I’ve had email inquiries like the one I received yesterday, and usually I can spot them right away. Bad grammar, too many capitalized words, and usually there’s some religious reference in them (signed “God be with you”, or some such…). It’s the basic ‘Nigerian Letter’ scheme.

The email I got yesterday, from a Reverend Peterson Brent pbrent831@yahoo.com (or Brent Peterson…it seemed to have changed as we corresponded), was a little suspicious at first glance. But it wasn’t over the top, so I needed to proceed cautiously. He mentioned his daughter’s wedding in San Diego, and was willing to pay mileage. He even listed the event hall he claimed to have rented for the occasion. The venue was a real one, but a slightly odd choice for a wedding. So I gave him some basic rate info.

He got back to me quickly, said he was doing missionary work in the UK (no doubt converting all those pagan English), and wanted to hire me. And – wait for it – he wanted to send me a cashiers check.

A quick search of his email address on Google showed a history of attempted scams with music equipment.

So how would the scam had worked? He would have gotten my address and hooked me a little more with some details. Then he would claim he had to send me a cashiers check for an amount considerably over the total, and would I mind making change for him by sending back the difference. There would be some good excuse for why he could only send a cashier’s check in a larger amount. The cashier’s check would turn out to be bogus, but in the mean time I would have sent him real money as his “change”. This scam is played out with many variations, but it is essentially the same.

So here are some tips so you don’t get scammed:

1. First off, as a photographer you should never give someone “change” or refund an over-payment of a cashier’s check or money order.

2. Never assume that a cashier’s check is legitimate. It might even clear your bank briefly, appearing to be real. But as it winds through the banking pipeline, the fraud will become apparent, and your bank will debit the money from your account. This is especially true with overseas cashiers checks, as they don’t clear the bank nearly as quickly as do domestic ones. Either wait a good three or four weeks before acting on funds you receive this way from overseas, or simply refuse to take them. You can always accept funds via wire transfer or PayPal instead.

3. If you’re unsure, ask questions. Find out the event venue and date, and also the contact person’s name and number at the venue. If it’s a scam, your ‘client’ probably won’t have that information. Then call the venue to make sure that person has booked the date. I had considered calling the venue that Rev. Brent had claimed, but after his second email I didn’t feel there was any need.

4. If the prospective client seems to have a lack of knowledge about your work, or a lack of concern about finding out more about your services, then you should be concerned. Let’s face it, just about every legitimate client has done a lot of research before contacting you. Anyone who seems unconcerned probably has another agenda.

5. Some other things that should raise a red flag, but are not signs of fraud in themselves: bad grammar or unusual wording, excessive capitalization of words, or an international element to the process.

That said, you have to remain professional. Just because someone uses bad grammar or emails you from another country, that does not mean that person is pulling a scam. You don’t want to lose a client by overreacting. But you do want to proceed with eyes wide open.

I haven’t hear back from the Reverend, after I told him I could only accept cashiers checks drawn on a US bank, for the exact amount. And I don’t expect to hear from him!

Yes, I shoot film. Not digital…film.

I used digital cameras for my portrait and wedding photography for a long time, so it’s not like I’m a luddite who never moved past the 1990s. About a year ago I realized that I wasn’t getting the same thrill from my digital images as I was from the film images I shot for personal projects. So I made the leap and switched – which was a little scary at first. Now I shoot film for all my ‘people’ images, i.e. weddings and portraits. I will still occasionally shoot digital for commercial clients if required, but that’s rare.

So what’s the big deal? As a bride or groom and prospective client, what does it matter?

While there are many little reasons that I personally like working with film instead of digital, there are three reasons that directly effect my wedding and portrait clients. And no matter what anyone tells you, a digital camera just can’t match film for certain things.

1. Dynamic range. Or to put it more simply, higher highs and lower lows. A digital camera’s sensor can only handle a certain range of light. While the camera’s light meter will adjust the exposure so that the overall image is basically correct, the sensor can’t handle parts of the image that are ‘out of bounds’. There will parts of many scenes that are either too dark, or too light, for the sensor to handle.

