QUOTE(GingerM @ June 6 2008, 05:55 PM)

I have some questions! (Thanks, everyone! I appreciate all of this advice SO much. Hey Bill, good to meet you in Vegas:)).
I guess I have a couple questions--if anyone has input on any of these!
1) Since I don't have a home studio, would it be ok to have people into my home to review their pics on my big TV? If so, I would of course consider putting up some frames and canvases of my work? And then make sure my house is always clean:)
2) These senior albums you are speaking of, do you have a favorite company?
3) Do you edit all of the best photos and then show those to them? Or, do you do basic editing (to say, 30-70 pics....??) and then have them select the poses they want? Do you put a limit on how many they select? I currently offer the CD of the images if they purchase *$ past their print credit, and it seems to have been a great incentive since they want it for facebook or grad announcements (and they still order past that...). However, that means that if I did not retouch every image from the session (or, say, the best 50 that I narrowed it down to), all those images would go on the CD. They don't look BAD, since I did basic editing to them, but is it ok that I give them my work that their skin is not perfect on? As of right now, I asked them what their faves were and did the skin touch-ups and further enhancement on those photos. I'm thinking if I leave it that open ("choose as many as you like for me to enhance") that's not going to work with doing lots of seniors. Suggestions about solutions about how many are touched up, and/or how many go onto a CD....? (or any other thoughts?). I am the type of person who likes to give printing permission with CDs, because I want my clients to have all of the images, since I like all the images!
(Sorry I'm so wordy!

Thanks for reading that novel...)
1. Our home studio is our living room and dining room. We do our proofing sessions in the dining room on days that we are not shooting. When we are shooting, part of our living room furniture is in our dining room, in order to make room to shoot. When we are proofing, we proof at our dining room table. We proof on a moniter, very simple setup, nothing fancy.
2. For our senior books, we do press printed coffee table books. We now get ours from WHCC. We get the books with the lay flat pages. I am thrilled that they are now offering smaller ones as well as the 10x10.
3. We show about 40 to 60 photos. Adam does basic adjustments on ours, but we never do heavy work on proofs so this isn't any different than what we usually do. Adam picks a few of them that we call something like art images. On these few he does some effects, such as black and white, sepia, vignette, cross-processed, vintage or whatever he wants to do. We tell them they can have any effect on any image when they order final prints, they just need to let us know if they want an effect. We do not offer digital files for portraits of any kind, including seniors. If they want to purchase a single file for some specific need we talk to them about it on a case by case basis. We do allow them to place their slideshow on their facebook page, we actually encourage it because it is great marketing for us.
If you would like to look at an online proofing site of one of our 2009 seniors you can go to
this link or
this link. You can view blog posts which have slideshows linked
here. The blog link goes to the senior posts that are on our blog. To see the slideshows, you click on any of the photos. The top three on the blog posts are for some of our 2009 senior ambassadors. Below those are some of the seniors from this past year.