For Photographers

Customer Photo Guidelines

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Another view-from-my-office photo taken during a tennis tournament, 11 August 2018. The approaching rain storm really did look like that. The sun (top-right-rear) was shining through the dark rain clouds.

British photographer Neil Turner wrote a post on his blog about customer expectations and customer-supplied photo guidelines.

Almost every commercial and PR client had a prepared guide that let you know what they wanted from a commissioned shoot and a few pointers of what they, or their end client, liked and didn’t like in their pictures. These ranged from really helpful pointers about what kind of clothing should be worn for portraits or whether or not images should have unfussy backgrounds through the obvious such as “images should be properly exposed” to the mildly bizarre “avoid any and all references to money”.

– Neil Turner

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Stop Being A Freelancer

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Photographers, stop calling yourself a freelance photographer. “Freelance” suggests temporary and, perhaps in the worst case, even fly-by-night.

Always refer to yourself as a professional photographer. It creates a much better image in a customer’s mind. For better or worse, titles are important in business.

So while “freelancer” may be more akin to how you see what you do, it might be selling you short. After all, your livelihood doesn’t depend on your own self-perception, but on how potential clients see you and your work.

– Suzan Bond

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2,000 Portrait Customers Can’t Be Wrong

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I’ve shot at least two thousand portraits over the past thirty-three years. Business portraits, environmental portraits, editorial portraits, magazine portraits, author and writer portraits, political campaign portraits, athlete and team portraits, headshots for actors, models and musicians, some family, children and pet portraits, a couple dozen prom portraits, a handful of bride and groom portraits and two maternity portraits.

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin (L) and goaltender Curtis Joseph pose together for a poster in 1999.

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Turning Down Congestion

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The Globe and Mail today published an article titled, Fed up with traffic, contractors refuse to work in Vancouver, which stated:

[Vancouver] homeowners are facing the high cost of renovation and maintenance as tradespeople either opt out of working in the city entirely, or charge extra for having to go there.

A big reason for the premium cost of hiring the trades is the city’s traffic, contractors say. Vancouver traffic is so congested, and so time-consuming, it makes working there a losing proposition.

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Negotiating Need

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I received an email from a local photographer about my previous post. This photographer couldn’t see anything wrong with doing 70 business headshots for $1,000 (i.e., $14 per portrait). She said she “would be thrilled” to make $1,000 in one day. She said she’s been a professional photographer for ten years.

Sigh.

After a couple of e-mail exchanges, it was clear this photographer didn’t know the difference between revenue and profit. She knew nothing about overhead costs, didn’t track any of her expenses and didn’t even have an Ontario business licence. But yet she’s a “professional”.
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Mind Your Own Business

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It’s been said the most important thing to learn is how to learn.

Most people will do a Web search when they need to learn something because it’s fast and free. But search engines offer disconnected, unverified information in random order. The searcher has to know how to interpret and verify the found information. They have to know how to learn.

The purpose of search engines is to offer shortcuts to what you *might* want to know. This is okay when you just want some quick information but it’s usually not good enough when you want to gain knowledge.

By making it easy, search engines don’t really help us learn. Search engines tell us what we asked for and not necessarily what we need to know. Search results can make you think you’ve learned something when, in fact, you haven’t (link to PDF). There’s a difference between knowing a few facts and actually learning something.
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Fixing the Payfirma for WooCommerce Plugin

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This post is only for those who use WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform and Payfirma as their credit card processor. This means that 99.9999% of you can stop reading right now.

The Payfirma plugin (currently version 2.6) for WooCommerce isn’t fully compatible with WooCommerce 3.x and Payfirma has said it has no plans to update it. So if you’re tired of the plugin generating a ton of php errors, here’s the solution that will take just a couple minutes of your time.

In the Payfirma_Woo_Gateway plugin, go to class > class.payfirma.php and scroll down to about line 508. Look for the block of code that reads:
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