I have been a network administrator for many years and in 2010 started another company servicing listed companies in Malaysia (including Maybank) and overseas. Besides robust and competitively priced cloud based web applications we provide internet security solutions to issues many companies and homes face.

Many parents are concerned about their young children’s exposure to sexual predators and porn web sites while on line. By setting up the correct software and routers we are able to monitor and prevent access to most unsavory sites and provide reporting on where they have been. We are also able to prioritize bandwidth so that applications you want to use e.g. skype for voice calling, gets top priority.

Companies face other issues, primarily with time wasting web sites that cut down employee productivity e.g. Facebook, as well as internet chat programs. Past success stories include uncovering evidence of internal theft within a company, confining access to social media sites like facebook and personal email to lunch hour and after hours, and providing QOS (Quality of Service) to prevent employees from leeching your band width through the use of torrenting and youtube when in the office.

With proper quality of service (QOS)  we can also severely hinder worms and viruses from overpowering your normal internet traffic. If you are into IT you know this is VERY COOL for dealing with virus outbreaks without the boss calling to complain they can’t get on line.

If you are concerned about these issues (and you need to be!) drop me a line.

The most essential application for me during my transition to the iPhone is called Appshopper.

I knew of it for months as it had been on my ipod touch, so it was great to continue using it. It is one of the many apps designed to let you find other useful applications in the  difficult to search itunes store. In my opinion it beats out all comers for its fullness of features. The app itself is free, and it updates daily. What sets this app apart is that every app you know you want to eventually get, can be searched for and then tagged in your “Wish list”. They keep an extensive database that enables you to see the apps price history. Many paying apps have sales or may end up free for a day or a week. By viewing the history you can get to gauge if you should wait or buy.

As it does push notifications, it will tell you when items on your wish list apps are available for free. I have snagged several +USD20 apps for FREE by using this programme.

I do have quite a number of other apps that are similar, but eventually I lose interest in them as they are not as well thought out as this baby. Try it by clicking on the icon in this story, or find it in the appstore from your mobile device itself.

Quick update: I show this app to a lot of people and everyone says they love it because they can put their wish list in and be notified when there are price drops. This means you can buy that USD4.99 app when it is on special for 0.99. Cool!

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I offer FREE wedding photography to lucky couples who are after the best quality at the lowest price.

How does it work?

Myself and my partner will waive all professional fees and charge nothing. That’s right. We shoot for free!

You only need to pay for rental of our equipment and we shoot for free. Rental is at a very low rate, only 10% of the actual value.

We will also throw in a free album. Woot.

As this is going to be an in demand package don’t delay in booking as soon as you can to avoid disappointment.

Let me know!

And for the professional wedding photographers reading this…smile knowingly

Why? The equipment we bring to each wedding is worth more than RM120,000. Ouch!

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I have made lots of mistakes on my journey as a wedding photographer and have decided to share some to help the up coming generation of photographers avoid some really easy traps! It could mean the difference between you being out of a job or having a thriving business. Today’s tip is about giving back soft copy.

This is a decision that is balanced on a razors edge, and the chance of cutting yourself in two is very real. First some history.

Back in the days of film photographers used to either never give back softcopy, or would hold on to it for a year or two then either give them back to the client for free, sell them to the client, or dispose of them. For my own wedding we never received the negatives back. Not helped by the fact that the photographer disappeared

So, why was this the normal policy? Two reasons, one was to maintain print quality, as the person holding the negatives was the one who controlled printing. Secondly, negatives didn’t duplicate well, so giving them away meant he photographer could never reprint photos for their own portfolio, advertising etc. As most photographers practiced not giving them back, clients were fine with the situation.

What changed when we went digital?

The second reason evaporated as digital reproduction is easy enough, however the first reason still remains, i.e. print quality control.

Now think for a moment, what are your down lines from a wedding? It is going to be your clients friends and family. By giving back full resolution files, you have surrendered quality control of all printing, and believe me, very few of your clients will spend on QUALITY reprinting. They will likely use the cheapest lab they know and the results will likely be DISMAL compared to a PROFESSIONAL LAB. When their friends and family view the muddied reprints, they will not blame the lab, they will blame the photographer. Your down lines are burned.

The other thing that today’s post film photographers usually do not know, is that the real money in wedding photography, and by this I mean the profits, what will keep you in the black instead of red ink,  is reprint and ALBUM sales. This is not profiteering, it is about whether you will be able to earn a livable income (like your clients do!), so you can pay your mortgage, meet your car payments, save for your kids to go to college, and for your own living expenses and eventual retirement. And believe me, to be a successful wedding photographer you will be working harder and longer hours than the vast majority of your clients do, so expect to be recompensed appropriately.

I personally know talented photographers who no longer shoot as they did not understand this, and are now back working as a salaried worker in a job they don’t like. Their dreams are burned, and the wedding industry as a whole is the loser.

So, what should you do?

Here’s my current policy. I give back watermarked  images re-sized for easy emailing and previewing on web sites and computer screens. Most peoples monitors are calibrated OK enough for the quality of my editing to be apparent. If people want to print from them…well good luck. BUT my packages always drive towards some sort of printing by me. That way poor reprints from a budget lab will look bad next to mine. Then the client will know the truth. A year later I give them back images suitable for 4R images, which is what they are most likely to print. By this time they already have my prints, so they know what quality is and will seek out the best labs they can possibly find. Lastly I retain ALL photos from ALL weddings in my storage systems, so that for the next 50 years or so they can get professional canvas prints and albums done at top quality.

This is why I will be in business until I can no longer carry a camera.

So, how do you convince your client to accept this. Simple.

