Creative Photography Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, Cheats, and Hacks

Darkroom Image Manipulation before Photoshop – A Walk into the History

3:32 AM

The person after the invention of Photoshop might know the techniques of image manipulation or retouching. He is doing such a retouching work within a short time in Photoshop. But, if you think about how the older generation did the work before Photoshop in the dark room, you will be amazed. At present time, you may not think photo manipulation work without Photoshop, but earlier our ancestors did the works well and even the present Photoshop copies many tools and technique from their works. In the modern photo editing sector, many techniques and strategies may bring revolution, but yet the role of the old darkroom is not less.

Though the ‘Photo Manipulation’ and ‘Photoshopping’ are considered as synonym, in the past, the manipulation was related to film and negative manipulation, darkroom manipulation, chemical manipulation, and more. Even, the word Retouching also has come before than photography with the painting. It means reworking on a painting to enhance it.

Photo Manipulation in History

Image Manipulation is anything to do on an image for correcting the imperfection areas and for enhancing it. It was started with the invention of the camera & photograph in the early 18^th century. An old remaining instance of image manipulation was in the 1860s when a photo of Abraham Lincoln’s head was attached to the body of John C. Calhoun. It is considered as the first image manipulation in history.

At the early stage, the photographers retouched and manipulated photos in the studio darkroom. In that time, they edited images applying traditional tools and technologies. Currently, photo editing sounds very cool, but before Photoshop software, it needed a whole box of tools, a lonely environment, very sharp eyes, extremely steady hands, and creativity as well.

Methods and Tools of the Darkroom:

Pre-Photoshop age, there were a large number of photo editing techniques viz dodging & burning, vibrating during exposing, scratching the negatives, blurring & airbrushing, painting on the negatives, coloring, etc. The photographers used photo-montage, or the combination of printing to manipulate records of the historical events or to create painting-like imagery, banner, wall art, etc. All such of the works, they performed in the darkroom of the studio spending a lot of time. They always did not get the expected result. There was the chance of many errors. For this reason, most of the Dark Room experts used to work on a copy of the master negative so that can get back the original copy again.

The darkroom experts edited & manipulated negatives using a double-exposure process or by piecing photos or negatives together. They do many things for this. They apply chemicals like bleaching to lighten or totally wash-out parts of the photograph or the full photograph. They also used hand coloring for fine art painting. All of these works are very laborious and time consuming as well as very manual.

The darkroom specialists applied many tools for photo editing and manipulation such as big & small magnifying glasses, pastes, varies types of inks, cotton, light, cutter, palettes, and opaque paints, various kind brushes, erasers, charcoals, scale, etc. Many tools of the present Adobe Photoshop have come with the same shape and function as these were before.

How did the Photographers work in the Darkroom before?

Before the invention of the digital camera and micro SD memory cards, the photographers shot photograph by the camera with the film, but there were many limitations. After finishing a whole film capturing photos, the shutterbugs had to develop the negative in the traditional darkroom.

Let’s have a look how the photographers worked in the traditional darkroom photoshop step by step

The darkroom experts opened the rolled film or negative out of the camera for developing.
Then, they bring out the negative from the rolled box for developing and in this time, the negative looks completely dark as it was you can find anything captured here. After developing, the captured photos become visible in the negative as like a white-gray shadow.
They cut out the beginning part and the ending part of the long lace like negative by scissors.
They loaded that negative with another large developing wheel for rolling and put it into a tank and finally set the cap. They performed the whole process with the clean and dry hand.
Now, they poured chemical mixture water into the tank and shakes the tank few time to remove the air bubbles. The water must be hot and its temperature should be 60 to 70 degree Celsius. It took at least six minutes for developing.
Then, they removed the water and filled with Stop Bath chemical mixing water again and again shake in the same way.
Next, they filled the tank with Fixture which is another chemical mixture vey necessary for film developing and shake again. It took usually 5-10 minutes.
Now, the photos became visible on the negative and this time they could print and wash the photos.
The developers placed the negative under a projector with a frame for printing. Here, they printed the photos with the projector-light on a photographic paper in the darkroom that take much time.
They took the printed paper on a tray & drowned into chemical water.
At this stage, they shook the paper very slowly. They did Develop 1 minute, then Stop 1 minute, and finally Fixer 1 minute. Then, water rinses at least 5 minutes for washing. All these process they had to do very carefully because there is a chance to be destroyed the image.
Finally, they dried the image with dry wind blowing or keeping under hot light and in this way, the image became ready for use.

