There are still 2 spots left for my May 22 "Building a Wedding Photography Business" workshop in Seattle.

This workshop is designed for wedding photographers just starting out, or for more established wedding pros that want to relaunch or simply jumpstart their businesses.

Topics include:

- Gear:  including minimum required gear, where to spend your $$, and where NOT to

- Marketing: how to get the most for your marketing $$. Where to advertise, where NOT to. The best way to market. Blogging and social networking tips.

- Website: what vendors to use, what to include, what not to.

- Portfolio:  how to build a portfolio. How to edit it to make you look like an amazing photographer.

- Pricing: How much to charge for that 1st wedding, 5th, 10th, etc. How to design price lists that maximize revenue.  How to design packages. How to charge for albums.

- Workflow: From downloading your cards to delivering the album - how to process your images in the minimum amount of time.

- Vendors:  I discuss all my vendors, from print shops, to canvas printers to album providers.

- Sales:  how to structure your sales meetings

- Contracts:  I go over my own contract line by line

All this and more, if time allows.  

Tuition is $350 for an all day session.  Contact me to register.

If you cannot make this session for whatever reason, I can customize a Skype session one-on-one for you.

Laurence Kim Workshops

Okay, I'll admit it, I'm the opposite of an early adopter.  I rarely use Facebook, and I've never Tweeted in my life. And I don't intend to. I just don't see the need to tell the world what I eat for breakfast every morning.

But there's one technology that is just too useful for me to ignore any longer.

I got on Skype for the first time last week, and I'm convinced it is the best way to do a remote workshop for photographers unable to travel to Seattle.

Why Skype?

• The calls are FREE. You don't have to tie up your phone or use any precious cell phone minutes.

• It's easy - sign up only takes a minute and you're ready to go.

• The sound-quality is much better than a regular phone call.

• Most importantly, using Skype my workshop students can VIEW MY SCREEN during the session, so now I can do more than simply verbally go over an emailed PDF presentation. I can now show my students in real time how I use Lightroom, Photoshop, design albums, etc.

Just email me to schedule a Skype session. Cost is $100 per hour and potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Lighting:  natural light, on-camera flash, off-camera flash
• Shooting:  metering, camera settings, focusing
• Posing: kids, brides and grooms, seniors
• Color correcting and proofing using Lightroom and/or Adobe Camera Raw/Photoshop
• Portrait retouching using Photoshop
  
• Marketing: a system for bringing in qualified portrait clients
• Pricing:  how to design portrait price lists and wedding packages
  
• Products: what to offer, where to get it, how to price it
• Sales: how to dramatically increase your portrait averages and upsell your wedding albums
• Gear: what gear you need, what you don't need, and what to buy at every budget
• Building a wedding photography business from scratch
• Building a profitable portrait business from scratch

Building a Wedding Photography Business

Saturday, May 22, Seattle WA

Seats still available  

New workshop

Building a Profitable Portrait Business

Seattle, WA

February 27, 2010

workshop fee: $350

Building a profitable portrait photography business is a lot harder than building a wedding photography business. When most couples get engaged, they start looking for a professional wedding photographer. Most people, however, don't wake up in the morning and decide to spend $1,000+ on a professional portrait photographer.

Many portrait photographers get frustrated. Why is it so hard to find clients?  And the clients they find don't want to pay for anything. It seems they all have a budget of $100!

This workshop will cover a soup-to-nuts, step-by-step blueprint for building a profitable portrait photography business.  Topics will include:

• Shooting.   Although this isn't a workshop about shooting, we will discuss some techniques/styles that generate big portrait orders.  
  

• Marketing.  How to fill your calendar with qualified clients. By qualified I mean clients that will likely spend $700-$2,000 on a portrait session.  No, this doesn't take a lot of money on advertising, but it will take some smart, focused effort. I'll give you the exact plan I followed to fill my calendar with qualified clients.

