Product skills can be broken down into 3 basic groups of skill sets – technical, creative and production.

Here’s how we define each of these three skill sets…

• Technical Skills: Technical skills include all the things involved in physically capturing an image including the proper use of cameras, lights, reflectors, meters, backgrounds, software, etc.

• Creative Skills: While technical skills deal with the proper recording of an image, creative skills deal with the aesthetics and composition of the image. In photography you start with a blank rectangle – for all practical purposes a flat, 2-deminsional object or area of space. How you fill that space is the result of your creative skill.

• Production Skills: These skills involve the process of creating tangible products that your clients will be happy to pay you for. Your production skills allow you to create marketable, saleable and highly desirable products that communicate your technical and creative skills.

To be successful, you’ll need to gain proficiency in all three “Product Skill Sets” and you’ll need this proficiency in the right amounts. Over-learning or under-learning in any one group of product skills will potentially impede your progress. It’s important to note that over-learning in any one area can be just as detrimental as under-learning.

We don’t want you to fall into the trap that many professional photographers fall into by attempting to over-learn and master technical skills to the detriment of everything else. In reality, it simply does not take a large amount of technical skill to capture and create quality, marketable images and image products that will amaze and impress your clients. Our techniques are very simple, easy to learn and are designed that way for a purpose.

Focus On What Matters

In reality, you can only fully concentrate on one thing at a time. In actual practice, if your focus is on the technical elements, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to simultaneously focus on the creative opportunities that are right in front of you. Taking full advantage of your creative opportunities is what will allow you to get the results you want and make the professional level income you deserve to make.

We also don’t want you to become over-concerned about our emphasis on the “creative”. You may or may not consider yourself creative and whether you think you’re creative or not really doesn’t matter – at least not at this point. Creative skills and recognizing creative opportunities can be learned, systemized, and duplicated. We will teach you the creative skills you need to get off to a fast, profitable start and then, creatively, you can take it from there.

The main point here is that you ultimately want to devote as much brain power to your creative skills as possible when you’re working with your clients in a photo session. To help you accomplish this, we have reduced the technical skill requirements to a “no-brainer” status in order to help you put the technical aspects on auto-pilot.

In Michaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book titled Finding Flow (Basic Books, 1998), he describes the concept of flow, as sort of a nirvana state that happens when we are completely absorbed in autopilot, where you no longer have to think about how to perform, you just focus on the performance. Your skills become so highly developed that they become second nature and you react automatically.

This is what happens when you become comfortable with the technical side of your craft. The goal is to become so comfortable with the technical aspects that you can focus on capturing the perfect moments. You will be able to react to your hunches and ideas without the distraction of how to pull it off technically.

In order to hear our true creative voice, you have to silence the technical chatter as much as possible. This only comes with time and experience, but it’s important to know that learning the essential technical skills will help you be more creative as well.

Mastering Technical Skills

There are four stages you’ll go through with every technical skill you’ll learn.

• Stage One - Unconscious Incompetence – at this stage you don’t realize that you’re doing something wrong and you may or may not even know that you’re not getting the result you need to be getting.

• Stage Two - Conscious Incompetence – now at least you realize you’ve done something incorrectly and take the steps to find out what went wrong and how to make the appropriate adjustments.

• Stage Three - Conscious Competence – you have the knowledge and the ability to achieve the results you want, but only with a substantial amount of conscious effort. In other words, you have to really think about it and concentrate on it to get it right

• Stage Four - Unconscious Competence – at this point you have mastered the skill to the level that it’s become a “no-brainer” for you and you can use it automatically. It’s at this stage that you’re able to put the technical aspects of a photo session on auto-pilot.

A recent NFL television commercial clearly makes this point when they say… “Amateurs practice until they finally get it right… Professionals practice until they can’t do it wrong”.

Your goal is to reach stage four – “Unconscious Competence” as quickly as possible – so you literally can’t do it wrong and you do it without consciously thinking about it. Until then, your tendency will be to focus on the technical skills you’re trying to master to the detriment of the creative skills. This will make it difficult to actually see the opportunities and capture the images that really matter.

This is why – besides the fact that our methods work, and work and work very well – the initial technical skills we teach you are intentionally simple and forgiving. We want you to get to Stage Four as quickly as possible and free your mind to focus on the creative and production skills that are not only fun but will catapult your earnings potential.

Avoid the Technical Trap

The natural tendency and the trap many photographers are drawn to stems from their insatiable desire to learn too many technical skills, or ones that are overly complex. As a result, they get never get past competence stages two and three. As a consequence, they rarely – if ever – get to know how it feels to break away from the technical bonds and experience a world of pure creativity. The proof is in their work. Many studio photographers are so focused on lighting effects and other technical elements that they force people into a uncomfortable and unnatural poses in an attempt to get the lighting technically perfect and then fail to capture “the moment” - the emotion, the feeling, the personality and the spontaneity. It’s no wonder their subjects end up looking stiff, overly posed and uncomfortable. They are.

While other photographers are out chasing technical perfection and making themselves insane with technically perfect photos, you’ll be steadily producing quality images that capture the hearts of your customers because you’ll be concentrating on the right thing THE PEOPLE YOU ARE PHOTOGRAPHING!

We emphasize this point because we don’t want you to get caught up in the technical trap. Your success and you income will be driven primarily by your creative and production skills. Mastering these skills will enable you to quickly move past the masses of mediocre photographers, and quite simply, take a short-cut to the top!

Now on to some of the technical things you do need to know.

Get to know your camera

Your camera is new best friend and this is definitely a relationship worth in investing some time and effort into. An essential part of being able to work on autopilot is knowing your equipment and camera settings so well that you don’t have to think about them much.

Every brand and model of camera has it’s own personality – meaning that It’s significantly different in its operation and image characteristics. Most photographers don’t even realize all the great features their cameras have. While we don’t want to cover every possible feature, setting and characteristic of the professional digital cameras we recommend, we do want to cover some basic guidelines that are helpful and generally applicable not matter what brand of professional camera you are using.

The first step to getting to know your camera is to customize a few settings.

1. Set the “Image Numbering” to Continuous. This way the numbering scheme doesn’t restart at 0 each time a new memory card is loaded. This will also help prevent duplication of file names and accidentally overwriting your image files.

2. If you have more than one camera, Time-Sync your cameras. You can set the clock on your cameras with accuracy to the second, and this time stamp will be embedded in your image EXIF information as images are captured. With multiple cameras time-synced, they can be loaded into a cataloging program (such as ACDSee) and sorted by capture date. This will put all your images in chronological order. They can then be batch renamed in this order so that the new numbers are continuous and in the order they were taken – regardless of which camera they were taken with.

3. Always use a custom white balance. Each camera is slightly different, but all allow you to dial in a perfect white balance using a white/gray card or an ExpoDisc. Refer to your camera to see how to set a custom white balance, then practice so you can do it quickly on the job. This pays huge dividends with your final image quality and color consistency.