The Jaz of Business

Another Date With Jasmine

Picture 8

The Jaz of Business

They did it again. They put together a “Jim Dandy” workshop, online, and for free, again. She did a great job, again.  Who? What? Where?  You ask?  CreativeLive and Jasmine Star of course.  Dawn and I watched another workshop by Jasmine, online, over 2 days, put on by CreativeLive. 

Picture 9

I wanted to multitask a little and type up this blog post in between running up and down the basement stairs starting one import session, after the next, of pictures into our personal web gallery. Personal web gallery?  Sure, doesn’t everyone have one in their basement?  Dawn and I have taken so many pictures for ourselves, that we needed a place to put them all.  We also wanted to share them with our friends and family, so that meant that we had to make it available on the web.  Well, with hosting space and bandwidth coast what they were years ago, I decided that the best thing for us was to host our photo gallery on our own web server.  I did some research and settled on Gallery2, a Linux/Unix, Apache, PHP, and MySQL based application. I nominated one of my old computers to be the “Pic Server” as we call it, and it has worked well for us.

Anyway, back to the blog posting.  In case you have not read some of the later blog postings about CreativeLive, I will tell you about them now;  CreativeLive is a website that presents live, online workshops with various professionals on various subjects (but mostly around artistic ventures) for free!  If you are a photographer, you really owe it to yourself to check them out and signup (and watch) one of their workshops.  They really are very educational, and the price is right!  And if you want to, you can even purchase the workshop video, generally around $100-150.

The latest workshop that Dawn and I watched was a two day, seven hour/day show entitled: “Building your wedding photography business” by Jasmine Star, a California based wedding photographer who shoots with her husband JD.

Jasmine is one of our, if not thee, most favorite photographers. We got to know her from her first CreativeLive workshop back in August 2010, when she did a 5 day workshop shooting a wedding live.  Ya, I know, not too many “dead” weddings, no I mean live, as in real time, on the air over the World Wide Web!  We watched it right on our computer screen.

This workshop we watched not on my 17 inch laptop screen but on our 42 inch LCD television.  As with the workshop with Bambi Cantrell, I hooked up my laptop to the TV via the DVI out and HDMI in ports.  It worked great!  We sat in comfort a good way away from the laptop.

Jasmine structured this workshop based on the timeline of her personal path to becoming a professional wedding photographer.  From her dropping out of law school to be with her sick mother and her finding her passion for photography to booking enough weddings to quit her job and then JD doing the same to her gradually increasing the fee that she charges to the point that now she only has to shoot about 25 weddings a year.

During the workshop Dawn and I took a lot of notes, because there was just so much good material that Jasmine was giving us, and did I mention that it was for free?!  Even though we took a lot of notes we kept finding ourselves saying things like: “Did that,” “Already know that,” and “Doing that” because we actually paid attention and took good notes at Jasmine’s first workshop, you know, the one were she photographed a wedding live.  There was just so much info at that one just like there was with this one that we could put it into use right away.  And we did.

Jasmine Star reminds me of a Jack Russell terrier, yes the dog, (but she is hardly a dog, quite the contrary actually) because she has so much energy and she talks so fast that I always think of her running around the room going back and forth and up and down the furniture with all that energy.  Our friends had a Jack Russell terrier and that is exactly how he was. 

I won’t go into all the detail of the workshop here, I may post my notes some day as I always type them up anyway, so keep checking back to this blog post and check to see if they are up.

Here are some of the points that I are worth noting: 

•         Connect with like-minded photographers on forums found on the web and local photographers around me.
•         Practice my photography every day.
•         Be passionate about your work and towards your subject.
•         Blog consistently, don’t let the blog get stale.
•         Create and stick to a daily schedule and keep refining it to make it work better for me.
•         Outsource the things that take us too much time or that we are not proficient at, like designing books, or editing 1000’s of photos.

One thing that they do on the CreativeLive productions is give prizes away. They do this by having people Tweet quotes from the guest presenter.  Here are some of the ones I remember (I will have to go to my notes to find the others)

Quotes:

        "Schedule time to help others."

        "Be personal within social media. Talk back!"

        "If you're not uncomfortable, you're not working hard enough."

        "Out shoot, out run, out hustle."

        "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity."

        "Have someone believe in you if you don't believe in yourself."

        "If you don't got the funk, don't fake the funk. They will smell it."

        "Put out what you want to get back. You will get clients that want you, for you."

        "My goal for your engagement session is for you to have a good time, my job is to make you look good."

        "It's my job to make every client, look, feel and KNOW they are beautiful."

        "I am like a party in a box."

        "Under promise and Over deliver."

        “Shoot outside your comfort zone”

We look forward to the next workshop that Creativelive puts on and really look forward to the next time Jasmine is on!  She really has taught Dawn and I a great deal and we had a lot of fun watching the show.  Jasmine has so much energy and it is hard not to be motivated and educated by her during the workshop.  Go check out her website and do yourself a big favor and check out the upcoming workshops at CreativeLive!