An Adobe Community Professional, you can find A.J. posting video tutorials & reviews on his website, when he’s not creating content for Layers Magazine or GeekBeat.TV. This is his second guest blog post for Tiffinbox. Read his first post as well. Then follow him on Twitter.

First, I want to thank Seshu for having me back on his blog. My schedule is such that I really try to make time for these guest articles; it's truly a privilege to contribute to the community.

For today's post I wanted to discuss copyright, and what you're not doing about it. I'm constantly surprised at the number of photographers who don't register their image copyrights. If you consider yourself a professional photographer, act professionally for the sake of your business and register your images. It's easy and affordable ($35), especially when compared to the insane amount of money you spend on your equipment. It can also be done online through the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO).

As I re-read the above paragraph, I can see how I'm coming off a bit harsh. Not my intention, it's just lately I've come across more photographers who have seen their work used by someone else. It's easy for you to register, it's even easier for someone to grab your image and use it. Consider this recent example in which Will King Photography was blatantly ripped off by 367 Media. What I find interesting is the folks that stole Will's images are located in the same geographic area. Usually, when I hear of these cases, they occur in other countries or different states.

In a previous post Seshu suggests you secure your images, and provides a link to David Riecks security page. Those are all good suggestions for discouraging infringement.

Registering your copyright is going to be your go-to solution if infringement happens.

Copyright is a civil matter handled in federal court. Without proper copyright registration you may be entitled to actual damages, e.g., standard licensing fees, profits received from infringement, and little else. You will not receive any statutory damages without proper registration. Considering most photographers reading this are using some sort of DAM (digital asset management) for organizing photos adding registration to your digital workflow wouldn't be too hard. For Lightroom & Photoshop enthusiasts I've recorded two videos on adding metadata to your images. Not only is this a good idea for SEO purposes, it's also a great way to ensure your copyright info is embed in every image you post. Did I mention most thieves are lazy? Yup, you shouldn't be surprised how many times your image is reposted as is, without even a name change, metadata intact.

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Here are some additional resources to learn more about copyright registration:

1. The PPA helps photographers educate their customers on why copyright is important.

2. Ken Kaminesky interviews Carolyn Wright aka The Photo Attorney who answers photographers burning copyright questions.

3. Jack Reznicki & Ed Greenberg produced the Photographers Legal Guide on DVD, which you can purchase through Kelby Training.

DISCLAIMER – I am not an attorney, nor is this article to be considered professional legal advice.

Do you copyright your images? Tell us about your process down below! You may want to consider a company like MyOWS to help you copyright and then manage and protect your images.

You probably already know that I work with a Business Coach.

More recently, I have considered working with a Life Coach (also known as a Personal Coach) as well. Why? Well, to help me get my priorities straight. I have just had two invigorating sessions with Bernadette Bolton of Exceptional Life. She works with clients far and wide. I would be remiss if I didn't mention my friend Arvind Devalia out of London, England, who is also a Life Coach.

If you are a photographer, I would also urge you to consider working with a Photo Coach. Two names come to mind – Selina Maitreya and Mike Davis.

So feed my curiosity a little will ya?

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Having a Business Coach, Life Coach and or a Photo Coach could make or break your business. Do you work with a coach? If you do, tell me/us why? If you don't, why not? Do you know of Business, Life or Photo coaches who should be mentioned? List their names and their website links below in the comments section. Thank you!

Amanda Reseburg is a wedding and portrait photographer from Beloit, WI. When she's not photographing for clients she's hanging out with her kids, shooting for fun and blogging incessantly. In the spirit of personal passions, Amanda started Kindred Spirits Hospice Photography in 2009. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter.

Starting a career in photography is a lot like dating.

In the beginning, the passion is ignited and you want to be with photography ALL. THE. TIME. Your camera is your constant companion and you will photograph anything that moves. You love photography. Photography loves you. It gives you butterflies. You will be together forever.

As you become more serious with photography, you begin to settle into a typical routine. Sure, you still love photography, but the passion has waned a bit. You have regular clients. Regular shoots. Regular poses. It’s all very comfortable. All very regular.

There may come a time when you become SO comfortable with your long-term love Photography that you start to hate the very sight of it. Everything your camera does starts to bug you and you just want some time to THINK … ok, maybe not … but, much like dating, if you don’t feed your relationship with photography … it will die. Those butterflies you felt in the beginning will go away, and what you’ll be left with is a JOB. Yes, I maintain that even at its most hectic I have the best job in the world. But, that doesn’t mean my passion for the craft couldn’t use a little pick-me-up.

Enter personal projects. Diving into personal work is a way to not only practice newly learned skills, but it’s the best way to really enjoy your craft again. With personal work, the rules fade away for the most part. You are shooting for yourself and yourself only. There are no clients to please and no deadlines to meet.

