This is a guest blog by Boston-based photography consultant, Selina Maitreya.

For months many photographers have been laying low, few of them actively marketing citing financial setbacks and slow economic times. However proactive photographers have been working on their portfolios, updating databases, sending out direct and visual email and going on sales calls.

Who’s going to be in the running when the assignments start rolling in? My guess would be our proactive friends. No surprise there.

If you chose to cut back on your sales and marketing efforts in the last months or even years, NOW is the time reboot your business. Here is my checklist (in order) that you can use as a reference as you seek to re-charge your efforts.

VISUAL PRODUCT: Your body of work is your product. Make sure you have a deep body of work 25-40 images that represent your visual approach to your subject area. Go back and make sure all examples are current, and applicable to your vision. Edit and repaginate.

DATABASE: When was the last time you used your database? If it’s been a while, check with your provider and restructure your contact list. Make sure you have enough contacts for your outreach efforts (direct and visual email) to show a healthy return (1000-1500 names). If you don’t have a list. Invest in one. Contact AgencyAccess.com. They have a super team.

Develop Sales and Marketing Tools:

1) Get a print book fill it with the same images that is in your main web gallery and use it.

2) Choose locations 1 hour North, South, East and West of you and choose 75-100 contacts from your database and create an in person sales call list.

3) Set a goal for yourself for appointments you need to have per month and get going.

4) For my wedding folks your numbers for contacts will be smaller but if you look to see function hall contacts, wedding planners etc. you should have lots of in person leads.

5) Develop inexpensive post card mailers and plan on sending one every other month.

6) Develop and plan on sending out emails on month’s direct mail does not go out.

Social Networking:

If you have been a bit intimidated by social networking or only communicating with other photographers get your self-educated about the use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as business applications. These helpful contact tools cost nothing but your time and attention.

I’ve given you what may seem to be a very large task, but if you take these suggestions one at a time and facilitate them you will be in great shape when the economy turns, and my wish is that it turns in your favor!

Follow Selina on Twitter, connect with her on Facebook and or LinkedIn. She is also the producer and voice behind The View From Here, an audio (MP3) program for photographers. If you found Selina's post here useful, you are going to LOVE The View From Here. Simply use “FOSSES” when you check out, to get it for $199 $99! (Yes, that's an affiliate code)

Duluth, Minnesota-based photographer Max Caven posted this quick guest blog about using his iPhone and the WordPress application to publish articles to his blog.

I just wrote this short tutorial so that you may post anything to WordPress (your blog) from your iPhone. It doesn't have to be just images, however.

1. Grab your iPhone and download the WordPress app from the Apple app store. It's FREE!

2. On your computer head over to your WordPress Admin console, and click the ‘Writing’ section under the ‘settings’ tab. Check the box next to “XML-RPC” to allow mobile publishing.

3. Open up your newly downloaded WordPress app, click the ‘+’ button to add a blog, and then input your credentials.

4. Hit the ‘Posts’ button on the bottom on the screen, hit the new post button on the top right of the screen and write your post!

5. When you’re all done and ready to post, change the status from ‘Local Draft’ to ‘Published’, hit ‘Save’ and you’re all done!

Don't you just feel the peace, serenity and love in this stunning image by Gabe McClintock, a photographer based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada? Gabe calls these portrait sessions before a wedding, “Connection” Sessions (instead of the ubiquitous and somewhat boring E-Sessions). Makes sense to me. This is what wedding photography should be all about!

Feel free to visit Gabe's website which is so full of amazing moments that are gentle, quiet and graceful. Thanks, Gabe for the opportunity to host one of your images here.

Post your comments below. Tell us, if you are a wedding photographer, how you portray the connection your couples have between each other or the connections that families make in multicultural weddings.

This is a guest post by Scott Jarvie, a photographer based in Utah.

So this is Holi: The Festival of Colors

The Holi festival in Utah is one of the largest of it's kind (outside of Asia) in the world. This is what wikipedia says about Holi.

Two years ago I first heard of the event which had been growing over the years from some devotees and handful of local college students to where it is now some devotees and a mass of college students and others. I was lucky enough to take the iconic picture that year (Below), which is still probably one of my favorites.

Last year one of my biggest regrets of the year was taking an out of state wedding instead of heading back to the festival. This year I would have none of that and not only went to the event but organized 12 other photographers to come and take pictures to amass in a huge gallery for the benefit of the attendees and the temple. Between the 10+ photographers we walked away with 10,000 pictures and in the end we came up with a gallery of 4992 pictures. The reason for so many is because this was for the attendees and when you have well over 15,000 people there are rarely duplicates of the same person… unless of course they were doing something fun or were covered uniquely. You can see the pictures divided by each photographer here. Including mine of course.

In some circles I'm known as the Jarvie of the “Jarvie Window” experience. (Strobist) So of course I snapped a few pictures ala that style.

Wedding photographers might find it interesting that I also arranged for some clients and friends to show up in wedding dresses.

BUT what is the Festival of Colors?

It takes place at the Radha Krishna Temple located at 311 West 8500 South Spanish Fork, Utah 84660.

(Above) The temple is a unique and perhaps out of place building in the middle of a farming community in a highly LDS (Mormon) Utah. They pack them in. Estimates vary widely. They don't do an official count … but my guess would be somewhere between 15-25k (that range is pretty safe, I know).

(Above) this is hours before the color starts, but close parking is limited so they come in early.

The temple's priest, Caru Das Adikari (Below) runs the show and helped make the temple and the Krishna community happen in Utah County.

They have dancing and of course chanting but the big event is when they do the count down, burn the witch, usher in the spring and throw the colors.

