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Lesson Info

How to Deliver and Choose the Best Engagement Photos

In previous lessons we talked about how I prepare my clients for a successful engagement shoot, how, then, I shoot their engagement session, and now where we are in the spectrum is the workflow and marketing from that shoot. What you saw was a beginning, middle, and now you're gonna see the end. Now you're going to see how I leverage every opportunity to make sure that my clients feel like a number one priority, to make sure that the experience has been personalized, and to make sure that they feel that they are absolutely, positively, number one in my queue. Whether or not they are or are not, does not matter. If they feel like they're my number one, then that's beneficial. Now I talk this section, or this lesson, is entitled workflow and marketing. Now there was another section where we get in detail about marketing, but I want to talk about how I use every opportunity within my business to market, even if it's just a tiny bit. So we're gonna get to that. We'll sprinkle that in at th...

e end. But the bulk of this presentation will be about workflow. So because I'm going to be in different aspects showing things, I'm gonna be showing you in a viewing gallery, then I'll be showing you in iView catalog, and then I'll be offline, I'm gonna be doing a lot of different things, so I want you to, I want to cast the vision so that you can kind of see where we are in the step of things. So first, my workflow, which might seem odd to you, but is expressing appreciation. Far before I start editing, far before I start culling, I need to express appreciation to my clients. I'm gonna talk about how I do that. Secondly, I'm gonna talk about how I cull the session, how I choose my keepers and not keepers. I want to talk to you about how I make quick decisions, and part of the reason why I make quick decisions is because this is the first encounter, outside of actually meeting my clients, and I may or may not have met clients. I might have booked them entirely online. So their engagement session is our very first interaction. So I make quick decisions because I'm not so concerned with giving them four different angles from four different things. I'm trying to say, these are the best photos from your engagement session, and I only want our very first experience for you to walk away and feel like, wow, we did such a great job. And me as a photographer, I wanna say, these photos really, distinctively feel like my brand. First encounter, first experience, I'm gonna be very judicious in the phots that I choose. Then I'm gonna get into the editing process, and what that looks like for me. And when I say editing, I mean it loosely, because I've taken control on the front end, and then I've abdicated responsibility by outsourcing the large bulk of it. We're gonna talk about why and what I do. Then we're gonna talk about marketing, and you're gonna see the pattern. I have spoken to you about the marketing pattern. Now you're going to see the marketing pattern come to life, and I do that by way of a blog post, by way of social media, and all of those things, every step of the way, is preparing my clients for a little bit more. For a little bit more, because once they see the blog post, and once they see it on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, well then, what am I gonna be following up with? They think, I'm so excited to see the gallery, but wait, there's more. I send them a slideshow. Then I send them a slideshow, and we're gonna talk about what that slideshow means and what the slideshow does for my business. Then we're gonna get into releasing the gallery, 'cause that in my mind is part of the experience, how the clients receive their images, download their images, and things of that nature. And then I'm gonna be following up with the client. Once I've released it, once they have printing instructions, once the creative team has the ability to share those images, I'm gonna follow up with the client, and I'm going to ask what their favorite photo is. Why? Because I want to send them a gift. We're gonna talk about what that is. So now you see the big, over-arching idea. We're gonna splice this up into different sections, so bear with me as we flip between things. So first things first, expressing appreciation. I want brand association So what brand is, isn't a logo, and a brand isn't a website, and a brand isn't your Facebook page. Your brand is a set of expectations or experiences that enable a client to choose your service over another, based on preconceived notions of what that experience will be. That is kind of like a loose quote from Seth Goden. Now, because a brand is an experience, it's not something you can buy. You must make your client feel something, because when they feel something, they have an experience with you that they want to tell other people about. So my brand association is one of the things I want my clients to feel is appreciated. It's taking care of. It's being, loosely, for lack of better words, loved. I want them to feel loved on. So I do this. The next day after the engagement session, I send them an email, two, three sentence, just to reaffirm their decision to shoot at the location they shot, to reaffirm her decision to get hair and makeup done because she looks so beautiful, to reaffirm their love and tell them how appreciative I am that they hired me. Of all the photographers they could have chosen, I was the lucky one. And I use a template email to say thank you, because if I'm writing this same email over and over and over again, and I want to make this into a quick and efficient workflow, then I simply copy and paste, and then I add a couple of zha-zhas. A couple of zha-zhas about location, a couple of zha-zhas about her outfit, but I'm not sitting at my computer being like, okay, here we go again. The base is there, then I add a few personalizing details. Then another way that I want to express my appreciation is secondly, through a sneak peek. Now I tell my clients at the engagement session that they're going to see a sneak peak of their images about a week after the session. But because I want to surprise them by expressing appreciation, I'm going to send them a sneak peak the day after their session. How does that make them feel? Taken care of, excited, loved. Already they're feeling like, we must have had an amazing shoot, because she shared a photo the next day. Thirdly, I write a hand-written thank you note. Early in my career, even though I couldn't afford it, there was a lady at our church who, I don't know if it's popular anymore, but it's something called creative memories, where they would make these photo books and they would put like stamps and foil and flowers, and I wasn't into that so much, but I said, can you use like your talents and make me a few cards with like my logo and a ribbon? And I would put it in the envelope. And so I wasn't just buying like an off-the-shelf thank you card, although that's totally good if you feel like that reflects your brand. But the idea of having a personalized thank you note, and I have since invested in getting stationery that is entirely my own, but after every session, I write a thank you note. And I say, you know, because of the template email, it's kind of like I personalize very little because it makes it easy, then I take time to say I love where we're going. If this is what's happening in June for your engagement session, cannot wait for September. We are so excited. Just wanted to drop a note and brighten your day. I can not tell you how that changes things. Some girls will take a picture of the note, and then they update their social media. They're like, my wedding photographer sent me a note, and I'm thinking, what? That's amazing. But what are you doing to kind of create that experience? What are you doing to express your appreciation? On an ancillary note, that this wasn't in my notes, is that most of my clients, because I know my target clientele, most of my clients are paying for the wedding themself. This is a target I attract. This is who I hone in. Now every so often I get a client whose parent will pay for the wedding. Now, if I receive the contract from the clients, bride and groom, they sign their contract, they send it to me, and she tells me the check is coming from a different address. I look at the address, and I realize, oh, based on the last name, it must be from let's say her father or her mother. Once I get that check, I confirm with the client. I say I received it. Thank you so much, we're in store, I'm gonna lock it up, I'll invoice you. And then I break out my stationery, and I say Dear Mr. Shutman, I received your note. Thank you so