Point and Shoot Snapshot????

[John]. . .So it's been a while. I've been bad. Sorry about not updating sooner. We did a spring break trip to Marco Island FL. Our friends, pictured here let us use their condo for a week. That was really nice. They just built a beautiful home down there. I wanted to thank them and give them something nice and I thought a family portrait in front of their new home would be nice. The problem was that I didn't take my Pro camera down. All I had was a tiny Canon F100fd point and shoot. But I thought OK, I'll take the risk. Of course, they wanted to dress just the way they do every day while they are in Florida, so I wasn't too concerned about their clothing. But I told them in spite of the fact that I didn't have my professional camera that this was going to be just fine. Now mind you, when I have a point and shoot in my hand, I literally point and shoot. Hey, I'm on vacation, give me a break. I never take care to be careful with the shots. So for this shot I had to REALLY Psyc my mind out. As I was looking for the perfect light and the perfect pose, I imagined that my pro camera was behind me on a tripod. How weird to walk back to my position holding this dinky little camera and here they are so perfect in front of me. I braced the camera on a car trunk, put it on 2 second timer, calculated the time and inspired some verbal communication. I took about ten shots. I had to wait to get home to see if I got anything sharp as chimping wouldn't reveal this. I was really surprised to see that the image held up nice at 100% so I figured OK, I'll take a chance. I'm going to order them a 16x20. So to put the advantage in my court, I printed it myself on textured fine art paper on my Epson 4000 printer. Wow, I couldn't believe my eyes. It REALLY looked nice. I mean, I was thinking, did I use my BIG Canon for this??? So the point of the post is this. It ain't the camera. It's the skilzzz dude. (Or Luck) But I figure if you get the lighting right and the pose right and the expressions right and the resolution holds, you've got a home run. After we had it framed in a very nice frame, you could not tell this was a "Point and Shoot".
Let me burn some bridges here. I've seen way too many so called pros, take mere point and shoot images with their professional cameras. What a shame that our clients are confused as to what a quality image is. Again, it has NOTHING to do with pixels. It has everything to do with content that is uplifting and timeless and perfect in every way.

Some of the best ideas never get old

Ron.... I Finally got my last sessions posted from our Spring animal session, This has been an amazing year We started Shooting on the 19th of March and ended the following week on the 27th. On a normal year we would do from 40-55 sessions This year with a little help from our social networking sites we did 100 sessions, Wow! Facebook thanks for the free advertising.

This year we had Ducks , Bunnies, and a Lamb and on the two Saturdays we had a special guest, a beautiful Miniature horse named Chula belle, Chula Belle was a great hit with everyone.

If you're not offering children's pictures with live animals your missing out, this is a great opportunity to build your customer base. You will see children from just a few weeks old to the oldest we had this year was 20 but for the most part we saw kids from 2 to 7 years old.
While families were waiting in our studio for their turn to shoot they watched a slide show on the flat panel TV, this gave us a opportunity to showcase our other photographic services. We booked several other sessions for families and children and many took information for Senior photography.

A few tips if you decide to do a event with live animals, always have a animal handler, someone who can keep the little critters corralled and close to the children. Another good idea is to use a full length canvas background, the backgrounds that we use are 12ft wide by 20ft long ideal for this type of work. The reason for the canvas is it's very easy to clean, not if but when the animals decide they need to go potty, believe me muslins or carpet is not a good idea.

So gather up the animals and put the word out and they will come. We asked our customers this year how they heard about our Spring animal special just to see how they heard about us, there were very few newspaper a fair amount of word of mouth and a lot of Facebook. Also over 30% of this year's customers were first time customers with us. The coolest thing is many of the parents who brought their kids in for pictures had the same type of session with us when they were children. So it just goes to show you, some Ideas just never get old.