Emilie Sommer, a wedding photographer based in Portland, Maine has a wonderful history in photojournalism. She worked at The Washington Post as a picture editor before moving to the north east to establish her business which has blossomed. Her heart, I can tell, is still in telling stories using the visual medium. She founded the Roots Workshop, a popular gathering for photographers who wish to flex their photojournalism skills.

One of things that Emilie has done for her business is expand it and open it up so that associate photographers under her company's banner can also serve wedding clients throughout the year. Emilie will be presenting at Inspire Photo Retreats, a conference that meets annually, from February 9th through the 11th in Portland, Maine. Her topic will address the necessary steps a studio must take before hiring or employing associate photographers.

Emilie and I chatted briefly about her presentation and the fact that this year Inspire Photo Retreats takes place in her backyard! Give this a listen:

If you are coming to Inspire Photo Retreats, please stop by and say hello to all the speakers. That's one of the things that differentiates Inspire from other – your ability to simply walk up to anyone you want to and chat with them about anything that is related to photography or life in general.

Matt and Enna Grazier, of Grazier Photography founded Inspire Photo Seminars with a group of like-minded studios three years ago, and are counting the days till Inspire 2012! Follow the Graziers on Twitter. Follow Inspire Photo on Twitter.

Thank you again Seshu for inviting us to share our ideas about how to get the most out of a conference! In Part 1 we described our philosophy about conferences and the wonderful benefits of smaller regional conferences. Large or small, attending a conference is a significant investment of time and money, and in this post (Part 2 of 2) I'm happy to share my strategy for getting the most out of a conference.

Winter is conference season! Several great events have already happened in January, and a few more are on the horizon (WPPI in just a couple weeks, and our Inspire conference later in March).

I tend to get a little ADD – if I may use that term lightly – when I attend a big conference. I’m likely to wander dazed through the tradeshow and collect every single piece of paper that is offered to me, and forget to take notes about products that I might want to buy or sell. I wander from one shiny object or person to the next, I bounce in and out of conference sessions, full of indecision about where to spend my time, or I play hooky from the classes entirely, opting instead to spend quality time with old and new friends over coffee or a long lunch, or even camped out in the hallway outside of the conference sessions.

Don't get me wrong – I LOVE participating in a conference in this fashion, and I'm sure I'll never change my ways, whether it's a cozy intimate conference like our own Inspire or Pictage‘s Partnercon series, or the mega-sized WPPI. What I’ve learned through trial and error is that it’s important to go into a conference with a “strategy”, a plan of action and goals, so that when I leave I can feel that my investment was well worth the time and money.

When attending a conference, our advice is to choose conference sessions and opportunities that will give you concrete help towards reaching new goals. If you're just getting started, this will help keep you from feeling too overwhelmed by all the new information. And if you’ve been in business for more than a few years, then the great thing about this strategy is that – if you’re completely honest with yourself – it should be easy for you to identify the areas where you need the most help or improvement.

1. Set Goals. What is your business in need of? Look over the course descriptions and find the ones that interest and will benefit you. Set a few goals for the conference based on your own needs and the unique opportunities offered by the conference. Don't shy away from the challenging topics.

2. Choose Classes. Prioritize your list of classes to attend. See how they fit in the schedule. This can be difficult as you are bound to have to sacrifice a class or two due to scheduling conflicts, but your goals should help you make these decisions.

3. Make a List. Make a list of people to meet, Exhibitors whose products or services you wish to learn about, and any other topics that you need to research at the conference.

4. Connect. Reach out to some of the other attendees and speakers before the conference. This will also make it easier to make connections with people at the conference. We're super excited about our online conference community which is designed to facilitate this exact sort of interaction and networking before, during, and after the conference! People who are attending our conference in March are already interacting and getting to know each other in our virtual conference community, preparing for their classes, learning about our sponsors.