much. I look forward to thanking you in person in August. Until then, please feel free to contact me with anything. What can we do to express appreciation for our clients, but also express appreciation for the bank that's paying you, you know? Takes five minutes, and it really changes the dynamic. Now, we're gonna be moving into culling the session. So once the thank you's are done and I've expressed appreciation, we have shot the entire engagement session. And you've saw the way that that transpired for us in Los Angeles. Now what you're going to look at is a portion of the engagement session for the Knot dream engagement. Now you're going to see my approach. You're going to quickly see how I move through my selections, and you're going to see what I'm looking for when it comes to keepers. Now I have a tendency to speak fast, move fast, shoot fast. If I'm moving too fast and you guys aren't really understanding the linear ideas that are going in my head, please stop me. I want to, before I get into that, I know that somebody would ask about our back up systems. So when I go home, I get the raw images, and I drag them on to my computer. Once I have the raw images on my computer, I plug in a hard drive, and I copy all of those raw images. Then, now that the hard drive is backed up with all of the images from the shoot, I will only work with the raw images on my desktop, okay? Once I go through and I cull the raw images on the desktop, anything that I do not keep, automatically into the waste basket. I'm only keeping on my computer the images that I'm keeping for the client, okay? So the way that the backup system works, and I'm gonna get to the logistics in a second, but I have the raw image keepers on my computer. I have all of the raw images on the hard drive that I will only keep for about six to eight months after the session. If my clients aren't asking for a raw image six to eight months after the session or after the wedding, then I feel abdicated. Now in my contract, it says that I am not responsible to give them the high res. They are commissioning me for the high, the raw images, they are commissioning me for the high res JPEG images, which is what I will deliver to them. But I keep the raw images just to be certain. But in almost 10 years of doing this, I've had clients ask for raw images once, and then when I asked what do you need the raw images for, because that's not what we contracted for, she had said she really wanted to do a very, very, very large print on her wall, to which I was flattered, and then I said, I will be in control of ordering that for you. I will not make a profit on it, because she was worried that I was gonna try to mark it up. I said, I want you to have your photo, but I don't feel comfortable handing over the raw image. Let me handle it for you, and I will invoice you for the exact cost. It was a win-win for us both, and I didn't have to turn over my raw images. So the backup then looks like raw images on my computer of keepers, the raw images on the hard drive, and then I upload the raw images to my post-processor. So now, in theory, I have three backups of the raw images, before they've been mated to JPEG. Cool? Now we're gonna move on to what I'm going to show you is a gallery of my raw images from a portion of the raw images of the shoot. So what you guys see right now is a catalog of my images. I use iView Media Pro. You might not have heard of it because it is really old and it does one thing only. It creates a catalog. So some people ask why I don't cull my images in Lightroom. Because I just feel like with Lightroom, I'm an easily distractable person. I wanna do all these things all at once, so if I am in iView, the only thing I can do is choose my keepers and create a catalog based on what that is. So what you're seeing now is a portion of the shoot. We started the shoot roughly about here. Okay, so I'm gonna show you this particular section and how we moved through it. One of the very first frames we fired off camera is one of the frames that I really liked. Like I was like, oh, great. Every so often that happens, and I'm like, before this course I was like, phew, makes me look good. Like everything on fire, voom-voom; no, not at all. You're gonna see as we kind of go through this. So she was, we were, I was talking to them behind the camera, which is what you saw in the footage. They turned to me. They were just nice and relaxed. Now this photo is not good. Like, it just doesn't do anything. Her face is coming up like this, which is why I'm not going to keep it. Same for this photo. Here her eyes are blinking. Here his mouth looks a little dead. Here she's looking nice, but his eyes are closed. Here we picked it up, but now her eyes are closed, and that eye closing is not really indicative of my brand, so I have to understand that if their eyes are closed, I need to sell the heck out of the closed eyes, because whenever I look at a photo and there's two people like this, or two people like this, I just wonder, were they really like that? Do people really do that on a wedding day? So as a lifestyle photographer, that is my decision to say if that's true, I'll sell it. If it's not, I'm not gonna get it. So here, same pose, but do you notice how the minute she closed her eyes, she opened her eyes from being closed, her chin was raised, and then you'll see the curvature of her back, it seemed to have lessened, so instead of this photo with her eyes closed, which might work for your brand, her with her eyes open, smiled and relaxed, works for mine. Now here's one, two, three. I need one. I don't need to give her multiples of the same thing. So I went through, I chose which one I felt was the strongest, which was the first one. Now here you'll see that I changed my settings a little bit so the exposure wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be, but their skin tones still look nice, so I saved that one, but I chopped off a bit of their feet, and even though, because of their height difference, I'm okay chopping off at, cropping out, at certain appendages. So wrists, elbows, ankles are okay, but ankles are one for me that kind of irk me. If I'm showing your ankles, I should have gone all the way down to the toes. It's a personal thing for me. But due to their height difference and me starting the shoot trying to figure out what their dynamic was, I still kept it, because I feel like potentially if propped in they can make it into a very nice portrait. So that was the reason behind it. Now here, in this particular portion of the shoot, I had them walking towards me, and I don't use a lens fit, so I had my hand. What you see in this frame is what it looks like without a lens hood, and without my hand blocking the sun. This is what it looks like with my hand up, blocking the sun. So I knew that that's okay, and now I'm gonna start picking. But here her chin was still too high up. I didn't like the way that it looked. Here her chin gets better, but it was jutted out. She'd smiled, and then went like this. So the one that I ended up keeping was not this one, 'cause they look mid-conversation., was not this one because she looks, she's turning her head, not this one because her eyes are down. But now her eyes are down, her hand is up, and her leg, instead of her legs walking out like this, we have one leg crossing in front of the other. That was a small little tweak that ended up me making the decision. So not this one on the left because there's too much haze. Not this one on the right because her hair flip is going too strong. This one, they're looking right at each other. Both her legs are walking in a way that look complimentary. Not that one because of the haze. And then I just kind of felt like I, I had just about three feet to shoot them. I knew that if I got one photo, I would be stoked. The fact that I got two, I'm okay with. Not keeping that one, definitely not keeping that one. These ones just look a little too fake, and the tonality of them went to a very distinct blue green. And what I'm thinking, because I'm going to outsource my edits, I need to start making sure that the color continuity tells the same story. We're gonna get to that in a second. So those ones did not make the edit. Now this one just looked way too, like, Olan Mills, portraity portrait, and it wasn't even exposed well, so it did not make the edit. Now we've got to a place where I was shooting this one at 800th of a second, and I'm pretty sure we dropped down to 500ths of a second here. Now, small modifications, and I like this pose, but she kind of has a little too much of a scrunch in her nose, and as we moved, she started laughing, but then her mouth came up, and that's never a good angle. Then she started talking to me. Then too much haze