Photo Editing and Manipulation In The Darkroom

Image editing or manipulation activities in the darkroom were not as easy & cool as the modern photo editing in Adobe Photoshop. It was very hard working task and time consuming also. It was then almost like drawing a painting from a scratch.

Spot Removing: In the darkroom, the image developer removed spots from photos by maintaining analog process, such as-

Firstly, they placed an image with spots on a table.
They taped the image on the table to stop the unwanted moving at the time of retouching.
They applied thin but long brushes according to their requirements.
Considering the type spots, they selected different types of inks, water, chemicals, and more.
They took different colors with the various brushes, tried outside the negative to match with the color of the other portions of the image. They did it so that they could a flawless photo without any distortion.
When they got the best match, they applied the color on the spot they wanted to remove and let it dry under sun or in the darkroom under hot light.
Finally, by maintaining this ways, they completed the small amount of spot fixing works in the darkroom.

Negative Retouching:

Negative Retouching was (and still is) an important task in the photographer’s darkroom. The guy who retouch in the darkroom, used to edit the negative before photoshop for color correction manually, lighting, shadowing, painting, spot reducing, etc. They maintain a process for a small negative retouching work. What they did for applying lighting effect on a portion of a photo is the following:

They took a black & white negative for applying lighting effect on a table and taped it tightly to stop moving. If it moved, they could do the task well.
For getting a clear view, they used sharp pen and magnifying glass. It provided a zoomed in advantage to the retoucher.
Then they made numerous white dots on the spot by hitting with the sharp pen where it was needed white light.
As a result, when they developed & washed out the negative, they got a white light on the dark portion of the photo. This process provided a lighting feel on the image.

History of Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the most powerful and widely used photo editing and manipulation software globally that has a wide range of powerful tools and options. It was invented first time by Thomas Knoll and John Knoll. Later, when they sold out the license to the Adobe systems in 1988, they launched this software first. This very software has brought out a revolution in the field of image editing industry.

At the beginning, the very word ‘photoshop’ aroused a laughter, but as time goes, its necessity and usefulness has revealed. Day by day, this editing software has become very popular and unavoidable part to the graphic designers and photographers and even to the people who are not related to commercial photography. Its application arena has been widen with the good crowd of tools and options, and has become beneficiary for the various designs, graphic design, image manipulation, image retouching, and more. Many graphic design companies have grown relying on the very software with the progression of the digital photography, ecommerce business, and many more.

How Did the Photoshop Tool’s Icon Originate?

From time to time, the icons of Photoshop has been changed or developed. There is a great variety in the shape and appearance of the photoshop icons which are available now. There are some icons that are looking exactly as you think it should be, but there are some tools, seeing those you cannot but laugh at their appearance. However, know how they have originated from the old darkroom studio.

Crop Tool:

The crop tool is a very useful tool and it mostly used for cutting any individual portion of any photo. Its appearance is something funny. This tool is mostly looked like the original darkroom cropping tool. Its sliding gizmo let the darkroom experts to crop and to resize any image maintaining the same aspect ratio. This photoshop tool has originated from this tool as it is shown in the image above.

Brush Tool:

In the Adobe Photoshop software, there are various types of brush tools viz Brush tool, History brush tool, Healing brush tool, many creative brush tool, etc. These tools are being widely used in the image editing sectors for image retouching. The brush tools are also originated from the darkroom brushes as these were. Look over the darkroom brushes in the above image.

