I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve decided to look into the possiblilty of running a little workshop.  However, I don’t want to cover stuff nobody really wants to know, or that’s been covered to death so I would like some feedback from the community.

A) Would you be interested in attending a relevant and local workshop?

B) What area would you most like to gain more knowledge or insight into?

Please respond either here or through e-mail to dwilson@secondsightstudio.com. 

In my attempts to become more involved in photography as part of my effort in getting my business up and running I’ve taken part in many of the new social media experiments.  I’ve joined Twitter, Flickr, started this blog, and have enhanced my presence on Facebook with a Facebook Page for business.  Next up is fine tuning everything and getting some of that mystical Google Search results holy grail of being on the first page of a search for Edmonton Photographers or Edmonton Wedding Photographers.

While playing around with these new tools and hangingout at other photographers blogs and listening to podcasts aplenty I’ve had the odd sensation several times now of referring to some of these people as friends.  Many of them of them likely saw my name for a moment when I first started following them on Twitter or from a comment I may have made on their blogs but really, they probably have NO idea who I am, so why am I calling them friend?  After spending a good chunk of time following the lives of others you get to know them almost like a friend.  But without that one on one interaction, can you really call them a friend?  Why not!? As far as I’m concerned we are ALL friends.  Some of us just haven’t been properly introduced.

And that’s a core thing for me in business and was a major point of conflict between me and an ex-girlfriend (she fiercly disagreed with me).  When I’m dealing with a client I don’t really want a client/business-owner relationship, to me that’s just a cold thing.  It says “I’m here to take your money and don’t really care that much about you as a person”.  No, I’d much rather have a friendship  that says “yes, I’m performing a service for you for which I must be fairly compensated but I care about how you feel about the results of the service I provide and eally want you to be happy with what you receive.”  I’m not looking to be your Photographer for this event.  I’m looking to be YOUR photographer.  For life!  Let us photograph your wedding in July and then 24 years from now, let us photograph your daughter’s wedding!  And during that 24 year journey allow us to photograph all your most memorable events.  We’re here for YOU.  Payment is just a neccessary evil.

Over the last few months, between my three real jobs, I’ve been working on resuming my photography as a business.  The big step in that process was in teaming up with my good friend Mel Bettcher and revamping the web site.  The web site is now in a substantially complete form and just needs to be filled out a bit more and fine tuned  for accuracy of informatioin and presentation of materials.  That will come with time.

Another aspect of what I’ve been doing is research.  Research into business practices has been at the bottom of the list though it shoudlbe higher.  Mainly I’ve been researching wedding and portrait photography and the various ways photographers of these styles work and run their business.  The problem is that I tend to get caught up in the imagery and I’ll lose HOURS just pouring over images, and videos of other photographer’s work.   The ad part of that is that sometimes I’ll come across a photographer whose work I love but because of how I’m going about things I forget to bookmark them and I end up losing the info about them. 

I don’t know about other folks but here is a sort of breakdown of how my mind works reflected in the way I surf.

This morning I’m on Twitter and see a post by a guy named Scott Bourne (@ScottBourne) about a dude named David Hobby who has a blog devoted to flash photography (http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/), where I discovered a link to Belgian photographer Bert Sephani’s web site that had a video for a guy named Guillermo Calderon doing a cool series of photos in his bathtub!  It’s at this point I figured I should probably stop link-hopping and write this blog post about how my mind is all over the place all the time and why I don’t want to just focus pn wedding photography but ALL Photography because I just Love a cool image!

So that paragraph is pretty much how my mind goes every 13.8 seconds.  Welcome to my world!

So with my last blog post I indicated I was playing with some new software.  Using that product I created our new front page video at www.secondsightstudio.com.  I still wound up loading the video into Adobe Premier to cut in an animation of our logo which I’m not totally happy with but it works for now.  The main software used is actually a web service called Animoto.com.  It’s very easy, and very cool however I made the mistake of signing up for their one year package which is still very limiting.  Moving to their business or photographer packages DOES NOT let you  tansfer your $30 payment over so if you make my mistake, your $99 package or $249 package will end up costing you that extra $30 so be forewarned!  It is very good product so I will likely end up moving to their higher accounts but not until I really it.  After all, I still have 11 months of this main service to go.

Also, I”ve added two new links to the Prety Cool Links page.  These are by a guy named Scott Bourne who is providing the photography world with some pretty cool information as well as lots of fun giveaways!  If you don’t like free stuff, stay away from Scott!