Today I thought I’d share with you a few of my favorite things that I use in my photography business, maybe it will be of some help to you.
To start off, an application that I recently discovered and completely love is BlogStomp. This handy, light weight application handles all of my re-sizing and logo stomping for my blog and my facebook fan page. The guys over at BlogStomp have given you four default ways to prepare your images for your blog. They have thoughtfully also given you an option for totally customizing how you want your images to look if you don’t like the default options that are given. For a mere $49 you can own this little beauty, and usually you can find a coupon code somewhere so you can have a little discount.
Another piece of software I thoroughly enjoy is Adobe Lightroom. I do about 95% of all my editing in Lightroom and I really love how easy the software is to figure out. I know Lightroom has the capabilities to do far more than I ask of it, but it does get the job done and pretty quickly I might add. If you’re thinking about trying Lightroom, but don’t have the cash at the moment, you can download a free 30-day trial of the software and have some creative fun with it.
For those of you who are quick with your math, you must be wondering what do I use for the other 5% of my editing. So glad you asked. I use Photoshop Elements. Since I don’t have the money to afford the full Photoshop Creative Suite, Elements works for me. I don’t do a ton of stuff in Photoshop for a couple reasons. One, I’m still learning the software and two, when I use it, it’s primarily for removing blemishes or things of that nature. One of these days I need to sit down and just go through everything Photoshop Elements has to offer.
A freebie for you! About a year ago I came across a website called CreativeLive.com. This is a huge resource for photographers! Creative Live is an organization headed up by Chase Jarvis, a world famous commercial and advertising photographer. Creative Live is affectionately known as a live, worldwide creative classroom that brings in guest speakers to discuss topics related to photography. They broadcast it live and best of all it’s FREE to watch! If you like what you see, or don’t have time to digest everything you’ve heard, you do have the option to purchase the course. Featured speakers in the past have been Zack Arias, Tamara Lackey, Jasmine Star, and Bambi Cantrell, just to name a few. Definitely check this one out!
There are a few forums that I like as well. One is a free forum to sign up for, Open Source Photo and the other is a paid forum, The [b] School. Both of these forums talk about of similar things. I’ve learned many things from both of these forums. If I’ve got a question about a situation with a client, or a particular lighting setup, or a piece of equipment, or a website question, I usually head to these forums and ask my questions there. More often than not, someone else has had the same question and I can find my answer there. Forums are a great place to learn and even find shooting gigs.
I recently purchased some presets from Totally Rad Actions for Lightroom. They also have actions for Photoshop. I have really enjoyed playing around with these presets, it has opened a whole new world of editing and effects I do with my photography. A couple other presets I use in Lightroom are from Pretty Presets, Rebecca Lily, and The Coffee Shop Blog. There are tons of free presets and actions available, just google them and see what pops up.
What are your favorite photography related tools? I’d love to know works for you so leave me a comment!
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