1. Use a pro lab for your printing. Maybe print the same photo at a pro lab and a budget lab on their cheapest no-brand paper and show them the difference.
2. Print on the best quality papers you can – BTW some pros in Malaysia still compromise on this. I don’t compromise and it shows in better prints
3. Ask your clients how they wish to use the images. If they want to do an album tell them that it is part of your package. If they threaten to use someone else explain why you want to do the album, to ensure quality. If they get bolshy, walk away. They are likely going to be a pain. Be nice about it but maintain your standards.
4. It’s more probable your clients will be using the images only for their web site, blog, facebook, and phone anyway, so 72dpi 700×700 pixel images is enough for most people
5. Make sure your contract stipulates that you hold the copyright.

Remember: ALBUMS are your main reselling tool, so NEVER do a shoot without an album included. I have, and deeply regret having done this. It has usually resulted in no referrals from these clients as no one ever sees the photos

All the best and I will do another story along these lines in the future.

When is a back up not a back up?

When you ony have one copy.

Let me explain.

Some photographers copy their images to their hard drives as a “back up”, and then format their cards so they can continue shooting. This is not a back up strategy. Backups mean you have a copy of the photos you have taken, in two different locations. If one source fails, then the other is still intact. Therefor “backing p to a hard drive is a backup, but deletign the files from your cameras cards eliminates the back up, as you are left with one single copy, and therefore one single point of failure.

There are various ways of doing this. I use all of the following techniques as they work for me, and I can think of nothing worse than telling a client that you lost their photos!

First method is copying the photos on to your hard drive and having enough CF or SD cards, so that you need not erase the cards before you have completed editing the photos, and handed back your client the deliverables. I use a LOT of 4GB cards, and as they are fairly inexpensive this is a a sound method. The only time this gets awkward, is when you have a lot of shoots back to back.

The second method I use, is to have my computer do a regular back up, and to back up the photos to an external hard drive BEFORE you erase your cards. This method is very cheap, with terabyte hard drives being very inexpensive these days. If you are using a MAC then things are even easier, as Time machine automatically backs up your hard drive every hour without you even thinking about it.

The last method I use, for when I move the files off my main system, is what we call “near storage” or files we can access easily enough if required. For this I used to use DVDs. Once your collection of post shoot DVD archives gets over a thousand discs you realize there has to be a better way. I use DROBOS. I have two of them. They are very expandable and pretty fast once they boot up.

Their only weak point is that they use a proprietary OS, so if the main unit goes, you must buy a new one if you want to recover your data. That’s why I have TWO.

Other options include running your own servers, and should you opt to do this FreeNas is a pretty excellent one to use. You can learn more here. Well worth a look.

How important are belonging to associations and awards? I know photographers who make a big deal about them however like many professional photographers I have never entered a competition. Why do career professional photographers not bother with them? They are busy doing their job, and their job is pleasing their clients, NOT winning awards. I did not think like this when I first started out. I was looking for marketing ideas and joining associations like the WPPI and WPJA looked like the way to go. That changed when I read an article on photo.net where the writer said that the truly good wedding photographers do not need to join these associations as they get lots of word of mouth referrals. I found this turned out to be true.

So how do these sites maintain interest and keep milking photographers with steadily rising fees? Prizes and bragging rights! Napoleon Bonaparte said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon”, and so it is for plaques and awards, a bit of glass, a piece of wood.  That’s why they run competitions. Unlike awards whereby the clients have a say, they are a closed environment, and what photographers are looking for  has NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT A BRIDE AND GROOM ARE LOOKING FOR!

Read this article. It talks about the criteria used for giving awards. Judges are not looking for what you are looking for. Judges are looking for something new and with inpact.  Now, if we were talking commercial photography, advertising, then sure, impact counts. But today many people do not understand what classy and timeless wedding photography is about. Why is this important? Fads change. What is in this year is going to look old next year. In 30 years it will look even older. In 80 years your grand kids are going to wonder what you were thinking. Remember, your wedding photos are supposed to be timeless, not fadishly impactful today.

The easiest way of knowing what works is to look at a royal wedding, or a Hollywood celebrities wedding. You will immediately see they did NOT get a photographer who shot in them in some artsy (soon to be cheesy)  way. The photographer captured emotions and took classic photos. These photos do not win awards. They please clients.

On at least one occasion I have been asked to re-shoot a portrait session as the “Award Winning Photographer” took photos that were so artsy as to be unusable. That is why our portraiture is classic and timeless. I want you to be able to hang it on your wall when you are 65 and not be embarrassed when people ask, “Nice setting…is that you?”

If you are deciding on a wedding photographer and someone trots out they have won awards, tell them that’s nice, but ask to see a full wedding portfolio as it is more relevant than an award. If they heavily focus on their awards (trying to dazzle you) and have a weak portfolio, take it as a warning sign. It is likely they will use your day to focus on what they are after (awards for themselves)  rather than chasing after what you want. Great photos.

Remember a photographer is only as good as their most recent shoot.

BTW my awards are here.

I don’t know if you have ever needed to rescue a mirrored hard drive before but I ran into some issues recently when I disassembled one of my servers and lost access to the data.  It is possible you may run into this problem with Windows 7 as it is the first consumer oriented disk system to enable mirroring.

For Windows to allow mirroring of hard drives, something you do to protect your data in case a hard drive fails, you need to convert a drive to a dynamic disk. The gotcha is that if you pull a system apart and then try to access the data from an external hard drive bay or another computer, you cannot. However there is an easy way for you to access your data. You can find it here: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=191006

The instructions given are for one partition. I had two drives, one with one partition and the other with 2. The second partition was on the line immediately underneath, and simply changing the hex code tom 42 to 07 worked perfectly, giving me access to both partitions in their entirety.

Hope this helps you avoid some headaches.

Beautiful day for sailing.

Looks inviting, but off on the horizon you can see the snowy peaks that feed the lake….ice cold!