Is the Sky Falling?

Talk of the sky falling for photographers is on the rise. For two must read articles, see Photography in a Recession by Lin and There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch by JimmyD.

What’s new this time is that we’re under a three-sided attack. First, the economic slowdown (or recession) signals the end of discretionary spending for a lot of folks; second, the continuing and unstoppable onslaught of technology allows even the rankest beginner to produce decently exposed images; and third, the dumbing-down of what is considered acceptable quality reduces the number of potential clients willing to pay the price for excellent images.

The bar is dropping—and quickly.

A case in point: A military wife contacted us about boudoir photographs for her husband, a Marine on his second overseas tour of duty. She loved our work that she’d seen on the Internet and was grateful for our military discount. But in the end, she chose to take her own photographs by holding a digicam at arm’s length. That the results were blurry and distorted didn’t matter. It’s hard to compete with free and convenient.

At the same time, though, market segments do remain that will not settle for badly lit, blurry, distorted, or awkwardly composed images. The challenge is finding them. Call me a contrarian, but I don’t think that Internet advertising is the best option for boudoir photographers. Why? Because that’s what everybody is doing, making your business nearly invisible on a crowded Yahoo or Google search page—and it’s never a single page!

A recent search for boudoir photographers in San Diego returned over 11,000 hits! Many of these aren’t even photographers—let alone boudoir photographers—and virtually none of them live and work in my area. They show up anyway because of disingenuous and self-serving keywords, and because search engines aren’t as discriminating as they’d like you to believe. Narrowing the search to just my section of San Diego County reduced that number to some 3,500. Nope, they don’t live here either.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you abandon the Internet. On the contrary. It provides endless opportunities for others to see your work. And yes, pay-for-click advertising can be effective. But search engines and Internet advertising aren’t the best way for a local business to stand out from the crowd—especially a business as personal as boudoir photography.

So, what’s the answer?

(1) Make yourself locally famous. I got this advice years ago from celebrity photographer Marc Hauser. When I asked how, he said by hanging your work in local places where it will be seen: restaurants, bars, gyms, nightclubs, lingerie stores, hair salons, barber shops… you get the idea. Remember that for the most part boudoir photography is a local business where word-of-mouth and reputation count for a great deal. (Marc was at the top of his game then and was more than gracious to talk with me. Several years later a tragic accident turned his life upside down. You can read about it in the January 8, 2008 issue of Rangefinder Magazine, or click here for a PDF.)

(2) Market more aggressively on a local level—where you can meet face-to-face with prospective clients. Carry samples of your work. Large prints are best, and not just because they’re impressive, but because they represent the type of product most often ordered. If you offer DVDs, then carry a sample or two on your iPod. And don’t be embarrassed to ask someone, “Have you ever thought of boudoir photography”

(3) Use direct mail and custom mailing lists targeted to a customer base that might want—and can afford—boudoir photography. No cheap paper flyers—send full-color 4”x6” postcards. Two sources that specialize in postcards are psPrint and Modern Postcard. Both of these companies offer a free sample kit. They also offer complete mailing services, including the tools you need to design a customized mailing list based on a wide variety of demographic data, like zip code, age, gender, marital status, income, and more.

(4) Focus your direct mail campaign—random noise doesn’t work. Make your offer specific and limited (for an example, see the top of this page.

(5) Do you have images of past clients that weren’t purchased? As a reminder of your services, send them a wallet-sized print of one of those images and then follow up with a call asking for referrals.

So, while the sky may not be falling, it’s certainly bearing down quickly—and on three fronts: the slowing economy, increasingly sophisticated cameras (even at the low end of digicams), and most damaging, the dumbing-down of what’s acceptable quality. All of these contribute to a tightening market. While we can do nothing about the first two, the last one presents an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Use your website, of course, but also aggressively pursue local clients by displaying large prints of your best work in as many public venues as possible—show them what good work really looks like! And don’t forget those targeted mailings with high-quality postcards highlighting a specific limited-time offer!

Please keep in mind that this is very much an open discussion, so if you have ideas on this subject you’d like to share with others, please leave a comment.