Meanwhile film has an amazingly large dynamic range, when compared to digital. Skies that would be completely blank white on a digital camera, will retain some detail of the clouds on film. Shiny highlights on people’s skin will turn into a circle of pure white with a digital camera, but will maintain a smoothness with film.

Should you care? Well let me ask you: is any part of your wedding, reception, or getting to/from the ceremony done outside? Will you also be wearing white? Then yes it matters very much! You probably spent a lot of money on your wedding dress, and you’d like to have images that show the beauty and the detail. But your wedding dress is one of the most challenging things to shoot and expose for properly, with a digital camera. With film…it’s no big deal.

Look at the image above. If that had been shot with a digital camera, the overall scene would have looked similar. But the places where the sun is hitting the dress and veil would lose all detail, and just be a sheet of pure white. And if the photographer had underexposed to keep the dress’s detail, the groom’s tux would have lost all detail. It’s likely there would be a happy medium where this image could have been captured digitally, but it might have taken a number of adjustments and shots. As a wedding photographer, I simply don’t have time to risk missing a shot. Film doesn’t require me to fiddle with the exposure settings as much. So I catch more wonderful moments like this.

2. Skin Tones. Skin tones with modern films look absolutely stunning. Kodak has come out with three new film formulations in the past couple of years, based on their movie film technology (most big-budget films are still shot on…film! Go figure.). In conjunction with my professional photo lab, the results are perfect, right from the start. I don’t have to fiddle for days with the skin tones, like I would with a digitally-captured wedding.

3. Film just has that ‘film look’. Digital images are very precise and clean. Which, when capturing people, can come across as harsh and severe. It’s probably the combination of the dynamic range, mentioned above, and the ‘grain’ that gives a softer look. Film looks ‘creamy’ compared to digital images. Yes there are Photoshop effects that can simulate the ‘film look’, but it’s not quite the same. Not to mention, it saves me a lot of time to just shoot on film in the first place.

Digital photography has its benefits, don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful as a delivery method. It’s very convenient to keep images on a hard drive, send them to friends, use them to make albums etc. But as a capture method, film is ideal for wedding photography.

And I make use of both technologies, to get the best of both worlds. I have a professional lab (Richard Photo Lab) process and scan all my film, and then they deliver the images to me as digital files. I can then treat them like I would any other digital image: I can retouch them, I can design albums with them, make prints from them, the whole nine yards! But the initial benefits of capturing the images with film are maintained.

And I’m not the only one shooting on film, of course. Some of the most amazing photographers in the world shoot exclusively or primarily on film: Jose Villa, Lisa Lefkowitz, Jen Huang, and Jonathan Canlas are just a few who come to mind. Sure, it requires skill to shoot weddings or portraits with film, so not every photographer can handle it. But a film shooter is definitely worth seeking out.

These two brothers in Los Angeles are probably unaware that they caused a massive sea change in my photographic work. The Brothers Wright, with their wedding photo blog Twin Lens Life, got me shooting film again. When I first started shooting professionally (about six years ago?), I used a mix of digital and film cameras for my client work. This had everything to do with the fact that, prior to ‘turning pro’, my all-consuming photographic hobby was centered almost entirely on film-based cameras. And since at the time I only had the one digital camera, a film camera was a must, as “back up”.

But as I got all fancy and stuff, I dropped the film use for clients, and was about 100% digital. I still shot film for personal work, family snapshots, the odd ‘arty’ moment etc. I found however that the film images moved me way more than the digital ones ever did. So I started playing around with adding film back into the mix, specifically in my fashion work.

Then I stumbled on their blog about a year ago. And I realized that film was something worth sharing with my clients. Sure there’s a higher hassle factor, but now that I’ve been shooting (almost) exclusively film for awhile, I can say: it’s worth it.

