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

My last post was in March. It's funny how quickly the time goes. I felt like I did that update last week. First I have a few photos taken from that chronological gulf.














What more is there to say? Lots. There is a part of me that is desparetly trying to keep up this blog, like the lone captain of a mortally wounded B17 bomber fighting the controls even as the last of his crew bails out. Well, it's not quite that hopeless. I have this bad habit of following a metaphor to it's conclusion, relavence be damned. It was a good one, yes?

I am also trying to turn SoKoNotes from a blog on teaching to a blog on photography. I'm toying with changing the name. But to what? Nevermind. If anything particularly clever strikes me, I'll let my (maybe two, three) loyal readers know. Until then, SoKoNotes is now a photography blog.

With that in mind, I'll start by talking about teaching.

My last chess class came and went last week. Technically speaking, my Championship Chess classes came to an end three weeks ago, but I continued giving private lessons to a group in Cumming up until last week. The parents of that group honored me with a nice gift and a little extra pay. I recommended another coach, but they didn't want anyone but me. They said I was the only chess coach who could put up with their kids.

I have to admit, their kids were a handful. The best player was Rohan. Nine, male and mildly spoiled. However, he was as bright as a 100-watt light bulb, and from the very beginning he became the bane of whoever was across the board from him. He had a gift for learning that was disarming. Rohan never cried or gave up hope when someone actually beat him (we went to a tournament at one point). Instead, he turned his loss into a win by applying the same strategy against his next opponant!

Through teaching chess I've had the opportunity to peer into the world of parenting. Strange place. Through talking to and observing parents, I've determined there are three attitudes towards afterschool programs such as chess. Rather, there are three kinds of parents: Those parents who are strapped for time, those parents who actually want their children to broaden their knowledge, and those parents who just want a little peace and quiet.

No single set of parents falls completely into one of those categories. And in some families, one parent falls into one category and the other a different one. I've had a mother pick up her son on time and grill me for ten minutes on what I taught that day. The very next week dad shows up twenty minutes late, throws me an abashed nod, grabs his kid and bolts. The parents in my former chess homegroup use the hour's break from the screaming to catch up on gossip and cook dinner in peace.

Another odd phenomenon I've observed is the dorkification that accompanies some people's transitions into parenthood. Some people consider a couple of rugrats excuse enough to start wearing ridiculous shoes, floppy hats in hyper colors bizarre sweaters and generally let themselves go. I suppose having a child is like giving up half of your life, giving that time and energy to your offspring.

In general I am in awe of the parents who picked up their kids from my chess classes. The time, money and energy they appear to expend seems tremendous. I wonder if I'll have that kind of energy when I have kids.

I am currently trying to expand my business to cater to these very same parents. Just today I photographed my old math tutor playing with her two toddlers. Some photographers make their entire living from this alone. The same parents who fall into the "expand my child's mind" category mentioned above also usually fall into the "document every waking moment in my child's life" category. I'll probably be one of these camera-and-credit-card wielding maniacs.

Well, I hate to suddenly cut this post off, but I'm tired. Got a lot to do tomorrow. I'll try keeping this blog going. Photography is fun. Running a business is challenging. There are people out there who want to read about both.

Peace,

Stephen "Notes" Jones

It's been too long without any photos. Blogs that are long on words and short on photos find themselves short on viewers, too. I've taken a lot of assignments these last four months. The following are a small collection from that take.














I can't explain all of the photos. It would take too long. After that last, sort of introspective and dark entry, I did some more introspective wandering and found that things aren't all bad, and I really love what I'm doing. I'm just not sure it's the right path.

Last week I sat down and had a talk with a gifted teacher named Leanne Lutrell. She has been teaching in the Gwinnett County school system for the past 17 years. We met at a small cuban restaurant off of I-85 and spent three hours chatting about the technical, physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual realities of becoming a teacher in this American age of tests, tests and more tests.

It was a rich experience. Lutrell exuded the type of personality one would want in a teacher: Positive, good-humored, honest and excited but measured. Her highly expressive face changed like the weather. A broad, inviting smile could cloud over into a serious, furrowed brow when the conversation turned, and then switch right back again. I could understand why she didn't have many behavior problems. She could easily go from a bright sunny disposition to a raging, angry storm in the blink of an eye, and the only way to keep the sun out was to be good.

She was honest and helpful as I peppered her with questions. Is your first year truly as hellish as they say? What are the keys to discipline? How much room does the curriculum leave you to breath? Can you be creative in your lessons? How much does beaurocracy effect your classroom environment?

As we got into our separate cars to leave, I arranged to sit in on a few of her classes. Though I am drawn deeper and deeper into the professional photography world every day, my relatively new love for teaching does not die out. I also feel a need to give back to my community.

I feel that community service is a keystone in any democracy, but particularly ours. Many of the things in this country that I take for granted were won by people who laid aside their personal goals and picked up a picket, tutored in an afterschool program or cleaned up a trash-strewn beach. By focusing outside of themselves, they connected with their community and learned about it's issues.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, the Freedom Riders; they all connected to their community and looked to heal it's wounds. After America has faded into the past, it is their names and their actions that will be remembered when people speak of what made America great.

I once believed the journalism world could fill this need, but I was disappointed in this regard. In the final days of my journey to Korea, the tears, hugs, letters and gifts the students gave to me as I walked out of the doors of ESS Best Jr. taught me the power of helping another human being. A society that worships the individual over the community isolates people from one another. To teach is to care, to let another human being know they aren't alone, to heal the raw wounds of isolation.

Photography and teaching are both creative arts, and both involve connecting with people, which is why I love them both. One thing I hinted on in the last update was that sometimes when I was lost on the AT, looking over my shoulder and wondering if I was walking the right path, I would suddenly stumble across the main trail and realize what I'd done. That describes the last few months pretty well.

Spring is here. I went running today the air was perfumed with an olfactory cacaphony of blooming daffodils, honey suckle, cherry blossoms and azaleas. The warm air rung beads of salty sweat from my skin. I wiped them away with my shirt at stop lights. There is nothing quite like a little unbridled sweating. It's the feeling of expelling the toxins that build up in one's body, a cleansing, healthy sensation.

OK, got to run. Enjoy the photos. Sokonotes is not dead! Just busy as hell.

--Notes