Brandon Malone Photography

This year has become the year that we’ve decided to start incor­po­rat­ing more por­traits into our pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness.  In the past, we’ve been com­pletely focused on wed­dings and other small events, so there really is a lot of re-learning to be had.

Holly and Jason are pre­vi­ous wed­ding clients of ours from a few years ago.  We’ve also pho­tographed Holly’s sister’s wed­ding, as well as some fam­ily por­traits for the entire fam­ily.  They really have wel­comed us into their own fam­ily, so when Holly became preg­nant, she and Jason asked that we take care of their mater­nity and baby pho­tos for them.  Both ses­sion types are new for me.  Each requires a com­pletely dif­fer­ent mind set for pos­ing and light­ing, as well as prod­ucts for dis­play, from wed­dings.  But we were able to use our new pro­jec­tion sys­tem finally for the sales pro­jec­tion, which was great.  Way bet­ter than look­ing at pic­tures on a com­puter monitor.

Because we wanted some vari­ety, we decided to do a split indoor/outdoor ses­sion for their mater­nity pic­tures.  For the indoor pho­tos, we used a sim­ply stu­dio set-up and shot specif­i­cally for black and white images.  Though color images were nice, the images and their sto­ries were bet­ter told with black and white.  And they did look beau­ti­ful!  I didn’t even need to do any editing.

While we were shoot­ing the indoor images, their dog was in the back­ground.  I can’t remem­ber his name now, but he’s young and was hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time not being allowed with his own­ers for this part of the ses­sion.  Some­times it worked in our favor to get warm, gen­uine expres­sions from Holly and Jason.  But it worked against us when we wanted the more seri­ous looks.  It just gave them early prac­tice for when it’s their new baby, Logan, scream­ing for their attention.

Once we were all wrapped up indoors, it was time to head out­doors.  There’s a park down the road from us in Bryans Road, MD that doesn’t get a lot of traf­fic.  It was chilly out­side, being that it was Jan­u­ary, but Holly loved it, being that her body tem­per­a­ture was prob­a­bly ten degrees above nor­mal because of being preg­nant.  The rest of us were want­ing to bun­dle up.  We started on the road, lined with trees on either side, and then ven­tured around the park.  Obvi­ously we couldn’t keep Holly on her feet too much, but she was a trooper.  But again, we kept it sim­ple, got our images, and called it a wrap.

Then comes baby Logan…

Once Logan was born, we knew we needed to try sched­ul­ing a ses­sion for him within the first cou­ple of weeks.  In pre­plan­ning, we passed along some advice that we’d learned from our own expe­ri­ence pho­tograph­ing our lit­tle boy, Zachariah.  This includes warm­ing the house up above nor­mal so the baby is com­fort­able while naked, plan the feed right before the ses­sion starts, keep the dia­per lose so to avoid mess marks, and have any impor­tant items pro­tected in case of pee­ing babies.

We used the same light­ing set-up for Logan’s pho­tos that we did for Holly and Jason’s indoor mater­nity pho­tos, but I real­ized I needed a shorter light stand for next time.  But as with our expe­ri­ence pho­tograph­ing Zachariah, so also was Logan when it came to coop­er­a­tive­ness.  Every­thing is done is short spurts of pho­tos with lots of atten­tion from mom in between.  So we picked a set-up, got a few shots, then changed and got a few more, and just did this a few times till Logan was totally done with get­ting his pic­tures taken.  But before we could fin­ish, I new that there was a spe­cific request to get Holly, Jason, and Logan together in a photo with Logan wear­ing a spe­cial green shirt.  Because of the green shirt being so impor­tant, I had Holly and Jason wear black shirts.  Then we wrapped it all up.

So now we have a set of mater­nity pho­tos and first baby pho­tos for this new fam­ily addi­tion.  I per­son­ally came to think that a book or album is best for show­cas­ing the mater­nity pho­tos them­selves, while sav­ing the wall space for the baby and new fam­ily pho­tos.  I espe­cially pre­fer a book or album that includes the mater­nity and baby pho­tos both, telling a more com­plete story than just the mater­nity pho­tos by them­selves.  Get­ting only one side of story is really an incom­plete story.  Cap­tur­ing both the mater­nity and the baby sto­ries together bet­ter pre­serve and tell the spe­cial story than can never be retold.