Oh but this post wasn’t about me, was it? Back to the Wright Brothers. It wasn’t just that they were shooting film. It was the WAY their images looked. Completely 180° to what I was doing, but with a feel that I want to evoke with my images as well. They’re darn good shooters, and they have a whimsical sense of humor. And it helps that they seem to have my same love of vintage and oddball equipment. If I were getting married again, I’d save my pennies and hire these guys. Assuming I wasn’t available to shoot my own wedding, of course.

Oh and you’ll notice all the photographers I list here shoot primarily or exclusively on film. Coincidence? NOT!

Lisa Lefkowitz, one of the current ‘rock stars’ of wedding photography, is based out of San Francisco. Her style is a little more feminine, and perhaps a tad more serious. But very light and happy, if you know what I mean. I see she has some digital cameras listed in her virtual camera bag, but I believe she primarily shoots on her Contaxt 645, burning through medium format film like it was on sale at Walmart (which it most certainly ain’t).

Jose Villa is another wedding photographer inhabiting the stratosphere of wedding photography. He’s just down the street from me, relatively speaking, in Santa Barbara (I’m in Ventura). He’s an avid Contax 645 shooter as well. He has in incredible sense of color. If you scroll through his wedding blog posts quickly, you’ll notice each wedding seems to be completely color-coordinated. Given the chaotic nature of weddings, how does he do this? No doubt it’s because of some really heightened editing skills. Both after the fact, i.e. selecting the images for display, and actually in camera: editing out the parts of the scene that don’t work. I don’t know if he walks around a ceremony site mumbling to himself “pink and moss green, pink and moss green…” But the results speak for themselves.

And finally (at least for this post), there’s Utah-based Jonathan Canlas. He seems to currently be building an empire around his use of film for wedding photography, with workshops, e-books and private instruction. And it’s well-deserved! He’s got a very strong opinion about things, and he’s often right. And he backs it up with very strong images.

These are the wedding photographers who inspire me. Go check ‘em out!

So, needless to say, I was a little stressed. So many unknowns to deal with here. No way I could plan for every eventuality, because there were too many variables. I started thinking about other shoots that had had last minute problems, or big unknowns or unresolved production issues. I thought of myself as having pulled those shoots “out of the fire” so to speak. I was giving luck more credit than I gave myself.

And then I got to thinking: this is what commercial photography is all about. While planning makes a shoot go smoother, sometimes you can’t tie up every loose end ahead of time. It’s what you make of a situation that is the real skill. Sometimes a shoot will just go to heck and there’s nothing you can do about it. But the ones where you make something out of nothing, or keep it from becoming a disaster…that’s the defining quality of a good commercial shooter.

I came to the realization that, more often than not, I’m going to range from mildly anxious to scared out of my wits before any major shoot. And there’s no getting around that. Part of my job is to embrace that chaos, and forge something out of it. I need to just dive in, and let go. The better I am at what I do, the more likely I’ll be able to manage that chaos and turn it into something beautiful.

So from now on, when I get those pre-shoot jitters, I’m just going to tell myself: that’s my job. To dive on in. And that’s what I did yesterday. And it came out alright!

My fashion/commercial site: www.onethousandumbrellas.com

[I love blog comments! If you leave a comment, and I'll donate a canned good to the local food bank, FoodShare.]

Back in 1999, when I was a musician making electronic dance music under the name The Rip Off Artist (among other names), I had a little track released that, while never a ‘hit’, got used on a few movie soundtracks and such. It was a remix of an old lounge tune called “Sway”. I took versions by Dean Martin and Julie London and did a mash up of the two (before “mash up” was even a term), and it was released on a compilation of lounge remixes called Electro Lounge.

So tonight my wife turned off the TV. As she did, I heard this little snippet of music…and yelled “wait!!!!” I turned the TV back on, and there’s my friggin’ remix, being used for the current Chrysler 300 commercial.

Sigh. And it was a flat fee buyout. I made my money back in 1999, and it has continued to make Universal money ever since. It’s weird being dragged back into my ‘other life’, even for a brief moment.