• Pricing.  This is where most photographers go wrong. We'll discuss how much to charge for various products and your session fee. Next, we'll discuss how to construct your price list - which items to place first, last, etc.  I'll show you how to construct a price list so that you'll never sell a print smaller than an 8x10 ever again.  
  

• Digital files - to give or not to give. This is one of the biggest dilemmas for portrait photographers. We'll discuss a plan for how to address this issue without sacrificing profit.

• Selling.  How to conduct your sales session.  What to say and when to say it - a step-by-step workflow guide to the sales session. When to put images online - and when not to.   Typically, the mother will be your ally and the father will be your adversary.  We'll discuss how to get the mother to do the selling for you.
  

• Products. How to design a product offering. What to offer and how much to charge for it. How to get your customers to desire a product even before you've taken a single picture.

• Payment. How to get paid, when to get paid.

• Getting repeat customers. We'll discuss how to get your customers to not only come back for more sessions, but how to turn them into your own best sales force.

• Start up clients. You started your portrait business by being very cheap. After this workshop you're going to increase your prices by 2x, 3x, or maybe even 10x.  So what do you do with your original client list?  We'll discuss strategies for handling them.

Email me at info@laurencekim.com to register. If you implement 1/4 of what you learn at this session, you'll make back the workshop fee with your first portrait session.

Want to attend this workshop in your city?  Be a workshop host. All you need is space for 12 people.

Location Lighting 101 Workshop

Seattle, WA, January 23, 2010

1 seat left

Laurence Kim Workshops

Location Lighting 101 Workshop

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Seattle, Washington

This full-day workshop will be focused on location lighting. The primary focus will be on off-camera lighting, but feel free to ask on-camera lighting questions as well.  By the end of this session you will be able to quickly set up and execute an on-location lighting setup.

This workshop is limited to 6 participants only. This is going to be very hands-on and I want to make sure all your questions get covered.

Topics covered:

• Why use off-camera lighting?
• Equipment. I'll give you my equipment recommendations for various budgets from shoestring to elaborate.
  • Monoblocs vs. power packs vs. hotshoe-mounted flashes
  • Infrared and radio transmitters
  • Cords, connectors, etc.  
• How to meter your camera for off-camera flash
• Why you don't need a light meter
• How to set the correct exposure on your subject
• Understanding modifiers: bare flash, grid spots, umbrellas and soft boxes
• How to create soft lighting or hard lighting
• Lighting groups with a single flash
• Limitations: what your flash can and cannot do
• Understanding light placement - where to place your flash in relation to your subject
• Fill lighting: when to use it, how to use it and when not to use it
• Lighting wedding receptions

We'll discuss the theory behind lighting, but the primary focus will be on practical, hands-on experience. Much of the day will be spent actually setting up and shooting various off-camera setups.

Prerequisites:  I'm going to assume that you've never worked with off-camera flash before. We'll go step by step from square one. You don't need any prior flash knowledge, but you will need to come with a basic understanding of how to set exposure on your camera. In other words, you'll need to know what ISO, aperture and shutter speed mean.

The details:

Price:  $350 for the full-day session.  We'll go at least from 9am - 5pm, but that's not a hard stop. I'll stay longer if there are still many unanswered questions. Lunch is included.

Payment:  Check, Visa, MasterCard or Paypal

Location:  My Seattle office

Bring to the workshop: a DSLR and a notebook.  If you have a Pocket Wizard and a speedlight, bring those too, but not required.

Deadline:  There is no deadline to sign up, but remember that space is limited to the first 6 participants who sign up.

Contact:  Email me at info@laurencekim.com to sign up.

New Website

I've put up a simple website with more details on workshops so that you won't have to search through my blog for workshop-related information: lkworkshops.com

You can access the website through the "MY WEBSITES" button on the top of my blog.

Want to host a Location Lighting 101 Workshop in your city?  See my new workshop website for details.