Using Social Media to Grow Your Business

Use Social Media to Grow Your Business, says Carrie Wildes wedding photographer + social media diva. Carrie demonstrated how she uses social media as a marketing tool attract clients and market herself:
- she blogs about the events and people she photographs to generate buzz
- she posts "thank you" emails she receives from clients and vendors
- she pays attention to keywords (keywords depend on your business, of cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifurse)
- she created a Google business profile (it's free)
- experiment with all social media platforms: Word Press, Twitter, Facebook, Squarespace, etc.
- she uses a blogsite as her website
- she uses hyperlinks and tags to rank her SEO
- she also uses her blogsite as her working photography archive- keywording makes even more sense now :)
- she creates photo galleries on Facebook, tags the subjects in the photo and through a link she redirects those interested to read more about the event and the subjects on her website!

But she agrees, using social media as a marketing tool takes a lot of time. It is well worth it for her and she schedules blogging and Facebooking into her work.
If you plan to follow her path, you should learn to manage your workflow and your time. She religiously blogs and monitors her Google ranking- you should do the same because it is fun and FREE!

I also suggest you follow other photographers to learn how they use social media for branding and creating a buzz!

Thank you Carrie Wildes for sharing the information and spreading your love for photography at the Menaul Gallery. I am looking forward to attending your next workshop on social media on June 6th at the Menaul Gallery in Clearwater! Special thanks to Jerri and Scott Menaul for hosting these workshops.

RAW vs. JPEG in Wedding Photography

Wedding shoots scare me to death because there is no chance to reshoot the images: if I miss a moment, it is a lost one. But as always, do your research and scout the place before you get there. My last photoshoot was this Saturday at Josephine and Arthur’s 25th Wedding Anniversary. The assignment was challenging because I had to take pictures in a room with big windows and my backdrop for group shots was a white wall with a painting on it. Not to mention the white dress Josephine was wearing and the 15 person group shot that was a last minute decision.

I shot the pictures in RAW format because I was afraid that I need to do more post production. All the images in the album are proofs and I edited them a little (crop, sharpen, dodge). Next time, I would shoot the images in JPEG to save time. Ultimately, I think I made the right decision because I was shooting in low light and I had high contrast issues. I also had plenty of space on my camera’s compact flash card. After I shot the images in RAW, I edited them in Lightroom 3 and saved them in JPEG format to upload them on the photo gallery. Some photographers recommend saving the processed images in DNG format (it’s lossless) instead of the JPEG format.

So, why shoot JPEG/JPG? This file format is already compressed and processed inside the camera, JPEGs can be opened in all photo editing programs, and this file format allows for minimal post-processing. Minimal processing is what photojournalists do. BUT, every time you edit a JPEG , you lose information and sometimes the camera may not process the file correctly. Shoot JPEG to save time and space on your harddrive and flashcard. Most photojournalists shoot JPEG. One of the best wedding photographers, Jasmine Star, also shoots JPEGs. I would still recommend using the largest JPEG format available to take images.

Why shoot RAW? If you think you need to do more post-processing on your images, shoot RAW. RAW images are unprocessed (lossless file format) and contain more data. Thus, the photographer can do more post-production work on the images. BUT, RAW files are much larger and take up a lot of space on your camera card.
Before you decide in which format you shoot, I would recommend you to shoot RAW+ small JPEG to see the difference.

Ken Rockwell gives a good explanation on the RAW vs. JPEG.
Another tutorial on RAW vs. JPEG is on the Digital Photography School’s site.