Category: Words
Wedding Photographer Scam
You’ve probably heard this story at some point; a couple hires a photographer without doing enough research on them, the photographer makes nice until they get the deposit, and runs off with the client’s money. This scam will sometimes be carried as far as the wedding, where they will go and shoot, collect the full payment, but then never deliver any photos, and are never heard from again.
Here are a couple real incidents where this actually occurred:
http://www.wsaw.com/home/headlines/93342049.html
http://www.cbs6albany.com/news/photographer-1273962-cbs-picture.html
As a wedding photographer, I would like to recommend some tips for not getting caught in this scam. It might be really easy to “fall in love” with your photographer, and trust them to the extent that you do not do any homework, so be wary of getting scammed, even if your photographers are really sweet. Five minutes of research online could save you hours of worry and years of heartache.
Here are my suggestions for making sure you’re hiring a legitimate photographer:
1. Google them. Search for their names, emails, business names, and any other names associated with their company. Usually if someone has had a bad experience with them, you’ll find out right away.
2. Search the Better Business Bureau. Find any unresolved complaints related to them or their business.
3. Check their references. Legitimate photographers are already aware of this scam and will be happy to give references to make you feel secure in their hire. Do not be afraid to ask them for contacts of previous clients, or other professional references. As a wedding photographer, I happily give out references of past clients who have given permission to use as a reference.
4. Make sure every part of your agreement is well documented. A legitimate photographer will have a solid, legally binding contract which will protect both parties involved. A good contract will be professionally written- take a copy home before signing anything and show it to any lawyer friends you have, or get some help from a legal advice website. In addition to a contract, your photographers should provide documentation of your payments. Another safe routine is to ask for a copy of any business documentation they should have, such as their fictitious name statement, certificate of payment of business tax, business license, reseller permit, or any other government issued document with their name(s) and the name of their business. You may also want to get their physical addresses, phone numbers, etc. Again, these are things that legitimate photographers will be prepared to give to you. Anyone who has been in the business a long time will not be shocked by your asking for this information.
5. Stay away from deals that are too good to be true. If a photographer is offering to shoot your wedding at far below the market price, they are clearly not very experienced or they are operating some kind of scam. Professional photography requires expensive equipment and dozens of hours spent on each wedding.
Think about this: a professional grade camera costs around $2,000 and is rated for about 150,000 photos. A photographer will shoot about 1,000-2,000 photos in a wedding, or about 1/100 of the camera’s lifespan. That means, the wear on just the camera costs about $20 per wedding. That may not sound like a lot, but add on the wear on the external lighting, lenses, memory cards, batteries, tripods, light-stands, camera bags, miscellaneous cables, laptop, umbrellas, etc. A photographer can have $10k-$20k worth of gear at a wedding, the wear on the equipment can cost hundreds of dollars per wedding. Now add that to time spent with clients prior to the wedding, driving time, gas, electricity to charge the equipment, storage space to put the equipment, fast computers to process the images, dry cleaning to look good for the wedding, equipment rentals, AND all of the time spent post-processing.
Considering all this, how could a photographer afford to charge so little to shoot your wedding? Either this person doesn’t have the equipment needed to do the job, they are shortcutting something important, or they are not legitimate at all.
Affordable Ecommerce
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What I build are simple, SEO friendly, aesthetically pleasing sites. These are designed to effectively pass your message to the client and create a positive user experience. Your site can be as simple as a few basic pages, or as complicated as a fully-featured ecommerce store with reviews and ratings.
Some of the sites I built or designed are:
South Sun Beads
South Sun Wholesale
Best San Diego Wedding
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Our House Compared to Ray at Night
Check out this map of Ray at Night for May 8th 2010. I added the green start to mark where our new live/work studio is located. We’re really looking forward to the move, as you might expect 
.
See more about Ray at Night at: http://www.rayatnightartwalk.com/
Idea: Wooden Finger Ring Percussion Things
Maybe this already exists, but I just imagined hollow, elliptical spheres which fit on the inside of your finger like a ring, held by an elastic band like a ring. The band would fit snugly in the groove of your finger, just above the knuckle. The wooden spheres on the insides of the fingers produce sound when struck by each other or mallets.
The musician could produce sound by sliding his hands across each other, making a washboard type sound, or just by clapping. Someone creative could probably figure out several other ways to make sound. I think it’d be exceptionally nice if the hollow spheres were sized differently to produce different pitches. They could potentially have a xylophone-like effect and could be used with mallets this way.
I’m already wishing I had a set of Wooden Finger Ring Percussion Things (I’m working on the name).
Why Leapfish Will Not Succeed
Leapfish is a recently created alternative search engine designed to take the best of Google, Yahoo, and Bing (live), and combine them into one very simple search engine. The end result is surprisingly convenient and easy to use. Although it does seem like a winner at first glance, here are some reasons why I think the website will fall flat on it’s face.
- Advertising Strategy. To combat Google’s pay-per-click advertising, they have targeted small-mid sized businesses and sold them permanent placement for a high introductory rate plus a 5% annual fee. Because their ad strategy doesn’t weigh in the relevance of the landing page like Google’s does, and anyone can buy a top spot, when searching on leapfish a whole lot of users will find highly irrelevant or outdated websites. This will kill the leapfish user retention rate.
