Professional portrait photographers looking for marketing assistance, photo-shop training or camera room techniques should check out the resources at their professional photo lab. Many of today’s top pro photo labs offer the professional studio photographer personal one on one marketing and training assistance. Contact your pro labs customer service department to see what they can offer your business.
One example idea, how to get free sample display prints. Contact some of your previous studio customers explaining that you are going to have a special photography gallery display at a certain location. Describe the theme of the event and let your customer know you will be offering special portrait sessions and discount display prices for portraits that will be included in this gallery display. Make several ‘display sizes’ available to your client. Naturally your customer will receive this portrait after the gallery show is finished. Picture frames could also be included in the display discount and should be.
The portrait studio owner gets the chance to have a gallery show funded by new sessions and portrait purchases from previous clients. Their clients get a savings and the excitement of being included in this special show. The excitement of being included in your gallery show is the strongest motivator for your client to participate in your display. Clients should be given a few invitations that they can send to their friends announcing the gallery display opening.
One more important tip, one way to stay ahead in today’s professional portrait market is with the highest quality professional photo printing available. Of course top quality Kodak photographic prints require the very best high quality digital image files. Your pro lab mentor is a good resource to pick up the latest techniques and settings in digital camera file processing. Using your cameras raw file option combined with Adobe Software’s Camera Raw plugin or Lightroom 3 software are good choices to achieve finely tuned high quality digital camera files.
Your pro lab can provide you the optimum settings to use during your camera file processing work. Here is a good opportunity to have a few test prints made to verify that you are setting the ideal values for shadow and highlight detail in your camera files. Maximum printing detail for shadows and highlights do vary somewhat between printing systems and technologies. For those professional photographers who are striving to produce the very best, no compromises products these steps are important.