This guest post is by Rob & Lauren, who are photographers, educators, travelers, and all-around fun-loving folks. They spend their time teaching on Photography Concentrate and creating portraits of fun people. They are currently obsessed with espresso and robots. Follow them on Twitter.

Once upon a time we made a really big mistake in our business. The kind of mistake that still comes back to haunt us on a regular basis. A real forehead-slapping, bad-word-saying, doozy of a blunder. 

But before we tell you what we did, let's take a second to talk about mistakes. 

We're human. So are you. (Unless you're a robot, and then you don't really need to read this.) Human beings make mistakes. All. The. Time. If you haven't made a big mistake in your business yet, chances are pretty good that you will.
 
And so a big part of being a business owner is getting your mind in the right place to handle the inevitable missteps. Here are a few steps to take care of those problems when they pop up:

Step 1: Understand that you will make mistakes.
 
You're not perfect and mistakes will happen. When you accept that, you'll feel a lot less anxious and worried! You may even come to embrace mistakes when they happen! Maybe…

Step 2: Admit the mistake.
 
This is a big one. It's easy to hide from your mistakes, and pretend nothing is wrong. Bad move. They have a way of getting worse over time, and you lose your ability to nip the problem in the bud. So when you make a mistake, acknowledge it. Write it down to make it real if you have to. Just admit you messed up, and you'll be in a much better place to fix it.

Step 3: Look at the mistake objectively.
 
When it's your business it's easy to get emotional, and think the mistake is much more dire than it really is. Take a step back, get some big picture perspective, and figure out just what went wrong. Be honest.

Step 4: Fix it. 

This might not always be easy, but do your best to figure out how to fix the mistake. Make things right with clients, with your business, and with yourself. Every mistake is different, so there's no single answer to this one. But now that you've admitted the mistake, and looked at it objectively, you should be able to figure out how to fix it.

Step 5: Learn from it. 

After you've worked to fix the mistake, now comes the most important part. Learn from it!! This is the silver lining, and the big reason why it's ok to make mistakes. They are amazing learning experiences in disguise. If you figure out how to prevent the mistake in the future, you end up growing as a result of making it in the first place. Win!

Step 6: Move on. 

Remember, it's ok to make mistakes. After you've learned from it, then move on. Dwelling on mistakes you've made doesn't help you at all. Focus your energy instead on doing great things in the future. You can't change the past, after all! (Unless you have a time machine, and if so we should talk.)

So, now are you ready to hear about our big mistake? Let's do it.

After a couple of years of shooting weddings in our hometown of Edmonton, we thought it would be a great adventure to move to another city (Vancouver) and set up shop. We went out there to look around, and even did a bunch of networking with local photographers. 

Then, the big mistake: we announced that we would be moving on our blog. 

And never moved.

But all of our clients and potential clients thought we weren't going to be in Edmonton anymore. They stopped contacting us, referring us, telling people we weren't shooting here anymore…you can see why this was a big mistake. 

When we decided to stay in Edmonton we did post about it, and sent out a newsletter, but we never really admitted just how big the mistake we made was. We didn't take the “fix it” stage seriously enough. We didn't put in enough effort to make sure everyone knew we were staying.

And so fast forward a few years, and we still regularly get asked when we are moving, or hear statements like “Oh you're still here! I thought you had moved!”. Bummer.

Luckily it didn't send our business down the toilet, but that was a very real possibility. We've now learned to never make big announcements online unless we are absolutely, positively, 100% sure about it. 

So, have you made a big mistake? Did you admit it and fix it? Or ignore it and have it grow into a big issue like ours? What did you learn from your boo boo? Share with us in the comments now!

Need to learn how to use your camera, edit images in Lightroom, design wedding albums in InDesign? Robert & Lauren Lim are passionate about teaching you through their website and products. Buy them here using these affiliate links so that you may support Tiffinbox as well.

For the last 6 months, there has been a low rumble in my brain to present an annual award to a photographer or photography teacher who universally inspires us all to be better photographers, perhaps even be better human beings. In my mind, it had to be a person who goes well beyond the ordinary – shares her/his knowledge openly, invites dialogue and challenges us to elevate our craft and vision.