The solution offered is usually…

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…some sort of price-fixing or collusion. Sometimes it’s a subtle “I sure hope no one ever actually accepts an offer like this” or a disparaging “no REAL photographer would accept such outrageous terms”, in an attempt to influence competitors to say no. Other times it’s more blatant, like a call for guilds, unions or to standardize rates for services.

The problem is, this sort of ‘solution’ never works for long. And with the internet reducing all sorts of economic friction at an ever increasing rate, any attempt to force buyers and sellers into a pricing regime falls apart immediately.

Ironically, photographers have been huge beneficiaries of getting “more for less”. The capabilities of today’s digital cameras far surpass anything available in the past, and for much cheaper (on a dollars-to-capabilities measure). But imagine if camera manufacturers said to each other “customers are demanding our cameras do more for less, so let’s band together to keep camera prices high.” There would be legal action to stop this price-fixing, and eventually someone new would come along and build a better/cheaper camera anyway.

Magic Gadget

But what if you, as a photographer, had a magic gadget that enabled you to complete ten projects in the time your competitors could only complete one? For a quarter of the price? Would you lock this magic gadget away in the closet and not use it? Of course not! You’d keep it running 24/7 and use it to beat the competitors into a pulp (figuratively speaking).

What if that magic gadget wasn’t a thing, but a process. What if you improved your work flow to the point that it became a competitive advantage, for example. Or you found cheaper suppliers to lower your costs. Or you found new ways to move parts of your business online. Or you inherited a warehouse property downtown that you could turn into a studio for next to nothing.

You’d do it, wouldn’t you?

Rather than moaning about how unfair it is that someone is undercutting your prices, worry that someone might successfully be undercutting your prices. You might have overlooked an advantage they have. Life isn’t fair, and different folks have different advantages: trust-fund babies, math geniuses, well-connected people, good-looking people…someone somewhere has an advantage over you. It might make their job easier, and your job harder. It might also make them cheaper, and you more expensive. It’s unfair, and it’s part of doing business.

Ruining It For Everyone

But what about all those new photographers trying to break into the business? Aren’t they ruining it for the ‘real’ photographers by charging too little for a job? Yes I think this does make it harder for established professionals to keep making the money they’d like. But I also don’t think it’s an unfair advantage. And more importantly, a newbie hasn’t earned the right to charge so much. A photographer with experience is worth more than a photographer without it, if you factor out fuzzy things like talent and vision. A new photographer generally has only one competitive advantage: the willingness to work harder for less money.

It’s likely that many new photographers give up after a year or two and go find a real job. But others might be more savvy than that, realizing that losing money for a year or two might be worth it in a long run. In any other business, losing money as a start-up is just the price of doing business. But in the photography business, new photographers who don’t charge enough are called “cheats” and worse. Yet established photographers who can’t make money are somehow the victims of the same newbies who are also not making money.

Everyone has the right to lose money. Making money, on the other hand, is a privilege.

Times are hard, that’s a given. Many clients are no longer able to pay like they used to. As an established photographer, you either have to be so good that your work compels a client to find a way to afford you—you ARE that good, right?—or you must find a way to use your experience and business skills to be more efficient at a competitive price. And don’t think that this applies only to commercial photographers. Portrait and wedding photographers have the same competitive woes: clients who are not willing to spend as much, and competition with part-time or amateur photographers. Even the client can be a competitor when he or she thinks “hey I can do this myself and save some dollars.”

As a new photographer, you need to convince the client you can actually handle the job, and offset the risk of disaster by charging less. As an established photographer, you must convince the client you can deliver superior work in a reliable way, and you charge a premium for that. There are no bonuses for average work. If you find yourself losing jobs or clients time and time again, then you quite simply are doing something wrong. Either your work is not compelling enough, or it’s not efficient enough. Whining won’t fix it; you need to adapt. The alternative isn’t pretty.

As always, if you leave a substantive comment on this blog post, I will donate a canned food item to the local food bank, Food SHARE.

