I had my first 'big gig' tonight: A Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce gala at the Hyatt Regency. 800 business leaders from across the state showed up in tuxedos and flashy dresses to fill the main ballroom from end to end.

Two funny things about the gig: I didn't have any idea that it would be so completely huge, and for some reason the Secretary of State, Karen Handel, knows me on a first name basis. Karen is Georgia's first hispanic Secretary of State, and a rather pleasant woman, despite being Republican. In this state, Republican and Democrat don't really say much about someone's politics.

Anyway, I was sort of shocked by the sheer size of the event. Betsy Davis, the staff PR head for the Chamber, immediately put pressure on me by assuring me that every photographer who had come before me had screwed up the awardee group shot at the end of the performance. I told her that I accepted her challenge and I would be the first to defy that awful pattern. Betsy shrugged, smiled and joined the crowd in the lobby. Hey dude, it's your dragon to slay.

After she walked out, I looked around and began to realize what had burned the brave men who had come before me. It became evident that the cavernous space in which I was too work was specifically designed to ruin photographs.

The walls were dark gray. The stage was black. The chairs were black. The ceiling was thirty feet high, black and festooned with a most busy assortment of convoluted sheet metal strips and giant plastic saucers studded with dim, yellow incandescent bulbs that added ten years to every face in the joint. It was ugly. It would take George Lucas' personal army of lighting specialists and about 30,000 watt-seconds of flash to make the room livable. I had two strobes and a digital camera.

Luckily, there was a guy in the balcony with a couple of daylight-balanced spotlights to light the speakers, and the curtain behind the podium was nicely lit with amber and purple gels. I set up a couple of my radio-slaved lights, hid them behind a giant movie screen, set up my camera for grip-n-grins and waded into the sea of tuxedos and cocktail dresses, snapping away with a smile and the flash bounced off a business card jammed into the strobe head.

There were a bunch of speeches, some awards. For such a large event, it went exactly by the books, and I had to admit to myself that working for newspapers had perfectly prepared me for assignments such as these. I could have shot this assignment in my sleep.

The terrible lighting conditions were no match for my Canon 580EX flash. As I went from table to table, taking group shots and grip-n-grins, it sent just the right amout of light to the happy faces posing for me. The room didn't want to be in the photograph, and lowering my exposure to 1/2th of a second and f2.8 was out of the question, so despite being so well lit, everyone in the photos looks like they hosted their gala in deep space.

I passed out tons of cards, and I'll be able to upload the photos to my online gallery for guests to browse and order prints from. That's great, considering I only charged the GHCC $100 an hour to do this job. A little extra goes a long way. Also, hopefully this will be an account that will stay with me for a while.

After the awards were given out, I successfully took a group shot. Those radio-slaved strobes make all the difference. I just picked them up, placed them where I wanted them, posed my nine awardees and blam blam blam...That's it folks! It could have been better, in my opinion. A third light on the background would have helped cut down on the shot-in-a-cave look, but Betsy was in love with the shot simply because it was well-exposed and sharp. Score one for the good guys!

The best part of the entire gig was after the ceremony had wrapped up. A latino band took the stage, picked up their instruments and started blasting out some explosive, lively dance music. The crowd, who had been sitting on their asses for the better part of three hours, was more than happy to take to the portable parquee and get down to business. And as I had expected, they were amazing dancers. I slapped on my trusty 50mm and did a little shooting for me.

Check out the photos!

The name of the game is branding, or so I'm told.

I went to a meeting with my business advisor, Lydia Jones, at the Small Business Development Center. Lydia is probably the best thing to happen to my business since I started it back in October. The SBDC is basically paid for with tax dollars, and new business start-ups such as myself can meet with the professionals such as Lydia and discuss things like financial planning, ideas, overhead, and most importantly to me: Marketing.

It seems like in this digital age, a good marketing solution would be a hop, skip and a -click!- away. Indeed the internet, particularly Google and Yahoo! have made marketing much more accessable to the common man. It has. Too easy. Type "Photography" in the Google bar at the top of your page and you get, well, agoogle hits. How to choose? Perhaps modify your search with the word "Atlanta" or "Portrait" and you've narrowed those hits to around 178 zillion.