Dodge and Burn Tool:

The dodge and the burn tool of photoshop have come from the darkroom’s original lollipop shaped tools which are shown in the above image.

Ethics and Aesthetics of photo editing and manipulation:

In case of Photo editing, there is a crowed who shows their opposite opinion regarding ethics and aesthetics. Actually, ethics is a set of rules and aesthetic is related to nature and beauty. But, yet there are some guys who mix the two terms together.

In image editing, ethics is a decent issue. If the editing on a photo is excessive and make fake the true message in the image, it’ll destroy the main purpose of the image manipulation. There are some images that you should not edit such as: politics or politicians, war photos, natural calamities, and more. Because, the manipulation of this type of image ruins the real message. The visitors and the readers always like to see or know the realistic photos with the actual news. There is no place for the fake images. Any kind of image editing in the print media, can also mean yellow journalism that is not expected. There are some magazines such as National Geographic, Discovery, and etc. use a little bit of image retouching methods to enhance the aesthetics. In these kinds of fields, reality matters most than the glittering appearance.

However, the themes, aesthetics and ethics are two different opinions. It’s actually all about how true message you are giving to your followers. If the image editing is too much that provides totally alternative message to the readers and viewers, then that is not ethical. But, if the editing is enough to maintain the real message, then there is nothing unethical issue.

According to the aesthetic opinion, image editing is almost limitless since it is related to the beauty. But, yet as long as it seems natural, you can edit for beautification. There are some sectors which take high end photo editing. These sectors are related to fashion and model photos, fashion magazines, fine art photography, paintings, and more. The main purpose of the image editing is to make the photos more beautiful and appealing than before.

Image manipulation for beautification has an old history. Earlier than Adobe Photoshop, it was very laborious and time consuming as well, but just after the invention of the Photoshop software, it has become easier and more accurate. The Photoshop has increased the scope of image manipulation. This tool will provide you the photos in the way as you desired to have and this feature has made the Photoshop, its various tools and options popular.

Image Masking

A comparison between Pen Tablet & Traditional way for Image Masking!

3:14 AM

Image masking is a technique of removing image background. It is applied on the delicate edge of the furry or hairy images, model & fashion images, hairy doll or furry animal images, thin fabrics like muslin, chiffon, and so on. For removing the background from such type of images, only the clipping path is not adequate. So, in such a circumstance, image masking service comes inevitably to complete the job perfectly.

Traditionally, the graphic experts use a mouse, Photoshop, and its various tools & options such as the pen tool, brush tool, add layer mask, refine edge, and more. They do the job manually and they have to do it carefully for the high end quality. But, in case of furry photos, masking 100% perfectly is not possible. Such type of photo requires something more. And for this reason, the expert graphic designers use Pen Tablet.

Pen tablet is in fact an input device. It works with the Photoshop as an ad-on. The graphic designers use the device during photo editing instead of a mouse. It is very hard to select the flying or stray hair using a mouse for photo masking. But, the pen tablet can perfectly perform this work. Besides, the pen tablet enables us to make hand-drawn photos, animation, and graphics. It has a pen-like fantastic stylus that gives a sense of drawing photos same as like a pencil and paper. The designers apply it to get various graphic data or handwritten signatures. They also apply it to grab an image from a paper.

Here Is a Comparison Between Pen Tablet VS Traditional Way

There are a lot of advantages of applying a Pen Tablet for masking an image. Regarding the accuracy in case of delicate edge photo masking, this device can play a master role over the conventional way. Anyway, let’s compare and contrast between Pen Tablet and the traditional techniques of image masking-

·        The graphic experts apply pen tablet at the time of image masking because it can perfectly catch the hairy delicate edge of the photo. It is faster, smooth, and more effective than a mouse.
·        The designers can move from every point to point of an image on the screen in a single movement, but by a traditional mouse, it repeats the slides.

·        Pen tablet make us capable of doing more natural input for activities, for example, creative hand drawing and photo retouching.

·        The stylus has two buttons like the right click of the mouse.