5. Go. Go the conference. Have fun and learn to the point of exhaustion.

6. Take Action. Set a deadline to take action on all the new ideas and information that you take home! Don't just let those ideas ferment. Give yourself a deadline (we think 1 month is good) to take action on the most important things you took home from the conference. It may help to find someone you can be accountable to for these action steps – your business partner, or a fellow conference attendee are both good options!

Here’s My Sample Plan:

Our Studio Goals for 2012

a) Expand our studio to include a team of associate photographers
b) Refine our product selection for portrait clients
c) Network with more photographers in Seacoast NH, ME, and northeastern MA
d) Explore other sources of revenue (non-wedding and portrait related)
e) Polish our brand and portfolio

My Punchlist For The Inspire Conference

Look at and hold every Couture book available (and decide which to offer in our Boudoir and Portrait clients). Learn album sales strategies from Studio Nouveau’s session on Album Sales and Workflow.

a) Connect with at least two photographers who we might consider hiring on as Associates.
b) Get an intensive portfolio review with Allana Taranto (I need to choose a good set of images to share, so this review can feel comprehensive)
c) Take tons of notes in Carla Ten Eyck’s Managing a Team class (I admire Carla’s bustling studio so much, and I’ve wanted to learn some of her management techniques for years)
d) Learn about pricing and bidding on commercial shoots from Jane Shauck.
e) Attend Doug Levy‘s lighting demo where I can learn how he works with light.
f) Feed my heart with insights and ideas from Lauren Rutten on how to keep my business and work emotionally sustainable.

After The Conference

a) Set up a meeting with potential associates/employees at our Portsmouth NH studio.
b) Order new sample albums.
c) Identify some potential commercial clients/subjects in our new hometown and pursue them.
d) Get our revised portfolio selections onto our website asap!
e) Have a long meeting with Matt (my hubby and business partner) to discuss all our ideas and new knowledge that we want to implement or continue to develop. Preferably with wine and chocolate.

Like I said, I’m notorious for skipping or bouncing around in between conference sessions because I want to hang out with people, or just can’t decide which session to attend. Heading into the conference with this punchlist will help me stay on task, remember my goals, and ensure that I’ve maximized my time and financial investment in attending the conference. Of course at Inspire I'll be busy running around behind the scenes, but I do plan to work hard to address each item on my punchlist while at my own conference!

Be one of the first 5 to use this PROMO/DISCOUNT CODE: 2012TIFFIN and receive $50 off your registration.

This guest post is by Dr. Dhiraj Kacker, CEO and co-founder of Canvera, an online digital photography company based in Bangalore, India. Dhiraj has numerous patents and publications to his name in the field of Digital Imaging. Dhiraj can be found online on twitter, his company blog or his personal blog.

With the advent of digital photography and the simultaneous rise of the Internet the entire photography landscape has been revamped in the last decade. This audience knows these changes quite well so I won’t dwell on all of them but rather I’ll focus my post on the technology and craft that goes behind a product that was spawned by this revolution: Photo Books.

I don’t know how many people actually sit back and think about it but it is quite remarkable that today we can actually get a single copy of a book printed at a reasonable price and turned around fairly fast. In the traditional book publishing world the economics just would not make sense unless there were at least say a 1000 copies of a book to be printed. There are many services that provide the ability to print one-off books:

a) Consumer grade photo books by companies such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodakgallery

b) Self publishing service providers such as Blurb, Amazon etc. that focus on generic publishing not just photo content

c) High-end photobook and album manufacturers such as Graphistudio, Asuka, Queensberry etc. that provide a much richer variety in covers, papers, finishing and other customizations. These are the favorites with professional photographers because they best showcase the work of a pro.

Canvera falls in the last category and we have slowly but surely added more and more options as we engaged with more photographers and understood their needs. There is however a constant tension between how many options we can offer versus producing a high quality output and keeping fast turnaround times. What makes this difficult is that there are many different pieces that have to come together in an exact sequence without requiring any one person or set of people to keep track.

