While it may be second nature to many of you there are numerous options to consider so I created a short video.

If you have questions by all means let me know. We’ll also add this to the Photoshop Lessons video page.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO

I am really pumped about this! It is going to be awesome fun. Starting at noon CST, Thursday, February 9th, 2012 on the The Portrait Expert Facebook page; THE PORTRAIT EXPERT we’re hosting our first photo contest.

It has a Valentine’s Day theme. Create an image that represents Valentine’s Day to you. Maybe it’s an image of your very special Valentine (nothing risque please) or maybe it’s a still life – like a box of chocolates. How about an image of your three year old daughter clutching her new Valentine’s stuffed animal or your 90 year old Grandpa, gnarled and wrinkled old hands, holding a Valentine’s card.

Awesome Prizes

This is the best part – we’re giving away awesomely cool prizes.

Grand Prize:

An Amazon Kindle Keyboard. Has a six inch screen, a physical keyboard and comes wifi compatible. Enough storage space for 3,500 books. Choose from more than a million downloadable options from Amazon – you can be reading your favorites in sixty seconds or less.

Second Prize:

A bundled package that includes The Complete High School Senior Portrait Photographers Toolkit AND Garage Portraits!!! You’ll have enough reading and business building action materials to keep you busy for the next year! You can check out everything that’s included at the following links:  THE TOOLKIT  &  GARAGE PORTRAITS

Third Prize:

Scott over at New Portrait Biz has generously agreed to donate his newest course, Digital Backgrounds 2.0. If you want some solid information about utilizing digital backgrounds in your photography Scott’s the guy you need to talk to; he knows how to do it right. You can check out everything that’s included right here: DIGITAL BACKGROUND SECRETS 

Fourth Prize:

Will Crockett and the folks at Shoot Smarter and Friday Photo School are the contributors of our great fourth prize. Their most popular DVD training course in 2011; Ultra Portable Portraits. Nobody knows his stuff better – with respect to lighting – than Will Crockett and this is a great DVD. Check out more right here: ULTRA PORTABLE PORTRAITS

Fifth Prize:

No studio? No problem. Fifth prize is a complete copy of Garage Portraits by The Portrait Expert – who else?!?! If want a complete system for running a portrait business “sans-studio” Garage Portraits will show you the way. Check it out: GARAGE PORTRAITS

How To Enter – and More Importantly – How to Win!

Contest photo submissions will be accepted until noon CST on Sunday, March 4th, 2012. You simply go to the link on Facebook, complete the entrance form and upload your image. Public voting then begins at 12:01 pm, Sunday, March 4th, 2012. Those of you who enter will receive a link to your photo. You send the link to all your friends and family and ask them to help you win a Kindle by voting for your picture. Each person can vote one time for up to five different images. (Five different prizes)

Public voting ends at noon CST on Sunday, March 18th, 2012. The winners will be announced on Facebook at noon CST, Monday, March 19th, 2012. Winners will also be notified by email.

Please Help me Spread the Word

Being totally transparent this is of course just one way to build Facebook engagement and you can certainly do the same thing for your business. I’ll post the results here on the blog – with respect to new members gained and page “likes” so you’ll know how it worked out. The idea is to increase the “reach” of the Facebook page. The more “likes” you have to your page the greater your “reach”.

But I need your help to make the contest a success. Please send a message to all your Facebook friends – just a post on your wall will do. Tell them about the cool photo contest at The Portrait Expert fan page – anyone can enter. I appreciate your help.

Fire Up Your Camera

So what are you waiting for???? Go create some awesome images and enter the contest. You have nothing to lose and some great cool prizes to gain!

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Don’t make the same mistake Alice made. In this post I’ll give you three simple steps for gaining clarity on your goals.

Decide What You Want from Your Photography Business

Jim Rohn once said, “When you know what you want, and you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way to get it.” But the problem, the real challenge, is in knowing what you want. Of having a crystal clear picture in your mind of that which you want to achieve.

Gaining that clarity – developing that “white hot desire” as Napoleon Hill calls it – proves to be a continual struggle for many – myself included.

Decide what it is you want and where you want your life to be so when the clock strikes twelve on December 31, 2012 – you can celebrate a year well spent.

Gain Goal Clarity with Three Simple Steps

No matter what your goals are for the year – and I do hope you have them written down by now – you need to gain clarity on what success means to you. You need a clearly defined destination – your goal – so you’ll know when you get there and a map – our action plan, to lead us in the right direction.

It’s not enough to say;

“I want to photograph 50 high school seniors this year.”

 - or -

“I want to generate revenues of $100,000 in my photography business this year.”

A goal without action – without an action plan to achieve it – is nothing more than a wish. 

Step One: Define and Refine Your Photography Business Goals

If money is your goal – business revenues – then figure out exactly how much. Someone who says,

“I want to generate revenues of $100,000 in my photography business this year,”

is probably pulling a round number out of the air. (or somewhere else) You need to break it down so you can assimilate the numbers.

If the goal is $100,000 how much will be profit and how much for expenses. Is it a big enough goal? If photography is your only source of income is $100,000 of business revenue going to be enough to support you and your family?

Will all the revenue come from senior portraits or will some come from children, families, sports, weddings, pets, etc…? You can’t say, “I don’t know where it will come from,” business revenue doesn’t just “appear.” You need to develop a plan on how you will attract the business you need to reach your goal.

If your goal is to become the “best” senior portrait photographer in your market – what will that look like? Who do you currently see as the best senior portrait photographer in your market? If their imagery is – in your opinion – considerably better than yours, what about your portraiture needs improvement? Is it posing, lighting, backgrounds, composition?

