It was an honour to be featured on The Photography Parlour this week, talking about my experiences of combining my photography business with being a mum!
Big thanks to Rosie Parsons for her inspiring blog and for interviewing me x

Photoshelter

Photoshelter offers a bunch of useful tools in one place. You can use it to backup all of your images, to allow your clients to view the photos from their shoot via a password protected area, it handles your ordering for you securely and can take payments, and lots of other things.

Blinksale

Invoicing people when you’re just starting out or have a small photography company can be a headache. There are lots of products around that promise to help you do them easily and quickly, but they’re often something you have to install on your computer. Blinksale is a website that you pay monthly for and it means you can send someone an invoice from your iphone while you’re out and about.

Highrise

Keeping track of all of the exciting opportunities you’ve been offered, dates, emails, phone calls you’ve promised, the name of the best man on the wedding day, and so on can make for an overwhelming email inbox and lots of wasted time spent searching.

Highrise is another ’software as a service’ tool that helps you keep track of everyone and everything in one place and means you don’t forget important stuff. And on the subject of forgetting things…

Evernote

Evernote is a great utility that helps you keep track of things you want to remember using your phone, laptop or desktop computer back at the studio. You can use it to take a photo of a receipt with your iphone (I should probably write another post about how useful that is), or write an email to yourself, or tag a website, anything – you can add it to evernote and then it’s permanently recorded and accessible from anywhere.

What’s more – if you photograph some text it has some built-in cleverness that scans through the image and converts it into real text, so you can search through hand-written details about a wedding (if your handwriting is good enough) on the road using your phone. Handy.

Booking Bug

One of the main questions that wedding photographers have to answer for a prospective couple is “are you available on our wedding day” – Booking Bug solves that question. It’s a calendar widget and ordering system that lets someone check if you are available and then make a booking. Easy. I’ve not yet used it because I’m waiting for a new version of their widget that lets you search for a date, rather than showing all of the bookings in your calendar, but the guys at Booking Bug tell me that’s a feature that should be coming soon. And on the subject of calendars:

Google Apps

I use Google apps for all of my email, calendars, writing documents to share with other people, spreadsheets, and it’s all free – a pretty great deal. A lot of people don’t realise you can use Google Apps email with your own domain name, so you won’t appear as joebloggs1234567@gmail.com!

Drop Box

Moving files around to other people when you’re shooting on the new high-end cameras that we’re using can be a pain – what used to be emailable files can now come in at over 10MB each. In the past you’d have to upload the files somewhere and then send a link, but just uploading the files can mean you’re sitting at your computer twiddling your thumbs while they all go up, and then one fails, and you have to click to start it again – it’s all a bit laborious.

So instead, I use Drop Box, which is a little utility that you install on your computer. It makes a virtual drive that you can use just like any other hard disk, except when you copy something into it, in the background it starts synchronising its contents with a version on the web. Much easier! Which leads me onto…

Backblaze

I’ve found the whole process of getting backups sorted out really quite difficult – too many files to move around, lots of different versions, hard disks that suddenly fail, having to keep two or more copies of everything, worrying about someone breaking in and stealing the backups, and so on… Back blaze is a tool that I use to give me some extra peace of mind. It runs in the background on my main computer and combined with a little script in Aperture it uploads all of my ’starred’ images to the web while I sleep. So if the studio burns down the day after I’ve shot a wedding I’d still have the photos. I’m not sure that’s where the name comes from…

Twitter

And finally – Twitter. The best, loveliest and most useful place on the web I’ve found yet. Where would I be without it?

Do you have any useful places on the web that you find useful – leave them in the comments!

On New Year’s Eve I sat down and had a big think about what I want this new year to be like and one of the things at the top of my list was to create a much better work life balance. When you work for yourself you have the flexibility to work the hours you want to. This may sound fantastic but the reality is that you end up working far longer hours than you would working for someone else. And as for holidays…what are they again? It can be quite simply exhausting and lead to burn-out, which is no good for me, my family or for my clients.

When we moved to London in November I had already decided to change the hours that our nanny works, to enable me to have more time with our two little ones before time whizzes by and they start school. This has been a great start and is working well for the whole family.
However, the big problem for me is that many people I work with expect me to be available 7 days a week both 9-5pm and then when they get from work too, so 6-10pm. I worked out that there were 4 days when I didn’t do something for someone in 2009. One of these days was Christmas day, one was the day I was in labour with my second child and two were spent in hospital lying flat on my back recovering from a labour complication!!

So, this year I am changing the way I work. I will be stricter with myself. If it’s a day or evening when I don’t work then I will not reply to emails or calls. I will not edit images. I will not order prints. I will not design albums. I will not blog! I will wait until I am back in my office. If it is extremely urgent then I have my PA who can help and will get in touch with me if it cannot wait 24 hours. I have worked out my hours and know that I can get everything done within those hours. I know from past experience that if I am playing and resting as hard as I am working then I work smarter. I am more creative, organized, efficient and energized. So, if you contact me and I don’t reply straight away then it’s not because I am ignoring you, it’s just because it’s my day off and I will get back to you the following day.

Oh and there is no doubt that in 2010 we will definitely be taking a family holiday or two!!

Happy New Year to you all!

Towards the end of last year I became a member of Greener Photography in a bid to make Emily Quinton Photography more environmentally friendly and green in 2009.

Greener Photography is a member-supported, non-profit organization set up by Thea Dodds and Dawn Tacker who are both based in the United States, with the aim to enable photographers to share ideas and practices to become greener. I am currently only one of two Greener Photography members based in the UK, so come on UK photographers join in!

I currently aim to be green by using recycled stationery, working from home and turning off my MAC when I’m not using it. But I know there’s so much more I can and will do to help the environment through my business.

The first step I am going to take in 2009 is to reduce my print ordering and dispatching to once a week. This may mean that some clients have to wait a couple of extra days for their prints but it saves on the packaging and delivering of the prints. At busy times I have been known to send an order to print every day of the week, resulting in 7 different packages being sent to me, when 1 could have done the job perfectly. I will also have made 4-5 trips to the Post Office, when again 1 would have worked much better. Read more about shipping on the Greener Photography site.

If you are a photographer please think about joining Greener Photography today and making steps, however small they may seem, to becoming a greener photographer in 2009!