It’s this time of the year again. December. Christmas coming soon. Time to spend with your family and friends. Time for traditions.

One tradition I started last year is to invite my wedding photographer friends from all over Switzerland for our annual Christmas dinner in Berne – the Wedding Crashers Switzerland Xmas Splash ‘10. We spent a wonderful evening at the restaurant Altes Tramdepot Bern with good food, some drinks and a fun little Pocketbooth app on our iPhones ;-) The freshly baked cupcakes we did with the Cookie Chicks Jeanine, Nadja and Karin at the pre-event were delicious and so were the home-made roasted almonds from Stephanie - yummy! I’m very happy to see the network and friendships grow. It has been a great year, thanks ya’ll!

In the picture (or not), in order of appearance: Nadja Oeler, Andreas Feusi, Philippe Wiget, Richard Overtoom, Katharina Wernli, Urs Anderegg, Ruggero De Pellegrini, Tobias Schmid, Daniel Daeppen, Stephanie Greter, Karin Näf, Jeanine Linder, Colette Dewan, Karin Vonow, Ildiko Varga, Daniel Knecht, Ilsuk Sun, Matthew Anderson

And if you are still thinking about if all this social media stuff like Facebook and Twitter is worth it, read this amazing story of Keith how Twitter let him connect with people he didn’t know in Guatemala and how they became friends.

So, my recommendation for 2010: Get you a Twitter account and follow Keith Ferrazzi @keithferrazzi

Have a great 2010!

Wedding season is mostly over here in Switzerland and we wedding photographers settle down. We spend more time in the office editing weddings at the computer than being on the road and shooting. So it’s a good time to meet friends, eat, drink, chat and exchange unbelievable stories of these awesome weddings we shot during the last months :-)

This year I was traveling a lot, met incredible people and made great new friends. Now it’s time to reconnect, time for “Share Your Power – Reloaded”!

I think it’s important to meet people from time to time in person and let them connect with each other too. Best to be done while having dinner or a drink. If you are a fellow photographer and want to share some thoughts, ideas or the vision of our business in the future, join us! If you’re not a photographer but are interested in networking and making new friends you are very welcome too!

Please fire me an e-mail if you’re interested to join us and I will send you the details. I look forward to meeting you! See you on Thursday, November 6, 2008 in Berne.

[UPDATE]

Save the date! “Share Your Power – Xmas Edition” on Thursday, December 18, 2008 in Berne!

When your business is running well – and it hopefully is – it is important to stay well organized to keep on track with everything you have to do on a job. There are so many important things not to forget: Did I edit the caption for the whole shoot? Has the client received the link for the online proof gallery? Did I send them the CD of the engagement session? Did I archive the images? etc.

I invested half an hour today and created a job checklist. So I don’t forget any task I have to do for an engagement session or a wedding. I always know what already has been done and what is still left to do. I use a Word document with checkboxes, very easy. I guess some photographers go with an Excel sheet or use online tools. It doesn’t matter, take what is the best and easiest for you.

Happy Sunday!

It was great to make new friends and meet other photographers. It’s kind of different if you talk with your no-photog friends and they always say: “Wow, that are great images you do!” And then you meet other professional photographers and they have a different point of view than you have. They know more about the subject so the discussions will be more profound. They do things in a different way and you notice how you can do it in another way too. It’s not about better or worse, just different. For one photographer Jessica Claire’s Shootsac meets perfectly his shooting style. But the other photographer is shooting differently and for that has another perfect fit in camera bag. You just have to try it out and see what works best for you. That’s it.

Check the work of these awesome photographers:
Jeanine Linder, www.jeaninelinderphotography.com
Philippe Wiget, www.photophil.ch
Christoph Ris, www.christophris.ch

About something else. I recently started to use more flash in my photography. Not my big studio lights, but just my strobes (Canon 580EX II). If you are looking for a great flash bracket that holds two strobes and even an umbrella, go visit Brewer Bracket. Todd Brewer developed it himself. It’s well built, very sturdy. And Todd is a great guy, providing you an awesome customer service. Congratulations, Todd!

If you do post production and work the whole day at the computer , it’s easy to be disturbed every some minutes. Of course your computer is online and the emails keep coming in. You just want to have a quick look and…

So I tried a new email policy. I check emails only 3 times a day (10 am, 2 pm, 4 pm). That will do nicely. If it’s urgent, use the oldfashioned phone instead. It’s anyway better to connect with people by voice. Try to use your phone instead of email and you will see how better your communication will be and how your business is going to improve!