Today’s image: Cristie on Couch No. 0056

Boudoir Photographer Takes Five

My blog is troubling me, and I’m asking for your feedback.

I’ve fallen back on old writing habits: Long, detached, technical discussions peppered with bullet points that I’m guessing nobody reads, or at least not to the end. Given my history, that’s pretty safe ground for me. But when I venture away from that place, as I did when I started this blog, I worry a lot about offending a potential client or another photographer.

Truth is, Patty and I redacted each article I wrote to remove those things we thought might offend any but the smallest minority of our readers. Can you see the ball-and-chain here? And I’m not alone in this thinking: Even Lin at Fluffeytek, a delightfully irreverent writer, worried about a possible decline in client and model bookings after airing her opinions on certain topics. And most of the sites focused on client marketing take their worry to an extreme by avoiding all controversy, maintaining an upbeat tempo in their writing, and generally exuding an effervescence that goes beyond reality. But I digress.

Back to the ball-and-chain. What makes it heavy for me is my dual readership—photographers as well as existing and potential clients, and not just mine, but boudoir clients in general. In the beginning, I thought I could serve both and offend no one. But that was wishful thinking, and it kept many good articles from seeing the light of day. For example, I wanted to show potential clients what bad work looked like and how to appraise a photographer’s skill set for this type of work. But each time I started an article like that, valuable though it would be to a woman looking for a boudoir album, it ended in the trash… for fear of offending a photographer. Or the article on photographing overweight women who’ve been convinced by a lingerie store that they’re a plus-size diva model and should buy this or that skintight latex body stocking… also in the trash.

I’m a civil guy, for the most part, and offending people isn’t something I do on purpose—even in a heated political debate. But if I continue to write about boudoir photography—civilly, but without fear of offending—then, hey, some will be put off or offended. Why? Because I’m of an age where I’m reading books like Encore, and I’d like to think I have better things to do than redact my thoughts to the point of zero offensiveness. Frankly, I don’t know that it was ever the right thing to do.

What do you think?

Today’s Image: Lexi, a fabulous client, getting ready for a little soft bondage.

Valentine's Day Preparations

Valentine’s Day—that special day for lovers—is almost here, and regardless of which side of the camera you’ll be on, there’s a get-ready list. Patty and I thought you might like to see what’s on our list—and on the list we give our clients—as we prepare for our annual Valentine’s Day photo shoots.

While the client list has changed over the years, the four most important items have remained:

• Stop tanning three to five days before the photoshoot. This reduces unwanted redness—a problem here with all the tanning salons.
• Stay hydrated.
• Arrive on time and well rested.
• Bring an attitude that is both positive and flirtatious.

To see our complete client preparation list for Valentine’s Day 2008, click here.

And what about us, do we have a get-ready list? No, not at all—Patty and I like to live on the edge, so we wing it. Who wrote that, anyway? Yes, we plan. Patty long ago nicknamed me Justin, as in Justin Case, the guy who prepares to a fault. What follows is Justin’s list:

• Confirm photo shoot location.
• Contract hair & makeup artist.
• Draw lighting plans for location.
• Order postcards for direct mailing (psPrint).
• Order presentation folios (Renaissance Albums).
• Create online payment options (PayPal).
• Put together client preparation list.
• Add links to all websites.
• Test all photography and lighting gear.
• Verify backup gear.
• Safety check photo gear trailer.
• Prepare shooting schedule.
• Setup the day before; check cameras and lighting.
• Arrive early and well rested.
• Bring a positive and flirtatious attitude.
• Pray nothing fails.

Todays image: Valentine’s Day Girl, played by Melyssa, who was never late, and always arrived at the top of her game.

Can You Hear Us Now? Happy New Year!

Patty and I have returned from our holiday sabbatical and want to wish all of you a happy new year. But more than that, we want to extend our warmest thanks for your patronage, without which there’d be little point in us doing this. Thank you.