came through. Then they were looking off in a distance, which would work if they weren't really looking at bushes. That was my mistake, right? It's like, look off fondly, into this barren wasteland. (laughs) You know, they did a great job, and they looked really good at it, but I'm going to be very judicious in the amount of photos that I would shoot. Now if they were overlooking a cliff, that might be a different story, right? So, in light of this, this photo looks good, but I'm not gonna keep it. I'm gonna be very choosy with what I want. Now if you'll notice, I had my hand up over the frame, and a slight shift in my body let too much light come in, so I had a little bit of haze. I had a little bit of haze. We came back to it, I got the pose that I wanted, so I'm selecting that one. Now what you'll see between my selects and no selects, is see this area down here? This is green. I can change this to any color I want. So I do this to the numbers count. Two is green, green, three is blue, four is brown, five is pink, and so forth. So if I was kind of like on the fence, oh, should I, should I not? I might mark it a different color so that when I go back and review, in light of the entirety of the gallery, then I can make those decisions. But I'm kind of just like, I used green. Green seems like growing and positive, so two. I choose my keepers. I don't choose my throw aways. It does something for your artistic ego, as well. So, I chose this one, and I let a little too much haze fall through this one, a little too much haze fall through this one. Now this one works, and I decided to select it, but one of the things I wanted to caution was, was from this. As Taylor came in down to Samantha, so this one, she's just kind of like laughing down at her hands, which I don't think is selling. Here she's too calm, and because he's so tall, his hands came right under her bust line, which is kind of something that I just didn't find as appealing. So in order for Taylor to come down without bending at his hips, I had him come to the side and kind of cuddle her. That was the cue; this is what resulted. He came down to her, but what resulted was this photo. Her bringing her arm up, him coming down into her. And while it's cute, I don't think it's the most complimentary of her. I kept it because it is truly their real cuddle, but now I kept one for her, now I'm gonna go through and select one for me. So we kept that one. So because I have that one dialed in, and because it's not a favorite, okay, I'm passing on. I'm gonna pass on. Now I said peel away from each other. This was the cue, peel away from each other, and that's what you see here in 211, and then I say, can you come in, but Samantha, don't bring up your left shoulder. And this is what resulted. Him coming down to her in 213, so I kept that one, and I kind of got what I wanted, and then I kept 217, because her hand, instead of right here, was right about there. So I'm gonna give her three options of the same pose. One a truly cuddle-cuddle that reflects them, and then two poses that I like. One is like a half, kind of like a half time, and one where it's a little full time. So I probably shot somewhere in the ballpark of 12 to 15 frames. Maybe they'll keep three. Now we're gonna cruise on. Once I had set up the light, and once I knew, now, if you recall back to the footage that we had seen, it was really, really, really bright. I had no open shade. We found about two and half feet of open shade, and I was like, this is where we're gonna stay. This is so lovely. This is me trying not to panic, right? So I said, this is our light, and I know that they're backlit, and so I'm going to try to give them an action, so I'm prepping them for the action in this photo, and so you're gonna see that a lot of the times after the cues that I had given her, her back was to the camera. So anytime her back is to the camera, unless Taylor is doing something really, really, really great, I was not gonna keep. So this is a no, this is a no, this is a no. That's a possibility, but do you see what's going on with her ankle? It looks like she's about to break it. Not gonna make the cut. Now there we go. Now we have her right leg behind her, and I intentionally had her walk into the sun so that we can get that nice, beautiful front light, and then what was in front of me and behind me was a natural reflector. We talk distinctively about natural reflectors. We talk distinctively about creating a shooting with intention, and this is, you see it self-manifesting itself. So I kept this one. I did not keep this one, because the arc in her back is too strong, and it pushes her pelvis too far up, which is not complimentary. Back of her head. This one's okay, but she's kind of stumpin'. Her right foot has a stump going on. I'm not gonna keep it. Then I kept this one 'cause she had turned at her hips. Look at how it accentuates her waist. Kept it. Not gonna keep it, not gonna keep it because the back of head. Back of head; twist, shoulder comes too up. This one is okay, but I gotta have something that kind of fits the bill for that one from the same dimension, me being at equal distance to my subject. Now, she's walking to, she's walking too much into the darkness, and so this is where I know I need to start slowing the cue. So in this one, her ankle looks a little too twisted. In this one, she looks a little too perky, like she's up on her tippy-toes. But this one she leans back into her hips, turns this way, and that's the one that I kept. So you'll see the tiny little things, the nuances that I'm looking for when it comes, and you'll see that because I talk so much behind my camera to give the energy to my clients, I might fire off anywhere between 10 and 12 images. What they will see and keep, not as general rule of thumb, but what I've seen so far, is anywhere from two to three. Cool; an average session for me yields about 400 images. What the client will see, what I tell the client they'll see is 50 to 55. What they usually end up seeing is about 65, maybe 70. Cool; now we have a question here. I'm gonna get a mic here, and then if I feel like I'm gonna answer that, I'm gonna move right into it. Cool. Perfect. I was just gonna ask, do you trash them, all the other photos that you didn't choose in the session? Yes. Okay. Yes, I do. Now, every time that I'm shooting, I'm constantly, we've spoke about this but I'm giving myself a back door, 'cause I tell, even if you saw in the footage, I'm like, I'm not sure if this is gonna work. I am okay telling my clients, I'm not sure it's going to work. Because if they come back to me like, oh, that one photo, it's like, unfortunately guys, the light just didn't work. It wasn't complimentary, it wasn't the right angle. It had nothing to do with you, it just didn't work. But I look forward to trying it again on the wedding day. And if you deliver 'em what you say you're gonna deliver, I say I'm gonna give you 55 images, and then you give 'em 65 or 70, yeah, that doesn't become so much of an issue. Cool. So now we're gonna talk about what the editing process looks like for me. So, before I get there, I need to just lay it out all on the line. When I started my business, I aspired to be a wedding photographer. Now the little bit of photography experience I had was in college. I shot on film, and when people always say, oh, she must have film experience. Well actually, it was a sociology class entitled Sociology Through Photography. So they didn't teach you photography. They just said, do you have a camera? Do you want to study sociology? Join us. I went to a very granola college. I love it. Go with your college, it was very liberal arts. So what I did learn was how to develop my own film, and it was fantastic, and it was invigorating, and it was exciting. But one thing that I quickly found out that a lot of the other students were doing, which I completely subscribed to, was we found a good lab, a lab that we liked, so that when we were done with our rolls of film, we sent them to the lab, and the lab processed them, and then we got them back, and we felt, wow, this is great, a wonderful experience of being creative. Well, what happened with the digital advent is that it changed our entire perspective. We then felt the responsibility to become the photographer, and the lab, and the processor, and the marketer, and the album designer, and the tax collector. I mean, we went through all of these things. When I got into photography, and remember, I told you in a previous lesson, in the bonus lesson, that when I shot my very first wedding, I went through every single photo, and I photoshopped every single photo on a laptop, on a track pad, on a 12 inch screen, in Photoshop. So I knew things had to change, and what I thought