Last Saturday, my six year old son Nick became an entrepreneur.

He wanted to set up a lemonade stand. My wife, who has happily professed not to have a single entrepreneurial bone in her body, insisted that I tackle this project with him. Working with him on this project reminded me of some very grown-up problems people have with running their own business, and I thought I’d share them here.

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1. Location, timing, marketing and sales are at least as important as a good product.

And man, we had a good product! Fresh-squeezed lemons, water, and a mix of sugar and splenda. This was the best lemonade I’ve had in many years. Simple, but we nailed the recipe. Was it enough to bring the customers in?

Of course not!

And while my wife rolled her eyes in the other room, my son and I had a ‘business development meeting’ in the kitchen. I think Nick would have been content to sit on the curb with a cup of lemonade in his hands, hoping someone would stop and ask to buy it from him. Through some guided questioning, we came up with a plan to sell and market the lemonade. We decided on a location (we live on a corner…perfect!). We also made signs. My three year old (Finn) made his own sign, which you can see being used as a floor covering in the above photo. We talked about how it might take a long time to get that first sale, and that he had to have patience. We decided on a price of 25¢ per cup.

2. Know who your customers are, and why they buy from you.

We discussed the demographics and basic customer profile. I explained to my son that there were two types of people who would buy lemonade from him: kids, who just want stuff because it’s there, but don’t have any money of their own. And grown ups, who think kids with lemonade stands are really cute.  These grown ups will buy lemonade even if they don’t want it, if they think the kids are cute enough.

I suggested that he and his younger brother waive and smile to cars as they drove by, for maximum cuteness and to attract the attention of an otherwise-distracted potential customer. I on the other hand should not be too close by, as this would drive down the cuteness factor considerably. I proposed instead that I wash my car in the driveway. This proposal met with some resistance from my eldest, as he’s a little shy. He just didn’t understand that no one wants to buy lemonade from some old dude on the corner. But he eventually agreed.

3. Know your strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re not good at something—for example, sales—make sure you’ve got someone on board who is.

It turns out Nick was so painfully shy about actually interacting with potential customers, that he couldn’t bring himself to waive. Nor say hi. Nor say thank you. About all he could do was bury his chin in his chest, look at the ground, and pour lemonade. Fair enough, we all have our strengths. He decided to get his three year old brother to do the waiving and saying hi instead. The little guy has NO reservations about chatting people up. He will one day be the skydiving member of the family, and will make a living selling trunks to elephants, straw to scarecrows and will no doubt be the boy your mother warned you about. Finn decided that cars two blocks down from our corner, heading in the opposite direction were in fact potential customers, and he shouted at the top of his wee little lungs to get their attention.

4. Partners don’t always see eye to eye.

Finn however has the attention span of a…umm, what was I talking about? Oh right. Finn got bored very quickly and decided that playing with toy cars was a much more interesting pursuit. His most favorite thing in the world is to talk about how fast Lighting McQueen goes. Speed, speed, speed, it’s all I hear about. Oh that and crashing. He’s always rooting for me to go really fast on the freeway and then crash. I find this unsettling.

Nick however is very much a “leader”. And by that I mean a control freak. It’s ok, his mother and father are both control freaks eldest children as well. His business partner’s sudden abandonment of responsibilities was a serious blow to company morale though. Nick stuck by that lemonade stand as long as he could, but it was difficult remaining on-message when his little brother was racing and crashing and racing and crashing, all with chortles of glee every time the blue car fell off the wall. How’s a six year old to make any cash with all that racket going on?

5. You must always have a “call to action”

Our first sale…excuse me, the boys’ first sale was to the mailman. He walked by just after we set up our prime retail location. He chatted with us for a little while. Ok, he chatted with ME a little while. Nick practically hid under the table. Finn mumbled something in threeyearoldese about crashing and red cars and going fast. I waxed poetic about the benefits of building confidence and the entrepreneurial spirit in children, and the mail carrier thought it was just great that the kids were selling lemonade on such a beautiful day. But did he offer to buy a cup? No! Why? Because there was no “call to action”. No request that he actually buy something.

