Michael [mahy-kuhl] – noun
1. A male given name. 2. A witty, charming professional wedding photographer who enjoys movies, exercise, romantic walks on the beach and large pepperoni pizzas.
Maven [may-ven] – noun
1. A connoisseur or trusted expert in a particular field who seeks to pass his knowledge onto others. 2. An intense gatherer of useful information. 3. An individual who demonstrates passion for learning and teaching a specific topic, particularly through a well connected social network.
Thank you for coming to my blog! I update it regularly, so if you ever want to know what I am up to, please come by and take a peek. Feel free to leave your comments below.
I had an epiphany today about the Sky Cam. I am often asked about how to make these, which is why I have posted the construction guide on my store. The Sky Cam is a way to secure your very expensive SLR camera on top of a painter's pole which will allow you to take pictures from 10-30 feet in the air. One of the problems with using the Sky Cam is that unless you have a special Zig viewer which is a small camera that fits over the view finder and plays on a detachable monitor, you cannot see what you are taking a picture of.
I just realized, the new Canon "Live View" feature solves this. All you would need is a video coupler, ($.99 at Radio Shack) and 20-30' of video cable, just plug it into your Media Store / Portable DVD player. You can see everything! If you are going the transmitter route, you are good to go! (If not you have 10 seconds before the timer fires. Ive learned that if you go this way, set up your AEB right next to each other and it will take 3 pictures).
Here is the sketch I made this evening:
It will be a while, but I have a video in the works on the Michael Andrew Sky Cam. The adapter itself can be made for about $25 from materials found in most hardware stores. If you are serious about making one and would like the very detailed instructions you can purchase Michael Andrew Sky Cam Adapter Guide Here.
Does anyone know anything about this video? Is it for real? I mean...if it is I am a little freaked out. Its about 8 minutes long, but wow...if this is real its amazing.
I apologize for the down time on the blog. My hosting company has made some improvements, I hope we will see the results. I had a great shoot today and will be posting a forum video on Youtube shortly. Please Standby!
Photoshop Express launched today. For those of you who don’t know what this, its basically a place for your to store AND edit your photos on line. I believe this is truly revolutionary because other photo sharing sites such as Flickr do not allow you to edit, organize and SHARE pictures like this. Especially on the share part, slideshows, emails, embedding all made super easy. Look for Photoshop Express to give sites like Flickr a run for their money, because it offers features that are not available anywhere else on the internet for free.
Facebook and MySpace have really revolutionized “social picture sharing”. I was impressed to see that there is a sign in feature on PS Express that allows you to sign into Facebook, Picasa, and photobuckt and edit those pictures on those sites.
Photoshop Express is VERY VERY limited in what it can do compared to the regular, armed to the teeth Photoshop. We are talking, extremely basic stuff here….no layers, masks or whatever. Photoshop express reminds me of the very earliest versions of Photoshop Elements. In any case, most casual photographers will find these tools useful and helpful.
Check it out...its fun, its free, its a nice place to store pictures online. I signed up.
Hey everyone- Just wanted to give you a heads up that my sites may be down for up to 48 hours starting tomorrow. My hosting company is upgrading the service / doing maintenance and it will experience some downtime, at least this is what they are telling me.
So just remember from March 28th-30th some weird things may be going on, there may be no blog, or it may be glitchy for a day or two. Thanks for your patience during this time.
A few weeks ago a little school girl came to my door and sold me a box of some generic brand White Chunk Macadamia Nut cookies, the frozen kind you cook. I bought some just to hep the girl out, and dont you know the cookies were MIND BLOWINGLY good. Like AMAZINGLY good.
I was craving some more a few days ago, cant find the little girl, so I went to the store to see what my options were. These were the only two I could find, so, I decided to try both. I do this a lot if I am looking for a new product, and if it's reasonably priced, I just buy both and do a taste test.
The Pillsbury brand, in the blue bag, I thought appeared to be yummier, but just look at this picture below (same perspective sides) after they were cooked. Its a no brainer, the Toll House Cookies were almost as good as the cookies the little girl sold me. The Pillsbury ones were not very good at all. They dont even look like their picture! That little pillsbury clay man isnt so cute anymore. He looks more like a Decepticon.....I know why he is smiling like that...he is thinking: "Yeah buy these cookies, just buy them, even though they wont look or taste anything like this" Sneaky little clay man....
But ya...try the Toll House White Chunk Macadamia nut Cookies if you ever get the urge, they are yummy. Does anyone know of any other brands out there that are good? I really like these cookies.....
Best Way to get Started making money as a photographer.....
I get asked this almost every week by beginners. If you are truly serious about making money by taking pictures, this is my best advice:
Do it for free...