Take for example a flush mount book with a custom cover and a personalized box with pictures. The inside of the book is printed on a silver halide machine and bound. The cover and the box wrap are printed on a wide-format printer (in Canvera’s case). The cover goes for separate finishing and then through barcodes is matched at a separate station with the book block and then bound together. The same happens with the custom box. Now there are complications in the process: the silver halide printer and wide-format printer have to be producing the same colors at all times, we can’t afford to have anyone trying to match colors on a book by book basis; individual sheets may have to get re-printed for a variety of reasons; QA may reject the finishing of one of the pieces and that may have to get re-done and matched back with the remaining finished pieces.

None of this is possible to do at scale without significant automation and technology. But adding options brings with it significant complexity as well. Even seemingly simple things such as adding more cover varieties, paper types or hot foil stamping fonts requires us to think through the full workflow: what equipment do we need, where will the raw materials be available on the production floor, how will quality analysis happen etc. We keep trying to push the envelope in adding choices (and at times have gotten burned!) but it is a balancing act.

At Canvera our driving philosophy behind everything we do is as follows:

a) 80% of what makes a good photo book or album is the photography! No matter how many digital photography touch-up tools have been created and how many effects one can do, the pressure on a pro to produce great pictures is as high as ever. In fact I’d argue that with an explosion in images fueled by the web and multitude of capture devices, consumers have subconsciously developed a greater appreciation of what makes a good picture.

b) Fast turnaround time matters a lot. Take the case of wedding photography: For the bride and groom 90% perfect pictures and album received within 10-15 days of the occasion are much more valuable than the absolute perfect set received 6 months after the event. At Canvera therefore, once we get an order we try to put it in the mail within 48 hrs.

c) Quality of printed products should be high and predictable. It is not good enough that the samples are great, but every single product produced every single time without requiring any special treatment should be produced at high quality.

With these driving principles, we focus more on turn-around-time and end-to-end workflow to ensure speed and quality while hopefully letting the photography do most of the talking. This does not mean that we don’t keep adding options, but we do try and think through the full implications first.

Here are things for you to consider when choosing a photo book or album company (beyond of course liking the samples):

1) What kind of front end tools (web or client based) do they provide to capture the order correctly? If there is complexity of choices in the order that the front end tools are not capturing and you are sending instructions over email/phone, chances are that mistakes will happen..

2) As the company grows, do they have processes in place to maintain their turn-around-times and quality at high volumes or are they better off as a low volume hand-made producer?

3) Do the variety of options on the books and albums lend themselves to more mistakes? Is the company ready to handle that much complexity?

4) What kind of color consistency is there in their production work flow?

As I said earlier, at Canvera we are taking the approach that first and foremost the photographs should do the talking. That’s key. And we as the photo book and album manufacturers should get out of the way by quickly turning around a high quality product with the right colors morning, evening or night, even if it means in the short term compromising a little on the variety we offer.

What do you think? How do you pick your photo book and album company? Do you agree/disagree with this thinking?

For editorial photographers, looking to archive and sell or license their images, PhotoShelter offers a solution that is hard to pass up.

I caught up with Allen Murabayashi, the company's CEO last week and spoke to him briefly about the state of the photography industry, what we can expect to see out of PhotoShelter in the coming years and why those meaty guide books the company publishes helps to educate photographers about the current marketing trends.

The complimentary guides help you grow your photography business:

PhotoShelter is offering all Tiffinbox readers the following discount when you sign up for PhotoShelter before midnight on October 31st. When your readers sign up at www.photoshelter.com, they can enter the promotion code TIFFINBOX1110. The code entitles readers to the following discounts:

1) Annual Standard Account for $305.00/year – a $55 savings versus a monthly plan.
2) Annual Pro Account $529.00/year – a $70 savings versus a monthly plan

I am told that as of today, all new and existing standard accounts will receive 60 GB of secure storage (it used to be only 35gb), providing all standard accounts a safe space to store thousands of extra files. This increase comes at no additional cost.

Now that you have watched the video, can I ask a favor of you? Post a comment below & tell your friends. You have a variety of options below to spread the word. Thank you!