·        Holding a pen is better than holding a mouse. Most of the users with repetitive strain injury (RSI) suffer less bad pain when using a pen tablet.

·        In a graphic design project, working with a mouse needs repetitive muscle movements when the rest of the hand remains still, creates uneven muscle fatigue. A pen, on the other side, allows you working in a more relaxed position.

·        Pen tablet doesn’t change the natural texture. It is very much useful for model photo masking. The designers apply it for changing color tone, exposure, brightness, contrast, etc. of a photo more accurately, but by the mouse, the job cannot be done like that of.

By the way, if you use pen tablet or not, you have to be very experienced, skilled, and expert to get desired hair masking result. Alternatively, you can go to a professional image manipulation company to get your desired result for image masking such as model photos, fashion, furry animal, etc. Image Masking Service is one of the best photo editing service providers, who use pen tablet for accurate hair masking.

Business plan

START YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS FROM HOME WITHOUT ANY MONEY PART-2

5:20 AM

Please read the part one from here!

Getting targeted Clients

Getting targeted potential customers is not an easy task. You have to do more things to draw their attention to your business. At the first stage, you have to create a brand of your business. You should be strict to provide the best quality services. You must show your own style of photography. You have to target your customers with some specific services like wedding photography, product photography, baby or nature photography, and something like this.

Grow a fruitful and strong network to enhance your business. You may be a skilled shutterbug, but if people don’t know you, it must not bring anything better. So, for publicity and marketing, you must join in the various forums, clubs, meet up with the guys on your track, etc. As a business holder, you should maintain a good relation with your customers. Show your co-operative interest to them so that they can be your long time clients and they refer you to the others.

As a helping hand of marketing, you can use various social media. There are various social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and many more. But, for your business promotion, Facebook and Instagram may be the best medium for you. These social media are the best free tools for marketing and generating potential traffic to your business website.

Your first customers can be your friends and family. Thus, they can help you much to grow up your business. So, you should spend time to capture their photos. In this case, remember you should be professional because it is your business. So, make specific rules and give discount for them. Make them understand this fact. Don’t be rude, rather ask help from them.

Grow Up Your Business

Suppose, now your business is established. Then, it is high time to promote your photography business to achieve the goal. You have to take steps properly for marketing you business because marketing is the fuel of any business. However, here I want to give you a short list that you have to do for getting the desired growth.

· It is the suitable time of investing a considerable fund for marketing your business. It will help much to publish your photography business.

· You can promote locally. So make banner, billboard, and get sponsor in local events, sports, various cultural events, and many more.

· For doing digital marketing free, use various social media. Try their paid marketing tools. Create pages, groups, offer contest, etc. for getting visitors into your website.

· As a paid service, use Google ad services like PPC, use facebook paid ad service and buy some SEO tools to have right analytical results.

· Create an email list by landing page to give your clients various updates viz: greetings, offers, discounts, etc.

· Maintain a blog page. It is a powerful way to increase engagement.

· Photography is a seasonal business and that is why on the season, you can earn a lot, but in the off season, earning will be less than the average. So, make a saving plan to run business smoothly.

· You have to diversify your business. So, find new opportunities and set another plan. Guess, you are capturing wedding photos, now you can also take the photos of maternity, new born baby, nature, and so on.

· Keep learning new things. You have to learn from mistakes and avoid not to do that again.
· Be patient and behave decent with your employees. Mind it, every success is the result of a mutual endeavor--

"All progress takes place outside the comfort zone."-- Michael John Boba

Hire Help as-needed Basis

Toward the start of any business, most of the work like setting up shoots, taking shots, editing photos and even marketing you do by yourself. As the company advances, you should expand the arena of your business. You should employ people as-required basis. When your business is well established, you should delegate duties and responsibilities among the employees. But, when your company is very busy with a lot of works, you can outsource. For instance, you can take numerous photoediting services like clipping path, image masking, photo retouching, color correction, neck joint, image restoration, and mores. Again, you might think who will provide these editing services with the best price. There are many such companies globally like Color Experts International, Clipping Path India, Image Masking Service, and many mores. They have been providing above mentioned photo editing services professionally.

ecommerce

Bulk Photo Editing Services for Photographers & Studios and Graphic Desi...