Ask anyone and everyone you know if they would like to have their picture taken. Get shots of them, their family, their friends, their dogs, cats, monkeys. Become a photographer fool....hey its digital....if the shot doesnt work out, delete it. Chances are, unless its a special event your friends wont care. If the shots work out, they will be thrilled and recommend you to their friends.
Your skill will develop with practice, with practice comes experience, with experience comes intuition that is irreplaceable on a big shoot. This intuition is why some wedding photographers make it and some dont. You will not have time to think about camera settings during the wedding. It must become second nature.
I promise you, that as you do these free shoots, eventually your "clients" will start offering you money.
I still shoot for free a few times a month, just because I feel good to offer it as service. Its a wonderful thing, but, yes, that is the best way to start:
Yesterday 12 huge packages arrived- the first shipment of my canon 40 d tutorial training dvds, well over 1000 of them. This was pretty exciting for me. Packaged, Bar Coded, the whole shebang, even the disk itself was silk screened. I was pretty proud of it. I know you are probably asking yourself, how in the world has Michael Andrew been selling these things for the last few weeks if he didnt have them? Well...thats a good question- the short answer is, Ive been making DVDs (although they are wedding videos) for about 5 years now and I have gotten pretty good at it, including the boxes and everything, so I had made a short run of about 75 from my own production studio. The problem with these shorter runs, is they are not so cost effective. The disks I received yesterday were professionally made, complete with glass mastered disks, guaranteed to play on any DVD normal player, and they cost about half as much to produce as in-studio disks. The only problem with this route is you have to order at least 1000 of them.
Now, comes the hard part, the marketing. I know there are tons of photographers out there with Canon 40D's, who have spent all this money on them and arent sure how to use them. I got an email today from a student who said he has been shooting with the Canon D series cameras, like the 10D, 20D, 30D, etc and said he didnt like the camera because the pictures didnt look professional and wanted something that could take a professional picture like the ones he saw on my website. Well...all the photographs on my website were taken with these cameras. A skilled photographer will be able to use just about any camera to get a nice portrait because he/she knows the rules of the game. So, students will spend $1500 on these cameras, and then give up after a few weeks, when a small investment would make all the difference, and I will tell you now, the guide that comes with the camera is not enough.
Now to answer another question I am sure you have by now. Why does Michael Andrew keep on talking about this DVD?!? LOL :) Well about a week ago I wrote a review on the video with a very specific purpose, and that was for the search engines to pick it up. I am trying to learn everything I can about helping search engines find websites. This is the missing link, I have a good product, there are photographers out there who want it, how can I help photographers find my Canon 40D DVD? Especially because its such an amazingly fantastic DVD. Its like a turtle without a shell if you have a 40 D and no Michael Andrew Crash Course training...ya know?
I had one student, who I really appreciate Sandy, email me a few weeks ago and point me in the right direction. She can be very blunt, but I listened to her and she has been so right. I needed a crash course on Search Engine Optimization. So I have been studying this topic like crazy the last week or so. In the process, I also learned that my blog, particularly those articles on the front page, rank extremely high on google (this is due to the fact that I update it regularly and have so many wonderful friends that visit so often....THANK YOU!!)
Test it out and do this search on google:
Allison's Bridal Shoot
Granted its not a super competitive keyword search, but in the amount of time (2 days) the number of brides out there named Allison, I believe this is pretty impressive. (Its ranked number one as of this writing). That article I wrote on my Canon 40 D DVD, as of now, its like #7. So....that's what I was up to when I wrote that article.
Let me just tell you a little bit about the project- It took a good 4 months to script, write, edit, re-shoot, re-edit, going over and over and over to get it just right. This is something I am planning on going into retail stores, so it had to be as perfect as possible. It was a very difficult project, but I can say I learned soooooo much about it. When I finished, I wasnt sure if it was worth it. Now, however, it absolutely was worth it. I get emails all the time from students who have watched my canon 40d dvd and they really have appreciated it.
I know now that from what I have learned I could probably re-make it in about 2-3 weeks. I have 3 new DVD projects in the works, Photoshop Crash Course, Canon Rebel SXi Crash Course (to be released in May) and a Videography Crash Course.
Now I am trying to figure out how to market these on the internet, so I am learning all about SEO. I had a company from UTAH do the SEO work of my photography site, but I wanted to try on my own for this project and its been a wonderful learning experience. Ive even gone through the trouble of purchasing the domain name www.canon40ddvd.com and tonight as I was reading one of my SEO books, I learned about all these mistakes I was making. Mistakes can be good, because if they are painful enough, you wont repeat them.
Ok, maybe I am rambling here, but the lesson I have learned from these experiences is that there is so much to gain from being a little brave, sucking it up and just trying to do something even if you arent really sure how to go about it. If you commit to just sticking it out, eventually you will have success (just....probably not when you want it).
