Check out their blog and their other podcasts at http://photoprofessors.nikonians.org

Just a quick summary of my last day at Imaging USA. I made it to the morning sessions on glamor photography and posing, but that was about it for the classes. I spent the early afternoon in the tradeshow looking for last minute deals. What I walked away with was a copy of ProSelect after watching Ron Nichols give the demo for the third time. I got it home and it is all that it says it is and more. Configuring your price lists and products is a bear, but I muddled through it and it now is cranking out orders for me.

The afternoon was spent help LaDawn Ziser with the products tables for her husband David’s featured presentation. It was a blasting helping them and also good to know that even the big guys have hiccups in their planning, but recovered smoothly and helped a lot of people after the presentation take advantage of David’s products.

A quick trip back to the room and it was time to get out for a quick run around San Antonio in the 70 degree weather. Showered and hungry, I headed for the closing party hosted by Kodak. Good food, new friends, and ringing ears from the loud music. I didn’t stay up late because it was up at 4:45 am to get the shuttle to the airport and the 7:30 flight home via Chigago Midway.

Next year is New Orleans. Already planning the trip. Anyone want to split a buddy pass?

-M

The second speaker was the ever entertaining Julianne Kost from Adobe. Gotta love a speaker whose job position description is “Evangelist”. Polished and knowledgeable, Julianne is a whirlwind of energy and talks faster than I do. She also let’s the various voices in her head have an outlet, resulting in 2-3 parallel trains of thought going at once. As long as you are sufficiently caffeinated, it is a great show. Come in with no coffee and limited sleep like the previous night party-goers and the is immediate eye glaze and a thumping so loud in their heads that *I* could hear it.

One of Julianne’s endearing qualities is her honesty and candor. If Lightroom doesn’t do something, she tells you that and tells you why. She is also intimately patient and answers questions until the promoters drag her off the stage. Check out her blog at blogs.adobe.com/jkost.

With my Adobe appetite satisfied for awhile, it was time for the Expo/trade show. It really should be called “The Blackhole” since once you go in, you don’t come out. I skipped the afternoon seminars in favor of the booth-based presentations by many of the vendors.

The quality and quantity of the vendor education is the best I have ever seen. With the smaller groups and plethora of sales people, I was able to fire up my laptop on ore than one occasion and say, “Here, show me how. On my system with my photos”.

I was also able to spend someone else’s money. Kim from Myers Photography couldn’t attend this year, but provided a fine shopping list. I moved from vendor to vendor wheeling and dealing on her behalf and once the deal was done, I called her to provide payment.

Why do that? Because Kim is a very good photographer that respect and wouldn’t be looking at these products without a very good reason. She knows what she is doing so I am changing my perspective to see things how she sees them and then how it can benefit me.

Once Kim was taken care of, it was my turn. Good meetings with OnOne Software, various packaging vendors, plus a great meeting with Candid Color Systems and their chromakey services. That warrants a follow up call next week.

Before they shut down the expo, I spent 45 minutes with the ProSelect people. Great looking package for organizing, presenting, and preparing portrait images for printing. Very attractive but oh so expensive. Time to do the math tonight and determine if i can make back in sales what the package would cost. It would really improve my presentation and position me better for up/cross selling.

A quick 4 mile run around town and it was time for some Texas BBQ for dinner.

Time to prepare for tomorrow’s classes, my last pass through the expo and then to help the David Ziser presentation at 3.

More news and updates as they happen…

-M

In laying here staring at the ceiling, I never *really* ever considered a $78,000 month and all the planning and work necessary to execute to that kind of goal.  The kicker is, I am not sure that $78,000 was *his* goal!  For all I know, he fell short of his goal and was disappointed with a month like that.

Perspective.  The subjective evaluation of relative significance.  You will never realize that you can break 100 in a round of golf until you actually see someone relatively similar to you do it.  Same with running a marathon.  Same with raising successful kids.

When you have your perspective shifted, the world looks different and for a very brief and precious time, you have the opportunity to reconsider everything you previously believed.  A brief time because the brain hates change and uncertainty.  When you shift perspective, it immediately wants to try to put everything back like it was.  It was safe then.  Known.  Comfortable. Predictable.  Wait too long to embrace a new perspective and your brain will introduce Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt as means to guide you back to the way it was.

Want to sell $78,000 of portraits in a month?  First, see others like you doing that and then ask, “What is getting in your way to be like them” (or better).   Assuming you know the basics to the game for example, and want to break 100 in golf, g0 play with someone who averages 90 or better a few times.  Watch.  Listen.  Learn. Let your perspective change.  Imagine the possibilities.  Make the changes.  Don’t fall backwards.

