AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 27 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography.
Experience Over 27 years experience photographing weddings professionally. Past 4 years shooting digital exclusively.
Organizations Better Business Bureau.
Education/Credentials Going to photography seminars and reading all the wedding photography books I can find then applying the techniques and new styles I've learned with each wedding. You always need to grow and learn to keep up in this field. With each new wedding you photograph, you must challenge yourself to do better work than your previous wedding. You must always have the goal of making the wedding photographs for a bride & groom be the best photographs they have seen of any wedding.
Question Hey I work in a photo studio where the photographers shoot with latest canons and nikons and they use sd or compact flash. Our customers want to sit with us and design there albums, not dvd albums but actual albmus that will be printed. Do you have any know good recommended software to design albums, something wih lots of effects and inserts, easier than photoshop?? I want to sit with a customer and show him how everypage will look on his physical album but I need software which will have effects and inserts and easy to use, if you know anything please let me know THANKS!
Also check out Art Leather's Design Ease at http://www.artleather.com/ if you offer Art Leather albums or are willing to for software which will enable you to design layouts using albums with a great creative variety of mats. This software is currently free.
GraphiStudio called me the other day about a free software for designing GraphiStudio albums but you must have a professional photographer account and sign into the Trade Area for the download. I've not used it yet so I can't recommend one way or the other at this time. But you may check out GraphiStudio at http://www.graphistudio.com/usa/index.html
For the sake of All Experts readers, you will always be provided up to date information about photographic software and hardware by subscribing to professional photography magazines like Rangefinder where you may receive a free subscription at http://www.rangefindermag.com/
Another great professional photography magazine is Professional Photographer by the Professional Photographers Association (PPA) at http://www.ppa.com/
For my own wedding customers I offer a PDF download "Story Boards" which they may easily print. These forms makes it faster and easier for my customers to understand how to organize and quickly design the layouts they would basically like for me to create for them. When I'm working with a distant client, they simply mail me the Story Boards and I email them the design proofs for feedback and final approval before printing. When working with a local client, they bring the Story Boards to me and I design everything and then set-up an appointment for a sit down "final design session". This saves me a LOT of time.
When I first started doing magazine style album designs, I had a few customers who would walk in and not even know which pictures they wanted to use! Of course, I have better things to do with my time then sitting with them looking at pictures on the monitor while they try to figure out which pictures they want to use. My "Story Boards" forms explains how simple, easy and quickly this entire process can be done.