of, even though I'm a digital photographer, what I need to do is find a lab. I need to find a lab that I like so that I can turn them over, and then I get my images, and then I get to play with my favorites. So early on my career, I tried different digital labs, and then I came across one from a friend that I was in a photography online group with. And he had said, you guys, I'm starting a business, and it's outsourcing, and it's called Photographer's Edit. Well, because he was a friend, I trusted him, and I sent him my images, and that was about eight years ago. I have been working with Photographer's Edit for eight years. Now, I hear often from photographers, well, they'll try, maybe not just Photographer's Edit, any sort of digital lab, and they'll say it just didn't work for me. They just couldn't get what I wanted. Well, I'm going to respond and say, no lab will ever edit exactly how you edit. They are not you. They are making the best educated guess. But what I will say as an over-communicator is that over the past eight years, I have said great job on that last edit, guys, but can we work on this? And can we work on that? And in this lighting scenario, this is what I prefer. And on this lighting scenario, this is what I prefer. So you can't walk away. It's like going, it's like not giving a guy a second chance, or a girl a second chance on a date, because when she ate, she had ranch on her mouth. Well, if you had told her you have ranch on your mouth, you might have like a different kind of reaction to the entirety of the date. For me, I had to be very specific with what I wanted. But I want to talk about why I choose them. There are wonderful other amazing labs, but I have only had eight years experience with Photographer's Edit, and I choose them and I stay with them because they are dependable. They tell me, you will have your images in three days, and I have my images in two and half. Are you seeing a pattern? Like, I like to work with companies who like, over, under-promise and over-deliver. There we go. I work with them because they're fast. They have a turnaround, during a high wedding season, their turnaround is seven business days. And so sometimes when I shoot, I shot a wedding in March, and I uploaded the images on Monday, and they had them to me on Thursday night. That's fantastic. My clients are on their honeymoon, and they're seeing their gallery. We're gonna talk about that in a second. I use them because their customer support is amazing. I email them, and I have never waited more than 24 hours. I get a response from them same day. And lastly, they edit my photos based on my Lightroom presets of my choice, which means I'm not sending images and saying okay, guys, I hope you do a good job. They've given me the, they've afforded me the luxury of saying here's a starting point. Now you can amend. So I want to talk to you about what that looks like. So this is what the, my preference panel for Photographer's Edit. Now, my brightness, white balance, and contrast, they asked for my blog so that they can get a sense of how I'm blogging and what my favorite images look like and feel. Now, they've given me an opportunity to upload sample images for every job I update. So I can edit four images from a wedding, maybe one from prep if it was like tungsten lighting, then one in bright light, and then one in ceremony light. Say hey, guys, use these as rule of thumbs. And secondly, I upload my Lightroom presets. I upload, they give me the option of uploading one color preset, and one black and white preset. So already, we're off to a good start. Now, what Lightroom presets do I use, and what presets do I love? I use and love Replichrome. Replichrome presets are fantastic. They are by Totally Rad Actions, and you can find that at totallyradactions.com. I'm gonna give you all the details at the end. So I use Replichrome, and part of the reason why I decided to use Replichrome as opposed to other presets is because they've kind of mastered making digital photographs not look so digital. But they don't aspire to say, oh, we are the presets for film. I shoot digitally. I need to understand that my photos may not look like film, but can they possess similar qualities? Yes. And that is what I love stylistically. So I would, people ask what is my favorite preset? Kind of my go to is the Fuji 400H. That's my go to. I've made a few modifications, so one of the modifications is I lowered the contrast, and I lowered the grain. I lowered the grain, 'cause right now, they had initially had the grain set out at 30 something, and I, or something like that, and I lowered it down to 5% grain, 'cause I don't want too much grain in my photos. Now, let's go back. So once I've uploaded my presets, once I've uploaded how I want my photos to be edited by Photographer's Edit, this is what we're going to look at. So I place an order. So for instance, for Samantha and Taylor, I think, if my memory serves me right, they had about 80 images from their engagement session. I promised them 50 to 55, but because we had the Creative Live crew come along with them, I wanted to give them more, because I didn't want to feel like they were distinctly at a disadvantage if my attention was divided, 'cause I'm shooting them, right, and I'm turning to the camera, and I'm talking to the camera, and I'm talking to them, but I'm talking to the camera. As a division of my experience and my brand, I needed to give them more to assure them that we were on the same page and they weren't getting chintzed. So I uploaded about 80 images. Now you have two options. This is the web uploader, where you simply drag and drop your raw images to their server. They take your raw images, and then they edit them, and then they export them to JPEG, and then what you do, or you can also send a catalog. You can send your smart previews from Lightroom. They edit there, and then they send the catalog back to you, and then you apply those images to your images, and they apply the modifications to your images so you can export on your own and make modifications as you see fit. Cool. Now, Monday, after a wedding, well, let's go back. We're talking about engagement sessions. So I shot Samantha and Taylor's engagement session on a Monday. So I went home, and on Tuesday morning, the entire session for me was culled. I chose 80 images. I uploaded them, and on Thursday, I had my images waiting for me, which was fantastic. So I got an email that says Jasmine, your images are ready. So when I go, I simply click this button, and it says download, and they download to my documents folder, and then I get my chance to play. My chance to play is now I know the images look nice and great the way they are, but I'll make small, minor modifications. Before we get there, I want to show you a before and after for two photos. I didn't want to do them for so long because I wanted to keep my ego intact, be like, oh, my photos look great out of camera. Okay, so what we're gonna start, and I'm being totally facetious, so what you see on the left is straight out of camera, and what you see on the right is the modifications that they made. I'm a firm believer in trying to get the photo as close as possible to how I want it to look, and I would say the biggest difference is, is in skin tone. But everything else is pretty darn similar. And we do that by leveraging natural reflectors. We do that by finding really great reflective light in otherwise really harsh lighting. Second before and after. So this was the beginning of the shoot, and this was closer to the end of the shoot. What you see again is really strong similarities. There was a fog that had come in just off the coast, so it softened the light quite a bit, and the thing that I'm going to take into consideration the most is you see what they did with their skin tone. But everything else stays pretty true to form. But that is because how I request it. Some people want bright. Some people want punchy. Some people want contrasty. Some people want grainy. That's great. You upload your preferences, and that's how they will edit them. Now what I want to do, is I'm gonna move into showing you what a completed gallery looks like in my iView catalog, because remember, we started off with the raw, I showed you how I culled, now what I get from Photographer's Edit are the exported JPEGs, then I put them into a catalog so that I can see, maybe I want to reorder them, or I need to renumber them, and we're gonna look and see what that looks like right now. So what you're seeing now is a fully edited session. Down here it tells me how many images are in this. So what I ended up keeping for them was about 77 images from the shoot. What you're going to see is a mix of what we call location setters, so to, in order