And when you are all done, go to a conference, stand up, and inspire someone else to change their perspective.  Send them on their way and see if they don’t change your perspective in return someday.

$78,000 in portrait sales in a month.  Hmmmmmm.   That has to be a lot of very, very satisfied clients.

I can do that.

‘nite

-M

Basically, I am here on behalf of each and every one of my future customers to make their photos and experience with Fairfield Photography the best it can be.

The first speaker discussed his approach to handling Seniors in the compressed summer and fall in Oregon. Impressive to hear how he is able to turn $78,000 of business in August. It was also nice to see that a lot of my business practices mirrored his approach, and to discover the handful of things I am missing that helps him be so successful.

My second class investment was with Hanson Fong. Premier wedding and portrait photographer from the San Francisco area, international speaker, Master photographer, excellent instructor, and genuinely entertaining guy.  Saw him speak 2 years ago and part of his presentation today repeated some of his famous “Flow Posing” and large group posing techniques.  It also reminded me of things that I had forgotten from the first seminar.  I hit my forehead more than once with a “Dang! How did I forget about that?” when it came to posing and backlighting for depth.  Forty plus years in the business and he is still going strong.  The best thing is that he is sharing his knowledge.  He is probably the first photographer I have considered making the big investment in the week-long immersion classes some of the big name photographers offer.

From Hanson’s seminar…

“If you are planning for a year, sow rice.  If you are planning for 5 years, plant a tree.  If you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.”

After a 4-mile workout run around San Antonio and a quick lunch, it was back for my first foray into the trade show expo.  Right off the bat you can tell the economy is turning around and improving.  More vendors, more innovation, more products, more competition, and several new start-ups taking the plunge.   The other thing you notice is that the aisles seem MUCH MUCH smaller than in years past.  Traffic was backed up in the areas I explored, but with a limited window of time (I am here to learn, not spend — at least that is what I keep telling myself), I only made it into the first few rows before I headed up for the first of the afternoon classes.

Trade-show Expo Report – Part I

– Wacom has a new tablet for retouching – the Intuos 4.  It is awesome.  Besides being left/right hand reversible, all of the shortcut commands are displayed next to the assist buttons in little LED displays.  Change the command and the LED changes.  Change from right and to left and the commands flip over to read right on the other side.  They also offer “Precision Mode” which dampens the pen movements for when you have very small screen objects you are trying to grab or to move sliders a VERY VERY small amount.  Try doing that with older pen interfaces and you always seem to move the cursor a hair when picking it up (unless you are VERY experienced).  The Intuos 4 seems to solve that.  They also are getting away from the old sizes of 4×6, 5×7, etc. and going with naming conventions of “small”, “medium”, “large” (and thankfully, NOT “Oh My God It’s Moving Towards Us!”).  the proportions of the pen writing surface is much wider now to correspond to the 16:9 proportions so many monitors are going to.  Not sure if the newest drivers for my Intuos 3 offer the “Precision” mode, but if it doesn’t, you can bet there will be a really clean, low mileage, only used for retouching on Sundays, Intuos 3 on eBay soon.

SanDisk.  Now offering 32Gb compact flash memory.  Remember the original 1.44Mb floppy drive? (You do? How about the 5.25″ soft floppy or the 8″ soft floppy – yes, I am old and getting older – just ask my wife).  Anyways, do the math.  How many 1.44Mb floppies can you fit on a 32Gb compact flash memory (I will let you do the easy math — Assume a gigabyte is one thousand megabytes and that a megabyte is a million bytes — I know the real math is different, but this is a blog post, not a math exercise!)  I will wait while you plug in your abacus.  Answer? Around 22,222.  The SanDisk rep recommends not putting all your eggs in one basket and for working pros, to use two 16 Gb cards instead of one 32 Gb in the extremely unlikely event that a chip would fail, you would only lose half your work.  He emphasized “unlikely” enough that I thought he was going to spell it out and write it on a card to give to me.  I use SanDisk cards in all my gear and never have had a failure.  Can’t say that about the 3 Lexar cards that sitting in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

Had a nice visit with Richmond Pro lab about some of their plans for green screen keying services and met a new statuette cutting vendor who is still kicking it “old school” with hand-cut statuettes.  Rounded out my visit with some time at the White House Custom Color booth (booths actually, I think it has its own ZIP code).  They have some great looking wrinkle free backdrops that I am going to compare with Denny Manufacturing’s offerings tomorrow.