And a special thanks to JimmyD at Pretty Girl Shooter for his gracious article that lifted us from obscurity. By the way, for the second year running, JimmyD won Fluffytek’s Best Glamour Photography award—an award he very much deserves. UPDATE: We received a special mention in that same category—this made our day (!) and sent us to the fridge for that bottle of champagne we never got around to on New Year’s Eve.

Today’s image: Not sure who those happy folks are—found them on the Internet.

The Stony Path to Web Videos

Music (Daydream) by Robin Stine

Today's image: With her permission, the transformation of one of our clients—from her first meeting with us, shot with a 1.3MP cellphone camera, to her first photoshoot.

Patty insisted I introduce this article with a warning that it exposes my nerdiness. Even though I thought it unnecessary, as it will be quite evident soon enough, she persisted, and (big surprise) I acquiesced: This lengthy article contains detailed technical information. So there!

Although we've been creating private DVDs for our clients for some time now, putting together video clips for our websites is new for us—and frankly, it's been a bag of unpleasant compromises.

The content of our private DVDs, for the most part, comprises still images set to music. They are processed using Adobe Photoshop, Audacity, Canopus Imaginate, and Adobe Premiere Pro, all running on XP Pro. Photoshop is, of course, where the original file is edited. I use Audacity, a free audio editor, to assemble mp3 files. I chose Imaginate to handle the Ken Burns Effects (pan, zoom, rotate, etc.), because it facilitates this work far better than Premiere. And Imaginate acts as a plug-in, so its native files can be dropped into a Premiere timeline without having to first encode them. Premiere is where scene transitions are selected, RGB values tweaked, sharpening or blurring effects applied, titles added, and where any last minute changes to the audio track are made. Premiere is also the media encoder, that is, the application that produces files you can actually watch on your TV or computer monitor.

Why, for the most part, stills? Simply because our clients are not actresses, and expecting them to look terrific in front of a video camera is, well, asking way too much. With stills, we select the images that work and then focus the viewer's attention in ways not possible with static images or simple slide shows. That said, video alone—no matter how sophisticated—isn't the whole answer. We then blend the video with story-telling music that elicits and shapes fantasies that delight our clients as well as their lovers.

Life was good. We had even moved some of our DVD production to high definition formats. But then I got the bright idea that posting video before & afters would be cool, and that maybe down the road a bit I'd post some behind-the-scenes videos. And that's when the problems began.

First, altering our DV/NTSC video workflow to accommodate web-based clips put us in a position of forcing rectangles into squares: We needed to find a solution for displaying 4:3-pixel video clips on square-pixel computer monitors without any top-to-bottom squashing, which makes the subject look broader and shorter—not a good thing for a boudoir photographer! Second, it meant finding a file format that would hold up pretty well under the compression punishment applied by video sharing sites, resulting in noticeable pixelation, lack of contrast, and diminished saturation.

I solved the pixel aspect ratio problem by creating a new Premiere project with a QVGA load preset. That set the pixel aspect ratio to square pixels (1.0) and the frame size to 640x480, which can be easily reduced to a width of 400 or so for blog use.

When searching for a file format that would hold up to the compression challenge, I tested these: WMV, AVI, MOV, and MPEG. In all cases, the results played back by the video sharing sites were better when I gave them an MPEG file. The caveat, however, is that their playback results were never anywhere near excellent. So, from Premiere here are my encoder settings: MPEG2 with the aspect ratio set to square pixels, the quality level set to max (5), and the audio set to 48kHz with a bitrate of 224; other settings remained at their default values. For the one minute video at the top of this article, that created a 35MB file.

Given the size of that file, why didn't I encode directly to Flash Live Video (FLV), since that's what the video sharing sites are serving up after they process your files? The reason: None of the three video sharing sites I researched accept FLV uploads.

In addition to our own web server, I looked at three options for serving video, all video sharing/community sites: YouTube; Vimeo; and Revver. There are two advantages to using one of these sites: (1) all your videos are essentially backed up on someone else's servers, and (2) they are served up using someone else's bandwidth. That makes the process FREE. And even when quality sucks, free is hard to beat, which is why there are hundreds of thousands of users uploading ever more videos on a daily basis. The disadvantages of video sharing sites, in addition to the quality issues, are the hokeyness of many online communities and the ever-present advertising. As I said, however, free is hard to beat, and they know it.

