Thanks for stopping by!

I look for interesting details of the wedding market and report on them here. I have traveled the country this year speaking with many photographers about everything from workflow to marketing... Everyone I met was willing to participate in a meaningful way to the discussion of market trends. That showed me that you are all very passionate about the business of wedding photography! I will continue to report on trends here as I see them come up in the industry. Please bookmark my blog, pass it around to friends and of course comment on what you find here! Thanks for visiting my blog, I appreciate your time! Putting together a new blog over at http://jbrides.wordpress.com/ so will be slowly transitioning to that!

Friday, March 30, 2007

Vegas 2007

Here is a great video put together by Ron Dawson...great work Ron!



This is the newest Simple Photo Minute!

WPPI -- One Long Week

WPPI in Vegas was one long week of success! liveBooks had a terrific showing at our booth and our speakers were top class...thanks to you all! I should have some pretty cool video in the near future. On Tuesday we had a film crew in and got some great footage that we will be putting together over the next week. I didn't even have time to pull my camera out but will showcase some other photographers photos below as I can find them.


This is a fun picture of Em and I at a party...taken by the Infamous Mark Adams who is below:
Is this guy cool or what...his LaCour crew is amazing and was so much fun to hang with them in Vegas! Hope we can do it again soon...



In this case I hope what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas as I would like to everyone to continue talking about liveBooks!





Found this on Tim Halberg's blog...funny stuff!

Friday, March 23, 2007

WPPI -- Vegas Baby!




Will be in Vegas this weekend and for the next week for WPPI. This is the premier tradeshow for wedding and portrait photographers and an absolute must for anyone involved in the industry! I have spent the last couple years there working for Pictage and this year I am very excited to have liveBooks making it's wedding debut there! The liveBooks team is just top notch and full of class, so I am looking forward to see what our draw is there. If you are going please stop by the booth #701.

If you need a tradeshow pass...there is a free one in a previous post!

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Me Ra Koh releases DVD Set


Me Ra is having a pre-order special on this new DVD set.
For the last nine days of March, we are doing a Pre-Order special! We’ll be giving 10% off to those that pre order! Order DVD 1 or 2 for $29.99 each or BOTH for an even better deal of $49.99! And for those who order their DVD’s before 5pm tonight, we’re offering FREE SHIPPING! **Click here** to order! (I seriously can’t believe I’m saying this b/c we’ve been working on this project for so long! :)

Me Ra and Brian are such good people and I recently was at their home in Seattle, they have a beautiful family. Looking forward to seeing both of you in Vegas!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Interesting use of the lightsphere!

Found this video on KillTheFill.com, which is Zack Arias's blog. I have not met Zack, but understand from some mutual friends the Nudds that he has some great insights to share.

Looking forward to seeing what Zack's modification pulls off...



Friday, March 16, 2007

7/7/7 Wedding Date

Found this article on US couples make beeline for 777 wedding date!

ARTICLE

Gotan Project Inspiration





Gotan Project - Diferente


Just a cool video to inspire!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Power of Balance





"This week's show is a tough one for me. It's tough because I see the wisdom in it and how much room for growth I have in the category of balance. As I think about it, I'm not sure "balance" is the best word for what we're going after but I think you guys get it. We could have easily called this one the "Power of Refining Personal Priorities", but that would have sounded silly. Check out the fourth episode of The Power of the Few series and stay tuned for our final installment next week."

Dane Sanders of SimplePhoto.tv, SimplePhotolife.com and danesanders.com


I personally am taking the idea of balance to heart and will be working on that in my life. I to often find myself working late into the evening and need to take some time off to concentrate on what's important to me. We all can probably look at what we are doing in our daily routines and find places to balance...

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Hijack! Blogging Tips to Increase Traffic

Blogging Tips to Increase Traffic Hijack'd from the Great Me Ra Koh's Blog

Do you have a blog and wonder how you can increase your blog’s traffic? The other night we had the privilege of having Steve Makofsky come and speak to our PUG group on blogging. His website, www.furrygoat.com, gets 100,000 hits per week. Amazing!

Here’s a video with some of the highlights from the night. With four blogging tips, the rest are below!





A few other tips from Steve that have helped us!

#5 Make Categories! This way people can easily find a recent post or have their interest perked at going through your archives. This advice has totally paid off since I know a number of you check the “Photography Tips for Moms” category to find exercises and tips to try. Some of our blog visitors are brides and want to go straight to our Wedding Slideshows, or they want to know the latest on Fabulous weddings. All they have to do is click the VH1 category. Big time saver for your visitors!

#6 Good Titles! Google and other search engines specifically use the titles of our posts. So make sure you title your posts with key words to help those search engines find you.

#7 Link, Link, Link! I know it was said in the video, but it’s such a big deal for your Google rankings. Link to others and have them link to you. Hyperlink words within your blog. All these things get you higher on the totem pole when someone does a search.

#8 Do ads work? From Steve’s experience they don’t do much. He has ads on his archived posts only, and with the amount of traffic he gets, he still only gets a couple hundred a month from his ads. Definitely not something to quit your day job for. :)

These are great tips to take to heart and put into practice...word of mouth advertising is the way to go in the Internet Age! Increasing your website views by blogging only takes a few moments a day.

Thanks for putting this together Me Ra!