for me to tell a complete story, it is super helpful to arrive a few minutes early and take pictures of the environment so that when you start like a slideshow, or if you start like a blog post or something on Facebook, to set the tone of where you are, really, really, really does a lot for your storytelling narrative. So here I start my gallery with palm trees to indicate that we're in Los Angeles at the beach. We're near the beach. Now I'm just gonna kind of cruise through what you've seen. And then what I'm going to do is I don't want to go through the entire gallery this way, because I actually wanted to show you how my clients will actually view it. So I kind of want to give you an idea first, that this is what it looks like now that it's edited. You saw before and afters, gotta have a idea, you saw us shooting as we went through it. Now, a few things to point out, most of my gallery is color, because you can always take a color photograph and make it black and white, but in this situation, I was shooting a couple portraits of the bride, and so I felt pretty confident making a couple of those portraits black and white because she does have those color options. Now what we were talking about at this particula portion of the shoot was that it was so stinkin' windy. Now I have two options. I can be really upset and frustrated and just go like, this is not working for me. I can put her for the, so the wind is coming at her, but then I have this like untold, what is it, with the flying dog from the Never Ending Story. You know, it's like where her hair's behind her, which is never a good look for girls, so what I did is I decided to put the sun behind her, which is my preferred mode of shooting when it comes to really harsh light. Throw a natural reflectors in front of her, and then I said, let your hair go. Because I can try to fight it, and then have hair, and that doesn't look right, or it can just look a windy day, tousled at the beach. I chose the latter. So because of that, I gave her a few options when it came to color and black and white. So this will give you a pretty good idea. Now here's something I kind of want to point out when it comes to the gallery. We were at the beach in Los Angeles, and then we kind of, we started off up at a field, and we walked down some switchbacks, down the hill, down the mountain, well, we say mountain in LA, but anybody with mountains are like, no, no, no, that's silly. (audience laughs) So it was the quasi-mountain, and we got down to the beach, and they needed a place to change. And so there was this, kind of like, it looked like an abandoned type, maybe old school, an old, abandoned school or a monastery of some sort, and so we thought this would be a great place to change, and then I saw this location, and ugh, this is not reflective of my brand. But I was so caught up, and I'm like oh, it's a painting, and it's, we're in like a desolate area, and it's backlit, and I shot it. And in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, but like life always works, she's like, I love that photo. Did you know that our heads made a heart on the wall? (audience laughs) I can't wait. And I'm just like, ugh. (audience laughs) So it kind of goes to show what you, if you were questioning whether or not you want your clients to like make that her header on Facebook, maybe question whether or not you should be shooting there in the first place. Either way, I will still stand by the photo. She loves it. I think it's exposed well, and it's quirky, and it shows that they're at the beach. Fine. Did it make my blog? No. Did it make Facebook? No. Did it make the slideshow? Yes, because it was part of her story. We're gonna get to that in a second. Now, people ask, well, what kind of editing do you do after you get your photos from Photographer's Edit? I wanna show you just, I do very, very, very light editing. Now, I want to say that I do very light editing because I have worked so hard on the front end with Photographer's Edit to get it dialed in the way that I want it. The more work you put in to any digital online lab, the better you're gonna, the more happy you're gonna be with your results. Now let's take two photos, but another thing to note with this particular couple, there's very little retouching to do with them, but this is quintessentially what I would do. So here is a photograph of the bride and groom. What I would do very, very, very lightly, is I want to, and I do this only for photos that I think I'm going to use in heavy access, in heavy ability, frequency. I'm gonna use it a lot of frequency. Now I knew that because they're the Knot dream wedding, they were gonna need to, they would need a couple few solid shots. So I wanted to get on the front of it if she needed a couple few solid shots. She doesn't really have bags under her eyes, but because I knew that she's gonna be impressed a little bit more, I wanted to clean up to the best of her ability. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna enlarge my bride's face, and I'm going to duplicate this layer, and how I duplicate a layer is command J. Same layer of the photo. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the patch tool, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the patch tool and go over the part of her wrinkly eye. Now I usually do this with a mouse, so just bear with me a little tiny bit, although I should have plenty of experience editing on a track pad. Cool. So once I grab that area, I'm gonna drag it down to simply soften what it looks like. But that looks way too fake and way too Barbie. What I'm gonna do, is because I'm working on a duplicate layer, I'm going to go through and I'm going to make the changes that I want. And then, I am going to lower the opacity to kind of get it to way that I want it. So this is at 100% opacity of the duplicate layer. Now I'm just gonna peel it on back, 'cause I still want her to look like she has undereyes. I don't want it to look too, too, too forced. So I've just softened that, and if you notice here, there's small little lines in her forehead. I don't want to use, sometimes occasionally I will use a skin retouching tool in Photoshop, like an action, but you know, when bride's get their make-up done professionally, a great make-up artist can do really great things. So once I've softened that, what I want to do is I will shift command E, I will collapse those layers, and stuff that I know I want 100% removal, see this little tiny blemish on his neck? I don't want that to be in competition with her eye level. So I'm just gonna move that on over. I don't need to do that on a duplicate layer, because I know that I want that removed in its entirety. So I just remove anything that I think could potentially be distracting. And now what I'm gonna do is what I, the biggest catch-22 with shooting backlit is that if you have fly-a-way hairs, or on this particular day, it was so windy, that we'd get a lot of just, lot of action going on above her head. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna get the clone stamp, and I'm just going to enlarge it, and I will just simply select areas around it. Now I try not to go too close to her head, 'cause I don't want to make it look too, too, too artificial. And I might, depending on whether or not I can actually sell that little loop, if I can actually remove it in a way that I could sell it, or like that I'm convinced that it looks natural, then I will. So let's just give it a little go. In order to make my tools smaller, I use like the little bracket tools on the side. I mean, some of you guys are like nodding, but when I was learning Photoshop, I was like what? There are these shortcuts? Kind of just go around for these fly-a-ways. Great. So what we did was something really, really, really soft, really, really, really not noticeable. Those are the types of things that I'm doing. One last thing, in regards to environmental elements, what I did, and I left this one intentionally, because see down here in the lower portion of the left frame, you'll see what I'm kind of going around with my mouse, this area right here. They had these little spokes sticking out of the ground, and it's not a big deal, but I considered if this was a photo that they happened to use for press, or if the coordinator saw this, I need to show that, I need to show the coordinator since it would be, if I hadn't worked with her before, our first time working together, that she says that if I had left those in, she would think that I don't pay attention to details. So what I would do, and these are very simple, very simple fixes, I will simply get the patch tool, and I will circle the things I don't want in the frame, and I move it. And it was about four or five spokes. Was it