Wednesday

Q&A WEDNESDAY

OK - This one is going to have to be very short. Yesterday was my hubby's birthday so I had no time to get this done and I'm swamped in editing right now... If I didn't get to your question this week, I'll try for next! Thanks for understanding!

For your phone consultation/get-to-know-you before the shoot, do you have set questions that you ask? I think I am guilty of jumping into the photographing too fast. But I really don't know what to say. Can you help?
I too was very guilty of this same thing. Recently I realized that I'm only an email name up to the day of our shoot when we actually meet and once again after our session. I didn't like this at all, and I wanted to make things much more personal. So thats the reason for the change. Everything usually starts via email (because thats how they contact me 99% of the time). Once the deposit is received I give them a call, introduce myself and just reiterate to them a little about my style and talk about the emphasis on how clothing makes such a statement, I ask if they have chosen wardrobe and if they have any questions. They want to tell me what the were thinking and ask my opinion. Of course this is a great time to give it! I really don't have any set questions. I'm a chatty one as it is so it's pretty easy to just go with it. Really my main two prerogative are this; 1. have a say in what they wear and 2.
help them get a little taste of my personality and get excited about the session!

For your cd that you give to clients, you said that it is high definition. What does that mean? Is it a special kind of cd that you purchase? A certain way to put them onto the cd? I just download files to the disk. Am I doing that wrong? You also give pictures that can go up on facebook and other sites. What do you do special for those pictures?
Hmm? This is news to me! ;) Where did I say high def? I don't even know what that means? I should probably take that off! ;) I use Cd's sometimes but usually I just use DVD's. Here is an awesome tip for buying your DVD's and CD's. Day after Thanksgiving Sales! I absolutely hate doing the day after sales, but that is one time it's really worth it!
So all I do is give them a folder with the final images, a folder that had all the sneak peaks (sized for web with my watermark and framed) it's usually only about 5 images. And a print release document. Sometimes I include a slideshow for them that I created from Animoto (just the web version). I use a Mac so I just create a burn folder, pop the DVD in and press burn (love how easy it is!)! I'm sure you are doing the disk properly I just need to make sense of my terms!

Do you have to resize your photos? My photo says it's 78 x 52 inches. That's huge right? What am I supposed to do to make my image smaller but not crop? And what about printing? Can you explain this to me?
First off. I have started trying to take images from my camera as I would want to print them, or in otherwords so I would not have to crop it at all. Not always possible but because I don't know what size a client will order, I want to keep it as large as possible. But yes, you can resize images. Lets say you have a photo - love everything about it (so you don't want to crop it) you just want to resize. Go into IMAGE --> IMAGE SIZE. And you have a box that looks like this. Now for this image the first thing I notice is that the resolution is at 72. So yes the image seems large at 54x36 but it's at a web quality resolution right now.
Lets change the resolution to 300 (where you want to print at) and check Resample Image (or if checked, just uncheck and recheck the box). This brings me to about 12x8. So for printing purposes it's much smaller. I could hit OK and it would than resize to the new 12x8
Lets say you want to change it to an 8x10 for printing. This is NOT the way to do it and let me show you why. Our cameras do not capture in a one perticular aspect that fit's to our printing (if it did the closest would be a 5x7 ratio).
Because this is actually (in ratio) closer to a 12x8. If I try to resize it as an 8x10 it will condense it. Notice the condensed image below. To change it to an 8x10 at 300 dpi you would crop the image and will have to choose what part of the image you want to loose the head or the chest.
This is why I have started trying to shoot so that I will not have to crop. Each size has a different look to it. If you have not noticed this, open an image in photoshop and crop it is a 11x14, 8x10 and 5x7 and you will see what I mean.

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