anytime really soon but am working on them on a weekly basis!

So why the lengthy article today without any photos (don’t worry photos will be back tomorrow!). Really two things I want to share with you all. One is to always pursue your passion and don’t let anything get in your way. Even though it might not turn out the way you thought it would, the experience alone will be worth it. And second I just wanted to let you know how excited I am for a few things I am creating. From some additions to this website to a few learning tools I am working on I am more excited today than I have been in awhile. I have been working hard on some books and other products that I hope are going to be a great help for many of you and at an amazing value.

As always I love your comments, leave a note below on any thoughts you have or suggestions for our website. We also have a facebook account now, become a fan of our facebook page here: Digital Photo Buzz

P.S. I do have one thing that will be coming out very soon that will be really cool. I can’t let the cat out of the bag yet, but check back tomorrow for some more news!

Today’s post is going to be a quick post touching on marketing and some future posts I am going to be working on. A few years back I really was looking for something new to add to our photography and really wanted a higher impact with our slideshows. At that time I was just creating slideshows myself with iMovie or sometimes Final Cut Express. I would change around the pacing of the photos a bit to liven the show up but they still didn’t have the impact that I wanted. After thinking for awhile I thought it would be so cool to have some little snippets of video throughout the slideshow, I had a pretty basic point and shoot that took decent video so was going to try that out. I tested it out a bit but the quality never matched what was in my head and along with that I found a company that created pretty amazing slideshows (eMotion media) so put the video thing on the back burner for awhile. When the Canon 5d Mark II came out with HD video I thought, Perfect, this is just what I am looking for. I can create HD video, plus use my current lens set to create some pretty artistic video. Well with the busy schedule of shooting 40+ weddings my idea never became reality. It was a project I wanted to do but was on my “someday” list.

This year I am finally making this happen and over the next few months working on getting some samples for my clients to see and marketing this to them. But looking back over the past year and a half this really taught me a good lesson that I think is key to marketing. Listen to your heart and ACT on it…. right away. Plain and simple, but a huge key to success. Honestly there are many reasons other than being “busy” for me never trying this out. Fear of rejection, fear of not knowing how to do it, so many little things that all got in the way of me trying something new. So how does this all tie into marketing? People want and crave uniqueness, especially in a saturated field clients want someone and will remember a photographer who stands apart from the rest. I always look for things I can do that nobody else is doing, whether it’s the albums I offer, printing, anything I can do different I try out. Looking back at last year I think if I had went with what my heart was telling me and offering a cool new Fusion video with my weddings I think that could have helped me book more weddings. Now one year later there are more people offering this and when we roll it into our offerings we won’t the the first in our area, I still think it will be something of huge value to add to our clients but won’t have the impact it would have if I would have followed my heart and went for it. Aside from the marketing benefits of trying something new and being the leader in a new area when you try something out you grow. Even if it fails and clients don’t want it you still learn and grow. Your passion along the way for your art also grows as well.

So I am getting into the new Fusion and am going to share my experience along the way. Having no formal video training I am learning the ropes as I go along and going to post about my experience. So far I have done two fusion shoots and have learned a lot already. I’ll post a review of my first shoot next week!

If you are doing Fusion shoots I would love to hear your experience so far, leave any comments below.

Great Exposure – Revenue Generating Sites for your Photographs

When you got your first ever camera, it was probably as a gift and definitely when you were quite young. Neither the person who gave you the camera nor you ever believed at that stage that you would evolve into a professional photographer, yet here we are – spending our lives (or part of it) finding images to capture and trying to generate sufficient revenue to pursue our vocation with the security of a financial safety net.
Several photographers have acquired a following on Shutterstock.com, Flickr.com and iStockPhoto.com, and these can be quite lucrative if you market your photostreams correctly. The best way to do this is by adding comments to other professional photographers’ images, and draw viewers back to your portfolio. Here are a few additional sites on which you should upload your images which may not be so familiar to you.

www.dreamstime.com claims to pay the highest level of royalties in the industry, and has a sliding scale for payment which reflects the popularity of your images. They also have a bonus scheme for photographers who sign exclusively with them.

www.123rf.com takes the marketing of your photography to a new level, by rewarding you not only for your photographs which are downloaded, but also for bringing in new photographers and customers. Quite like “Multi-Level-Photography”, but with the potential to be lucrative.

www.fotolia.com offer reward for downloads on a sliding scale based on volume and your choice to be fully, part on non-exclusive on their site. They also have their web site available in ten different languages which should the greatly increase market for your images.

www.canstockphoto.com claims to have the fastest image submission software, and therefore is useful for any photographer with a large library of images to upload. Photographs that appear on canstockphoto.com also appear on (and are sold via) www.fotosearch.com

www.bigstockphoto.com pays a higher rate than Shutterstock, but has stricter submission guidelines.
Hopefully, one or more of these five options will be new to you, and turn into a revenue generator to provide that financial safety net.