Last summer I started a personal project based on my love of turn-of-the-century children’s portraiture. I wanted to tap into what I call the natural “creepiness” of kids. It was a departure from what my portrait clients typically ask for, but it was FOR me, no one else. The project morphed into what people started calling “Creepy Kids.” It was met with mixed reviews. Some people LOVED the darker take on children’s portraits. Some people thought I had made the precious children look dead or evil. But, I was satisfied in the end that I had created something that I liked and in the process learned something new about my aesthetic.

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Tapping into a darker, moodier feel to my portraits changed my outlook on my regular client-based work. In that sense, stepping outside of my “9-to-5” to shoot just for me really changed my work as a whole. I could have continued shooting what easily sells, but I wonder how long I could continue to do that before I reached maximum burnout.

I challenge all working photographers to take time out to shoot for you. Reclaim your passion, embrace what others may find strange, and find those butterflies again.

Are you working on a personal project that you would like to share with other photographers? Tiffinbox welcomes your submission. Simply contact me if you are interested in guest blogging.

Today's guest post is by Jared Bauman who has built a photography studio in Southern California that photographs over 200 events and sessions annually. In business for a decade, Jared's clients fly him across the world to document their big events. Jared is a Co-Founder and President of ShootDotEdit, the #1 post processing partner for the professional wedding photographer. Known for his business background, Jared has released several educational DVDs and tours the country speaking to photographers about their small business. Follow him on Twitter.

Think Like An Owner

Mention that you’re a small business owner to anyone, and more than likely the response is along the lines of “Wow, you must make a lot of money and have a lot of time off!” Contrary to popular opinion, being a business owner seems to be synonymous with being a jack of all trades and master of none. Being a small business owner is overwhelming, time intensive, and all consuming.

In his book “The E-Myth”, Michael Gerber talks about going to work ON your business, rather than IN your business. By stepping back and watching your business, you learn to develop a system that will work outside of you. Systems don’t make mistakes … Only people do. So by developing a system, you can ensure that your business will run smoothly and effectively, providing the best possible product and experience for your clients.

Think of how much time we waste each day. Imagine if you weren’t the owner of the business … But merely just an employee. What would the owner think of how you spend your time on a daily basis? Are you working just to get things done? Or are you going to work and acting like an owner, working on tasks that only an owner can to grow and advance the business?

Determine the tasks in your business that only you can do. Spend time developing a system at your studio. It takes a lot of effort. But, by creating a manual for your systems and operations, you’ll be on the path to working ON your business, rather than IN your business. And this is where you’ll experience all of the freedom that small business owners dream about.

Efficiency

As small business owners, we are responsible for every part of our business. Most days, we juggle email, phone, calendar, billing, editing, production, IT … All in addition to our busy shooting schedule!

Because of this, becoming hyper-efficient at the tasks we are required to do becomes imperative. If we HAVE to do the task (reference the previous entry for more on that), then we need to perform the task as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is the only way we’ll be able to spend our time growing our business, rather than just operating it.

Here are some great tips for becoming more efficient in your daily tasks:

1) Set up Drafts and Rules in your inbox to handle frequently asked emails. Typically speaking, most of the emails we receive … We’ve answered before. Save your answer as a Draft, and next time you get that same email, copy it over as a response. Add a personalized intro and close, and send it off!

2) Utilize Rules to sort through emails that you can delay for later.

3) Utilize shortcut keys. Apple has a well-developed set of shortcut keys, along with Gmail. Shortcut keys can shave minutes off of your daily activity, but these add up to hours each week. You can see what that adds up to each year.

4) Take advantage of software like Text Expander to further reduce duplicated time.

5) Maximize your usage of a To Do list app, like Wunderlist or Things. Tasks that can be handled quickly (under 2 or 3 minutes) should be taken care of right away. Anything else is placed on your to do list, with a defined due date.

6) Much of this seems mundane and somewhat extraneous. However, if you can maximize efficiency on day-to-day tasks, you leave yourself able to do more of what you love…. And isn’t that what we all got in this for?

Pricing & Packaging

Pricing. It’s often the last thing we think about as photographers. We focus on our website, our branding. We pour over reviews of the latest gear, and try to learn how to light for every situation. Email monopolizes our time, and fulfilling client orders takes up our off days. And yet, pricing is one of the most important pieces of our small business.

Believe it or not, there is actually a science behind Pricing. From the beginning, you should set your goals BEFORE you construct your pricing. Do you know how much you want to work? Do you know how much you want to make? All of these things should be taken into consideration as you construct your pricing.

Confusion is usually the main reason prospective clients don’t book. Confusion enters the picture when the pricing is introduced. It might be confusion through the structure of the pricing, and they couldn’t find a package that suited their needs. Or maybe they were interested in an album, and there were just far too many options. Maybe they didn’t see an engagement session anywhere, it wasn’t in the packages, and they couldn’t find it on the a la carte list.

Simplifying the pricing process gives you a huge advantage when it comes to booking.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1) Have an odd number of packages. This gives your pricing a “natural middle” point, which naturally guides your clients towards certain options.

2) Whenever possible … Less is more! Reduce the number of options available.