We have enjoyed this new expe­ri­ence, and this new area of our pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness, and look for­ward to cap­tur­ing more sto­ries for other fam­i­lies in the future.

Through­out each year I receive emails and phone calls from aspir­ing pho­tog­ra­phers, or the par­ent of a young future pho­tog­ra­pher, look­ing to me for help or oppor­tu­ni­ties.  Of course I’m not able to take on assis­tances or pro­vide con­sis­tent educ­tion.  I wish I was able to, but I can’t.  What I can do, though, is pro­vide some very valu­able resources and some lessons learned.  Each of these resources are extremely valu­able in their own way, and I strongly sug­gest every pho­tog­ra­pher look­ing to learn and grow at least looks at each of the resources I’ve listed.  I’ll talk about some of my lessons learned in a future post.

Pho­to­Vi­sion is a source of video educ­tion cov­er­ing just about every­thing for a pho­tog­ra­pher.  They visit with tons of other pho­tog­ra­phers where you get to see actual shoots, post-production, learn about sales and mar­ket­ing, and more.  They have a library of dif­fer­ent col­lec­tions of videos, plus they have their annual sub­scrip­tion, which is only $49 for PPA mem­bers.  I’ve had a sub­scrip­tion with them for years.  I learned about them from another pho­tog­ra­pher, and I con­tinue to rec­om­mend it as one of the best edu­ca­tional invest­ments avail­able.  Even at reg­u­lar price for non-PPA mem­bers, what you get for your money is unreal.  You’ll never get that amount of vari­ety and edu­ca­tion for that price any­where else.

PPA (Pro­fes­sional Pho­tog­ra­phers of Amer­ica) is the world’s largest non­profit asso­ci­a­tion for pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers.  Their mem­bers enjoy the best ben­e­fits and pro­tec­tion avail­able.  As the lead­ing cer­ti­fy­ing agency for imag­ing pro­fes­sion­als, PPA’s Pro­fes­sional Pho­to­graphic Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram is rec­og­nized through­out the industry.Those who have earned the Pro­fes­sional Pho­to­graphic Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion have passed a com­pre­hen­sive writ­ten exam mea­sur­ing their tech­ni­cal exper­tise, and have suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ted their work to a panel of judges for review and approval.  This is the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that I carry and have to main­tain through con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion and a improv­ing port­fo­lio of work.  PPA also has Imag­ing USA, a week long con­ven­tion packed with tons of classes and hun­dreds of vendors.

WPPI (Wed­ding & Por­trait Pho­tog­ra­phers Inter­na­tional) is another amaz­ing orga­ni­za­tion pro­vid­ing indus­try lead­ing edu­ca­tion and resources to pho­tog­ra­phers around the globe.  I receive my Rangerfinder Mag­a­zine from them.  They also have their WPPI Con­ven­tion every March in Las Vegas and is sup­posed to be the biggest in the indus­try I believe.

Joy of Mar­ket­ing was cre­ated cre­ated by Sara Petty of Sarah Petty Pho­tog­ra­phy.  Sarah come to pho­tog­ra­phy from a strong mar­ket­ing back­ground after work­ing with Coca­Cola.  Thank­fully she has seen a need in our indus­try where her pas­sion for busi­ness is greatly needed since most of us pho­tog­ra­phers started because of our love of pho­tog­ra­phy, not busi­ness.  Of course, we have to be stronger at busi­ness than we do our pho­tog­ra­phy if we want to suc­ceed as a busi­ness.  Using The Joy of Mar­ket­ing, she makes avail­able the largest amount of pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness educ­tion I’ve seen to date.  I’ve even par­tic­i­pated in one of her spe­cial groups called the Pho­tog­ra­phy Mar­ket­ing For­mula where she drowned me for months with more infor­ma­tion than I can recount.  Because of Sarah, I have made tons of changes to my busi­ness so as to make it more sus­tain­able and prof­itable over the years.  Oth­er­wise I was at risk of being one of the many that fails due to unsus­tain­abil­ity result­ing from not charg­ing enough for my time and prod­ucts.  I also learned bet­ter sales, mar­ket­ing, net­work­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and more.  Def­i­nitely a must for pho­tog­ra­phers that aren’t strong in the busi­ness arena.