Be that as it may, if you want the best quality—quality not as good as a website still image, but excellent nonetheless—free won't do it. You'll have to ante up for the bandwidth and roll your own by encoding directly to Flash and then uploading to your own web server or a fee-based hosting service like FLV Hosting.

Now let's look more closely at the free offerings.

YouTube is, as they say, a mixed bag—the service that everyone loves to hate. The community is so enormous that your video has a chance of going viral (if that's important to you). The flip side is that its per-frame quality ranks towards the bottom. On the other hand, its playbacks are comparatively smooth, and it has several channel (your personal homepage) customization features unmatched by the other video sharing sites. I was disappointed, though, in the small number of choices available for the opening image (the one you see when you first load the Flash player), and none of them could be the initial frame, which in my case is the title page.

Vimeo has a lot going for it: the best individual frame quality, tech support that responds quickly to initial help requests, support for high definition at 24 frames per second (FPS), and no advertising. So what's not to like here? Annoyingly jerky playback. At first I thought they were encoding their Flash files with a suboptimal frame rate, but tech support responded that their frame rate for standard definition (SD) is set to 30 FPS, which is way good enough. But there's a problem somewhere, either with their initial processing or with their bandwidth. Whatever it is, I hope they resolve it soon.

Revver's playback quality is good, a notch up from YouTube's. But Revver is all about advertising, and they make no apologies about it. In fact, as a user, you participate in their advertising revenue. Nevertheless, I found the advertising overbearing and passed on Revver.

In the end, if not for the jerky playback, I would have chosen Vimeo. But for now, it's YouTube. I'll keep an eye on Vimeo, and I'll continue to look at affordable ways of serving video from our own web servers.

OK, so after YouTube finished processing my uploaded MPEG, how did I get it to play on this site? In simple terms, I inserted some code in the actual article—using the HTML entry mode, not the compose mode. This code loads a Flash player and points to the location of the video file. Among other things, the code also tells the player what size to make the video window and whether it should play once or loop (continuous play). Video sharing sites make this step easy by providing a button that displays the code ready to be copied to your clipboard and pasted into your blog entry.

That said, the code isn't always what you want. The size of the player may be off, it may be set to loop when you want single play, or there may be too many extraneous links. Most of this can be changed, but that requires modifying the boilerplate code provided by the video sharing site. If you have no programming experience, this might seem daunting. Give it a shot anyway—there's not much you can hurt. If you do have some programming experience, you'll find a good article on embedding Flash here. Remember, the code goes in the article itself—not in your Blogger template.

One caveat about the YouTube player in conjunction with Blogger: It doesn't seem to scale well below a width of 425 pixels. If you find this to be true, and you're using the Minima template, you'll need to confirm that the template's outer-wrapper width is at least 675px and the main-wrapper is at least 425px. To do this, go to Customize, Template, HTML; then scroll down until you see the section marked "/* Outer-Wrapper"; the first two items in this section are what need to be confirmed or changed.

Last, a few words about audio played on the Web (I've written more about it here ). At the very least, you should use DRM-free music and hope no one sues you. The best option, however, is PodSafe music, the use of which is granted by the artist under a Creative Commons License. The downside to PodSafe music is this: You'll have to search through a pretty big pile to find the gems. Robin Stine, the artist who granted me permission to use her work with this video, is one of those gems. I encourage you to click her link and listen to the entire song as well as her others—and maybe even buy her album.

Here are some other sources for PodSafe music:
How to Find PodSafe Music
PodSafe Audio
ccMixter
Musicloversunion.org
PodShow

While there were many compromises—some of them unpleasant, others downright annoying—video on our website is, nevertheless, a wonderful tool for showing our potential clients boudoir photography transformations as well as what goes on behind the scenes at an actual shoot. Patty and I plan not only to continue its use but also to expand its reach.

Today's image: With her permission, the transformation of one of our clients—from her first meeting with us, shot with a 1.3MP cellphone camera, to her first photoshoot.