And where does Stephen Jones Photography fall in that massive tome of hits? Oh, you know, I'm like on page 146,349,533. Really. Go check for yourself.

Even if a customer lost my card but new my name and added that to the search I'd still be on the fifth or sixth page. Lots of guys named Stephen Jones out there. Sheesh. So much for internet marketing. Well, not really. There are a lot of steps I could take to maximize my Google searchability, and I've taken a few of those steps. However, the best marketing mechanism remains the good ole' fashioned word-o-mouth.

There is simply no more efficient way to bring in business than referrals, especially if you happen to be a photographer. A long photography session is such a personal, even intimate experience, that people are extremely reluctant to hire a complete stranger. That's why the first advice I ever got from my dad was to start going to church. Indeed, a photographer I knew in Hattiesburg (who shall go unnamed) told me once that he can pretty much retire early thanks to the massive 3000-person congregation attending the megachurch west of I-59 in Oak Grove. I love Jesus, too.

I'm not going to church to make money. So I'm back to the tried-and-true formula for getting my name out: Run an honest, reliable business with excellent customer service. Oh, and get a good-lookin' website, which brings us to part B of my marketing plan.

My current website has drawn criticism from my business advisor. Too black. Bad fonts. Doesn't load right. Not Google friendly. Not user friendly. Time for a redesign.

Oy. Sigh. Jesus help me. It took me two months working almost every day to build the current bucket-o-bolts and now it's back to the drawing board. Oh, well. In some respects, I agree with her. There is a lot that could be improved, and this is a chance to really make my site shine.

I also felt like a re-design was inevitable, even from the first day I uploaded it to my ISP, sort of the way you know from the first week you're in a new house that furniture is not quite in the right place. This is my chance to rearrange a few couches, move that table out of the dinning room, paint the living room, install a flat-panel display and put hardwood down upstairs. Ah, the joy of anticipation. The future is bright!

Now where did I put that doggeared copy of "Adobe GoLive 6 for Dummies?"

The website also will be a cornerstone of my ongoing marketing war-o-attrition. It will tell potential customers what makes me unique. It will help to "brand" me as a certain type of photographer. In business, if you can fill a niche, you can make money (theoretically) hand-over-fist because no one else fills that need. I need to set myself apart so people have a more compelling reason to hire me other than the fact that I'm well-trained, experienced and have $8000 worth of Canon digitalia.

It's sort of like in nature. If no other organism eat that icky green slime covering those rocks, evolve into something that eats that slime and you can get fat. So I need to A) Find my slime, B) Fine a way to eat it, and C) Keep other photographers from doing the same.

Bringing this whole over-stretched metaphor full-circle, Lydia and I talked today about what makes me unique. We were discussing my child portrait business, which has recently blossomed. I told Lydia how it works: For $50 I go hang out with my client and their children at a park or hiking or something. I take pictures the whole time, turn the whole thing into a slideshow DVD and upload the photos to my finisher's website. The way it works is, parents watch the DVD, fall in love with the photos, jump online and go hog-wild with their credit card buying prints.

Lydia liked it so much that she hired me on the spot to photograph her grandchildren next weekend. She also pointed out that a few things about my system make me unique: I shoot unposed action shots, give someone a DVD that they can then keep and show to family and friends, and I come to their house. Having been to a number of studios throughout her life, Lydia thought that was the clincher. Parents hate going to a studio. Time is precious for parents, and driving all over the place for a few awkward photos is stressful. What makes me unique is that parents and their kids can live their life as they normally do. I just pop in and take pictures.

Less stress on the parents, unposed photos (what maniac tries to get 3-year-olds to sit still?) that exhibit more of the child's natural personality, low up-front cost, and a great, easy way to view and order the finished photos. Seems like I might have found my special green slime. Yum!

Now to find out if it works.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I need to craft a slogan for my soon-to-be-new homepage that says all of that in fewer words. It needs to be a slogan that capitalizes on stressfree, creative and inexpensive photos.

Any ideas???


--Notes