Can­non Learn­ing Cen­ter is a cre­ate site that Can­non has put together.  It has also made many improve­ments and changes over the years.  I’m not a Can­non user, but they do make great equip­ment.  Most peo­ple either for­get or don’t real­ize that Can­non is pri­mar­ily a research and devel­op­ment com­pany, not a cam­era com­pany.  So they are able to do amaz­ing things.  But I still say Nikon blows Can­non away in low light sit­u­a­tions (yes I tested my the­ory).  But all of that aside, they are amaz­ing, and this web­site is full of videos and tuto­ri­als for all kinds of how-to edu­ca­tion for pho­tog­ra­phers and video­g­ra­phers.  Since I’m work­ing on learn­ing how to make use of the video abil­i­ties of the newer cam­eras, this site has be very helpful.

ProS­e­lect  is my sell­ing soft­ware.  I use it to project view­ing and sales ses­sions for my clients.  With it, I can show slideshow which include my logo and a song of choos­ing.  I can then eas­ily review images on my 64″ pro­jec­tion screen, show­ing images at actual size from 60″ down to 4x6” with frames.  There is also a fea­ture that allows me to put these images (with or with­out frames) on room views, which can either be stock images or images of a clients actual room in their home.  With room views, my clients can see exactly how an image will look on a wall to the exact scaled size.  There’s really tons of things this soft­ware can do.  Some of my other favorite things includes lay­outs, album design­ing (which dra­mat­i­cally improved my work­flow by cut­ting design time by 75%), and detailed invoic­ing.  It really is the indus­try stan­dard, and no online image gallery will ever com­pare to this.

Lynda.com is an online library of how-to videos for just about every ver­sion of every soft­ware avail­able to the com­mon pop­u­la­tion.  There’s some free clips here and there that you can find so you can get a taste for the site first.  Even these free clips can be help­ful.  If you enjoy the site, you can either sub­scribe on a monthly basis, or for the entire year.  Of course you can also pur­chase DVD’s of some of the courses.  One of my favorites has been Pho­to­shop train­ing from Chris Orwig who is a pho­tog­ra­pher and an instruc­tor for Brooks Insti­tute, which is the best pho­tog­ra­pher in the coun­try.  But as I said, they have just about every­thing.  Any ver­sion of Pho­to­shop, and tons of top­ics for each ver­sion.  If you’re want­ing to know more about any soft­ware you have, then you really should check this site out.

Quan­tum Instru­ments Light­ing Equip­ment is what I used for my pri­mary light­ing source for event pho­tog­ra­phy.  So when peo­ple see that huge round light above my cam­era, it’s the Quan­tum Trio.  Quan­tum makes some of the best portable light­ing equip­ment, and they cus­tomer ser­vice and tech­ni­cal sup­port are the best I’ve ever expe­ri­enced.  I love the light­weight, ver­sa­til­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, and amaz­ing qual­ity of light I receive from my Trio.  If I could afford three more units, I’d buy them and use them for loca­tion portrait/fashion work where more than one light is needed.  For those look­ing for a small nugget or two of light­ing edu­ca­tion, they do have that as well on their site.  I doubt I’ll ever buy another speed light again since they’re less reli­able, less con­sis­tent, more restric­tive, not as good a qual­ity of light, and don’t last near as long as Quan­tum lights do.

Collages.net is who I use for my online image host­ing for my events.  No, my por­traits do not get posted online for sales.  You’ll never make any real sales to make a liv­ing with by try­ing to sale por­traits online.  Events are dif­fer­ent since the main profit is made before the event, com­pared to after as with por­traits.  Col­lages offers an amaz­ing site for host­ing my event images with, mak­ing them flashy and easy for my clients and their guests to view, order, and share.  Col­lages has always offered great prod­ucts and ser­vice over the years that I’ve been with them.  Some pho­tog­ra­phers almost exclu­sively use them for prod­ucts as well since they offer all kinds of print­ing ser­vices.  I only use them for my event can­did prints.  I use other ven­dors for my other prod­ucts, but there’s noth­ing wrong with using Col­lages.  As I said, they are a great com­pany.  They really go out of their way to work with pho­tog­ra­phers and bring them new prod­ucts and improved ser­vice all the time.  There are other com­pa­nies that do sim­i­lar things as well, but Col­lages has remained my pref­er­ence over the years because of their qual­ity of ser­vice and prod­ucts, and of course price as well.  You really can’t beat them.