3) Don’t show them the whole menu. Save the details for later.

At the end of the day, keep it simple, and remove confusion at all costs. This will ensure you give yourself the best chance of booking the wedding, and working with the couples you really want as your clients.

This is Dr. Dhiraj Kacker's second guest blog post here. Read his first post on album manufacturing too. He is the CEO and co-founder of Canvera, an online digital photography company based in Bangalore, India. Dhiraj can be found online on Twitter, his company blog or his personal blog.

This post has been on my mind for a long time as I think a lot about the changing role of pro-photographers in the digital age. But in some ways I got beaten to the punch by a much more spunkier take on the issue by Allen Murabayash, CEO of Photoshelter, on his blog post “Rant: I Love Photography”. Please go read it. My post here will be much more sedate and boring! With that warning, let’s dive into it.

I have much more insight into the market where pros get hired for personal or corporate events (such as weddings, portraits, bar/bat mitzvahs, etc) so I will focus on that and not on commercial, editorial and stock photography which has its own set of dynamics in the digital world.

What do we all hear and say everyday: DSLRs are getting cheap, everyone has a camera, it’s getting tougher to earn a living being a pro! A lot of it is true. Digital Photography combined with the internet and cheaper and cheaper capture devices have made it simpler for all and sundry to take and share images like never before. Unshackled from the physical limitations of film and the cost of taking each picture everyone today can pretend to have some proficiency in photography. There are weekend wedding photographers who are taking business away from full time pros just based on price. There are pro-sumers who are building online galleries, showcasing their work and in fact selling their work.

But here’s the funny thing:

– For the first time in the history of pro-photography we have celebrity wedding photographers! Celebrity status was limited to fashion and editorial photographers, never to wedding photographers. How did this happen?

– Family portraits on the wall look like model shoots today, not just people saying cheese into a camera and accepting whatever came out. Perfect lighting, perfect smile are must!

– Corporate mug shots make management look like celebrities and anything lower quality doesn’t speak well of the company

– I am hearing more and more that right after a wedding date is fixed the first or second service provider that gets booked is the photographer; this used to be an afterthought

– Senior shoots are blurring the line between model portfolios and what was considered just pictures of the teenage years

– Parents want their kids’ sports pictures to look like shots from pro sports

– Never before have engagements & boudoir shoots been taking place in such large numbers. The smart photographers have also created the “trash the dress shoot” as well!

I don’t believe any of this was common a decade ago.

So what’s really going on? Let me talk a little from my personal experience. I had a run of the mill point and shoot film camera in the 90s and in 2000 bought my first 3MP digital camera – an Olympus 3000 for a $1000 (yes, a thousand bucks for a 3MP P&S camera). I remember the excitement of getting pictures back in the film world and just being able to relive those memories was amazing. At the time the pictures looked great but today, they look mediocre (and I am being generous). Too much sharpening, probably done by the minilab and too much contrast because of the film I bought. And of course I had no eye for composition or lighting. Initially I really liked my P&S digital camera – it was quite simply the excitement of digital. But my appreciation of photography kept going up and at some point that quality was just not good enough.

After my first kid was born, I finally invested in an SLR and for a few years managed with the default lens. And then I got fancier with the lens. It is safe to say that today with two young kids I shoot a lot of pictures, but here’s the kicker: unlike in the film world where I did not know any better, I can immediately tell how many decent shots I got. It takes me possibly 100 shots to get one really good one! I don’t have an eye for light or composition, and I rely on sheer volume to get lucky. So much so that on a recent birthday party I did the unthinkable: I called up a pro friend of mine to hire him to take pictures. By playing around a lot I have come to realize just how difficult it is to consistently take good shots. It is kind of like playing sports and developing a greater appreciation for the professional who plays the same sport. Isn’t it true that the omnipresence of little leagues and minors grows the business for the majors?

Here is what is happening: never before have average consumers been exposed to this much high quality imagery – web, mobile, magazines, hoardings, blogs – you name it. The quality of images on Pinterest or Tumblr is just mind blowing. Sub-consciously consumers have developed a greater appreciation for good images. Everything I’ve listed above is happening because of this trend. I believe that today consumers (like me) are experimenting a lot more with photography trying to reproduce the quality they observe. And like me they are coming to appreciate how difficult the art and craft of photography is. So when it comes to important life events (operative words being “important life events”), my prediction is that over the next decade pros will be hired in record numbers. Consumers will be spending in record amounts.

None of this means that things have not changed and pros can simply fall back to what they did in the 90s (which was essentially to build a physical portfolio and get referral business). Like a pro-sportsperson, they have to be savvy business people. I am writing on a photographer’s blog so I know that this audience is aware that from building a brand, to marketing to sales and operations, a pro has to do a lot more; a pro’s life has become lot more complicated. But boy, I don’t think there has ever been a greater appreciation for the art and craft of photography as it is today and I think we are at the start of a golden age of professional photography fueled by the omnipresence of images in our lives.

So, what do YOU think? Pen your thoughts below!