After a quick visit to the Nikon Professional Services hospitality room (were I was surprised to see that I was the first and only person who had visited there as of the afternoon but had a wonderful time trying out the D3s camera body), I headed off to watch a great presentation on best practices for portrait image selection, album design, and ordering based on ProSelect, a studio tool I have seen in the past, but has clearly had some investment made into it.  The speaker showed how she was able to shoot, cull, organize, and proof images from a shoot in a short period of time and then use the tool to assist the customer in finding great images in a very smooth flow.  When the sales appointment was over, the images are uploaded to the lab 30 minutes after the appointment.  I want some of that!!!!  I will be spending time in the ProSelect booth on Monday for more demos.  Could be the first non-food purchase of the show!

What would a visit to San Antonio be without dinner at Casa Rio?  I miss not sharing that meal with Mindy.  The food is great, but the experience is lacking without her smile across the table.

So I am back in the room, skipping the first night party.  No need to eat anything more and I am pretty tired from the day.  The main ballroom for the classes seems to be a in different timezone from the expo and entrance, so it was several long marches back and forth (including two stair cases).

Getting my hit list together for classes tomorrow and a serious assault on the expo.

Oh! I got the MiFi working.  I got frustrated enough that I tried all the setup/reset option I didn’t try before.  By going through the process of telling the MiFi that I was a brand new customer without an account, it went right online.  Then I told it what my account really was and it seemed to say “OK” and let me online.  I am back connected and able to use the iPad to stay current through the day and look up information that I see throughout the show.  Good thing, because the e-mail I got from Virgin Mobile just said to call customer service (really? again?) and the response to my facebook/twitter posts was a tweet back asking “are you still having the problem?”.  What do you say to that?  Yes? And wait for 12 more hours for them to ask another question?  Anyways, problem solved for now.  More news as I find it.

-M

Upon assuming position above 10,000 feet on the flight down here, I fired up my laptop and ProShow Gold to build a custom slideshow for a customer only to have the laptop convulse and lock-up. A trusty reboot resulted in a perpetual “Welcome” message from Windows 7. After 2 hours of this, Windows 7 pretty much wore out its “Welcome” and turned it off until I got to my room for Imaging USA.

I logged in under “Safe Mode” and found that a new video driver had been installed last night. When I restored the PC to the restore point prior to the drive update, *poof*, everything resumed working.

Great! Now to hit it and get some work done.

Not so fast there, Tex.

Now the MiFi, my VirginMoble pay-as-you-go no-data-caps-ever well-we-were-just-kidding-we-now-cap-it-at-5-gigbytes wireless router went into “not activated” mode. No amount of threats, resets, tosses against the wall, nor tiny-pins-in-the-reset-hole efforts work. It just sits there with a soothing, yet taunting green glow. Were it heavier, it would be a nice paper weight.

I call to VirginMobile customer support reminds why Texas fought to remain an independent republic for so long — they didn’t want to deal with tech support like VirginMobile. Well, that’s not fair. After nearly 90 minutes on hold and still no sign of a VirginMobile tech support rep, I can’t really say their tech support people don’t know what they are doing because I haven’t talked to one yet.

So I sit patiently listening to Virgin Music artists play bad music (or is it bad Virgin Music artists playing music) on hold.

Waiting…

Waiting…

Waiting…

BTW: The “virtual advisor’s” name is Alex and his voice recognition system is pretty good. He is very sorry I am having to wait this long and says one of their live advisors will be with me shortly. He says that frequently.

I was pretty positive about the Virgin Mobile MiFi today. Coupled with my iPad, it worked very well. Now I am reluctant to recommend it until I see how this problem is solved (and how quickly). The “pay as you go” part is still pretty attractive, but they just announced that they were capping their data at 5Gb/month when they advertised UNLIMITED all along.

UPDATE: 1/15/11 @ 9:50pm CST – I have shotgunned my issue to VirginMobile – Posting to their Facebook site, their Twitter account, and their customer support website (designed for mobile phone issues, not broadband MiFi, but what the heck, it got a message as well). Just got an automated response from Virgin acknowledging the website message with a case/tracking number and a promise to respond within 24 hours. Not a solution, but movement.

Update Sunday 1/16/2010 – 8:15am CST.
As you would expect, Nikki from Virgin Mobile lied. I am sure it wasn’t personal. She probaby told everyone the same story. No MiFi. “Headquarters” clearly let a lot of people down (or Virgin’s network is imploding and all of this won’t matter in the end). Oh well. I have 2 weeks to figure out an alternative before vacation.

I discovered WiFi in the hotel, but I am out of luck for live blogging or posting from the Imaging USA venue unless they have WiFi there (nothing was in the show literature about that).

So while I planned on multiple posts per day, I am reduced to daily summaries unless Sir Richard Branson gets his act together and resurrects my MiFi.

I’m not saying ANYTHING about my smartphone. Best I just leave it alone and pay it no-nevermind so it continues to work.