Samuel Bartlett writes mainly about
bachelor degree online and can be reached for comments at bartlett.samuels@gmail.com

Recently I was reading an article from Scott Bourne that really got me thinking about pricing and educating our clients on photography. You can check out the article here: And you call yourself a photographer

One of his main points really struck a nerve with me (in a good way) and also confirmed a lot of what I got out of WPPI this year. It was changing our viewpoint of the weekend warrior photographer, the craigslist people that are out there shooting $500 weddings. I used to think about them like a lot of you do, “who cares if some joe blow goes out and shoots $500 weddings on the side, the work is poor quality and if brides can’t see that there is nothing I can do”. I never really spoke out to brides against these cheapo photographers or other industry people. When I used to advertise with bridal magazines I never spoke to the editors about this problem to get them to write up about it. I basically just ignored it as something that was going on but wasn’t really a problem.

But some of Scott’s points in his articles I think we should all take to heart and start to advocate against these amateur photographers. Really the worst part about part time photographers working weddings is that the client is the one that gets hurt. They are having one of the most important days of their lives and are going to have bad photographs to remember their day. When their grandkids look at their photos on the computer (if they have backed up and archived that DVD they got) they will be poorly lit snapshots of the day. There could be a entire generation of brides that have bad wedding photos and because of that also have a bad view on photography. They might never want to have professional photos taken again because they don’t know how amazing a true professionals work can be. Bad photographers do put a stain on this industry and should be something that we all work to educate our clients and the industry about.

And I am really talking about part time photographers that don’t know the art of photography yet, they haven’t learned the true art of lighting, composition, etc… I don’t mean for this to be about part time photographers who have learned the art of photography and are committed to producing great work. I know we all start somewhere and when I finished up my degree in photography I didn’t go full time right away. I had a job to get by and did weddings on the weekend. But I didn’t take on my first job until I knew a lot about photography, I had multiple camera bodies, lenses, flashes. I have learned a lot since that first wedding over 11 years ago and will continue to learn every year, but I did have 6 years of training under my belt already.

Another thing he mentioned that we should all pay attention to is that these cheap photographers are dragging down the industry. They aren’t just effecting the clients they shoot for but as more and more $500 photographers come into the scene the pricing of wedding photography will go down. Sometimes when pricing goes down due to competition that’s a good thing for the consumer and the industry but in this industry it really isn’t. The main reason it isn’t is because most photographers don’t know anything about pricing and how to run a business. Full time professionals start to drop their prices because they feel the pressure to do so and the next thing you know they are running their business at a loss. They close down shop and open the way for more part time bad photographers to enter the scene. There is a very big reason why wedding photography can be expensive, it’s an art form that takes a lot of skill and creativity to produce great work. It also takes a lot of money to run your own business. Once you take into consideration your own insurance, cost of goods, equipment, computers, employees, you quickly realize that $3000 for a wedding doesn’t mean that much in your pocket at the end of the year. So the more that pricing is pulled down by cheap photographers the more real professionals that are trying to run their business legitimately are hurt.

I care way too much about the art of photography to see it suffer any longer. Any chance I get I will speak out about bad photography in the wedding industry and am going to be contacting all of the magazine providers. They always write up editorial content that sometimes hurts our industry. Speak out against it, if you advertise in a magazine suggest an article to them that shows the artistry and creativity in our industry. Maybe write an article about why clients might not always need a CD, something that shows a new perspective to some of the garbage that is out there.

I am an artist, always have been always will be. I will always promote the art in photography and will now be much more vocal about it.

And for those of your weekend warriors out there again this isn’t written to slam you. I want you to be inspired to create amazing work, take some classes before you take on a new wedding. Take a workshop, read a book, learn the art of photography first then shoot as a professional.

Also check out our other article on pricing here: Pricing your wedding photography

I have to admit when Google Buzz hit the scenes a few weeks ago I was kind of Social Media’d out. Don’t get me wrong I love social media, it’s a great way to connect with family, lost friends and meet new people that share your passion. I love connecting with other photographers on Twitter and use Facebook a lot to keep in touch with my friends and clients. But those two keep me busy enough and when Google Buzz came out I dismissed it mainly because I didn’t have time to check a third site every day.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Google Buzz yet its Google’s entry into the social media field and similar to Twitter in a few ways. You can follow people and post what you are doing (with photos also) but one of the main differences that I actually do like is people can comment on your status to open up a conversation. To me this is better than Twitters @reply system so people can actually get good conversations going.

A few downsides so far for me are there isn’t any searching like Twitter has. I can’t search photography and see what others are talking about in the photo world. For me the fact that it’s built into Gmail is a downer also, I don’t use Gmail that much and prefer having it as a stand along service that you can access from other devices. Twitter for me is so much more useful because I can access it on my iPhone with some great apps (I love Tweetie!). So whenever I have a few minutes free I pop open my iPhone and check in on the twitterverse (or facebook). Having it accessed through Gmail will make me a little less likely to use it often.

Since it’s new I am still checking it out and haven’t made up my mind if this will be useful or not. If you want to start up a conversation on Buzz check me out at Mark.Stagi.

What do you think about Buzz? Love it or hate it? Leave a comment below.