You probably already know some them. You've attended their workshops, hung out with them at parties and chatted with them one-on-one about your photography work and or business. You've come away after each encounter feeling energized and enthused about your calling – photography. They have rekindled that fire in your belly and you know that today and tomorrow are going to be great days because of the time you spent with him or her yesterday. Ever feel that way? It's time to celebrate them.

2011 Awardee

The list of friends, and they have become just that over the years, is long. Choosing one among all of them for this first Tiffinbox Award was no easy task.

The photographer whose name I kept seeing again and again – thanks to his awesome Twitter presence, his phenomenal feat of writing 4 truly amazing books in 3 years, his workshops, his thought provoking blog posts and his positive spirit as he faced life-threatening challenges – is David DuChemin.

So, David, congratulations. On behalf of all the photographers who have been inspired by your spirit, your hard work as a photographer, teacher and mentor, I am honored to present you the 1st Annual Tiffinbox Award. You'll receive a real Tiffinbox in the mail, filled with goodies you can munch on as you embark on your next trip with Jessie.

Craft & Vision

“Gear is good. Vision is better,” is his mantra. This simple, yet profound philosophy to photography and business has been my guide for the last few years. Perhaps it has been for you as well. So, instead of buying more gear, David suggests expanding the way you photograph your subjects. To that end, David began publishing beautifully designed and written e-books for photographers. At $5 each, these won't break your bank. Want to know more, check out Craft & Vision. [affiliate]

The Giveaways

If you have been influenced or inspired by David's blog posts, Tweets or even the e-books he produces, let me/us know in the comments section below. Be as descriptive and specific as possible. How has he helped you? What steps did you take with your photography after reading one of his e-books or blog posts? Which particular blog posts spurred you into action? Feel free to show us “before & after” images via links to a post on your site.

If I receive a 100 comments under this blog post between today and August 31, I'll select 4 of the best comments to each win one of 4 of David's awesome books (yes, shipped anywhere in the world) on September 1. So, hurry!

UPDATE: I've reconsidered the 100 comment requirement and I am pulling it. The deadline will be the same. You want to win 1 of 4 David's books, then comment away. I'll read through each of them and pick 4 winners. Deal?

Here are the four books I will be giving away:

Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography
Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Photographically Speaking: A Deeper Look at Creating Stronger Images

By the way, the annual Tiffinbox Award will always be presented on August 23. I'll let you figure out why. Also start thinking of whom you will nominate for next year's award.

WINNERS ANNOUNCED: This morning I chose the following to win 1 of 4 David's books – @kristaphoto @LaraWhite @nine9beans and @BelindaOlsen. Congratulations! Please contact me with your mailing address by September 7. All but one book will be shipped in September. David's latest is in process of going to print. If you already own one or more of his books, please let me know which one(s) so that I don't send you something you already have.

This guest post is by Olivier Lance, who with Pierre-Jean Quilleré launched Sylights in 2009, a wonderful web and mobile application for photographers that helps them document their lighting setups. Olivier, a full time IT engineer from Paris, France, develops MacOS X software for a living. He's also a passionate photographer. Please follow Olivier on Twitter.

Every now and then, when you post a photo to your blog or on a sharing platform, you get the common question: “how did you light it?”

That's a tricky one! How do you go explaining to somebody a full setup of light modifiers, gobos, flash settings, angles, etc.?

The short answer is: lighting diagrams.

Not everyone needs a lighting diagram to understand the lights behind a photography; experienced photographers can usually tell by looking at the shadows’ softness or shapes or at the catch light.

However, I'm not one of them. At least, not yet! So what do lighting diagrams have that can help me? Let's state the obvious first: lighting diagrams show the gear used to light a scene and how many lights were used. They show where the lights were set and how they were directed, relative to the subject.

“Relativity” is an important notion here. I think it's the key when working with lights. What I really see when I look at a lighting diagram is not “where” the main light is, but “how far” it is from the subject. And “how farther” (or closer, larger, etc.) the fill light has to be to do its job just as I see it in the resulting photo.

The same principle applies to flash power. This is a second set of information that's usually provided on or along with lighting diagrams. To correctly reproduce lighting, one has to know how powerful each light was. But it's really “the relationship between the different light levels that is important”, David Hobby tells us in his article Strobe/Ambient balance: A Shorthand Way of Thinking.

