Are Productivity Challenges Getting You Down? Try These Solutions
- 4 Tips for Running a Photography Business
- Tips for Processing Landscape Photos
- Portrait Post-Processing Tips
- 3 Common Photography Business Mistakes
- Productivity Tips to Jumpstart Your Success
- Stock Photography Success Tips: Planning and Research
photo by PeopleImages via iStock
Certain things we do as photographers, videographers, or as small business operators waste time, money, and effort. Industry analysts call these things productivity challenges. What are some of the common productivity issues for photographers and are there simple productivity solutions for photographers in business for themselves?
Connectivity is a Two-Edged Sword
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We all want to learn how to improve our photography and our businesses, how to be a more productive photographer. The internet is a great place to find information such as new techniques or a better way to use an old technique and general photography business tips.
Many times, we can find just what we need to solve some of our photography productivity problems with a search engine. For instance, you may have this very article by typing “productivity problems for photographers” into your favorite search engine. By the way, we’re glad you found us, check out our other articles, too.
But if we’re not careful, that same source of information we are pleased to have found can become a cause of major productivity challenges. How so? It has to do, not with the fine information, tips, or instruction, but with our use of how much time we spend on it.
Take Time Out to Learn
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It is going to take an investment of our time to learn a new technique or to improve in some aspect of our business, but we can so easily fall into the common time stealer of not sticking to a plan of how much and when to do and read.
Even this site, PhotographyTalk.com, which I’m proud to say is a very beneficial source of photographic instruction for many photographers at all skill levels, can end up wasting our time.
It goes like this: I have a question or problem, I search online to find answers and actually do find a great source, but then I get sidetracked because there’s so much to look at. Before I knew it, my 15 minutes of fixing one small issue turned into over 2 hours of interesting reading. We all do this from time to time and it’s one of the biggest productivity challenges of our online professional lives.
The solution is to have a plan of action, a schedule, and self control. I need to learn new things but I also really only have so much time available for that. So, budgeting out time for various aspects of our online learning is necessary. And then, in my leisure time I can go back and read for fun. This works for anything online, not just photography business tips.
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Invest In the Right Tools
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Yes, a good photographer can make beautiful images with very basic equipment, but sometimes we can invest in purchasing a tool that helps us do a better job or makes that job go easier and quicker.
Let’s look at three examples of what I mean. One is exposure bracketing, the second is using widescreen monitors that can tile programs, and the third is having a camera bag system to keep yourself organized.
Exposure Bracketing
When you aren’t using a certain technique, you have to find a way to get the job done otherwise. For instance, when I made my first spherical panorama for an interactive photo tour, I used a camera with very limited bracketing capability.
It took me twice as long to make those first tours as it does now because I’m using a better nodal mount and a camera with a wider bracketing range. So, investing in a camera upgrade actually made it easier and quicker to get the photos I needed, plus it eliminates extra possibilities for me messing up and losing track of what exposures to make.
Upgrade Editing
Editing photographic images and videography can be time consuming, which is to be expected, since there are often multiple operations being worked across multiple images or lots of video footage. Anything to assist us with these productivity challenges will be welcome.
Before I upgraded my own editing studio, I wondered just how much it would help me overcome basic processing productivity challenges. I’m now using a dual monitor setup based on the ViewSonic VP3881 38” curved screen monitor and ViewSonic VP3481 34” curved screen monitor.
First, the ultrawide curved screens of these larger monitors provide an immersive viewing experience, which already improves editing workflow over using the smaller monitors of our laptops or smaller monitors that came with a desktop kit.
Second, the wider aspect ratio allows tiling of multiple programs at once, in other words, you can see multiple operations at the same time without needing to switch between windows or operations constantly. Until I tried it, I really didn’t know exactly how much this impacts photo and video editing productivity challenges.
A couple of other reasons to upgrade monitors is to get super accurate colors and sharper resolution on the monitor like these ViewSonic monitors which also helps ease up productivity challenges since a more comfortable editing session will speed up everything we do.
Get a Better Bag
Those of you that know me know that one of my absolute favorite bags is my Peter McKinnon Nomatic Camera Pack. I've raved about it quite often as the ideal mix of form and function.
But now Nomatic and Peter McKinnon have done it again with the brand-new Everyday Camera Line that's currently on Kickstarter.
As per usual with Nomatic's Kickstarter campaigns, this one blew the doors off on the first day, far exceeding their $100,000 goal. And it makes sense why - because this is a product that photographers can use to boost their productivity and their organization.
In addition to the usual beautiful design, this system includes a backpack and a sling pack.
The backpack is thoroughly customizable for virtually any type of kit. You get room for your laptop, two water bottle pockets that double as tripod carriers, and nice, beefy shoulder pads that make it a comfortable carrying experience.
The sling, meanwhile, super easy to access, has dedicated slots for batteries and memory cards, and it fits perfectly inside the Camera Pack. And just like the Everyday Backpack, it's made of water-resistant materials.
You even get a camera tech organizer that works with both Everyday bags. It's the ideal solution for carrying small items like memory cards, batteries, your action camera, and so forth.
Head over to Kickstarter to get more details!
Schedules
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We’re most self-employed as professional photographers and videographers, which allows us great freedom of how to use our time. One of the best ways of how to be a more productive photographer is to have a regular schedule for all of our self support work.
Staying up all night editing images or video footage is available to us but it may not be the best use of our time. Especially if doing that negatively affects the quality of our finished product.
Except for those exceptional circumstances requiring putting forth a ton of extra work within a short time, which will come up from time to time, sticking with a schedule of when to do work allows us to be consistently good. Our schedules may be loose and flexible, but it’s a good idea to stick with one as a self-employed business person whenever we can.
As a plug, I’m going to suggest coming back to PhotographyTalk.com regularly in order to find other photography business tips and photographic techniques that can improve our images and videos and help us solve some of our productivity challenges.
But don’t spend all your time here! Go out and enjoy being a professional photographer!
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