WHO HAS TIME FOR BALANCE?

Last weekend, I photographed a wedding in Northern Michigan - one of my favorite places to visit.  As you can imagine, I had a wonderful time.  The weather was perfect, the wedding was beautiful, and the photographs turned out great.  In reality, all of those things were great, but what made it a truly incredible weekend was that Beth and the girls were able to travel with me.

In reality - I love what I get to do.  I love photographing weddings.  I love being a part of the important moments of people's lives.  It's a privilege and an honor - one that I take seriously.  But, all of that is small, compared to the opportunity I have to live in the important moments of my family.  

Running a small business isn't easy.  It's not supposed to be.  It's hard work and long days, and it's often very stressful.  That's the life of a small business owner.  At the same time, it comes with a great reward - freedom.  

One of the things I hear from photographers, is how hard it is to balance work-life and family-life.  It's hard to figure out where the boundaries are - or even what boundaries are!  For me, the answer is about perspective - and it's about understanding why I do what I do.

It's pretty easy to end up with a small business that consumes you - and your life.  There really is a lot to do, but your photography business doesn't have to own you.  By starting with an understanding of why your business exists, you can put everything else in perspective - including boundaries.

My business exists to:

Add value to my family, by adding value to my clients.

I value my clients greatly, but I value my family more.  In fact, it’s only because of my family that I own a business.  The minute it stops allowing us to meet our family and financial goals, and allowing me to meet my personal and artistic goals, it’s no longer worthwhile.  Here are a few of the things that might help define boundaries that make it easy to focus on that mission statement.

- Always take at least one day off a week with family.  For us, it doesn’t matter what we do, we just do it consistently (every week) and we do it together.  

- Maybe for you it would help to not check email after 6PM.  I try to not use the computer after 6PM.  There’s nothing that happens in my business that can’t wait until morning.

 - Keep to set “work hours.”  If you don’t define them, you’ll find yourself working all the time.

- Don’t bring work home.  No matter what.  Don’t edit photos from home, don’t reply to client emails from home, and don’t answer your phone when you get home.  Keep work at work.

Last weekend, I took more than 1,000 photos.  The wedding was gorgeous, and the couple was stunning.  The details were flawless, and I had a great time.  But the photo above is far and away my favorite.  That's Maddie, running on the beach.  And that's why I do what I do.

MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER: Stuff that helps stay organized

It's a new year, which for many of us is a great time to look at what we're doing - and where we can be more efficient.  If you're like me, there's always going to be more to do than I can possibly get done, so anything I can do to be more efficient is HUGE!  Here are a few tools I use that really help me keep things organized and save me time.  The best part is, many of them are free - or really inexpensive!

DROPBOX  (www.dropbox.com)  FREE (for up to 2GB of storage)

Dropbox is a killer app.  It's everything that Apple's MobileMe iDisk could have, and should have been.  Dropbox is an amazingly simple way to sync files across all of your computers, smartphone, iPad, etc.  It syncs your documents to the cloud and keeps them updated seamlessly on all of your devices.

This is especially helpful if you work across various computers, or want to have access to your documents wherever you go.  It creates a folder on your computer, and anything you "drop" in it is automatically and (almost) instantly sync'd across all of your other computers or devices.  It's also great if you share documents with other people and want to have access to the same files/versions.

The best part is, the first 2GB of storage is FREE!  You can try it out here.

EVERNOTE (www.evernote.com) FREE

Evernote is an incredibly easy way to capture ideas and organize them.  It's also available on your desktop as well as iphone/ipad.  I find that I rarely use word processors anymore, since I just open Evernote and type a new note.  It saves me from having to figure out where I put anything.  

I also use it to dump all of my business cards, receipts and other things I come across.  It OCR's the text on any document or image I upload and makes it super simple to organize and find everything.

THINGS (www.culturedcode.com/things) 

 Things is great for organizing projects and tasks.  It's not free, but it's been worth it for me.  I can add a task to my calendar and it imports it to THINGS and I can organize all of the projects I have going.  

MOZY (www.mozy.com) $5 a month for unlimited storage

Mozy is one of those things I wish I knew about sooner.  It's a backup service that backs up all of your files.  Everything.  It runs in the background, and once you have completed the initial backup, it only syncs the changes that have been made to your files.  You just tell it what you want it to backup and it takes care of the rest for you.  

 I've uploaded about 400GB so far (of about 2.3TB) and it just runs quietly in the background while I do other things.  it's simple to setup and it does it's thing without me having to worry about it.

TWEETDECK (www.tweetdeck.com)

Tweetdeck is a free application that makes it super easy to manage different social media tools.  It allows me to control what I post - and where - across various twitter and facebook accounts.  It lives on my desktop, ipad, and iphone.  It also makes it super easy to aggregate and view content on twitter.  

What about you?  What are some of your favorite tools - that help make your life that much easier?

FYI - I don't get paid by any of these companies to tell you about them.  These are just real tools that I use on a regular basis!  I do get a little extra free space if you click that dropbox link and sign up, but that's all.

A FEW DAYS WITH THE NEW SWAT DESIGNER FROM KISS

Wow.  I've been playing with the new SWAT album designer from KISS for a few days now, and the first impression I had is still the same... wow.  Now, you should understand that designing beautifully simple albums is a huge part of our business.  It's also a very efficient part of our business - which means it's a very profitable part of our business.

I have used Aperture as not only an image organization and editing tool for the last few years - but I've also taken advantage of it's best in class book designer to create the albums we provide our clients.  

I'm a pretty tough critic of album design tools.  If I'm going to make a change in my workflow it has to make me more efficient and be better at doing it's core function than what I'm already using.  Aperture has been the perfect tool for me, but I've been excited about SWAT ever since I first saw what it can do.

Now, as an Alpha tester, I can't show you much (or anything really!). What I CAN do is tell you this:  It's super simple (surprise, surprise), it's wicked cool, and it's extremely intuitive.  In fact, it will do 90% of the work for you.

Even in this early stage, I love how easy it is to create beautiful books.  I love that even though it's a web based software tool, everything behaves exactly the way you'd expect - even your very first time logging in.  I love that it's fast.  I love that our clients will be able to leave feedback and we'll be able to dialogue with them about their album design. 

The two reasons most photographers aren't making what they should on their albums is that they don't have a simple tool for creating beautiful books, and they don't have a good way of presenting their albums to their clients to allow for feedback.  

There are some solutions that at least partially solve one of these problems - but this is by far the first to solve BOTH for photographers!  It takes the stress out of designing albums, and makes it super easy to present them and SELL THEM to your clients. It's a robust, yet simple tool that makes designing albums easy, fast, and cool.  

To be completely fair, the only two drawbacks I see, compared to what I currently use (Aperture), are that you 1) can't make instant changes to your native images (processing, b/w conversion, etc) because it's hosted online, and 2) you can't add images to your design after you've started, quite as easily as Aperture.  

It's hard to call these drawbacks though - because it's not a fair comparison really.  Aperture is an application that runs on my machine and already has all of my native RAW files and all of their changes right in it.  

It's also hard to count these against SWAT since 99% of all other album design solutions suffer the exact same issue.  There is no other album design tool that lives natively in your editing software (like Aperture) so if you're currently using ANYTHING else (photoshop, photojunction, indesign, page gallery, etc), SWAT will be a HUGE improvement.

Oh yeah, and FREE!