5:11 AM

Business plan

Start Your Photography Business from Home without any Money Part-1

1:32 AM

This content is all about how to start a photography business. Here, you will get a detail guideline and sum suggestion like business plan, branding, finance, marketing, getting client and so on.

Do Your Math to Set as a Photography Business!

Photography may be your passion. You may have spent a lot of time to take images which you want or taken photos as other like. You may love the work and have a lot of experiences. But in a certain time of life, you may think to leave photography. Because, you have to involve with a profession that will help to lead your life.

Again, you may be trying to get a good job or may have already got a job. In this case, since you don’t love your job, you may not do well. Because your mind is crying for the photography that once you did well.

In this situation, I think, to set up a photography business would be the best option for you. Does it sound much? Or are you tensed thinking the way of success? You need not do that. In fact, if you can follow some easy steps, you can make true your dream of success.

As I’m inspiring you to start a photography business, I am presenting some strategies to run it successfully.

Determine Your Brand

At first you have to determine your brand. You have to research about the niche you like to run your business strategies.

Since I’m talking about photography business such as wedding, baby, nature, product photography, etc. I assume that you have chosen one of the niches for your business. Then, what you should do right now?

To choose an attractive brand name, you can research on google. Zero result is ideal here. When you completed selecting a brand name or niche, then you should check out the availability of it on the internet. You should also search out whether your brand is available in the different social sites or not, will these social sites let you run groups, pages, slides, or not. Thus you can choose a unique and an exclusive brand identify. You should visit knowem.com for you research. This website will let you check and select your brand name, product or username, trademark, etc. You have to choose your brand name which has available trade mark, .com domain, and Vanity URL for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Next, you should set up your branding strategies. You can create your branding with your real name, or add it with your niche, or business name. Suppose, you name is Scott Kelby. Now you can brand your own name (e.g. Scott Kelby, Skelby). If you get it very common, then you can add something with your name, may be your nick name or niche name (Kelby Photo). As an individual photographer, it can be Scott Photography or Kelby Photography, which ever you selected. If you don’t like to personify your brand, you can use other meaningful name that instantly tells what your niche is about (e.g. Bridal Lens). If you can’t find any, you can blend more meaningful words connected to your niche. Even if you can’t find any of those as well, still you have an option to choose non-meaningful words for your brand image. But, the pronunciation should be pretty easy (e.g. Cla-ching, the camera click sound evolved from Ka-ching).

There are ways to check if your brand is qualified as a good brand. I won’t go through all the strategies. But, you can try this one: Word of Mouth. Get 5-10 guys don’t know about your brand. Whisper your brand name to the first person, tell him to whisper the same name to the second person. Thus transferring your brand name to the last person, if the pronunciation of your brand name is a close match, you have got an excellent brand name.

After that, you should create your corporate identity. You need a well-decorated website. Design the site with suitable texts, images, videos, infographics, flowchart, graph, and so on. Create social media network with the most engaged pages, groups, texts, and images. You can create the mentioned contents by yourself, or you can outsource from offshore companies.

Considering your product photos, you might need to take various photo editing services for displaying them sophisticadly. In this case, you can outsource to us all kinds of photo editing services. We, Image Masking Service have been providing various photo editing services such as background removing, clipping path, image retouching, restoration, color correction, neck joint or ghost mannequin, raster to vector, and so on.

Business Plan

An appropriate planning is almost half of the success of any business. It is same as a road map of a travel. It is a forecast if you would be gainer or not. So, you have to make a specific plan of what you should do or shouldn’t do, what ways or strategies you should follow or avoid related to your business. Remember two famous quotes:

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” --Yogi Berra

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” --Antoine De Saint.

It is a difficult task. You should do some paper works, discuss with the relatives, family or seek help from experienced person for making a proper plan of workflow.