Becoming the best senior portrait photographer in your market is a great goal – but pretty subjective. How will you “know” when you’ve arrived? Why not try and replicate some of the images created by the photographer you aspire to be as good as or better than? Copy the pose, the lighting, the background and the composition as best you can. Then compare your images side by side and decide what you need to improve.

Step Two: Define What Success Means to You

Why do you want to earn $100,000 in revenues? Why do you want to be the best photographer in your market? A goal is nothing more than a dream or a wish until you develop a passion for it. What Hill described as that “white hot desire.” What Rohn describes as, “That thing that’ll make you get up early and stay up late and go, go, go all day long!”

Utilize visualization to embed powerful feelings about your goal into your subconscious mind. Visualize yourself as the best photographer in your market. How will you act and carry yourself, how will you communicate with others? Vividly imagine the level of confidence in your abilities you’ll have when you achieve that goal.

Program Your Mind

Our subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and something vividly imagined. You’ve no doubt heard the story about the basketball coach training his players to improve their free throw percentages.

The coach split the team into three groups.

1. Group A stayed after regular practice each day and practiced shooting free throws for an extra thirty minutes.
2. Group B went home after practice and did nothing further.
3. Group C also practiced for an additional 30 minutes – but only in their minds. They were to sit in a quiet place and vividly imagine themselves sinking free throw after free throw. Every shot – nothing but net. IN their minds – they couldn’t miss.

A week later they had another free throw shooting competition. Obviously Group B showed little change from the previous week. But no so amazingly, Groups A and C showed nearly identical improvements in their free throw shooting percentages.

Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between reality and that which you vividly imagine.

No it’s Not Hocus Pocus

Nearly everything we use in daily life – from a box of baking powder biscuit mix to a weed whacker or a cell phone – comes with directions on how to use it. Most of us spent anywhere from 12 to 16 or more years going to school learning how to read those directions and gaining the skills and abilities that would enable us to get a job and earn a living.

In all those years of schooling did you ever take a class on how to “operate your mind”? Have you ever seen a set of directions for programming your brain? If a computer as powerful as the human mind would require the space of a hundred story office building to house it – wouldn’t it stand to reason we might need to consider learning how to use it properly?

Step Three: What’s Keeping You from Achieving Your Goals?

Step one is to set your goals and create an action plan for achieving them. (You can use the My Best Your Ever Planning Guide to help.)

Step two is utilizing intense vivid visualization of your goals as if you have already achieved them.

Step three is figuring out what’s holding you back. What could possibly prevent you from achieving your goals.

If you’re goal is to become the best senior portrait photographer in your market – and you just bought your first camera – you’ve got some work to do. But then most of us recognize the ridiculousness of setting a goal like that . . . . . .

And therein lies the rub.

Without question it is our own mind that holds most of us back. Our own – un-programmed – minds can come up with any number of reasons why – new camera in hand, bubble wrap still crinkling in the trash can – there is no way we can become the best photographer in town within a year. So we don’t even try.

Your Past is Not Your Future

Begin today to set a course for a better year and a better life. What has happened to you in the past, your experiences, your trials, your challenges – has only prepared you for the future. What has happened to you in the past is in no way an indication of what will happen in the future. You are human and have the ability to change and achieve whatever you set your mind and heart on.

Just decide where you want to go, create a map for getting there and begin the journey. You can do this.

Go here to check it out:

CARD TEMPLATES

The first video is basic customization of the invites and the second one details how to create your own custom school logos for your graduation party invitations.

You can find the videos at the following links;

CUSTOM SCHOOL LOGOS

BASIC CARD CUSTOMIZATION

And if you haven’t noticed as yet – almost all of these new videos ask you to share them on Facebook before watching. Please help me spread the word about the Portrait Expert site. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Have a great day.

I received emails from several members asking if I would do a video on adjusting exposures on darker skinned subjects. Quite honestly I don’t have much experience with this so this was a learning experience for me as well.

When it’s all said and done I believe the Facemask Histogram to be a valid way to double check your exposures – no matter what the skin tone. You can then develop a system in Lightroom to become more accurate with your initial exposure adjustments.

As always – please share the love by spreading this video around and let me know if you have questions.

So here’s another video that covers this topic in more detail. In the video I show you how I adjust my exposures in Lightroom. In Photoshop, my final step in the image prep process is to make a contrast tweak using a levels adjustment. The contrast tweak will do more for your images than probably any other adjustment you can make.

So check out the video and be sure to leave your comments or questions.

At the time Will was teaching a technique he referred to as the Facemask Histogram – a method through which you could determine if the “mask of the face” of your portrait subject was properly exposed. It is a great and valid technique – ten years ago and today. Except ten years ago everyone was new to digital – including my lab at the time. It was the blind leading the blind – which is never good – but as one might imagine, even less so with photographers. But I trusted my lab, chucked the Facemask Histogram technique and burned an effigy of Will Crockett in the alley behind the studio. (Sorry Will)

Of course as it turns out Crockett was right and here we are today.

I can make you this guarantee. If you are not using a hand-held light meter and if you are using the “matrix” or “overall-average” metering mode of your digital camera – your exposures are off. Not maybe – they are – I don’t have to see them to know. And while they may appear to be properly exposed – your resulting prints are not all they could be. Under or over exposed images are not taking advantage of the full RGB spectrum of your camera’s image sensor.

But now you can change that. Use the Facemask Histogram to gain a better understanding of the histogram – both on the back of your camera and in Photoshop.

Let me know if you have questions.