Today started much like yesterday, check the weather, check the snow report. No new snow and still -22 on the mountain. That’s ok though, sometimes you need to have some time at the desk. It's an unfortunate fact that most photographer probably spend more time at the desk than they do out shooting. Everyone’s routine is different but if you shoot a lot of photos they all need to be archived, key worded, processed and distributed to various people. Then there is always the constant negotiations with people who are trying to buy your work for a price that doesn't even cover your expenses and the never ending chase to get paid for that photo that was in a magazine in a corner of the world you have never visited, where they speak a language you will never understand. It's not without out its challenges but damn I love it...
This morning was a good morning for some of the above. I'm also still trying to raise a 5 figure budget for a heli ski trip with one of the film companies but it seems the purse strings are pretty tight this month. Lots of e-mail response to this morning and some moderate success but I’m still falling short on my target. Time for some more e-mails.....
With that out of the way I turned my attention to my website. It is so important to have a strong web presence as a photographer these days, in fact I attribute a fair portion of my success over the last couple of years to having a good website. It's not that flashy, it's not that big and I wrote the whole thing myself with zero knowledge of what I was doing when I set out. But it is simple and the photos are the main focus of the site. I don't have any training in writing website code so things take me a while to get to where I’m happy with it but it is worth every minute. My site is currently going through some minor updates as you'll find if you have a look around. This morning I swapped a few photos around and most importantly added a new button to the front page where people can click through to buy prints of my photos! I set up an account with a company called smugmug who deal with all the printing and credit card transactions so now I can easily upload new shots as I shoot them and people can get prints of any size and description delivered to their door in a couple of days! I often get e-mails asking if people can buy prints so I’m stoked to have finally got this sorted out and now I can set about choosing which shots to put up there to buy.
I also put a nice big "Buy Prints" button on my blog. And that's the next thing that gets my attention on a day like today. The blog is fairly new to me but as I said, web presence is all important these days so I took the plunge and designed a blog a few months back.
The most asked questions from people through my blog are gear related. "What do you use for this?" "How do you travel with that and get it to do this?" Today I figured was a good day to start addressing these questions with some video so armed with my HD shooting Canon 5dMKII and a video tripod I went down to my garage and spent the afternoon recording the first video in a series about what equipment I have. In the future I’ll be adding more videos covering the rest of my gear (camera , lenses) and also videos on what I use each one for and hopefully some instructional video too. Stay tuned.
I definitely need to get better at video editing though, not one of my strong points as you'll see. I struggled a bit with this in Final Cut Pro but the rendering time for HD video was driving me crazy in that so I switched to iMovie HD and had it done in half an hour.
-Dan
