Casey Templeton Photography

The most valuable service I can offer my clients is my personal vision.  I have a certain way of seeing the world so I focus on that, not on giving the client what I think the hot style is in the industry. I would always be a step behind if I was only chasing the transient industry fads.  Find your vision, trust your eye.

When I am approached by a possible client, I like to show images I feel would fit within their brand to see if our ideas for the brand are somewhat consistent.  If we work together, rather than providing them with only the one or two images they asked for, I like to provide a photo library of images where each image can work with the others to show an overall consistency, a fluid vision.  Beyond filling their immediate image needs, this hopefully gets their minds racing with greater ideas of how they can incorporate the images in various other campaigns.

Long term working relationships are formed when your vision is adopted by the client and it becomes their vision too.

One of my clients that I have this relationship with is here in Virginia, Bon Secours Health System and their agency, Free Agents Marketing.  We began working together in 2009 and although the work is nothing too exotic or uber-exciting, they believe in my vision for their photography and have given me the freedom to place it directly into their branding.  Brand-Vision Utopia!  Long term working relationships are formed when your vision is adopted by the client and it becomes their vision too.  This makes it harder to use multiple photographers because consistency is lost, and keeps you in business.

“The first time we met Casey, he talked about creating a library of images for us, which was something we, too, were hoping to achieve.  You can see how this image library he’s created helps us maintain consistency across the Bon Secours brand,” Suzanne Doran, Art Director at Free Agents Marketing. You can see some of the images from the Bon Secours photo library below.

Bringing your personal vision to a clients brand.

I am always on the lookout for new clients, however, I put just as much effort into keeping my existing clients happy. In the commercial/advertising industry, a photographer out of site is most certainly a photographer out of mind.  So here are a few things I do to foster my existing client relationships and keep my name at the top of the list for upcoming projects.

• Under promise, over deliver.
• Be quick to deliver the work and make the process of your clients obtaining your files quick and easy (see “Utilizing your FTP“).
• Handwritten thank you notes for all jobs, small or large.
• Be responsive and accessible – answer emails and phone calls quickly.
• If you haven’t heard from a client in a while, send a note, email or quick call.  Don’t say “What gives!? Why aren’t we working together?” Just check in.
• Before submitting an estimate, be considerate of their budget if they have one. You don’t want to lose a client because you assumed the job was much bigger than it is and you submit an estimate that is twice the size of their budget.  This could send a client walking.  It never hurts to ask what their budget is.
• Never drag your feet on providing an estimate and with a returning client, try to be more flexible with your prices than a first time client.
• Be consistent with your estimates and do your best to consistently complete a project under budget.
• Keep good record of receipts to provide an all encompassing invoice.
• Always remember you are representing your client when on a job.  Show up more dressed up than you think you need to be.  Stay calm, cool and collected.
• Don’t friend a client on Facebook, let them friend you.
• Find your client’s personal comfort level of talking about business and personal issues and don’t cross it.

Your goal is to have your clients come to you and single bid the jobs.  But know the moment you get a new client is the moment you start losing them (Mad Men, I think).

p.s. It may be a bad idea to submit your clients emails to http://clientsfromhell.net/

A common headache for photographers getting started with digital photography is keeping their images organized; if left untouched, images can get lost in the shuffle very quickly. The key to keeping images organized is to come up with your own naming structure for your images and folders. In this post, I am going to explain my process of keeping images organized.

The goal is to have all of your images named in a way that if they are all put into a single folder together, they would all be in order by the date they were taken. Same for all of the folders we keep the photos in.  Often, your camera will come with a photo editing software you can use in taking your photos off of your memory card and onto your computer.  You can also use Apple’s iPhoto, Windows Live Photo Gallery, or for more advance photographers, Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom.

If you use a program such as Camera Bit’s Photo Mechanic to download your images, you can use this in your naming window:
{iptcyear2}{iptcmonth0}{iptcday0}_YourEventName_{seqn}   =   100302_YourEventName_001
or
{iptcyear4}{iptcmonth0}{iptcday0}_YourEventName_{seqn}   =   20100302_YourEventName_001

It is also important to keep your images similarly organized in the program you may use to organize your images such as Apple’s Aperture, Adobe’s Lightroom or any other program that may be provided in your camera’s software.  Below is how I keep my Aperture library organized.