A series about storytelling in album design. We turn the page in a wedding album… It's night time and we're at the reception. We turn another page… We're back outside the church in bright daylight! How confusing is that? Not only is the mood of the imagery completely different, the natural flow of the story is disrupted and any feeling of the 'journey' is lost. Chronology creates flow It may sound too basic to mention, but sticking to the order of the day helps make your images into a story. It also speeds up album design by predetermining the order you lay them out on the pages. Here's something To View More >>

Right up there with the 3% rule as a Queensberry mantra is Good Better Best. We don't claim that either of them is original, just that they're common sense. In fact fundamental if you want to build a sustainable longterm career. Good Better Best is a strategy for up-selling – having products and services to tempt your clients across a range of price points. To be blunt, you're offering your customers what they want (something cheap!) while at the same time encouraging them to spend more. Simply put, it does so by offering people three choices… GOOD is your entry level – affordable if you To View More >>

The other day I proposed a way to encourage enquirers to look past your prices and make personal contact. It was partly a way to start identifying people who should be your clients, and withdrawing (politely) from those who probably shouldn't. You need to demonstrate to the first group why you’re the right photographer to spend their wedding day with! The 3% rule The 3% rule is our way of saying that you can't succeed by trying to appeal to everyone, and you definitely shouldn't try. It stems from the time, years ago, when we tried to estimate the number of professional photographers in the To View More >>

Pete and Ian have been blogging about colour management systems and how they help to ensure your image editing work delivers predictable colour and high-quality printing. But there's a lot to think about! Even the light you're working in can affect the results … or the clothes you're wearing, or the colour of your walls. So what could be easier? Getting us to do the work! Here's an incredibly simple new service, and a special offer: Batch Colour Correction by Queensberry in Lightroom. You can use our plugins, no matter where you are in the world, to send us DNG files from raw images you select To View More >>

Are you proud of your work? What's it worth? Where do you sit in the marketplace? Cheap and cheerful? In the pack? At the top? If you're not happy with where you are, what are you doing each day to change that? I believe it's very hard to achieve our goals if we don't have our heads and hearts straight, and at Queensberry we have fierce internal debates about two questions that directly affect what we do each day. The first is about our relationship with you, the photographer. You're our customer, right? Our job is to package your images, enhance their perceived value and create new sales opportunities To View More >>

Pete started off his recent posts by saying that colour management is one of the cornerstones of digital photography, but often misunderstood. Let me describe what you can reasonably expect from a sound colour management system consistently applied (certainly not miracles!). What you can expect 1. A reasonable indication of what your final print will look like (assuming you're sending the files print-ready). 2. To avoid gross errors (an Adobe 1998 file treated as if it's sRGB will look strikingly different, especially if colours go out of gamut). 3. Predictability: You can send your files to the To View More >>

Ian likes to talk about the good old days, when colour correction and colour management were a matter of picking up the phone and complaining to the lab. OK … I remember them too. Well, you can still outsource colour correction, but colour management is a shared responsibility now. In my earlier post I talk about screen calibration and soft-proofing, which most of us at least know about - but few people understand that taking all the care in the world over those won't be enough if your working environment is wrong. Try this experiment. First thing in the morning, sit down at your desk (where To View More >>

Colour management is one of the cornerstones of digital photography, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Some photographers are experts, some try to ignore the subject, some don't seem to have heard of it, others have read about it on forums or blogs and (kind of) get it. Years ago when our lab went digital, we brought in the experts to help set up our systems and get the best results from our printers. This relationship was not a one-date wonder. Ian and Jessica from NZ Colour Management have consulted to us regularly ever since. One thing's certain. If you use our print-ready service you To View More >>

The Chicago Sun-Times made the news by laying off its entire photography staff last week, leaving 28 people without a job. While we all need to move with the times, the real heart-breaking twist for the photojournalists is that they are to be replaced by reporters who will be taught how to take pictures and videos using iPhones. The story made news around the world, in part perhaps because one of the photographers who lost their jobs was veteran photojournalist - and Pulitzer winner - John H. White, who is featured in this audio: Over the years John White has photographed, among others, Nelson To View More >>

How interesting are your wedding photos? It depends how old they are. If your wedding was a month ago you love them. If your wedding was a year ago maybe you haven't thought about them in a while. If your wedding was twenty years ago you won't have thought about them in years! If your wedding was thirty years ago that hunk you married is someone's granddad. If your wedding was forty years ago, your grandkids are a bit impressed by the hunk that Granddad used to be … and how strangely people dressed back in the day. § After forty years those old pictures are as interesting as they were a month To View More >>