So Whatever Happened to At PEaCe Photography?

The previous post is from October 2013. It is now 2014. You might be wondering, "What happened?"

There should have been a post about Tallassee Trade Day 2013, and one about Holiday Market, and at least one about graduation season with Village Photographers. But there's not. Here's why.

In June, I developed a pain in my shoulder. Thinking it was just the result of me sleeping on it funny, I did nothing about it. Fast-forward to September, it's getting worse. I started seeing a chiropractor (a graduate of Life University, whose commencement I've shot many times). My shoulder/arm problem turned out to be a neck problem. I was getting better for a while, and then I got terribly, horribly, suddenly worse. Chiropractor to physician, physician to neurosurgeon, it was a herniated disk in my neck--uncorrectable by therapy.

So there, I had neck surgery in early December and have been recovering slowly ever since.

Trade Day would have probably been a bust since there was rain and low attendance. Holiday Market is one I'm kind of bummed to have missed, along with the Tallassee Christmas parade. That was the weekend after my surgery, and I was pretty sure my head was going to fall off at any moment. None of my Wetumpka High School church-kids are in the band or anything, so I didn't mind missing the Wetumpka Christmas parade except for the free candy and chance to practice. I felt worthless having to cast off my graduation assignments, but I had warned Village it might happen. All the crews already had a suitable replacement lead--no harm, no foul there.

I'm not able to be up and active for more than three or four hours at a time yet, but I'm getting there. I walked over a mile today, and it didn't kill me. It's going to be great to be able to get back to some random gigs here and there in 2014. I'm already looking forward to the May-June grad season. Plus, I'm supposed to shoot my first wedding in April. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for being concerned about me. :P

Product Photography for Genesis Home Decor

Last Monday, I took a quick trip to Phenix City to take some product photos for Genesis Home Decor. She has a selection of home accent items. The short version is this. She had gotten feedback from the folks at Etsy that she needed better photos to sell her products effectively. So she posted an ad on Craigslist, I found said ad, we exchanged a series of emails, and BAM! Here are some of my favorites of the shoot.

I'm quite pleased with what we accomplished. The shoot took a bit longer than I had expected (over two hours before I was breaking down). It was a great learning experience for me. A few things come to mind that I could do better/differently/faster next time. Hey Paul, you need to...

• Set up multiple backdrops at once so you can take all your pics of a product together. This would have saved some time in shifting gears, and it would have kept me from accidentally forgetting to shoot two items on the black.
• Set your flashes and don't move them. I had one strobe bouncing off the ceiling a bit away from the camera, and another mounted to the camera that I would change direction on as I saw fit. Having both lights stationary would have cut down on time I spent adjusting settings.
• Set your settings and don't change them...mostly. This would only be possible if the lights aren't moving and changing. It also doesn't apply to the adjustments necessary for the relative lightness or darkness of a product, or switching between various backgrounds. Consistency in setting also allows for easier processing of the images after the shoot.
• Request good props to work with. This wasn't a problem; she had gotten a few things out to use in the pictures, and I found the baskets particularly helpful. Plus, putting other Genesis products in the background worked great. I only mention it here so that I think about it in the future.
• When shooting something reflective, picture frames for instance, put your reflector panels to use and black that reflection out. I had real trouble getting a shot of the picture frames without me and/or other distracting elements visible in the reflection. Thinking about it later, I should have shielded the items with my light control panel so there was a solid black field instead of a noticeable reflection.
• When in doubt about how to pose an item, ask the customer to do it for you. I was struggling to start with, in spite of the sample pictures she had of other product photos that she liked. So I asked her to arrange some stuff, and "Bob's your uncle!" We were rolling right along.
• Make a packing checklist. I forgot to take contracts and my shoot-through umbrellas with me. Not having the umbrellas meant I had to rethink my lighting (making all my at home tests fruitless). Not having the contracts cost me the extra self addressed stamped envelope I had to enclose with the photo CD so she could send me back a copy.
• Dress cool, and drink plenty of water. There's just something about a photo shoot that always makes me hot.

For any product pros out there who might disparage my wrinkled backdrops, I'll get a steamer and use smooth backdrops as soon as I can afford to buy a steamer and am charging enough to make the extra effort worth it.

Well, that's enough on that. On the way, more Holiday Market stuff, more grad season stuff, and some family portraits down the road.

Oh and a shout out to Village Photographers for letting me borrow the equipment that made this shoot and Holiday Market such a success.

Trade Day Edits Done!

