Who is Don Giannatti?

Please join me in my congratulating Don Giannatti, creative mentor and coach, as this year's recipient of the Tiffinbox Award.

I recall attending one of Don's first lighting workshops in Boston and kept in touch as he evolved and began offering his advice to other emerging photographers online.

Don is the consummate photographer/teacher, who gently coaxes you into being a better photographer and a better business person. He is relentless in sharing his opinion and delivers them as a matter of fact because he has the experience to back it all up. In addition to being a photographer, at one time Don also owned a design agency that worked with a variety of corporate and editorial clients. He brings all of his knowledge, distills it and delivers it to students through his websites Lighting Essentials and Project52.

In his own words:

I have been a commercial photographer since 1974, and have worked with advertising agencies and design firms all over the world. I have had studios in LA, Chicago, and Phoenix.

In the decades of my career I have shot fashion and beauty, product, industrial and corporate, and currently I make portraits and environmental images.

Project 52 Pro System is my flagship online learning center where I work with small groups of photographers, and I offer one-on-one mentorships.

I have taught at CreativeLIVE, and other online education platforms, and written 6 books on photography.

My belief in the power of photography and the creativity of photographers to wield that power makes my job the best in the world.

Example Of Don's Advice

Don's YouTube channel is one of my favorites. He doesn't mince words. He lays it out like any good teacher should. The advice is for us to take or leave behind. Here are two gems:

Don's Sample Portfolio

How Can I Learn From Donald Giannatti?

I've already mentioned Don's YouTube channel. But you should also follow Don on Instagram. He is a huge proponent of having a visually rich social media channel and likes what Instagram has to offer. Do pay attention to his advice on how to use Instagram, though.

Don is also a three-time book author. Yes, I do recommend his books.

If you are an emerging commercial photographer, you need to sign up for Project52. Interested in his other workshops or lighting tutorials? Bookmark Lighting Essentials.

Don's courses on CreativeLive are extremely popular. Here is one on product photography. And here's the first one he called Lighting Essentials.

The next course I want to enroll in? Don's environmental portraiture class.

Recognizing Past Tiffinbox Award Winners

Now in its 8th year, the Tiffinbox Award is now an annual tradition on August 23rd. Please visit and celebrate the previous awardees at the following links:

David DuChemin

Spencer Lum

Jamie Swanson

Jenika McDavitt

Neil van Neikerk

Megan DiPiero

David Anthony Williams

Do Me A Favor Please!

Did you learn something new or were you inspired by this post? Please share it with your photographer friends. Copy + paste the link and send your colleagues an email and tell them why they should check out this post or any of the other posts on Tiffinbox. I appreciate your help in spreading the word!

The #1 Question Asked By Photographers

“How can potential clients find me online?”

Even in 2018, a lot of photographers believe that all one has to do is upload photographs to a website and their clients will miraculously find them.

Adding to that myth are these words, “oh, I have a website but I haven't updated it in eons.” Then they chuckle.

Imagine your business is a steam engine (remember those?). The content you add frequently and consistently is the fuel for your engine to go faster and farther.

These are both huge problems that Galen Mooney of PhotographySquares is committed to solving for photographers.

If you want to be found online, your website needs to be set up properly and you need to be posting online often, sending search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! (among many others) an alert that there is fresh content on your site.

Why Squarespace?

Right now I publish two other websites: Seshu Photography & Connecticut Headshots, both using the Squarespace platform.

While it was super easy to set them up initially, I kept hearing about how it was difficult to optimize Squarespace sites for search engines. Digging a little deeper, though, I found out that was not true at all.

Now, compared to WordPress websites that use plugins like Yoast SEO, there aren't any plugins or extensions for diving into SEO on the Squarespace platform. So, one has to set things up manually (but done once and checked often, you should be good to go).

I might have been poking around Google and Facebook when perhaps it was a targeted advertisement that presented Galen's 5-day SEO Challenge (going on right now, with tomorrow being day 5, so sign up now and you can watch the replays of days 1-4).

SEO For Photographers

This is Galen's promise:

SEO for Photographers is … “Made especially for Squarespace users! You'll learn how to optimize your image tags, how to tweak old pages and blog posts to get the results you want, and how to track your SEO success as you start seeing results.”

If you are considering a Squarespace website for your photography business or you already have a Squarespace site, you owe to yourself to at least check out Galen Mooney's 5-Day SEO Challenge first.