As far as my prod­ucts go, that’s entirely dif­fer­ent ket­tle.  Prod­ucts are like equip­ment.  They can change at any moment I deem it nec­es­sary to sat­isfy the job.  If I don’t do my job right in the first place, no mat­ter of equip­ment or prod­ucts are going to fix it for me.  So in the end, get the edu­ca­tion and prac­tice till you’re at the point you can start work­ing and charg­ing as a pro­fes­sional.  When some­one that isn’t an edu­cated and proven pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher enters the mar­ket and starts com­pet­ing with those that are, it ends up caus­ing dam­age to the mar­ket.  Peo­ple start look­ing for “good enough” instead of qual­ity if it means they can save some money.  But those that charge next to noth­ing won’t be able to sus­tain them­selves over the years and will likely be a short lived name in the mar­ket, leav­ing their clients aban­doned.  So it’s really a dis­ser­vice to both the indus­try and the clients that hired them.  If you want to learn and grow to become a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, start with the resources I’ve pro­vided, or oth­ers you may find.  And then when you’re ready, start work­ing pro­fes­sion­ally.  Of course, I know money needs still needs to be made.  Just be hon­est with peo­ple and let them know where you are and charge appro­pri­ately, if any­thing at all.  But don’t give your work away either.  Fare work deserves fare pay.  Just be hon­est about your skills and abilities.

I hope all of this infor­ma­tion is a help to you.  Please let me know if there’s any­thing else I can talk about that can help you.  Best wishes in your adventure!

After almost nine months of devel­op­ment, and eight months of antic­i­pa­tion, lit­tle Zachariah Christo­pher Mal­one has finally arrived.  Though his due date was Novem­ber 7th, he was born 12:27 am on Novem­ber 4th, weigh­ing in at 7.3 pounds.  This is after begin­ning the labor process at about 3:30 am on the 3rd.  One of the deci­sions that I’m most thank­ful for hav­ing made was switch­ing from a doc­tor to mid­wives.  We went with the Fam­ily Health Birth Center

in Wash­ing­ton DC, and they were just amaz­ing.  In just the first visit alone, we had greater insight, aware­ness, and parental empow­er­ment than we ever had with the doc­tor.  I did like the doc­tor and his staff, but for my wife and child, I need more than we were getting.

The pre­na­tal care con­sisted of a group ses­sion every other week with other expect­ing par­ents that are close to the same stage in preg­nancy as we were.  Each ses­sion includ­ing train­ing on things such as SIDS, the labor process, breast feed­ing, daddy boot camp, and more.  They have a staff of mid­wives, lac­ta­tion con­sul­tants, and pedi­a­tri­cians on call 24 hours a day.  After the deliv­ery, they first ensured that the every­one was healthy and then left us for a while to just be a fam­ily.  Then they returned to do all the weigh­ing and mea­sur­ing and so forth, and we were on our way home within four hours of deliv­ery.  Granted we were both extremely tired, it was much nicer rest­ing at home instead of a hos­pi­tal.  Then the next day, our mid­wife came to our home to check up on mom and baby.

The labor process itself was a bit dif­fer­ent as well.  We showed up at the birth cen­ter when Amanda’s con­trac­tions were less than 5 min­utes apart and get­ting very intense.  The drive there was tor­ture as every­thing caused her extreme pain, which was killing me.  We thought we were get­ting close, only to find out that she was only about 4 cm dilated, and not near ready to start push­ing.  So one of the birthing assis­tants took us for a POWER walk.  With me on one side, and our friend Lucinda on the other, hold­ing Amanda up, we speed walked up and down an empty hall­way for about an hour and a half.  This did help greatly with her pain, but it didn’t help her open up more.  So the next step was a birthing ball.  About this time I’m loos­ing track of time, but I know she spent a lot of time in the fam­ily room on a birthing ball just rock­ing and rolling her hips in a big cir­cle.  Amanda later told me that the only thing she remem­bers see­ing in that room is a label on one of the cab­i­net doors that said “Water.”  Appar­ently that label was her focus point.