This is a guest post by Iurie Vlasov, a Marketing professional at Vitriol Consult LLC specializing in SEO and Innovative web-marketing.

On August 23, the world of photographers was touched by a piece of news that created quite some buzz – a totally new and innovative proofing system was to be released in October – ProofPress. You may be wondering what is the point of another photo cart when there is a myriad of different other products for online proofing available out there. Read on and you will understand!

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” ~ Steve Jobs

The creators of ProofPress, two young dashing individuals from Florida with an extensive experience in web-development and who specialized for years in e-commerce systems have come with an idea to create something different for the photographer. There is nothing new when it comes to photo proofing systems, and most of them already out there are very similar in functionality, but different in quality and price. ProofPress on the other hand was created with the end user in mind. But there are two end-users to a photo cart system you will say. Indeed, there is the photographer on one end who has the task of managing the system and the customer on the other end. Many photographers today are just too busy to deal with all the “advanced” functionality their current photo proofing cart provides, and may give up on using one for the sake of saving time and use the old-school “on-the-phone” method to get their print orders from clients. So much for saving time.

Now back to those two guys in Florida. What they did is to have an idea that was revolutionary. Being developers and not photographers they got in touch with a few portrait and wedding photographers and spent time talking and understanding what their needs were and what is that they miss most in their current systems. After many hours and tens of pages of sketches and charts and mockups etc. they finally decided to give the modern photographer a system that would work directly out of their WordPress blogs. Not bad, because 85% of the photographers out there use WordPress for their photo blogs, because it's reliable, because it's easy to use, because it's safe, because it's constantly developing and updating, and yes because – Google loves WordPress.

Well, here we go, why not have a proofing system that will work as a plugin from your WordPress administration back end. No need to remember different passwords for different admin accounts, no need to have a multitude of admin urls to remember, but instead just one plain WordPress backend. And that is what ProofPress does, installs as a plugin in your WordPress and opens a whole new system in there. The guys jokingly call it, “a system inside a system.” But be aware that you need to have a self hosted blog on an actual domain that belongs to you and NOT one of those “johndoe.wordpress.com” blogs.

That is all good you will say, but what makes it so special? My answer is simple here, it will indeed offer what most of the systems out there do right now but will also be packed with other features:

a) Full front end customization, you as a photographer will be able to customize your proofing site by editing a multitude of options, like changing your logo, background, fonts, colors you name it… and the system will also be compatible with custom created templates. Now you will be able to apply your branding and design and have a unique photo cart.

b) Per client management. No more gallery grids. Each of your customers will be provided with his own client site where he will see only his galleries and information that you provide, including a text page which you can edit the way you want by adding a model release form, or maybe some what-to-wear information

c) A revolutionized way of managing collections (packages). ProofPress will offer the most flexible way of creating a collection. Managing print credit, discounts etc has never been easier and you know what, you can even let your clients create their own custom collections.

d) You will also be able to manage your financials and send invoices directly from your administration panel which gives you some basic accounting features and you will always know the state of your expenses and profits. A great feature for beginners who don't really need a bookkeeping system like Freshbooks etc.

These are some of the many features that ProofPress will offer. Stay tuned for the official press release the guys will publish in the beginning of October. Meanwhile you can contact them via email at info@proof-press.com and sign-up for a 30% discount at ProofPress.

The Front End:

The Back End:

Win on 10/10/10! ProofPress is generously offering ONE free license to a Tiffinbox subscriber. Here is how you may be able to win this WordPress plugin: First, Tweet the following: “I just learned about a very cool WordPress plugin called @ProofPress on @PicSeshu's Tiffinbox. #ProofPress Please RT!” Second, comment below and tell me WHY you deserve to win. Don't forget to mention your Twitter handle so that I can make sure you have done both. I need to see a minimum of 50 real, honest, entries before I can give this away on October 10, 2010. So whatchawaitinfor?

WINNER ANNOUNCED – Kate McKenna – from Medford, MA has won ONE license of ProofPress, the forthcoming WordPress Plugin. Follow her on Twitter. Congratulations Kate!