My hope was that I would be able to run my Tallassee Trade Day pics through Adobe Lightroom, doing only minor edits and then letting it apply the boarder, and have all the images ready in a matter of minutes. Well, that didn't happen. While shooting, I wasn't as conscious as I thought I was being about leaving enough room at the top and bottom of the frame to allow for the boarder and words. That left me with a lot of shucking and jiving to do to make each pic fit the boarder, including some filling in at the edges. (I only had to punt and add solid color blocks to the sides of one picture, and that one was a freebie of my pastor's family.)

I'll be uploading the best of each group to facebook in a day or so. Prints will likely happen Saturday, mailing...probably Monday. To tide you over until then, here's my kid!

Trade Day Happened

Tallassee Trade Day was this last weekend. I set up a photo booth and took pictures looking a lot like this:

I've got most of the best pictures selected. There are a few I'm going to have to get a second opinion on from my wife. After that, there will be a few special editing issues to take care of that will be a bit of a time sink, then I'll just let Adobe Light Room apply the boarders and create the final JPEGs and they'll be ready for printing...then addressing...then shipping out.

Those pics above are some samples I took beforehand in my back yard when testing out my setup. The font is called "Big Top" and can be found free on dafont.com. Thank you Shamrock, whoever you are. If I had made any money, then I'd probably figure out how to send you a couple bucks.

As it stands, I'm pretty deep in the red for Trade Day. That will likely get a little better after we send the prints out. We had a pretty significant number of people wanting additional prints of their pictures last year. If we can get some additional orders, that will help. If I can get some portrait sessions or other work out of it, then that would be a big help, too. That's actually why I do trade day, getting my name out there to build some business. That, and the experience.

I learned two big lessons this year. First, it's not worth the trouble of chasing the sun to work under a tent. I'll be shooting Holiday Market without the tent and just blast people with flashes and shoot with my D70 at 1/500 sec. (because that's as fast as anything will sync to a flash). Second, prints don't sell well...if at all. I'm not settled on what to do with this information, but I've got to do something with it. I can't spend money on prints to sell and recoup 0% of that; it's just bad business. If nothing else, I'll be selling the prints I have at crazy low prices at Holiday Market. Hopefully I can capitalize on people buying presents.

Last year, I actually made a little money on Trade Day. This year, Tallassee's Trade Day was competing with Loachapoka's Syrup Soppin' Day, an arts-n-crafts fair in Wetumpka, and some Jr. League thing in Montgomery. Which means that Trade Day had fewer vendors and fewer attenders. I shot about 2/3 as many groups as I did last year and sold $20 in prints compared to over $50 last year. (That $20 for this year amounts to one 16X20 collage.) I did have the forethought to charge $1 for 1-3 people and $2 for 4 or more this year, so that helped boost the gross income some.

Lest you think I'm down on this year's Trade Day, let me say that I'm not. It wasn't a huge success in it's own right, but I did cover most of the costs that can't be justified in some other way. I had a good time. My customers will have a good keepsake. It was fun. I'd do it again if I had it to do over, though I'd do it slightly differently.

Oh, and I'd like to give a shout out to Village Photographers for loaning me some equipment that helped to make my photo booth more legit than it might have been otherwise.

End of Trade Day

If you got your picture taken at our photo booth at Trade day earlier, those should be uploaded sometime Monday. Postcards will be mailed late next week. Thanks for all who came out in support of local businesses, tasty food, and free stuff.

Trade Day was a decent success for @PEaCe Phototgraphy. We didn't make a million dollars or anything, but we did better than breaking even. It was a great experience. Plenty of people took business cards, and I expect to hear from a number of folks about custom Christmas card pictures. The printed pictures didn't sell as well as I'd hoped, but one lady ordered a custom collage and I only came home with one Thurlow Dam picture, so the prints were far from being a bust. The unofficial count of postcard pics is 62; a fine first outing.

I learned a number of things today: 1)I needed more height on the tent to allow more height on the flash umbrella [fix with 4 cinder blocks]; 2)I should have covered the sides of the tent at first instead of chasing the sun [fix implicit]; 3)side coverings and backdrop should have been weighted better [fix with sandbags/water bottles and clamps]; 4)print ordering got too much space [fix by putting 4x6s into an album for ordering and have only 5x7s or larger prints for sale]; 5)the backdrop was too small, and the scene was not quite broad enough [fix by setting up scene in the corner and using two backdrops]; 6)the back drop was too close to the subject causing shadows [fix by setting up scene further in front of the backdrop--also allows extra people to stand behind scene instead of only going wide]; 7)I was pretty dried out by the end of the day [fix by drinking more water]. I'm sure there are other things I'll remember later, but this is a good list for now.

[EDIT: Below are links to the unedited images in albums on my facebook page.]

[Trade Day Album 1 and Trade Day Album 2]