Some of my favorite photographer friends are having some time-limited special offerings that I felt I needed to share with you.

We all want to market our photography in a way that provides value to our clients and to us. That's called running a business. Some are assertive about it, while some others are passive. I believe you reap what you sow, but I also know frequency and consistency is key. One of the best products I've seen that teaches marketing for photographers is Jamie Swanson's e-book, 6-Week Photography Marketing Bootcamp. But this book is going away on Friday (yes, tomorrow). She is retiring it and rolling the information in the ebook into a new, more expensive course that should make its appearance in the Fall. But why wait until then? Get it now for only $49.

Ever wanted to see how a photographer consistently books wedding clients? Laura Novak's Wedding Inquiry Course just launched. Laura is not only a savvy business woman but she is a versatile photographer whom I respect a great deal. Now through July 31st, get 25% off her new course (use: “JULYINTRO”) that takes you literally by the hand to show you how she books wedding clients. She had a video crew record her interactions with a real wedding couple. No actors were involved!

Lastly, my friends Rob & Lauren Lim of The Photography Concentrate have relaunched their terrific tutorial, Super Photo Editing Skills, with new videos that address the new features in Lightroom 5. This is the one course I keep recommending to all my friends because it is so comprehensive, but not overwhelming. Plus you get a ton of bonuses like a style guide and presets that you can deploy right away. Super Photo Editing Skills is usually $79, but starting today through August 2nd, it will be $55. Ever wanted to learn how to edit your images in Lightroom? This is your ticket! Get it punched.

Full disclosure: I carefully pick the very best products and services for you. All are affiliate links that help support this site. So do the right thing!

An Adobe Community Professional, you can find A.J. posting video tutorials & reviews on his website, when he’s not creating content for Layers Magazine or GeekBeat.TV. This is his second guest blog post for Tiffinbox. Read his first post as well. Then follow him on Twitter.

First, I want to thank Seshu for having me back on his blog. My schedule is such that I really try to make time for these guest articles; it's truly a privilege to contribute to the community.

For today's post I wanted to discuss copyright, and what you're not doing about it. I'm constantly surprised at the number of photographers who don't register their image copyrights. If you consider yourself a professional photographer, act professionally for the sake of your business and register your images. It's easy and affordable ($35), especially when compared to the insane amount of money you spend on your equipment. It can also be done online through the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO).

As I re-read the above paragraph, I can see how I'm coming off a bit harsh. Not my intention, it's just lately I've come across more photographers who have seen their work used by someone else. It's easy for you to register, it's even easier for someone to grab your image and use it. Consider this recent example in which Will King Photography was blatantly ripped off by 367 Media. What I find interesting is the folks that stole Will's images are located in the same geographic area. Usually, when I hear of these cases, they occur in other countries or different states.

In a previous post Seshu suggests you secure your images, and provides a link to David Riecks security page. Those are all good suggestions for discouraging infringement.

Registering your copyright is going to be your go-to solution if infringement happens.

Copyright is a civil matter handled in federal court. Without proper copyright registration you may be entitled to actual damages, e.g., standard licensing fees, profits received from infringement, and little else. You will not receive any statutory damages without proper registration. Considering most photographers reading this are using some sort of DAM (digital asset management) for organizing photos adding registration to your digital workflow wouldn't be too hard. For Lightroom & Photoshop enthusiasts I've recorded two videos on adding metadata to your images. Not only is this a good idea for SEO purposes, it's also a great way to ensure your copyright info is embed in every image you post. Did I mention most thieves are lazy? Yup, you shouldn't be surprised how many times your image is reposted as is, without even a name change, metadata intact.

Lightroom SEO

Photoshop SEO

Here are some additional resources to learn more about copyright registration:

1. The PPA helps photographers educate their customers on why copyright is important.

2. Ken Kaminesky interviews Carolyn Wright aka The Photo Attorney who answers photographers burning copyright questions.

3. Jack Reznicki & Ed Greenberg produced the Photographers Legal Guide on DVD, which you can purchase through Kelby Training.

DISCLAIMER – I am not an attorney, nor is this article to be considered professional legal advice.

Do you copyright your images? Tell us about your process down below! You may want to consider a company like MyOWS to help you copyright and then manage and protect your images.

Going to try something new for Monday's – will give you all a weekly wrap up from the previous week, just in case you have missed reading a post or watching a tutorial or video interview.

Love The Products & Services Posted On Tiffinbox? talked about how some of the reviews of products and services mentioned on Tiffinbox have actually been very useful to you and your photography business.

Robert Norman wrote a guest blog post on How To Use CardMunch To Manage Business Cards, an application for your iPhone that will scan and save your data. Pretty cool!

Leon Sandoval from Colorati came back to Tiffinbox for another guest blog post about < a href="https://tiffinbox.org/how-do-you-keyword-your-digital-images/">keyboarding digital files. He had two short tutorials on using Lightroom or Bridge, whichever works best for your workflow.

Blair Phillips has a handle on using video to attract high school senior clients to his studio. In his guest blog, “Video Speaks Louder Than Words,” he tells us just how he goes about it.

Lastly, I had an opportunity to speak and interview David Hobby, the photographer/teacher behind Strobist, a veritable repository for off-camera flash users. David also spoke about his new project “HOCO360,” photographing the people and events in Howard County, Maryland. Check it out!

P.S. This weekly wrap idea was highly influenced by the awesome Copyblogger blog. You ought to check it out too.

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.