Rebecca said it right! The more you replicate other photographers the more beige you become. Be inspired by the success of other photographers and influenced by their philosophies. Be colourful, but accept that some people see beige as a safe colour. Somebody asked me how do we stand out when our audience sees us as somehow all the same ... just dearer or cheaper (light beige and dark beige). I was watching a piece on TED about a guy called Daniel Libeskind ... his work is very left of centre and clearly not beige. Watch it and listen to his talk. Take note of his word sets, Emotional To View More >>

I just made a couple of new friends, Jeff and Erin Youngren from San Diego… And it took all of a couple of minutes. Stephen and Danny first met these guys at WPPI in Vegas, and we’ve been in touch ever since. You may remember our post about their new website and promo video so I asked them to share some of their experiences around online marketing, business and their album strategy.  But it was their philosophy, not only to business, but to life, that dominated the conversation. Let’s be friends Jeff and Erin had just returned from a holiday to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, with To View More >>

I'm going to drop two shoes in this post. First shoe: Some time ago Johannes wrote a post he called Crikey ("that's a lot of money for an album"). It made me feel a little fidgety. I thought, we care too much about the quality of our products and services to compromise them, and maybe that's a problem. Clients often say they love what we do, but can we do it cheaper? Sometimes we try. We go about looking at how we could adapt a product, system or idea … but we don't do cheap well. We're as proud of our work as you are of yours, and compromising feels like we're shooting for the moon with an To View More >>

My interview with Rod Ellmore talked about how the close partnership between photographers and vendors in the '70s and '80s helped build some great careers, but it wasn't all positive. One disadvantage was that marketing gimmicks picked up at seminars organised by the vendors propagated like viruses! Like this one - the notorious "couple in the brandy glass". Pam brought us a picture (left) from her brother Martin's 80s wedding to Simone (thanks for sharing!). And I found proof that tacky ideas live on in Photoshop. Now you know I'm a snob – but not as much as I used to be: There's nothing wrong To View More >>

My clients would not dream of paying me $4000 for an empty photo album. Nor would they pay that for a book with somebody else’s photographs in it. They wouldn’t pay me that much even if I supplied them the files to print the images themselves. My clients would pay me $5000 for a book that told a story about themselves that was beautiful, personal, and emotional. The tooth fairy only pays up on the real thing. What is a sample album? Sample albums have several jobs. The main one is to set up an expectation. An expectation of quality, style, and professionalism. Our sample album(s) are what To View More >>

We know the feeling – you know there must be a way to do something, but you just can't figure it out.    Here's an example: there's no standard "title" aperture in PJ Remix, so how do you add a title? There are actually two ways to do it. The easier way (but maybe also easier to get wrong) is simply this: Add a blank aperture to the layout using the Add button (left image, above) Change the aperture to Customise (right image, above) Uncheck the Constrain Proportions box and enter the values directly. Easy as long as you remember the values: 112 wide by 200 high , as above. Whether you use To View More >>

Michael and Anna Costa have been touring the US over the past few months sharing their secrets at PUG conferences and events. We're their preferred album supplier so we designed an 18x12 Duo for them to take on tour. The objective was to demonstrate the value of differentiation: how great presentation can help you stand out and build your studio profile. So how did it go? We received this note from them: "I wanted to tell you the album is drop dead gorgeous. The hundreds of people that saw it absolutely loved it! It couldn't have got a better response.   "There’s just nothing quite like a Queensberry To View More >>

The New Year is a great time to stop, take a look around, absorb what you've achieved, and focus on what the year ahead offers. I've just done the absorb bit. Gone back and had a look at what we've posted over the past year. I found some really great stuff I'd forgotten about! No doubt you've forgotten or missed some of these posts too so over the next few days we'll bring you our favourite posts of 2008.  There's not much of a criteria - just posts that really stood out to us. I hope they do to you too. We'll start by engaging your senses. Today we've picked a couple of really interesting interviews, To View More >>

We owe a big thank you to all the people who completed our survey recently. We had a great response, and we thought you'd like to know the outcome. There were two major surprises, as you'll see. 1. We listed all the vendors whose resources we distribute, and asked you to tell us which companies you use. People named an average of two companies each, and some people named several. 2. Over a third named Queensberry as one of their suppliers, but the first big surprise was that 40% of respondents wrote in the name of a company whose resources we don't offer. In fact we discovered that PJ is used to To View More >>

Follow the links for "the story so far" in our series on the recession... Yes, times will be tough for a while but you shouldn't assume the sky is falling. It makes no sense to sacrifice your business and market reputation to survive the short term challenge. Instead you may need to pull your horns in and find ways to prosper while others decline. A good place to start is by analysing your budget and business model, and we have a spreadsheet to help with that. Most people react to the threat of declining sales by saying, "I've gotta cut my costs". Everyone needs to work out their own figures, but To View More >>