Some of you lucky ones living in warmer climates are already out creating portraits or photographing weddings. But New England, where I live, is still experiencing winter with more snow coming this weekend.

Rain (snow) or shine, your business has to keep going. If you are showing off images from last year or two years ago, it may be time for an overhaul. You are probably already tinkering with your website. Your marketing collateral – that which you either give to clients to take home or display prominently in your studio, is vitally important to keep fresh.

Amata Pictures is a new business venture I'm launching and I've already talked to local vendors with large wall spaces about displaying my images in their offices.

I could easily go with traditional prints. However, large prints, most of the time, require larger frames. And they aren't inexpensive investments. I really do love canvas prints and there are a number of great companies all providing quality canvas prints. One among them is Canvas Pop.

When I saw this PhotoDough offer (3 days left as I publish this post) to buy one gallery wrapped 20″x30″ canvas print from CanvasPop, I had to share it with you. You can get it now for $59. That's 60% off the normal $149 price.

If you buy a canvas print using this affiliate link, I get a small commission that helps keep Tiffinbox (mostly a labor of love) running. When you click that link, you will see the offer in the right-hand sidebar of the page. Do know that there is a $14 shipping charge.

If you are in the midst of a marketing massage anyway, why not consider buying a large canvas print for your wall. Save yourself some money in the process, too. Even if you don't own a storefront studio but work out of your home, you still need to display your work, right? How does that mantra go?

“You sell what you show.”

P.S. Once in a while, I will publish these types of posts. I assume, as a fellow photographer you are busy and appreciate these types of “head's up” articles that lead you to services and products that can genuinely help your business. If you have strong feelings about this one way or another, don't be shy about posting your thoughts below or contact me.

With a headline like that, I hope I got your attention.

I won't waste your time. I will keep my promise where you can save a ton on Photography Concentrate's tutorials, you might win big by entering their contest for a Sony NEX-6 and a ONA bag and become that photographer you want to be by using their tutorials.

Simply put, get yourself out to Photography Concentrate's Super Black Friday Event now.

First, you'll save 40% on all their tutorials. You won't ever find them discounted like this again … well, until next year perhaps! The tutorials are awesome and include the following:

Extremely Essential Camera Skills – Reg. $49.95 on sale for $29.97

Great for those of you getting started with a new DSLR. You know the one your Aunt Margie will buy as a surprise for this Christmas. Photography is beyond putting things on AUTO and winging it. Learn the fundamentals from these two. They explain it well and with videos too. Read my review here.

Simple Wedding Photography – Reg. $39.95 on sale for $23.97

In this behemoth of an offering our Canadian friends have pretty much outlined EVERYTHING you need to do right to get your wedding photography business on track. When I received this download, I was floored. So much information. All in one place. Boo-yah!

Super Photo Editing Skills – Reg $79.95 on sale for $47.97

You probably got your start in Photoshop Elements. (No one is judging you) And then worked up the nerve to buy into Photoshop itself. Then Lightroom came around and you got all conflicted about which to work with, right? Right. I have been there myself. In this video driven tutorial, you will learn to work with Lightroom the right way. The simple way. The elegant way. It's long in term of time but is filled with tips and tricks that will speed your workflow right up. If you are struggling with your workflow, buy this and give yourself a break.

Awesome Album Design Skills – Reg $79.95 on sale for $47.97

As a wedding photographer, designing albums was about the last thing I wanted to do. Sure, you could outsource it. But Rob and Lauren show you how to use InDesign to easily create templates that you can reuse and manipulate at will. Imagine being able to finish designing your albums in record time. Well, this is what you will learn in this tutorial.

Yes, I am an affiliate partner and I make a small commission that supports this blog. But as I have mentioned in posts past, I don't promote products or services willy-nilly. They have to be something I feel I would use myself and are of the highest quality. That said, get clicky with me and buy the tutorial that is right for you, or buy them all as this sale ends on November 27th.

In true, Photography Concentrate style, Rob & Lauren have also produced a PDF/InDesign set of questionnaires for portrait photographers. What better way to get to know your clients than to ask them about who they are and what makes them tick? This set of questionnaires is FREE. Yep, no strings attached. Just go here to download them. You get both PDFs and InDesign templates that you can repurpose with your own branding!

And the whopper? Enter to win a Sony NEX-6 and a ONA bag. Again, you don't have to buy a thing. Just enter here.

Remember, the sale ends on November 27th. Don't wait until the last minute. From Tiffinbox to you, a very Happy Thanksgiving!

As a photographer – whether you are just starting out or you are a seasoned pro – you can be easily overwhelmed by the dizzying array of Photoshop actions available in the market. I have used Kevin Kubota's actions for a very long time and for good reason. Here is why I LOVE Kevin's actions: they evolve.

Most other Photoshop action producers are quite happy churning out actions and then they stop making them better. No, not Kevin and his incredible team at Kubota Tools. Every photography convention I have met them, they are sure to show me how they have evolved their actions – made it beter and more efficient to run with the newest operating system or the latest version of Photoshop. And they constantly innovate too, bringing to us such options as a Dashboard for their actions, to make it easy for us to find, select and apply these actions. For this alone, I applaud them.