See you at Imaging USA Sunday…

-M

So what would a long plane flight be without the perfunctory “out the window” photo?

I am also trying out the WordPress app for my iPad. It has only crashed 5 times so far and only let’s me add one photo to a blog post – not very useful if you are a photographer. Maybe I am just holding it wrong.

Last year’s focus was on classes on various methods for doing better Team and Individual youth sports photography. Since that kind of photography amounted to 65% of my business in 2010,I would say that last year’s trip was a success in terms of return on investment.

This year, the emphasis for me at the conference is on portraiture and seniors. There is a lot of innovation going on in this area with presentation, effects, and technique. It has been a few years since I invested in some formal portraiture training, so the timing is right. I have also volunteered to help with David Ziser’s presentation on Tuesday. I saw David at the Professional Photographers of Central Ohio a few years ago and this guy really knows his stuff – both behind the camera and behind the desk in running his business. He has shot more 5-figure weddings than you or I (and 20 of our friends combined) will ever do, so I thing he is worth listening to.

If you are at the show, feel free to email me so we can connect. I will be in the Nikon Professional Services hospitality room from time to time and i plan to take advantage of warm Texas weather with a mid-day 5 mile run around San Antonio’s Riverwalk. Skip the greasy burger or overpriced wrap and come run with me before we have to return to the snow.

I will be updating my blog along the way throughout the show to highlight the new, cool, or outright odd. Looking for something special in the trade show area? Email and I would be happy to shop around for you! I love spending other people’s money.

-M

Sam demonstrating the correct camera and lens grip for sharp photos.

So this year, I decided to bring Sam along to help out at some photo shoots and allow her to experience photography as a business first-hand.  What better place to combine a love for animals with photography than at a horse show?

I outfitted Sam with my backup camera and a basic 70-300mm zoom lens, gave her 10 minutes of coaching for how to photograph dressage, and turned her loose.  In the end, over 100 of her photos were included in the pool of images for sale from the show, including several of the more difficult to photograph “extended trot” shots.

I think she would have had a lot more fun if the temperature was something other than “intense broil” — it was in the mid-90’s with no shade and only a small breeze.  Well, that was until the thunderstorms came and drove us off with lightning and heavy rain.

Sam is a fast learner and has a good eye.  She can work with me any time.

While searching out dinner after photographing the NRHA Reining Show at the Champions Center in Springfield today, we stumbled upon a great bakery.  Well, almost great.  While the cookies and cupcakes were outstanding, the cinnamon role I bought for Saturday morning breakfast turned out to have PEANUT BUTTER frosting!  Peanut Butter? Peanut Butter!

I hate Peanut Butter.

The folks at the bakery told me it was caramel.  Looked like maple.  I didn’t think it was my place to sample the frosting in the bakery.  Now, the fact that the rest of the sweets we purchased were fantastic, I am willing to give them a mulligan on this and let them try again next time with a more appropriate frosting.  Looks like it is going to be pastry surgery in the morning to separate the peanut funk from the yummy cinnamon.

“Home Made” trumps “Store Bought” every time!

Next thing I know, I have photographed nearly a half-dozen youth sports teams.  Photographed AND mounted/packaged the photos.  The next technique for creating distinctive composite sports portraits with 2-3 different images has really caught fire.  December could have as many of 3 basketball teams and then along comes January with several youth horse teams and more basketball.

Which brings me back to the blog.  All of that work has distracted me from posting.  Work is a good thing in this economy and I would like to think that my little piece of expanding business is letting me do my part to stimulate the economy the old-fashioned way.

But all of that work also has taken me away from a lot of things I love to do.  For example, keeping FairfieldPhoto.com fresh and current.  There is also the family, and my own interests of photographing things for *me* as well as what my wife calls, “dinking”.  Dinking is the process of exploring seemingly useless or overly geeky things for the pleasure of discovery.  Only for me, dinking is the Web 2.0 version of Research and Development.  Dinking is where I discover things.  Like Google Reader, Google Voice, JavaScript for Photoshop,  a new i7 processor-based laptop, and Windows Live Mesh.  I admit it, I am a geek at heart. Twenty five plus years of IT work before starting Fairfield Photography has imprinted me with a curiosity and a belief that nearly all problems can be solved with the sufficient application of intelligence.  Or dynamite.

So tonight, I am preparing to photograph my first horse show in nearly two months.  I even bought a new Western hat for the occasion (no, I will NOT be posting photos of it here).  A bit melancholy, perhaps.  I remember doing this same promoter’s show back in February and thinking how hard it was to shoot two days straight without a break.  Now I relish the break from Team and Individual sports work.

The message? We’ll look back on times like this in the future as “the good ol’ days”.

Yeah, they are.