This past week I attended David Ziser’s “Digital Wakeup Call Tour: A New Dawn” photography seminar.  The description sounded promising — for $59, get four hours of tips and tricks from one of the top wedding photographers in three broad areas — photography, software post-production, and building your business. I attended expecting lots of useful information.

So, you may ask, how was it? Overall, it was excellent, and I was very happy I went.

During the photography section, Mr. Ziser rapidly went over a flurry of tips on how to take high-quality, distinctive event photos. A few of the tips, like always taking indoor flash photos in M[anual] mode, I’d stumbled onto myself after lots of trial and error. Most, though, like manually zooming your flash when taking wide angle shots, were completely new to me, and will be very helpful the next time I’m in those situations. Mr. Ziser has a very different style from mine, and his photos are aimed for a different audience, one that prefers large prints over Facebook, so some of the tips didn’t apply. However, overall, I learned a lot, and I think the info from this section will do a lot to improve my photography.

The software section was where the tour sponsors became painfully evident. Given the relatively low admission price for such a high-quality seminar, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of the tour’s expenses were being paid for by corporate sponsors, and that those sponsors were promised advertising in exchange for their support. Mr. Ziser did seem genuinely enthusiastic about the products he talked about, and they all seemed helpful for most event photographers. They appeared to be less useful for me personally, for two reasons.

First, my style of cosplay photography is very high-volume — historically I’ve done more con coverage than selective photoshoots. That, coupled with the fact that cosplay photography pays, on average, $0/photo, means that I can’t spend that much time on each photo. In general, I try to spend no more than one minute editing each photo, including cropping, color, exposure, and contrast. Even with that goal, if I post 2000 photos from a convention, that’s 2000 minutes (or about 33 hours) of photo editing. If I tried some of the techniques described in the software section, it would take me six months to post all the photos. Though as I do more private photoshoots, I’ll probably start posting fewer photos, and have more time to edit each one.

Second, I do almost all of my photo editing today in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software. (The one major exception is noise reduction, where I use Noise Ninja.) DPP fits into my existing workflow very well, and I have no good reason right now to make changes. In the future I may move to Lightroom, but I haven’t felt I need its complexity or power quite yet.

After the software section, the seminar concluded with a section on growing a small service business. While the examples were, of course, all photography-oriented, they could easily be adapted for any small business. The most important tip, to me, was one that I still struggle with — Don’t undervalue your work. As a small business its easy to convince yourself you have to compete on price, that your business has to have the lowest prices, and has to win over every potential customer. A better approach is to charge a sustainable price, ignore unprofitable customers, and accept that you won’t be the best fit for everyone.

While in general the business tips were excellent, the technology-related tips did seem a bit behind the curve. Blogs were mentioned, but some other leading-edge techniques were ignored, including the importance of a good corporate web site and building awareness of your business on social networking sites.

I wasn’t very surprised by these omissions, because in general there was a very obvious gap between Mr. Ziser and today’s younger generation. Mr. Ziser has been very quick in adopting new photography technologies, including digital photography, the latest high-ISO techniques, IS/OS/VC lenses, and dSLRs with video recording. However, he doesn’t seem to have adapted as well to changes in how people view photography and paper prints.

For example, Mr. Ziser still believes looking through a physical wedding photo album is a better experience and is more romantic than looking at the same photos together on a computer screen, and he’s right, for most people down to the age of about 25-30. Younger than that, though, I believe the mystique of a physical wedding album is much less, and in many cases will never be preferred over looking at the same photos on the computer together.  In my experience people below the age of 25 very rarely want prints, regardless of the occasion, even when they cost $0.19 each; if you ask them to pay $10 or $50 a print they’re going to look at you like you’re trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge.  And, no, I don’t believe they all will regret the lack of a physical album in the future.

Mr. Ziser was also a bit behind the curve on data archiving. 45GB of data still seems like a huge amount to him. With today’s 1.5TB drives around $120/each, it’s a trival amount to store. Except, of course, when you’re trying to burn the data onto DVDs. Wait, why DVDs? Well, apparently, Mr. Ziser believes that DVDs are better for data archiving because they have been certified to last 100 years. Putting aside the obvious question of how media can be certified to last 100 years without a time machine, will it even be possible to find a DVD reader in a 100 years? (Consider 5.25″ floppies, and how hard it is to read one of them less than 20 years after they were the #1 storage medium.) A better solution is to archive data to the largest available storage device today (1.5TB drives), and then recopy the data every few years to a newer, higher-capacity solution. For example, I originally archived my photos to 700MB CDROMs. When DVD burners came along, I consolidated my CDROM archives into a few DVDs, which were later consolidated onto 250GB hard drives, which recently were consolidated onto one big 1.5TB drive. Because digital media changes so fast, archives have to be constantly moved to newer media, so as long as your archival medium lasts 3-4 years, you’re set.

Mr. Ziser also all but admitted he doesn’t really understand social networking sites like Facebook. In general, his customers appear to be on the older and fairly-well-off side. That’s certainly an enviable position to be in, but one that limits how much exposure he has to today’s younger, middle-class photography customer. Because of differences in how a screen and a printer render a photo, a lot of his photos don’t look that great until you see them on paper, preferably 10×14 or larger (or on metallic paper). This is perfect for his client base, but is less desirable to other customer demographics who want photos that also look great on Facebook.

I felt the seminar was well worth $59 and four hours of my time, despite the sometimes heavy-handed sponsorship messages. I came away with lots of mental notes on things to try the next time I’m in the field, and am very happy I attended. I recommend this seminar for all event photographers who wish to improve their craft and their business.