Digital Photography Guide

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A Guest Post by Elizabeth Archibong.

As a photographer, whether we like it or not everyday, there is someone picking up a camera hoping to become a pro-photographer and on the other end, established pros are constantly changing the script and reinventing what counts in the industry… so to get your business to stand out, you have to learn more and more on how to skillfully compete with what ever limited resources available.

The one major area we can compete is learning how to position yourself and your business to get the greatest rewards. How can you do this? Focus and specialize on one area of excellence.

If weddings are your thing – focus, specialize, let your website show that you eat, drink, breathe and sleep weddings; become ‘The’ wedding photographer. Rather than show images of babies, pets, nature and what not, your aim should always be to make your target client confident in you and what you can offer long before she has even met you and the best way to do that is your home (on the web) should tell that potential client that you are an expert in your field. It should give a feeling that there is nothing about photographing weddings that you don’t know about, because it is what you live to do. It should make her feel that she must definitely have a ‘chat’ with you – whether she picks you in the end or not is not the point here, the point is that you will be one of those that cannot be discounted and will at least warrant a meet up just to see if you are a good fit (and let’s face it, if a bride is asking for a meet up, you know you’re in there with a chance of getting the gig)

Specializing not only forces you to up your game, it allows you to increase your prices and charge accordingly for the services that you offer. You now are not competing anymore with everyone out there with a camera instead you are now competing with other specialists. This means you are more likely to get heard because the pool is lot less crowded than before. The sort of clients you start to attract, will be different and so will the expectations that come with having a higher end client. The competition is now not on price, but more on how tight your game is compared to the other specialists on her list and, if you will be a perfect match for her and hubby. If you are focusing all your available resources on specializing, you will be on top your game, so the fear that you will be seen as a fraud is not going come up.

If you feel you absolutely can’t give up photographing pets or babies just for weddings and at this stage, you want to take whatever job you can get – that’s okay, but understand that people looking for children’s portraits are a whole different market and they have different needs from the wedding client and require a completely different marketing strategy . It might be best to consider having a different home for your portrait work because little Benjamin and Clara’s mother is more likely to book your services if she believes without doubt that your are more than capable of providing the goods to make her angels look like angels even when they are not quite being angels. Same as above then goes for the sort of fees you can charge for your service of making clara, ben and chris look like little rock stars even on their worst day.

As long you are constantly (without the distraction of trying to be all things to all people) giving your potential clients reason to believe that you are more than able to match their expectations and solve issues that they may not have even considered, then you have gone a long way than others in making your business stand out from the crowd.

See more from Elizabeth Archibong at her website and blog.

Updated: apologies for the kooky formatting – Darren

Post from: Digital Photography School

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Many of the features in the Lightroom 3 Develop module have targeted adjustment tools available to help you make the adjustment. Here’s where to find and how to use these on image adjustment tools.

Tone curve

When you select the Tone Curve panel you can adjust an area of the image by clicking the targeted adjustment tool and then drag on the area of the image that you want to lighten or darken.

Click and drag up to lighten and click and drag down to darken.

If you click the Point Curve icon at the bottom of the dialog, you will change the look of the Tone Curve panel and the sliders will disappear. Now if you drag on the image using the targeted adjustment tool you will create control points on the curve. You can adjust these control points by dragging on them.

Control points are not added if you do not have the Point Curve icon enabled. So if you’re seeing the sliders, you’re not in this point curve editing mode.

To delete a control point, double click on it or right click it and choose Delete Control Point.

When you are working on the point curve in the tone curve panel, you can decrease the mouse sensitivity by holding the Alt or Option key as you drag on the image. This decreases the sensitivity so you will make smaller changes in the curve with even quite significant movements of the mouse.

There is also a targeted adjustment tool in the HSL adjustment panel.

Here you can select Hue, Saturation or Luminance and then select the targeted adjustment tool and drag on the area of the image that you want to change. If you’re working in Hue, you’ll be applying a color shift to the selected area of the image. If you’re working in Saturation, you’ll be adjusting the saturation of the color under the mouse pointer as you drag on the targeted adjustment tool. Drag up to increase saturation and down to decrease it.

If you’re working in Luminance dragging up will lighten the color under the cursor and dragging down will darken it.

In the B&W or black and white adjustment area there’s also a targeted adjustment tool. In this case, when you drag up or down on a selected area of the image, you’ll lighten or darken that area so you can craft your own greyscale image.

Unlike in other versions of Lightroom, when you exit a panel while you have the targeted adjustment tool enabled it will be automatically disabled and you don’t have to remember to turn it off.

Post from: Digital Photography School

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