If you want to learn more, then sign up for her course, SEO for Photographers. She will be opening enrollment tomorrow with some special bonuses, after her one-hour special presentation in her Facebook group.

5-Day SEO Challenge

Go ahead and LIKE her page and you should see a notification for her 10 am presentation. Just as a teaser, here is Day 1 of her most recent SEO challenge:

Interviewing Galen

A few months back, I interviewed Galen. You'll learn in this short interview with why it's important for you to optimize your site and what she teaches in her course, SEO For Photographers:

Of the two websites that I own that are using the Squarespace platform, I have used what Galen Mooney has taught me through her course on Connecticut Headshots and have seen a great many more inquiries and bookings. These are subtle or drastic changes – something as simple as using a H1 tag on each page or using the right descriptions when uploading images.

While she doesn't say it, I will … it pays to sweat the details. And like I say in the interview above, you won't be breaking anything when making those changes. If you find yourself flustered, Galen's Facebook group is a wonderful place to visit and ask questions and compare notes.

If you have a Squarespace site, you would do well to start optimizing it using Galen's advice.

“I'm the king of U-turns,” photographer Andy Anderson told our class at the 2014 Texas Photo Roundup. Over the course of the next few days, we'd come to learn that he meant that quite literally: Andy was in constant pursuit of his next personal project. For him that could have meant a dune buggy in a desert, or oilmen at work.

The bigger picture though, to me at least, wasn't about the art of it. Yes Andy spoke at length about how it was important to craft your own vision and continually be honing a unique point of view, and both of those things are incredibly important, that wasn't the golden nugget. The most valuable take-away from the workshop, and from my experiences since then was that photographers who shoot the most personal work get the most commissioned work of the type they want to do.

Other Tiffinbox blog posts that address the idea of personal work are here and here.

This concept has been reinforced by Andy's rep, Heather Elder, who writes the incredibly insightful, Notes from a Rep's Journal blog. Heather has often written that among the photographers she represents, it's always those who shoot the most personal work who find themselves the busiest commercially.

Years ago – I think it was from Nick Onken's blog, but am not 100% sure – I read the best advice regarding the photography business I've ever heard.

“Everything you do needs to be in service of two ideas – take better photos, and show them to more people.”

As I've built my business, that idea has been at the center of everything I do, and if a particular task isn't in service of one of those ideas, maybe that's something I should consider outsourcing (like bookkeeping).

The most valuable take-away from the workshop, and from my experiences since then was that photographers who shoot the most personal work get the most commissioned work of the type they want to do.

It all ties together though. In 2015 I committed to sending monthly e-mails to 2,000+ creatives and current clients via Yodelist as part of my overall broader marketing plan. Yodelist, while far less expensive then their chief competitor Agency Access, isn't a small financial commitment. To see a return on that investment, I realized quickly I couldn't send e-mails saying, “Hey! Come look at the same work I showed you last month!”

The catch-22 though is that much of the work I shoot in a given month won't be available to be shown publicly for a few months following, because it's either part of a broader yet-unfinished campaign, or because a magazine hasn't yet been published. As a result, having new personal work, like my recent “Fuego Faces” series is a key component to my marketing plan as I can shoot something today and have it live on my blog or website tomorrow.

While the “Fuego Faces” project was all shot in a day, my series of photos of New England Craftsmen has been ongoing for 3+ years with no end in sight. I don't exaggerate to say that literally every new client I've worked with during the past few years has referenced the craftsmen series – it's led to thousands (tens of perhaps?) of dollars of new work. I've received creative briefs with individual images pulled from the craftsmen gallery, and lost track of the number of times clients have said, “Just shoot it like your craftsmen series.”

Personal Work by Doug Levy

I try to treat personal work no different than commissioned work, and often that means paying an assistant to come to personal work shoots. It totally depends how you work though. For me, paying to have an assistant is just part of my overall marketing budget. I wouldn't do a client job without a second set of hands, so why would I shoot personal work any differently? To me, spending a few hundred dollars on an assistant = better photos = more paying client work. Personal work is also an opportunity to try new techniques and work in new assistants (or stylists, or digital techs) on jobs that inherently have a lower stress point than those involving large client expenditures.

I frequently get asked by local photographers, “How do I get more commercial clients?” At its root, the first step could almost always be, “Shoot some killer personal work and show it to as many people as possible.”