Financial Issues

For starting any business, everyone have to figure out the financial issues minutely. It’s also a part of right planning. A photography business should have gadgets, office space, and studio, editing software, business license, insurance, website, accounting software, globally trademark registration, etc. To purchase these necessary things initially, a considerable fund is urgent. So, initial funding is very important because:

“An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.”—Robert A. Rice Jr.

If you are tensed with your business fund or capital, I would like to say that there are a lot of solutions. It would be the best if you can manage this capital from your friends or family. Furthermore, the bank loan can be a great source for a startup business. Here, you’d get your required loan according to their banking policy.

As a fresher, you can begin your photography business with the fund that you can manage from your family. If you have enough economic backup, it will help to grow your business as you hope. But, if you’re a service holder and don’t have additional income, you should continue the job until your business can generate a handsome annual profit. When your business will get enough revenue to run itself and your daily needs, then you can leave your job for giving full time to your business.

Try to Have The Necessary Experience

Relevant experience of running any business is an asset. In case of photography business, professional experience helps much to go forward. Spend enough time to learn the minute details for your business.

I know a photography business owner who, at the first stage of his life, worked as a helper for a photographer. He got enough practical experience working with that photographer. Later he could start his business successfully.

Making A Pricing Plan

Setting up a standard pricing plan is quite hard and it’s important also. A competitive and affordable pricing will help much to get targeted order of photography.

During making your pricing plan, don’t forget about photo editing. So, if you take $50 per hour, keep in mind further 3 hours for post-production editing. At the beginning, your hourly rate should be less or average, but as the time will go, the rate must be increased in accordance with the service quality, working complexity and experience.

Make a Website

A photography business always needs a killer website. It’s a storefront of your services. It’d act as a showcase of the recent services. Now, it may be a matter of headache that how, why and what it should contain.

However, as startup business man, you must have a professional website. It must have engaging look with specific menus such as services, about, contact, etc. For generating various types of potential traffic, make your website all device supported. It will help to attract traffic. Since it is a photography business website, it must have a photo gallery and an excellent slider.

In the about page, clarify about your services, your location and yourself, provide a contact address, company profile, and many more. This page will provide an idea to your clients and help to grow trust. You should also keep a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page to make aware your customers.

It would be great if you attach an excellent pricing page that will help your subscribers to get a primary idea of the service charge. You should create a call-to-action button so that your clients can order directly.

Try to add a blog page in your business website. Write different blog posts regularly to provide photography tips & tricks, tutorials, photography stories, etc. for the newbies and for your customers. Such a page will help you much for marketing your business. There is another important task you should not miss to attach various social media buttons into your website. Social sharing is important for business publicity and marketing.

Photo Editing

Photo editing is the most important thing to scale up your business. You cannot capture the best photos every time since you want photos without any defect. Rather, most of the time you will take the photos, they may be unsuitable and you will feel the need for photo editing.

Then, how you will be capable to solve the photo editing related problems. Don’t get tensed. Just install Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom on your computer and edit your photos. There are a plenty of software or add-ons premium or free for making your stunning photos. For example, Google Nik collection is completely free now. You can download and install a lot of add-ons from here www.google.com/nikcollection/ and use it as standalone software and also as an add-on with Lightroom.

You can manipulate the photos by yourself. So, learn many techniques for making your photos better. But, do you like taking photography more than editing? Then, you should concentrate on what you are good at. And free most of your valuable time, by sending the photos to us for editing.

You can outsource all types of image editing works. Here, Image Masking Service (IMS) can be your best choice. We have been providing various photo editing services such as background remove, photo retouching, color correction, restoration, clipping path, and many mores. IMS can serve 5000 image files within 24 hours without compromising with the quality at the lowest PRICE. This number of image files can be varied considering the image complexity. We are enriched with the latest technology and we have more than 250 skilled graphic design experts who are dedicated and hardworking.

marketing strategies for photographers.