- Copyright Infringement. Their website takes Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s search results and displays them right on the leapfish homepage. Once the other sites catch wind of this I’m sure they will combat their approach with legal action. This is my own logic that has lead me to this assumption- I’m not a legal expert, but it just seems wrong to me that their content is 100% generated by other search engines.
- People like me who retort when struck by poor sales or customer service. Yes I had a bad experience with the salespeople who called me to offer their advertising services. They lead me in with a free link which turned out to be a lie, not a good way to earn my trust. They did a lot of talking about the achievements of their company without addressing my needs as an advertiser, or answering simple questions like, “Can you give me any information on how many searches you have a month for a particular keyword?” Or, “Do you have some kind of trial period to see if I would get any clicks with my ad?”
I think my typing is keeping my girlfriend up right now- she’s tossing and turning and making “I’m annoyed” sighs.
Time to go!
Sorry leapfish.com, maybe you will wow me in the future and I will regret not dropping $5,000 for one of your keywords.
Idea: Sell T-shirts
A friend and I recently came up with the idea to sell t-shirts based on gags from popular TV shows. This is not an original idea, but after hammering our brains against it for a while, we saw the real value in this project and realized why it is worth doing. Mainly, for the following reasons:
- These shirts would be very easy to market. Our first idea was based on a gag from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. To see how we might sell this shirt, we looked at how many fans of Always Sunny could be found on Facebook, and how many of them were males older than 21 (who we think would buy the shirt). There turned out to be about 300,000 people who matched this description and we could market to them for a meager $.70/click.
- This kind of business can take very little time to manage/operate. The whole operation is based on the fact that we could do the whole thing without ever touching a single shirt. By using other companies who specialize in printing custom shirts, we would eliminate our need to ship, store, or buy anything. Of course this reduces our margin on each shirt, but I’m looking for ways to automatically generate income, not another job.
- The content for new t-shirts is automatically generated by popular shows on television. Apparently, there’s no need to obtain permission for using the content from the TV shows as long as we don’t use any character likenesses, trademarks, or copyrighted material. No one can really sue us for making a T-Shirt with a can of wine on it, they don’t own the idea. This, again, is helpful because there’s not a required hours of slamming our heads against a desk until we come up with a great idea, we only have to watch TV and log particular moments which could be used for shirts, then test them against an internet audience.
- This idea is very testable. The fact that the entire marketing strategy is PPC based, we can repeatedly test a variety of material to see what people like/will buy without having to invest in any shirts beforehand.
- My girlfriend can make the designs in illustrator for me. I’m not an illustrator genius. I can get her help, fortunately. If she decided she wouldn’t want to I’d have to think of some other way to make the designs, or learn myself, a slight setback.
Why am I sharing this idea publicly instead of locking it away in a vault? The answer is because no one reads this blog, because this idea could be copied a thousand times and it could still make me money, and because if I don’t get around to doing this, maybe someone else can benefit from this good idea.
A Problem With Godaddy Email
I just recently synched my outlook calendar with my GoDaddy webmail- boy what a trouble saver that has turned out to be.
Setting the inconvenience of logging into a webmail server aside, I would like to address the most significant problem with Godaddy’s webmail: when you push the backspace key, the email you are viewing is sent to the trash.
This might not sound like such a significant problem to everyone, but as one who uses the backspace key frequently to back one page in my web browser, I end up losing a lot of emails to the trash folder.
Anyway, that’s the real problem with godaddy’s webmail.
Beef Boycott
It’s hard for me to admit that I really like eating steak and other beef foods, but there is a certain craving only meat can satisfy.
Despite my craving for meat, I, unlike animals, do not have to follow the (stimulus->response) method of living. Instead, I take the high road and make decisions for myself, not simply as reactions to cravings. This is called the (stimulus->independent thought->response) method of living. (Thank you Stephen Covey for the insight.)
I choose not to buy beef for the many negative environmental effects believed to be associated with the cattle industry. I don’t have a ton of other meat in my diet, but I thought it would be a small step to cut beef out (except on the few occasions when a plate of juicy steak is handed to me).
Stephen Covey teaches the proactive principle of (stimulus->independent thought->response) in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Wedding Dance
I love when the bride takes it away on the dance floor. I had a really good wedding today, from start to finish I was taking great pictures and feeling really comfortable.
I think I might have drank too much iced tea, I got mega caffeine shakes right now at 1:43 am. The food was really good, weddings are the only time I ever eat steak. I don’t buy beef (if you’re interested in learning why, read this post) but I sure do love the taste.
I have a sore lower back now and I’m tired from the long day on my feet. I’m also tired from the mental strain of taking photos and directing people.
Good night.
Music
I’ve started rating songs in my itunes while I listen on shuffle. Here’s how my rating system works:
***** – All time favorite – reserved for very few songs
**** – A good song that I like
*** – Wouldn’t mind it coming up in shuffle again
* – When I need hard-drive space this will be first to go
(no stars) – impartial or need to listen again to make a decision
I haven’t felt compelled to give anything a ** so it’s not in my description.
I can then make really excellent playlists from the accrued songs with stars. And by listening to shuffle, I am rewarded with more starred songs for even better playlists. I suggest you try my rating system.