Stay tuned for a Photo Blog Party, more details coming soon!

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Canon Mark III

This video is making it's way around the internet and thought it was pretty cool:




This sounds like fun!
That's Chuck Westfall of Canon who was holding the camera.

Monday, March 12, 2007

WPPI Platform Speaker : Gene Higa

This is the promo video that Cinematic Studios put together for our photography buddy Gene Higa. He's going to be a platform speaker at WPPI 3/27 and he wanted a killer video to introduce his presentation. Gene will also be speaking at the liveBooks booth: Mon 3/26 3:15 - 3:30pm and Tues 3/27 12:30 - 1:00pm, so please stop by and check out his presentation on Destination Weddings: Going live(Books) From Anywhere in the World!




Lightroom 1.0

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Have been playing with Lightroom over the past couple days and have been quite impressed. You can download a 30 day trial to check it out: HERE.

There are some really good videos posted on Simplephoto.tv on how to use some features and functionality by Matt Antonio:

Lightroom Introduction

Viewing Options in Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom 1.0 Library

Lightroom 1.0 Develop

Matt has a few more and I am sure will be making even more soon, so search Lightroom on sp.tv to see more!

Sunday, March 11, 2007

March Madness!

March Madness is one of my favorite times of the year... Not only is there non-stop basketball action, but spring is almost here! Cheering on my Hoosiers this year, but have Ohio State taking the title...Oden is a man among boys out there on the court!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Hijack! -- LaCour

Friday, March 09, 2007

Photo Studio Time Lapse


Last weekend, Erin and I photographed the wedding of our good friends, Jen Sens and Eric Larson. Eric and Jen photographed our wedding in August. Check our their wedding photography website.

There were about 50 pro photographers at their wedding - which is always a challenge to shoot, because you feel like everyone is watching what you're doing to see if you're getting the best shot/angle. But it was fun to have so many talented photographers there. The coverage of their wedding should be nothing short of spectacular!

I wanted to share an awesome movie clip that Eric put together and emailed everyone. You HAVE TO SEE THIS! It's hilarious. Cy Cyr set up a photo studio with a remote trigger for the guests to shoot pictures of themselves. As you can imagine, we didn't have to shoot very many group pictures ourselves, we just sent them to the photo studio! The resulting movie clip is a time lapse of all the pictures taken at the photo studio. 1300 images at 10 frames per second.

**Click Here to watch the clip!-Mark
posted by Mark Adams | LaCour at 3:01 PM 2 comments

The Whaletail

Gary has just released the Whatetail! He continues to bring revolutionary products to our industry and I am looking forward to seeing it in person at WPPI!

Click on the "Play" button for the unveiling!!!


Visit GARY'S SITE

tags technorati :

Friday, March 09, 2007

liveBooks at PPE

We are going to make a video similar to this for WPPI and working out some of the ideas now. If you have any feel free to email me: j@livebooks.com !

Foundation 5 Website

Recent workshop site for Foundation 5 in Texas:

There are some really talented photographers who mentor this workshop and the participants have really come through...check out the site.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

DWF's Honest Answers

Here is one of the better questions asked in the FAQ:

16. So many wedding photographers say "we do photojournalism." I don't get it! Are they all photojournalists?

Are we all photojournalists? Would we make it at USA Today or the NY Times?

Or is photojournalism just the catch all phrase right now...I hear a lot of people calling themselves photojournalists---really, what was your training?

There are some true photojournalists in our midst though...see if you can find them!


Monday, March 05, 2007

Sunday, March 04, 2007

WPPI Vegas 2007

Thinking about going to WPPI? Well now the tradeshow is on liveBooks!
Click on the Tradeshow pass below and bring it to Vegas!

Canon Mark III

While on tour I had many questions about the new camera that Canon was going to come out with, so I thought I would post some information here. Canon's site here. There is also some terrific information on Rob Galbraith's site, really in depth!

Not sure I will be running out to get one...really like my 5D, but will certainly check it out at WPPI!

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Hijack! Adobe goes Web 2.0

News

Scoop: Adobe to offer Web-based Photoshop

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, in conversation with CNET News.com Senior Writer Martin LaMonica, dropped a bombshell this morning: Adobe will release a Web-based version of Photoshop within six months. See the News.com story, Adobe to take Photoshop online, for details.

There are other online photo editors already (see our coverage of Fauxto, Picnik, Pixoh, Pxn8 , and XMG), but an online version of Photoshop is sure to capture a lot of users due to name recognition alone. We hope the online product lives up to the standards that the traditional version has set. The service will likely be free, and have ads in it.

Photoshop online will not be a direct copy of Photoshop. Even though Adobe's Flex technology allows developers to deliver graphically rich applications over the Web, there is still much one cannot do over a broadband connection. The online product is more likely to be a consumer-friendly, de-featured editor, perhaps even less capable than Photoshop Elements, Adobe's editor for consumers.

It will be interesting to see how Adobe begins to blend online and offline image editing. Chizen spoke of "hybrid" applications that are part traditional software and part Web-based. He expects that Photoshop online will eventually compete with a hybrid version of Picasa, Google's photo editor and organizer.

Adobe recently released an online video editor, Remix, via partner Photobucket.

Category: Content & Publishing, Digital Photography, Web Design Tools Tags: Adobe, Photoshop, photo editing, Picasa