We finally moved into a birthing room (no hos­pi­tal beds or iv’s), where she was checked again only to be told that she was 6 to maybe 7 cm dilated.  We were also tick­ing down on our time.  Because her water had bro­ken, she only has 24 hours to deliver.  If it starts get­ting close to that time, then we’d be moved to the hos­pi­tal to be induced.  We were only about four hours from that point, so this was hor­ri­fy­ing news.  Espe­cially since Amanda has been work­ing so hard at hav­ing a nat­ural labor.  They rec­om­mended she get into the tub with the jets and try to relax.  My mom and our friend, Lucinda, we asked to leave us, but to stay near by in case we needed any­thing.  The lights we mostly turned out, and Amanda and I were left alone.  While she laid in the tube, hurt­ing, exhausted, and scared, we prayed once again for God’s help­ing hand.  He’d done so much for us, and brought us this far, so though things were get­ting dark, we trusted in Him and His deci­sion.  Though we didn’t want to go to the hos­pi­tal and be induced, we sur­ren­dered our­selves to His well, yet beg­ging for His help quickly.  I stayed there by her side, sit­ting on the floor next to the tub, hold­ing her hand, and cry­ing as I watched her.

That was the begin­ning of the next two hours.  She found a great amount of relief lay­ing there, even falling asleep a few times in short spurts.  I con­tin­ued pray­ing.  The con­trac­tions were much more bear­able in the tube, which I was grate­ful for.  Even­tu­ally, she told me that she was start­ing to get the sense to push.  Not huge, but the start­ing of it.  I took this as amaz­ing news, but tried not to get too excited just yet.  Even still, I made sure to inform the mid­wife.  That was the fastest two hours for me.  One moment we’re cry­ing and pray­ing for God’s help, and next thing we know, she’s in active labor, giv­ing birth to our first child.  And as soon as he popped out, he was imme­di­ately put right on her bare chest for her to see and embrace him after all the months of waiting.

One of the amaz­ing things that I give God credit for is for the tim­ing of hav­ing my mom come up from Texas.  About a month before hand, I started get­ting a sense that Zachariah may come a bit early, and that my mom may need to come up a bit early.  But I never could nail down why I felt this, so I didn’t say any­thing.  After about a week, Amanda con­fessed that she was expe­ri­enc­ing the same thing, so I decided to go ahead and call my mom who was more than excited to be able to come up ear­lier than planned.  She arrived on the evening of Novem­ber 1st.  Then on the 2nd, we cel­e­brated Amanda’s 30th birth­day.  Then about 3:30 that night (the 3rd), she woke me up when her water broke.  If my mom had not come up early, then she would have missed the birth, and would not have been the help she was.

The entire expe­ri­ence has been an inter­est­ing adven­ture, and I know it’s only the begin­ning.  The hard­est part for me was watch­ing Amanda go through the pains of being stitched.  I had to leave the room for a minute because it was so dif­fi­cult to just help­lessly watch her go through so much pain.  But in the end, we have a won­der­ful baby boy, who only likes to scream when it’s bed time.  I’m very grate­ful to God for His many bless­ings, includ­ing those of through fam­ily and friends.

Like many photographers in the beginning, I knew that I loved photography, but lacked a focus. It was
kind of like discovering a love of chocolate, but not sure which flavor to gravitate to most. Over time
and through self exploration, I eventually discovered that the work I find the most satisfaction with
is that which has a human element to it, meaning that there’s a person incorporated into my photo
somehow, or the photo helps support a story of photos centered around a human element (such as a
wedding for example).

I might find myself looking at an outdoor scene, or a cool location and imagine what it’d look like with
a bride, a couple, a model, and so on. Not having someone as part of a shoot makes it feel like empty
work. But when I put someone into my images, they suddenly have a sense of life. They tell stories,
evoke feelings or memories, create fantasy and imagination, and take us places.

Photography is like my own portal into the variety of life. Each person is so uniquely different with their
own story, and for each person to bring me into their story is very humbling. To me, it is a great honor
and I am very privileged to be taken on each individual’s personal journey in life. I love being able to
create images for people that capture who they are in a way that makes glow with joyful surprise, or
capturing an time that holds the greatest personal value, or to communicate a message that can be seen
in a single image. I love being able to use my creative tools in a way that takes care of a great human
need by capturing each person’s image in that special time in their life. My adventure in life is through
others, and I’m recording it as I go through photography. Without people, where is the life in an image?