Category Archives: Business/Blog
Jenna Cole Blog has Moved!
Isn’t the URL fun? It’s where you’ll find all of my “freshest” content.
Wedding Photography Equipment
A few months ago, this clip circled pretty quickly among photographers on Twitter. The couple featured learned from experience that owning a nice camera doesn’t guarantee beautiful photos.
I feel for the bride! It sounds like she attempted to do her research, attending a bridal show in hopes of picking the perfect photographer for her from among a pool that she assumed would only be made up of top-notch photographers. Unfortunately all it takes to call yourself a photographer is the purchase of a camera and 10 minutes setting up a free blog or website. (In all fairness I am one of these people as I have had no formal training in photography 
)
One way to avoid experiencing the same fate is to ask to see a full wedding that your photographer has delivered to clients. Looking through all of the photos from the day, from start to finish, will help you see if the artist you are considered can handle the many different lighting situations that can be encountered throughout the wedding day. It is my opinion that every photographer willing to shoot weddings should be willing and able to show you a full wedding from their past.
An interview with a potential bride made me realize that there is another vein of questions that an astute brides and grooms can ask when searching for the perfect photographer for their wedding day. This particular bride surprised me by asking, “Can you tell me a little bit more about the equipment you would be using to shoot my wedding?”
Wow, I wasn’t expecting that! I gladly spent some time talking to her about what I have.
My main body is a Canon 5D Mark II:
My backup body is a Canon 50D:
Hiring a photographer with backup equipment is important because accidents and malfunctions happen, and you want to be sure that the person capturing your wedding day can keep on shooting without a run to the nearest electronics store for an emergency purchase. It’s also important to have more than one lens (once I tripped and fell at a wedding, landing directly on one of my lenses and rendering it useless for the rest of the wedding day), and if your ceremony/reception will be in low-light areas you might want to ask what your photographer would do in the event that one of their flashes stopped working for the day.
These questions can be intimidating to ask because you are likely talking to someone who can talk for hours about megapixels, aperture, and ISO, things you might not know anything about. Here is one simple question that you can ask which should guide your photographer to send back uncomplicated replies.
Do you have backup equipment for your main camera body, lens, and flash? What would you do in the event of an accident or technical malfunction resulting in the loss of one of these?
You can also ask what kind of camera body they are using, but assuming that a more expensive camera body will give you even more beautiful photos than the next guy is a mistake. Anyone can purchase a $7000 camera body and have no idea how to harness its power. If you do ask about the camera body I would be wary of anyone charging several thousand dollars and using entry level cameras from either the Nikon or Canon lines. Camera bodies that cost more are more versatile, handle low light situations better, and generally a person using professional level camera body has invested similarly in the lenses and other accessories they are using as well.
I think if more brides were to ask about backup equipment and viewing full weddings there would be less stories of unmet expectations like the woman who appeared before Judge Joe Brown.
Dear Fellow Photographers…
My cutie of a son
Congrats! You have a blog. I love to subscribe to the blogs of my peers and be inspired by their work. (It’s also a great way for me to learn about interesting locations around the area I live!)
As someone who subscribes to a lot of blogs, I admit I have a few pet peeves that could be easily fixed if you would take a few moments to do so.
First, modify the title tag for your site to indicate where you are located. When you visit my blog it’s really easy to see where I am located, because it has Jenna Cole Photography-Dallas, TX running across the top. Christine of Big Pink Cookie just posted about this as well.
When I subscribe to your blog in my Google Reader, I file you away in the correct folder. Right now as I’m preparing to move to Chicago I’m building up my Photographers-Illinois folder, attempting to learn who my peers will be when I relocate. Unfortunately many of them haven’t named their feed correctly, and so they show up in my reader named “Blog” or the title starts with something like “Wedding Photography” and I have to highlight over the name to see who it is. Make sure that your name shows up when I subscribe to your feed, and start the title with your name, not your location or what you do, otherwise you get lost in a sea of other “Chicago Wedding Photography” titles.
Summarized posts. This, in my opinion, only discourages people from subscribing to and reading your blog. I don’t read blogs that do this, because clicking over every time is so frustrating and time consuming. If you want to know how many people are reading, burn your feed using Feedburner and log in to check your “reach” each day. You’ll reach more people if you stop summarizing your content, I guarantee it.
The worst offense? Some of you don’t even HAVE a feed. Blogs are meant to be something people can subscribe to, to allow them to keep up with your ever-changing content. I don’t have time to check your page each day for new content, I want Google Reader to take care of that for me. If you don’t have a feed, I, and many other readers like myself, will never take the time to check out the beautiful work you are producing. And that would be a shame indeed.
The secret to knowing if it’s easy to subscribe to your blog? Sign up for Google Reader and subscribe to yourself. You’ll see what it’s going to be like for others who would like to do so.
The best part about these tips? Your clients and potential clients will like these changes as well!
Sincerely,
Jenna Cole
What A Difference A Year Makes
Things have been a little slow for me lately* and so I’ve been accepting sessions I don’t normally do on a limited basis, like the session I recently did with Tracy’s son. She was inspired by this session I did last summer and after I processed her images and then went back to see the results from last year I was shocked. Look at the difference a year makes!
Here is what I posted on my blog last year.
And here is one of the shots I’ll be giving to Tracy. Huge difference right? Since last summer I’ve upgraded my equipment (I had a camera body that was making everything very red which was very frustrating to work with), and my shooting and processing styles have changed a bit as well. Hopefully you will all agree they’ve changed for the better!
This shoot was in Deep Ellum and I love that I can find new graffiti and murals no matter how often I visit.
We’ll end with my favorite shot from the day. Isn’t he a sweetheart?
*Is it okay to admit that? No one else seems to do so, but with an economic downturn like the one we’re experiencing here in the US, I can’t be the only one who’s noticing that people are cutting back on the amount of money they are budgeting toward photography!