Now you are probably wondering what the headline is all about, right? Well, I just got an email from Kevin's team today saying they were temporarily dropping the price on some of their products, until the end of April. Yeah, totally nuts because they are easily three or four times their value IF you use them on a regular basis like I do. The Dashboard, for instance, allows me to use not only Kevin's actions but others as well.

Those who know me and know Tiffinbox also know that I typically don't promote products that I haven't personally owned or used extensively in my own photography business. Yes, as an affiliate, I do make a small commission. But I would be remiss if I did not at least alert you to this special sale going on only through the end of April.

Feel free to click on any of the product images below to order your own Kevin Kubota Photoshop action sets or the Dashboard, I've mentioned above. It's all good!

These artistic and production tools have saved me oodles of time:

These are also some of the products I highly recommend:

So, if you do buy one or more of the products listed, above, would you please come back here and tell us (1) why you bought it and (2) if you have used it for a couple of weeks, what your feedback would be for these products? Your opinion matters!

This guest blog post is written by Eric O'Connor, a Chicago wedding photographer, owner of Allori Photography and mylife-pages. Follow Eric on Twitter.

2012 will soon be here.

January is the perfect time to take a hard look at how to maximize profits in the upcoming year. These are a few recommendations that have helped me, follow all three and I know they'll work for you too.

1. What's in it for me?
2. Stay in Touch
3. Share the Love

What's In It For Me?

Your clients want information. They want to know every detail about their purchase. Give it to them! You are the expert. Share your knowledge and process with them. Whatever you do please don't wait until after the wedding to inform your client about the pre-design process. If you do they will feel cheated.  After they book with you make sure to take time or create a wedding album FAQ to walk them through the album process. This doesn't have to be complicated. Just a simple step by step from the day you shoot the wedding to the day you deliver their album. Set expectations and then deliver on them. It is important they understand you will be telling the story of their wedding day and you'll use as many pages as it takes to get it right. I always like to mention it gives them a great starting point. They can then customize the album to exactly what they want. Your clients will love this idea. Anytime they can take ownership in the process, you win!

Stay in Touch

Take a minute and think about the excitement leading up to the wedding. Your clients are excited about their wedding and then … BAM! … the wedding is over. It doesn't take long and they are back to real life. Catch your bride and groom in that first 30 days and their wedding day excitement will do the selling for you. You likely only have a 30 day window to take advantage of the wedding high. If 30 to 90 days go by and your bride hasn't seen pictures or a draft of her album it is much harder to add pages or sell additional albums. I make it a point to have everything to my brides 7 days after their wedding. I used to deliver images 30 days after the wedding and routinely life got in the way and the brides wouldn't even think about their album for a few more months. There were always a lot of album edits and very little pages added. Now, 7 days after their wedding they can view their Animoto slideshow, image gallery, and album pre-design right on their wedding website. I make sure to give my clients a deadline. We want to have the album completed and ready to print in 3 to 4 weeks. This helps give them a target to have their changes complete. Extra albums page sales have gone from a few or none to five, ten or more from every wedding.

Share the Love

Quick turnaround time is essential but I find coupling that with excitement from friends has really helped additional album page sales. A few years ago I emailed PDFs to my brides and they would leave me comments for changes. This was pretty efficient but didn't help me much when it came to advertising or extra album pages. I don't pay for ads in magazines and only have one ad online that I tested out this year and will discontinue Jan 1.  Word of mouth, SEO, social media, and over the top customer service do the job for me. The next iteration of album sharing was a slideshow posted on YouTube. I found I was getting quite a few hits and at the same time album sales started to increase. Brides started telling me their friends loved watching their wedding album movies. This was one of those common sense moments when the light goes on in your head. Friends of the bride love the album and they start telling the bride about their favorite pages. This process makes it harder and harder for the bride to remove or change pages.

Finally I arrived at the perfect solution, Share the Love! Wedding album movies on a post wedding website are essential to higher album page sales. With a favorites gallery, Animoto slideshow, and movie of the album, my brides have a constant flow of compliments from their friends about how much they love the wedding images and album pages. As you can see in the graphic the album movie in this wedding was viewed over 200 times in 6 weeks. I have been completely removed from the album page sales process. Yes, I have to take images my clients love but my brides' friends do the rest of the work for me. I do not meet with my clients to sell or add pages. These days they all add pages without sitting down with me.

Test out the three steps above. They are easy so don't cheat yourself and pick just one. Do all three. You will start to see a difference in sales. Click the image below to see how I display sample albums on post wedding websites.

Want to try a post wedding website? Your first site is FREE. Surprise one of your favorite clients with a wedding website with colors to match their wedding.

Andrew Funderburg is the founder of Fundy SOS, a software company that creates remarkable tools for wedding and portrait photographers. His Fundy Album Builder [affiliate link] recently won the Hot One Award by the Professional Photographers of America.

Most couples seek photographers who can deliver beautiful wedding albums. Most often, though, photographers find themselves hitting the breaks when trying to sell those wedding albums. What prevents them from making the sale?

“Fundy” as he is known has some advice for wedding photographers looking for ways to increase their profit margins. Check out this video that I created when I met up with him at the Mystic Seminars event in early January.

Please note that Fundy's is one approach to selling wedding albums to clients. How do you approach it? Would you be open to sharing your thoughts with us? Please comment below!