6. “Free” is the best four letter word around.

So as the mail man walked away, I shouted after him: “hey…postal workers get free lemonade. Want some?” So he turned around, walked back, and ponied up 50¢ for a 25¢ lemonade. Our first sale!

7. Not all lessons from lemonade stands translate into the adult world.

He paid double for something, when he didn’t have to. We had another customer that day—yeah that’s right, we had two customers, what are you going to do about it? You gonna talk smack about me and my boys? Huh? HUH???!!

So he and this other customer (a dad and son who stopped their car and paid $1 for 50¢ worth of lemonade) both paid double the asking price. Never having tasted it. From a dicey, un-permitted, un-health-inspected street vendor in the middle of BF-Ventura California.

What’s up with that?

I hardly ever have clients offer to pay double my asking price for photography services. I can only assume that Nick was not charging enough for his lemonade. Either that or he’s just waaaay cuter than I am. Probably he’s not charging enough.

8.Initial success can make subsequent plateaus harder to handle.

Ok so Nick made two sales in the space of about half an hour. That’s a nice warm up. Middle of the day is the hottest, and the most lemonade-friendly…but people are usually somewhere by then. In the morning and evening, they need to get somewhere. But at 11am, they are already “somewhere”. So traffic slowed down. Well it didn’t slow down for Finn, who was still flying at lightspeed toward some imagined brick wall of doom in his red race car. But for the rest of us, well it was the business doldrums. The time when those who are going to make it in business buckle down, and the flim and the flam, and the flotsam and jetsam of the business world pack up and go work for the man. (Honey, I don’t mean you. You always work for the man! You’re consistent. I love that about you. Now please balance the checkbook because I’ve been spending again…)

That’s right, thirty minutes into the business venture, Nick wanted out. Finn was having the most fun a child could have, from the perspective of one who is shackled, figuratively speaking, to a lemonade stand. Meanwhile Nick had made $1.50. That is SIX TIMES his weekly allowance for doing chores. Yes that’s right, we run a tight ship around here: you do your chores, you get a whole quarter! Or if Daddy is feeling generous…ok, let’s be frank, the exchange rate is set by mommy…you can have two dimes and a nickel instead! But do NOT ask for twenty five pennies.

9. Know when to get out of the business.

So Nick is thinking, hey man, I’m way ahead. I’ve made my easy money. I’ve got dad to make the lemonade, plan all this out, and carry everything out to the curb. This is soooo much better than stocking the toilet paper in the bathroom cupboards and watering the plants in the front yard. What kind of chump am I, sitting on this corner watching the world go by? It’s time to pack it in.

10. Your investors might not always agree with your management style

“You want to WHAT??! We just put this murmblefrugin table out here! You can’t give up yet!” And then he pointed out the obvious to me, which is that he’d made his big score. I suggested he go the distance. He balked. I suggested he wait until I’d finished washing my car. He balked. I informed him that I would not help him bring the stuff in until I’d finished washing my car. So he waited another ten minutes, left the money sitting on the table ($20 worth of change, not just his profits) and played cars with his brother.

That’s ok. Nick was happy he made some money, and moreso was happy that it was all over. I got some free lemonade from the deal. My wife, bless her, actually paid him a quarter for it. When Nick tried to get the same from me, I explained that I was an investor, had put up significant sweat equity, and was entitled to a free cup of lemonade. What am I, a charity?

And I made him bring all that stuff back in the house.

I’ve been on Facebook for awhile now.

And now on Twitter: matthainesphoto

Actually I’ve been signed up for twitter for almost a year, and didn’t use it. Didn’t even remember I had an account! My tweets (ugh) will be photo related only. No lunch-menu updates or youtube links to dancing cats. I promise.

OMGMIS! (“Oh my God Make It Stop!”)

Still recovering from my vacation. Got that part 2 of the last fashion blog coming shortly though. Actual paying work must take precedence, but it’s coming.