A crowd this size makes for more than a couple wonderfully candid and fun moments (Below)

(above) and the not so candid

There are a lot of people with cameras (Below) Both DSLRs and everyone with their own point and click. It's actually a whole lot safer to go in with a nice sealed Pro camera than these little point and clicks, but a bit of plastic bags to go around and anyone's camera is decently safe from the colored (Corn Maize) powder found in one of the 50,000 bags they sell on the property.

Of course… People get covered with colors. That's kind of the point for those going.

They come dressed pretty uniquely (Below)

While the majority of people are students is also very much a family event. Good clean fun you may say (Below)

Other details and portraits

If you're in town next March or you want to go out of your way to make it down here, get a hold of me, because I'm sure we're going to do it again. Maybe even have a larger group of photographers this time.

I used to write posts about how to protect the cameras but after 2 events I've decided that this is actually such a non-issue that I will no longer coddle the weak. I said to myself why am I so concerned about curing people's worries and getting more photographers there? All are invited (by the organizers and of course me) but it's not for everyone. I didn't do anything to protect my stuff the first time and this last time I used saran wrap and gaffer tape and both times my cameras were totally fine. So this is about all I'll say on this subject.

We should be talking about the pictures, the totally unique and fun experience.

Go and see a whole bunch more divided into lots of categories. Like crowd surfing, color throwing, Jarvie Window and the Krishna Temple.

Tell us what you thought of this post! I look forward to your comments. Thank you!

This is a guest post by Canadian photographers, Lauren & Rob Lim, whose spirited wedding, portrait and travel photography is the talk of the town.

At the moment in the wedding photography industry there is a bit of a backlash against educators. Whether deserved or not is up for debate, but it certainly has resulted in a lot of discussion about those who make money from teaching.

As we can be considered educators ourselves (have been quite happily teaching other photographers for over 2 years), and are now moving towards doing it more, we thought we’d give a bit of insight into why we teach.

To understand where we’re coming from, I’ll give you a bit of background on us. We weren’t the photographers who grew up with a camera in hand. Our interest in photography didn’t come until we were 19 and 21, during a requisite backpacking trip through Europe. As I’m sure has happened with all photographers out there, we instantly developed a very strong passion for creating photos. But, we knew absolutely nothing about the art. Nothing at all. Being rather young, we didn’t see that as any sort of hindrance, and began the process of teaching ourselves this craft so that we could become professional photographers.

That naivety allowed us to pursue our goals without any thought to whether it was even possible. And, thankfully, we simply made it possible. But it didn’t happen without an immense amount of time spent learning, reading, sifting through dozens of articles, and making a ton of mistakes along the way.

What we found, after years of self-teaching, was that the number of high quality and affordable resources out there for photographers was a lot smaller than we would have imagined. Sure, there are countless forums, blogs, and articles that you can find for free. But many of them offer differing opinions and ideas (though all too often they don’t see them as opinions, but rather as fact! That makes it even more difficult for a new photographer to understand what to do!). They also take a lot of time to go through, compile information, and try to process it in a way that works for the individual. It’s not easy or fun, and often it’s just downright overwhelming! I fear that a lot of people likely give up, simply because the task of finding and digesting high quality information is just too difficult.

Furthermore, many resources are currently being offered for very high price tags. Often upwards of hundreds of dollars (thousands if we’re talking about workshops). While there’s no way for us to decide whether those are worth it, we do know that they are far outside the reach of many photographers. Photographers on average aren’t rich people. They often have budgets just like anyone else, and many are left unable to purchase the tutorial they’d like, or going into credit card debt to attend the workshop they think will solve their problems. We were deeply unhappy with that approach. We strongly believe that teaching should be to help others, not yourself. With that in mind, we made a commitment to offer our education at prices that anyone could afford, including students.

Back to how we became educators! The more we learned, the more we found ourselves trying to help other photographers. We’d have colleagues over to our home to spend some time teaching them a new program or technique. And, time and time again, we’d find ourselves teaching the same material to each person. We were happy to be helping out that individual, but knew that there had to be a more efficient method.

The next logical step was, of course, to figure out how to get that information into the hands of the most people possible! So we created Photography Concentrate, a website dedicated to high quality, affordable information. We initially thought about writing e-books, but as soon as we began to plan for our first tutorial, all about RAW processing, we realized that books aren’t always the best way to learn for most photographers. We’re visual people by nature, so learning likely happens best in a visual manner! Thus began our foray into video tutorials. We’ve just completed our first one, and are hard at work at the next. We’re so excited about the possibility of helping photographers all around the world to learn to take control over the programs we rely so heavily on.

Which brings me to the final thought: Why We Teach

It’s pretty simple, and we can boil it down to one idea: we teach to help photographers acquire the skills needed to fully realize their artistic potential.

All the people we teach have their own incredible creative talent. We don’t need to teach them that. We simply want to help them unlock it. We believe that having a strong foundation of technical knowledge is the first step on that path, so that’s what we intend to share!

With RAW Processing Concentrate, our tutorial on editing in Lightroom, we’re hoping to help photographers improve the final look of their images. Very often we see an incredible shot, with great composition and vision behind it, but the processing falls short, and the image fails to reach it’s full potential. Processing is just one step in the creation of a great photograph, but it’s a hugely important one. Many photographers currently rely on pre-made actions and presets to process their images. These will certainly make you faster, but we don’t believe they will make you better.

Life as an artist is about growth and exploration, and one needs knowledge to achieve that.

If you’d like more information about our tutorial and teaching adventures check out Photography Concentrate.