Authors

I’m not sure why but in the last two weeks I’ve had three authors contact me.  Humm, do I have an authors look?  Authors typically don’t have any funds for a shoot and don’t understand usage so my fees are pretty reasonable for them.  One author was a previous client, I shot her twin daughters a few years ago.  The second potential client remembers me walking through the neighborhood and buying the bamboo bed frame from her garage sale!  Wow, that’s a stretch.

The third shoot was today and he was not a referral but found me through Google search.  I asked Mike to remind me how he found me, he said he typed in the key words “Michigan Photographers”.  SEO at work, gotta love it.  He said I was all over the net.  I’m sure it gave me tremendous credibility.  He also liked a particular image I had done for a male model I’d shot in the past and wanted to recreate it for the back of the book.

We shoot this fabulous headshot first, which I have to say really turned out great.  I nailed the very first image and had tons to choose from.  This is definitely going on my web site.

I shot it with north window light, silver tri flector, two black v-flats and a black cutter for the top of his head.  The background is one of my custom canvas backdrops with an HMI lighting it.  When I shoot this way the backdrop is not very high and I have to cover my white floor quite a bit, because you are basically shooting down.  It’s hard to get dramatic male portraits with window light so I really need to bring in some black to the scene with the v-flats and cutter.

With natural daylight you have to be careful to keep the neck area dark and not loose the jaw, so shooting high helps along with the black v-flats.  Again I use my flashlight technique in Photoshop.

I kept the image very strong with lots of pop so when it’s printed small it will still read well.

So it seems there is a market out there for front/back book covers and dramatic headshots for authors that I need to market and optimize for.

F2.2  400  ISO 200

Tagged as: authors, Headshots, SEO

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