See, we're not used to describing amounts of light in an absolute manner. You'd rather say “this room is dark” – referring to what we usually consider a properly lit room – than “wow, it's barely 150 lux in here!”. Both are indicating a light level, but the former is relative whereas the latter is absolute. So a good lighting diagram could just use the main light as a reference and then say “this light is +1/3 of a stop, this other one -1 stop”.

That's why a lighting diagram is such a wonderful document to any photograph. No matter the kind of flash I use and no matter how powerful they are. By using that basic information – relative distances, angles, relative light levels – I can reproduce the lighting over and over again.

That's the main reason I see why photographers should use lighting diagrams: memory. Some photos are easy enough to remember; a lighting diagram will ensure the others are as easily reproducible. Besides the memory perspective, a document as complete as a lighting diagram is also a great way to share your knowledge … but more on that in a minute.

Another very simple reason is that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If you’re working with one or several assistants, you’d rather be drawing what you have in mind than explaining it at great length several times! This leads me to the second main reason I think photographers should get used to lighting diagrams: teaching. There are so many people learning artificial lighting nowadays: amateur photographers, photography students and pros as well, who want to improve their technique.? To any of them, lighting diagrams are an incredible educational tool! By putting together a photo and its diagram, one can understand the role and effects of each light in a setup. So if you document your photos by using lighting diagrams, you can actually teach other photographers your lighting techniques and help them figure out very easily how you lit your shoots. Diagrams are also a perfect way to keep track of the setups that worked while testing and learning.

Finally, lighting diagrams allow any photographer to prepare a shoot beforehand. Just as I’m using a draft paper to prepare this post, a lighting diagram can easily be drawn to throw ideas, get the ball rolling and have some setups ready before a session. This is the third advantage of lighting diagrams: planning. You can of course use any other technique to prepare a shoot, but the completeness of a lighting diagram and its close representation of a real setup makes it a good choice to start with, before you can actually try your setups and make arrangements.

So, why should you use lighting diagrams as a photographer? Because it’s a great way to prepare your sessions, to document your photos afterwards and to keep track of your lighting setups as well as to share them with others and to teach beginners your techniques.

All those reasons pushed me to create Sylights, a service to photographers I launched a year ago with my friend Pierre-Jean Quilleré. Our idea is to make lighting diagrams easy to use and to base a complete sharing platform on them. Sylights’ goal is to accompany every photographers on their learning path and to store their lighting diagrams for them. We already offer a large range of tools for that purpose: an online diagram editor with a lighting diagram gallery accessible to anyone, an iPhone and an iPad app for when you’re on the go. Many features revolve around those three apps.

We’re still evolving and will gladly accept all your feedback to help us answer those three needs: memory, teaching and planning.

We’d also like to know: how do you use lighting diagrams, and why?

Stuart Little, our next guest blogger, is a Photographer, Writer, Blogger and Photoshop Educator with over 18 years experience in the field. Stuart has been teaching both Amateur & Professional Photographers since 1998 and he is based in the Scottish Coastal Town of Ayr in the West of Scotland. Visit Stuart's website http://www.alittlephotoshop.com.

Thanks to Seshu for giving me the opportunity to share with you a really cool and utterly simple technique for creating a rounded border from within Lightroom 3.

When Adobe brought out Lightroom 3 they added 2 new features to the post crop vignette that made creating vignettes even better than before. So much so that the older paint overlay style has kind of been forgotten until now.

You can watch the video for all the juicy know-how but for those of you who just want to get stuck in via your RSS reader then slide all the post-crop vignetting sliders to the left for a black rounded border, job done, nuff said. Yep! its that simple But here is the another cool thing. If you want a white border then just take the amount slider all the way to the right.

Best thing of all. You can save the whole lot as a simple preset so that one click will take care of it all in future. Fire up the print module and set the background colour to compliment the border colour. Make sure you are using custom layout and then you can drag n drop the round images directly onto a layout ready for printing. Although if you are going down the inkjet route I would go for a white border and save yourself some ink. Enjoy the video tutorial and dont forget to swing but alittlephotoshop.com for more Lightroom 3 training and free workflow actions for Photoshop.

Stuart has offered to send me another blog post, this time about creating a tilt-n-shift effect in Lightroom 3. Here's the deal, though, for that to happen I need to see at least 20 comments from you. Ask questions or suggest an alternative way of creating round corners. But I do need to hear from you. So, will you chime in? If you liked this post by Stuart, I think you will enjoy the next one too.