annoying to remove? Yes. But, again, these are the small things that I do. Undereyes, fly-a-ways, and environmental removal. That's what I do when it comes to editing. So once we have edited the photos in Photoshop, and I've cleaned them up in a way that I like them, and I've prepped them for my blog, and I've prepped them for social media, the first form of action that I do is I blog the images. I will blog the images, and I will blog the images with a title that I want the photos to be searched for. Now traditionally, I'm entitling each blog post by the location, because the most popular searches for engagement and wedding photographers are by location. So if a bride is getting married at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, her highest form of search would be Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel wedding photographer. So if then that is her highest searchability factor as she's searching, that's how I want to be found. So likewise, if I shoot an engagement session in Santa Monica, all of my engagement sessions start off with location, engagement photos or engagement session, slash client's name. A lot of times I see photographers using the client's name first, but then you're eating up the Google searchability, 'cause you can only see the first, I don't know, like 30, 50 characters, so I wanna be very strategic with how I do it. Now I could have said Los Angeles engagement session, or Rancho Palos Verdes, or I could have even said Abalone Cove engagement session. That would've been the smartest thing for me to do, because if a bride was searching for Abalone engagement session photos, mine would come up, but I want to be a little bit more strategic with this one because I want, if people are doing for the Knot dream wedding searches, I want my stuff to come up. So I titled the post the Knot Dream Wedding Engagement Photos. So I'm trying to cover as many bases as possible. Then I write a personalized story about the client, and we get into the reasonings why we write personal stories in the marketing lesson. So I'm not gonna get too deep into that. But one thing I want to point out is that in addition to writing a personalized story, it makes the client feel special. It gives Google an opportunity to find more of you. So in between each photo, or for the majority of in between each photo, I want to make sure that I'm writing things that could be searchable: the location, the weather of the day, what she wore to her engagement session, 'cause it's a very common thing, like what to wear to an engagement session. And then somehow, hopefully, Google will say, will read it and say, she wore to her engagement blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I come up in those searches. So be strategic with how you're writing about these things. So once I have blogged this, once I have put this content out from my end, now I actually need to point people to it, and I point people to it, I point people to it in three ways, because some people like to interact with Twitter more than Facebook, and some people like to interact with Facebook more than anything else, and other people like to interact with Instagram. So here is how I did it. The morning that I blogged this post, I have my posts go live around 6:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, and I let them sit there for a while. And then around 8:00, 8:30, I will then do what I call my push Tweets, my push status updates. So around 8:00, 8:30, on Twitter, I will update Twitter, and then I will update Facebook with a push Tweet, or a push update. I'm gonna get to that in a second. So I am finding ways to maximize my reach with every thing that I do. So here is the Tweet that went out the day that I blogged their engagement session: "Smitten with @theknot #DreamWedding couple. "their engagement photos are here." Linked my blog, and a link, I mentioned the coordinator, I mentioned the knot, and I used the hashtag. Now, the hashtag on Twitter is going to be, work really well, especially the closer we get to the wedding, so if people decide to go through and search for that hashtag, I wanna be a part of it early on, which is why I was this strategic decision. Secondly, we're now gonna go into Instagram. This is how I Instagram the photo. Now do you guys see the photo that I chose to use as my push photos? It was the one that I actually went through and did a little bit of extra. Do you have a question? You obviously didn't take that picture with your cell phone, so how do you get a beautiful, PC edited photo on Instagram? Okay; this is a good question. So when we talked about marketing, we divided it up as I will use my cell phone at the shoot, and I will indicate that it was cell phone shot by #iPhone, but what I do is I simply email myself the photo to my phone, and I download it to my phone, and I upload to Instagram from there. That is a great question. I get that asked all the time, and I can't believe that I didn't address it myself. That was great; that was great, thank you. So yes, this is an edited photo. Okay; now, what I want you to notice is today I blogged @theknot, #dreamwedding, engagement session for my bride and Taylor. Love these two, can't wait for this one @detailsjeannie, who is the coordinator. Then I also hashtag the Knot dream wedding. Because I was able to hashtag both hashtags in Instagram because I wasn't limited to the 140 characters. Now, I want you to notice that I tagged the knot, because I want them to see if by any chance they could, you know, repurpose the photo to 500,000 followers, I'd be all for it. I tagged the coordinator, because if she can repurpose it to her following, that would be awesome. I also tagged Samantha, the client, because what I noticed is Samantha does not have Twitter, or maybe I didn't find her on Twitter, but I don't, I also see that when I actually did find her on Twitter after I put this presentation together, she doesn't really use Twitter. So I'm only going to, and on Twitter you have 140 characters; I'm not going to sacrifice a chunk of the characters to go to somebody who doesn't really use the platform. But I know she uses Instagram, so I'm going to tag her on Instagram. And I am using both these hashtags, because if you follow these hashtags, you can go back to see who last year's dream wedding photographer was. You get to see images from that Knot dream wedding. So I want to start plugging in to that hashtag. I want to be found by the way of that hashtag, 'cause I know a lot, a lot of perspective brides are going to be watching the wedding live. I will be doing iPhone photos the day of. I will be doing a sneak peek the next day. I'll be doing multiple sneak peeks so that my photos end up at the top of that hashtag search. Now, oh, one thing I want to point out, that this girl said, I watched this pose on Periscope. The wind wasn't even a factor. Happy face. That's amazing, because I did broadcast from Periscope, and I said, hey, we're here at the Notting Age recession, and there was so much wind that people were just like, we can't even hear what you're saying. Like it sounds like you're in a wind tunnel. But his sweetheart of a girl watched the whole thing happen, and then she commented that the wind wasn't even a factor, which is great, because if my client happens to read that, there's not gonna be a shadow of doubt in her mind that I didn't deliver on the thing that I should have, and that matters to me. We also covered this previously, so I'm not gonna get too deep into it, but this is what it looks like on Facebook. This is what the push on Facebook looks like. I linked both to the knot, and to details, details, the coordinator, but I did not use any hashtags on Facebook, because hashtags on Facebook just don't work. They're just not that great. It's not native to the platform, so I won't use it. Now I also tagged my clients, and I tagged them in the photos. Now I tagged my clients because I only update my folders of images on my Facebook business page, not on my personal page. And I do this intentionally, because if their friends happens to like their photos and they want to see the originator of those photos, I do not want them coming to my personal page. I only want them going to my business page. I want them to see a professional version of me on Facebook to the best of my ability, which is why I am only leveraging my Facebook business page when I post images. So now, it's time for a commercial break, and I mean this in its most literal sense, because one thing I find extraordinarily powerful is a client experiencing their images by way of a slideshow. Now this is so amazing if you are not doing it yourself, and if you are not doing these for your clients, I'm telling you, you are missing on such a