Simple online and off line marketing strategy for photographer

3:24 AM

Many of the photographers spend too much time editing their photos instead of promoting their business. They remain busy only for a season, but the rest of the year, they remain jobless. Whereas I know some photographers who are booked for the entire year. They are very busy throughout the whole year. Then, what’s the secret behind their endless engagement?

Nothing spectacular, you don't need to spend much time to edit if you outsource your photo editing works. You can spend free time for marketing your photography business and surely it will help you to boost up your business up to the desired level. Just you need to follow some simple strategies for your photography business marketing.

Online marketing strategy for photographers

Online marketing or you can call it digital marketing is one of the best methods to make known the mass people about your photography business. It is here very easy to reach a good number of people within a very short time and the visitors also can send you their real feedback. You can know the actual fact about your business quickly from the online marketing and can take necessary steps to upgrade it. In case of this marketing, the photographer should follow some processes to stand out of all others.

Make a Website:

At the very first, as a photographer you should build a great looking website with portfolio. The site should go with your photography topic. You should add many menus-buttons for the specific category of the photos such as, events or wedding photography, baby photography, product photography and so on. Then, make a nice looking photo gallery. You can use NextGen, a WordPress plugin for photography website, to give your visitors an eye soothing view. Make your website mobile friendly so that your visitors can visit from everywhere whenever they want.

Involve in Social Media:

You have to share the detail news and views about your business with your visitors cum clients in the various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. These media are now-a-days playing the most vital role regarding sales and marketing. To race with the contemporary social media marketing strategies, perform some certain tasks such as:

attach social media sharing button on your website

share all of your social media usernames on visiting card brochure, etc

create YouTube video to welcome the visitors to your page

share experience, the story behind photography, give them tips & tricks

create resourceful boards in Pinterest, post quote and see who’s pinning you

use Facebook ad campaign and run a contest.

Social media marketing is a wider concept. There are plenty of methods that you should follow to be successful here. You have to share your best photos on social sites. You should share really useful content that may be text, video and other contents so that your reader take you as a friend, a teacher or an instructor. However, perform some additional things for connecting more traffic to your business, for instance:

make filmy photos using software like Lightroom

create infographic with engaging data for public interest

create informative video tutorial for YouTube

develop a custom landing page,

check out for other photographers to be trendy and so on

write list post with specific number such as top 5, 7, 10 etc. with useful data

Blogging:

You can use blog as one of your powerful tools for photography marketing. A well written text content will help you to catch the attention of more people. If you can write informative and useful content, the visitors will come to your site consistently and it will enhance the possibility of conversion. A perfect blog post will present you to the customers as a busy and experienced photographer. It will improve your SEO ranking, keyword ranking, back linking, which result your website in the first page during a google search. Once you can do so that means too many traffic and conversion in your site.

Email Marketing:

This is another useful tool you can use for your photography marketing. Make a list of active email of your target clients collecting by the landing page and send Email to them informing what new product or thing you are offering. Send them greetings on special occasion and thus maintain a virtual relation with your customers.

Offline Marketing strategy for photographers

All above are about online or digital marketing, but besides these, there is another effective marketing way which can be categorized as offline marketing. If you don’t think of online marketing, then the rest is offline marketing. It is almost local marketing within your surroundings where you live. As a photographer, you have a lot to do regarding this marketing for enhancing your business arena.

You should arrange public meet up or exhibitions for showing your photos to your target clients. Inform the visitors about the image, story behind it, share experience and tips to the new comers, arrange contest and prizes. Present your popular photographs to the famous persons.

For local marketing purpose, you can sponsor local sports team, cover various sports events and present the photos to the teams, decorate your vehicle with your business logo and banner, make calendar and gift as a new year greeting and so on.

In addition, you can host party or cultural event, offer great looking business cards, apply for business awards, write press release, write for magazine, etc. You can also offer free consultancy, training session, entrepreneurs meet up, etc.

In fine, if you follow the online and offline marketing strategies for your photography business, it would be easy for you to achieve your target clients and finally to boost the business. After getting success from here, you can apply advanced or paid marketing strategies to scale your business up to the level.

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