January 2012 - Frameable Faces Photography

I just read a fantastic blog post that I wanted to share. http://virtualphotographystudio.com/photographyblog/2010/05/running-a-photography-business/comment-page-1/#comment-11993 It is entitled “10 Things You Should Know About Running A Photography Business”, but you could easily remove the word “Photography” as most of these are universal and wherever the topic is specifically photography related you could easily insert products or services from your own trade.

For us this was mostly reinforcement that we are approaching our business the right way but we still have two weaknesses on this list and we’ll be the first to admit them:

Number 3 – we need to hand off some of this bookkeeping – NOW. I’m good at tracking many aspects of our business but I’m not exactly an expert bookkeeper and some of this stuff bogs me down. When I read this point it kind of smacked me in the face….

Number 6 – actually more of a strength for us overall (so maybe I lied). We do this well – we are specialists and not generalists (love that way of putting it by the way). We do NOT specialize in event photography. We will not photograph huge events. Or even pretty big events. We will photograph certain smaller events and we are selective about which ones will fit for us and our clients. We are fortunate to have the talents of miss Angela Bell as well for some of our informal events such as engagement parties that require more casual images – she is our second photographer and she does a great job on those. As a rule however, we specialize in portrait photography – all kinds. Yes it’s a broad category but it’s one category we enjoy the most and it’s where we rock. I listed this one because we need reminding – as do all business owners – to resist the temptation to accept a one-off job that isn’t really what you do best and isn’t what you want to be known for. We’ve done this before and we’ve learned that we should not be doing it or we should at least think it all the way through first.

Hope this helps and we would like you to add any advice for us and for each other if there is something you don’t see on this list. Please comment and join the discussion!

– Doug

We love photographing high school seniors here at Frameable Faces! As we prepare to start photographing our new crew of spokesmodels for the class of 2013 we have been reflecting on the fantastic class of 2012 and how great of a class it was. Having gone to high school together (go North Farmington Raiders!) we still talk about high school a lot and we keep a couple of our yearbooks here at the studio. The current seniors get a kick out of them. They are vintage 80’s yearbooks – big hair, skinny ties and the like. It’s fun comparing the changing styles and that leads to conversations about changing trends in senior pictures.

Do a search on Wikipedia for Senior Portraits and the article will tell you that senior portraits date back at least to the 1920’s, but today’s senior pictures aren’t your grandparents’ or even your parents’ senior photos… today they are way more awesome! North Farmington High School’s yearbooks for example didn’t even have color senior headshots in the yearbooks before 1988 and “back then” seniors weren’t typically going on location for part of a three hour shoot. So as we look forward to getting started with the class of 2013 we take a brief look back at a few of our favorite images from the classes of ’11 and ’12….