huge opportunity, because there is something different about seeing your images set to music. Does it sound silly? Maybe, but there's a cinematic quality that totally changes the dynamic. So at this point, my clients have seen the blog post, and at this point they've seen themselves on my social media avenues, and a couple hours on that same day, after I received a call from Samantha, and she was crying, and she was like, I can't believe these are my photos. Did you see our heads, and they were a heart? (audience laughs) I'm just like, it does make me happy. I was like, if you like those photos, like, just wait. More are coming. And she didn't respond to me when I put that out on social media. I mean, she was happy. She left comments, I'm so happy. But she picked up the phone and she called me, 'cause she was like, the music, the photos, all of it. A brand is an experience, and what she experienced was powerful, and then they want to share that experience with their friends and family, right? So they're gonna get a link to the slideshow, and they're gonna send it to their friends and family, but they're not gonna send a link, just like empty link. What are they gonna say? Maybe, I'm guessing, our engagement session photos. I'm so happy. I love them. We had a great time. They're pre-qualifying me. They're saying to their friends and family, watch this commercial, because I'm starring in it. Right? We might not watch a Ford commercial, but if your best friend's like, I got booked for the Ford commercial, all of a sudden you're like, I gotta watch Ford. (audience laughs) In like manner, we want our clients to watch our slideshows, because it's important for us to understand that we are photographers, and we're our directors, but we're also curators. Any good artist can tell you that he or she shines when they have a good curator. Well guess what? We are our curators. We put together our story for our clients. So what I want to do is I want to share the slideshow that I made for Samantha and Taylor. Now this slideshow is different than the other slideshows that I have shown throughout the course when I'm talking about shooting with intention, how to shoot in bright light. This is actually how my clients experience it as they view it on the web, and we're gonna go there now. So the slideshow program that I use is called Soundslides, S-O-U-N-D-S-L-I-D-E-S, .com. Now the best part about Soundslides is that it is a one-time fee, a one-time purchasing fee, and then you host the slideshows on your server. Now, about a year ago, I was looking for the right type of software to use, and I downloaded and tried about five or six. I bought some, I demoed some, and I will say that I kept on coming back to this one. And it's not the most glamorous. And it's not the shiniest. And it's not the most bing, bang, blow your socks off. But it is 100% viewable on multiple devices. By picking the right shell, once you download it you can see, it's called a shell. I picked the iOS shell, because I know that I am sending my clients their slideshow when they're on their honeymoon, and how many times are people walking around without a flash-based compatible thing? So in light of that, I choose this, and I think it works really well. So we're gonna take a step back, and we're going to watch how it works. (upbeat joyful music) ♪ Keeping to ourselves with guards raised high ♪ ♪ Missing the best while we fly by night ♪ ♪ And the magnitude of everything you ever said ♪ ♪ Kept us well and fed ♪ ♪ And the burden of our courage was amongst the dead ♪ ♪ Buried in our bread ♪ ♪ Starving, we're so starving for the kind we need ♪ ♪ Spooning out depressions we can barely feed ♪ ♪ And the magnitude of everything you ever said ♪ ♪ Kept us well and fed ♪ ♪ And the burden of our courage was amongst the dead ♪ ♪ Buried in our bread ♪ Cool. I heard you say it's a little disconcerting watching a slideshow, you know, with a room full of peers, being like, hmm. (audience laughs) I will say that as photographers, we view slideshows with a much different critical analytical eye. So the thing that I want to encourage you to do is when you put your slideshows together, do not think about your peers. Do not think about the curatorial nature that how somebody else might appear to seem and see it. I want you to think, how will it make your client feel, and that trumps everything. And I know that I made good decision in that regard, because my clients were happy. One thing I want to point out before we move out of this screen is I add at the end of the slideshow, I add a logo, at the end, because I still want it to be, remain as a reflection of my brand. And also, see down here at this little credits tab? It brings up that the photos are by me, and the music is by Brooke Wagoner. I want give photo credit, and I also wanna give music credit. It's very important for me to do that, and I get my music from the musicbed.com. And so I don't have to list musicbed.com. I have to list the artist so that my clients know who the originator was, and I thank Brooke, I don't know her personally, but I thank her for making my work look and feel stronger as a result. So now what we're gonna get into is we're going to look at what it's going to look like once the client has experienced the emotionality of social media, and I think her slideshow, and then, but wait, there's more. A gallery is coming, and that's what we're gonna get into right now. Now I have been using Pixieset for about two years, and I love it. I wanna sing from the mountaintops, and I'm seeing that people, and here's the thing about Pixiset. It's like a clique without being a clique, right? It's like, so the people who use it and love it, I'm watching you guys like in the studio audience, and you're like, yeah, to get pom-poms, Pixieset, go, go, go, because it's that great. It's easy, it's intuitive, my clients love it. I've had never an issue. But for those of you who are not familiar with Pixieset, one thing I want to talk about is you will now have lots of options to host your digital galleries. A few years ago, there was not very many options, and then as the years have progressed, more and more options have come about, which is great, but the minute I found Pixieset, I knew I was sold, and here's why. I can sell my prints directly through the gallery. So I get to choose my lab to provide those prints, so I work and love and use and swear by White House Custom Color. And I've chosen them because their customer service is so legit. They take care of my clients like those clients are their own. Any time I have a question, any time of day, any time, sometimes they will pause an order to say, hey Jasmine, did you know that you're cropping off a tiny bit of the side. And I'm like, somebody is looking at a print so carefully that they notice 1/100th of an inch might be cropped off, so are you okay with this. That, to me, says thank you for caring about my photos the way that I do. Now I work, my images go to Pixieset, and then my clients, when they order their prints, they are delivered and produced by White House Custom Color. And I tell my clients this. We're gonna get into that in a second. I get to set the prices of my prints and products through Pixieset. Other online galleries will tell you the price that you should charge, and in addition to telling you the prices that you should charge, they will take a commission off that sale. Now Pixieset, you get to set your prices, and they don't take a commission. So what you're paying for is a monthly fee for them to host your galleries. One thing that I want to do, oh, I love it. My clients will choose their favorites, and every time a guest logs in to their gallery, I get a notification that a new list of favorites was collected, or made. I get a notification when a print order is made. I get a notification every time photos are downloaded. I'm getting constant notifications of what is going on with my images and how I'm able to use them. Now lastly, the thing that I love the most is that my clients can now download their images anywhere, to their computer, to their laptop, to their iPad; it's phenomenal. So this is what an empty gallery looks like. This is my back end for Pixieset Now I will label my new folder as the engagement folder, and then I'll simply drag and drop the images to the screen. Then this is what results. This is the back end. You have now seen what the gallery looks like from an iView catalog, but already it's looking better here, but just wait, it's gonna get even better. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what the Pixieset gallery looks like online, so what is the client experience? Now you know what the back end experience looks like. We're gonna get into online what it looks like right now. So what you're seeing now is the gallery of images. This is what Samantha and Taylor got once I sent them their link. Now the beauty about this is that it's password protected, so if you are watching and you have purchased the course for Creative Live, you will get access to this gallery and every other gallery that we have shot. But I'm going to type in their password. Cool. So now this is what happens. This is what my clients will see as they come in. I'm going to click on open. It's going to scroll up. And now what they have is very similar to Pinterest-style gallery. Now the beauty about this gallery is that it's smart sizing, so here we go. So it automatically sizes for any sort of device that you're working on, which is super helpful and intuitive for my clients. One thing I want to point out is that if the client decided to get this image, because this gallery is for students, one of the things I have taken off for this gallery is the download capabilities, but my clients have the ability to download and share directly from the gallery. So that it is what it looks like, and this is how my clients experience their images, and then I tell them to please order their prints. Yes, they can download their images, but I price my prints competitive enough, just a bit over what you can get like at Costco or Wal-Mart, because there was a day where photographers could charge like $8 or $10 or $ for a 4x6, but those days, I think primarily, are gone unless you are doing so much work to the images. There's a lot of Photoshop, and a lot of your time in it, you can justify that. But just like your average processed image, it has to be a lot more competitive priced if you want to make money on print on the back end, which is what I want to do. So now that you've seen what the gallery looks like on the front, and I'm going to show you what my updates look. This is a panel of all my activity updates. Here you will see when Samantha and Taylor has been downloaded, new favorites created for Samantha and Taylor, another client has downloaded, new favorites, and all of this will come down, and also shows me what my print orders are and how much each print order is. I love it. I love it, I love it. I also think it's important because I want to know who is downloading. Based on my experience and based on like empirical data from people what have followed this type of thing, the number one orderer of prints is the bride. Second highest orderer, anybody? (audience members speak) Mom of who? Groom; mom of groom. Yes, all of the sudden, when I started noticing that, I was like, family photos for the groom. More family photos for the groom. (audience laughs) But it happens because you now get to see what is tracking, what are the photos that are being bought. So it's important to run it as a creative, right? We want our pictures to look pretty, but it's also important to get those photos that we think are just ah, but they sell, back end stuff. Now what we do is we release the gallery to the clients. Now you've seen what it looks like on the front end, on the back end, now it's time to share it. Now I send a template that outlines everything the client should expect, so they will get the link, they will get the password, then I teach them how to download, how easy it is. Then I teach them how to create favorites. Then I talk to them about printing their images, because I tell them I have to educate them how important it is to use a professional print lab, and I say, I use one of the nation's premiere print labs, and I stand by the quality that you get. And then I explain the difference in paper, the difference in ink, the type of machines, and the time that I have spent color correcting the photos, that my lab I know I will stand by. All of a sudden when I started educating, my print sales went up, because they knew what they were buying. And I also talk about sharing their images. Within the gallery there are sharing capabilities. I want my clients to share their images. It is marketing, marketing, marketing. So a couple days later, I follow up with a template email, and I say, like I'm so happy that you like, by this time they've usually said thank you so much for the gallery. Couple of days later, I will say I'm so happy that you like the images from the gallery. Now if you wouldn't mind telling me what your favorite photo was, because this really teaches myself and JD how to approach your wedding day. Stylistically, what do you want? What do you like? Well that's kind of like a loaded question, and so she'll come back and she'll say, well we really like this reason because, and she tries to get all technical. All I'm really asking for is because I want to know her favorite photo because I want to send her a surprise. So I've included this in the cost of my collection, but remember we're talking about under promising and over delivering. In her collection menu, it does not say that I'm going to send her a canvas. It does not say that I'm going to send her a surprise. But what I do is I order my canvas, I order my stand out prints. I order anything about a 24x36, so a big statement piece from White House, and once I order from White House, they dropship it to my client, and it is another opportunity for what? One single word. (audience responds) Thank you. He's hhmm, yes marketing. It is another opportunity for marketing. So much so, here is an example. Now I haven't, I emailed Samantha and Taylor before I left, you know, you guys are actually watching all of this unfold. They got their gallery a few days ago. Like you are watching this literally in real time. So I emailed them. I said let me know what your favorite image is. He's like, we're gonna get back to you, blah, blah, blah. I left to Seattle. So I want to show you an example of what a client did in the past. She updated her Instagram and Facebook, taking a picture of the print. This is an example. This is her reaction. We are the luckiest couple on earth. Who arrives home to a surprise package, only to find a canvas print of her favorite engagement shoot photograph? @jasminestar, you're too much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And then @ to her wedding coordinator, thank you for connecting us. How did we get so lucky? Spoiled. Jasmine Star, thank you. Engagement photos, love, 253 days, amazing surprise, can't wait to hang it up, excited. And then she tagged her fiance. So what does this mean for us? That between her social media following on Instagram, on Facebook, the two platforms she used, which is what most my clients are using, and her tagging her fiance, I had the potential of reaching 2800 people. So what did this endorsement cost me? The cost of the stand out print. I had a marketing campaign that could potentially reach 2800 people for $114 plus shipping and tax. That is powerful. Now we've gone over this section by five minutes. Is there just a burning question. Okay, we'll go one, two, and I know the producers are just like, but this is, you know. We're gonna deal with grace. Thanks guys. Two questions and that's it. Does Pixieset archive, or what do you do with the photos? How do you? Fantastic; that was so great. Thank you. Why am I singing? It's the end of day. (laughter) It's the end of day, and I see bubbly in my future. Yes, that is like a source of back up for me. The minute I, so I pay for the amount of storage that I use. If I need to update my storage, very similar to Dropbox, except for Dropbox has like an ugly outer interface that anybody can use. Pixieset, the galleries are marketed as my own. There's not a Pixieset symbol anywhere on that. So I leave my client images, and I'm contracted. I will have their images backed up for a full year. But I leave them online, because it's a backup for me, and that's why my clients are paying for me for. If I take them offline, I will give them six months advance notice. Please backup, please do this. I am no longer responsible. But I haven't got there yet. Question, yes. What resolution do you use when you upload to Pixieset, so in terms of pictures for print, 'cause I know there's a storage limit for Pixieset, right? Yes, there is, but if you pay it, so I pay like for the premium account, 'cause I just know how much I'm shooting, and I want my clients to have the high res images. So I'm 12x16 at 240 dpi. And so yes, it does take a while to upload them, and yes it does the time for my clients to download them, but I tell my clients, download at night, use a strong connection, and understand that you're downloading really big pictures so that you can print them however you want. Now all of a sudden, they're educated, and they feel better about that. You guys, I'm talking a bunch. Thank you guys, thank you, thank you, thank you. (audience applause)