I recently saw an email blast from my buddy, George Varanakis at Rangefinder/WPPI. He listed the top ten reasons not to miss WPPI. Personally, I’d drop a few and add a few, one of them being your ability to interact with vendor after vendor to help strengthen your business. I’d also add, one trip to Vegas gets you exposed [...]

This is an amazing industry and so much of every one’s success is based on networking.  Well, meet a relatively new friend who’s friendship just keeps growing all the time, Levi Sim.  I “met” Levi through PWSPI when it first started. Sadly, PWSPI didn’t survive in the current economy, but the friendship with Levi did.  He [...]

After each convention or workshop most of us tend to follow the same plan. We leave totally pumped up! We’ve got new ideas in our heads and often tons of notes. We’re excited and we’re ready to start implemented them the minute we’re home, but it rarely ever happens.
We get home and realize we’ve underestimated [...]

With Summer School starting in just a few days, whether you’re joining us or not, you need to be thinking about your network. A good network doesn’t happen by accident – it takes work to keep it maintained, active and useful. In this Real World Real Lessons post from GoingPro, I hit on a whole [...]

I know it’s not a new topic, but there are only a few times a year when I feel this way.  I’m in New York for Photo Plus Expo.  The show actually starts this morning, but yesterday I had some time and got over to Javits Convention Center.  During setup I probably bumped into at [...]

I try and write my blog every morning fresh.  Rarely do I have anything in the pipeline, but a few ideas.  This morning, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but enjoying the fact that I’ve really written about everything I wanted to over the last two weeks.  I’ve talked about being a speaker, getting published [...]

I was recently with a group of photographers who were talking about some of the cover shots on their favorite magazines.  Somebody made the comment, “I could have done that!”   Okay, it’s true, there are very few covers that most of you couldn’t have done, but the reality is you didn’t!  It’s that plain and [...]

Not sure what triggered this thought today, but here’s a phenomenon more unique to the photographic industry than most other career fields – people tend to help each other.  Over and over again I’m amazed at people who ask for help on a photographic or business challenge related to photography and find themselves delightfully buried in answers.
Don’t [...]

I’ve talked a lot about networking and how small an industry we really are.  Usually it’s been in the form of advice to newbies about being careful of what they say when it’s negative, because you never know who’s close to who.  This morning it’s just for the fun of it.  What got me going [...]

A short time ago I wrote a blog about the care and feeding of your network and it’s interesting, in talking to more photographers, how many do absolutely nothing to maintain it.  It’s almost as if they view their network like wildflowers – great to look at but they just grow and require no care.
Yesterday I had [...]