Try it. Don’t be a slave to the rhythm!

And yes, I ordered an iPhone :) So my iPod Touch 16GB is on sale now. It’s a great device, perfect as a PDA. You have always your calendar, contacts, email and internet with you. Its display is so big and brilliant, that it’s fun to show prospective clients your portfolio on the iPod Touch. You will never regret this investment! Send me an email if you are interested in my iPod Touch 16GB.

While I’m waiting for the iPhone to be released in Switzerland I still have to use my “old” SonyEricsson K800i. It’s a very nice phone though, has an awesome camera and a great display. But recently it broke down and I had to take it to the repair service. That’s always bad because in the meantime you have to use your “even older mobile phone” that you keep just for this kind of backup purpose.

Now imagine that you managed to survive this uncomfortable time with a mobile phone right out of stone age. And it’s the day you get your regular mobile phone back. They didn’t only change more parts than necessary and refurbished the whole phone. There’s even more.

The mobile phone was handed out to me in an “iPod Sock” saying “Home Sweet Home”.

You take it out of the sock and on the display is a sticker with a text like a SMS, saying: “It’s great to be back in your hands. I’ve missed you! If you need any more help at all, feel free to call 0848 82 40 40.”

Sweet! :) What a customer experience!

What do you do to make your clients happy? How do you handle complaints? What’s your outstanding service to give your customers a great experience and differentiate your business from the competition?

Did I mention before how important it is to backup your valuable data?
Yes, I did write about it last year in more than one post:

• Safe your life! Or your business. Or better both!
• Backing up
• Get you a robot!

But it really hit me when I read recently this message (image above) on the website of the Swiss National Broadcasting Corporation. It says that our national TV station lost a video server with all archives from the year 2005 and before and that they are currently not sure if they can recover the lost data!

How bad is that!? I can’t believe it…

So, if you are a professional photographer or run any other business: Do it better than they did!

PS: I’m happy with my Drobo. Highly recommended!

[See the UPDATE at the end of this post!]

In a recent post I was writing about why it is important that you regularly back up your valuable data. Now I found a new great device to do so: Drobo, your personal storage robot!

Watch the video on Drobo’s website that explains why this device is so awesome!

To make it short: Drobo has 4 drive bays. You slide in any SATA drive (no screwdriver needed), any make, any model, any size. Even when your Drobo is running! The data is stored redundantly, means your data is spread over different drives. If one drive fails you can access it on another drive. You don’t even notice. Just that Drobo gives you a red light to tell you there is a problem with a certain drive. You buy a new SATA drive and replace the broken one. Drobo re-arranges the data. You don’t have to do anything else than replacing the broken drive, Drobo does the rest automatically. And the best: your data is NOT lost!

If you need more space: You just slide in another SATA drive in an empty bay. Or if you already installed 4 drives in your Drobo, it tells you which drive to replace. Go to a shop, buy a (bigger) SATA drive and just replace the recommended drive in your Drobo. That’s it. You don’t have to copy around data from one drive to another. Drobo cares about that automatically.

To make it shorter: You don’t have to care about your data anymore. Drobo does.

To make it shortest: Great! Highly recommended :)

UPDATE:
Meanwhile there is a ethernet solution for the drobo. You can get a “DroboShare” accessory that will let you connect Drobo to your network. Read more about it **HERE**

Because Philippe was commenting his concerns about the Drobo speed, let me shortly point out my workflow. I had the same concerns before I bought my Drobo. But infact Drobo’s speed doesn’t slow down my work in any way. It just makes it a whole safer.

Drobo is a backup solution. It holds my image archive. That’s it.

When I’m back in my office after a shooting I first transfer all my CF cards directly to the drobo. This is the backup of the original RAW files. I never touch them again. Then as second step I transfer the CF cards once again directly to the internal SATA drives of my computer and import the images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The images on the internal SATA drives are the ones I work with. I do my post production, Photoshop work etc. When the job is done, the CD burnt and shipped with the invoice to the client, I archive the job. On the Drobo. This is a background process and I don’t care if it will take 20 minutes or 35 minutes to transfer the folder from the internal SATA drive to the Drobo. Later I have to access my image archive on the Drobo only very seldom. And even if I have to re-open and re-work an archived PSD file on the Drobo, I never had a problem with the time it took to access it.

In my workflow Drobo works great. With its redundant storage it gives me the best security and the least worry and maintaining. I will soon be buying another one.

I did myself a Firewire 800 test. I bought the fastest card reader (Sandisk Extreme Reader with Firewire 800 interface) in the meaning that I would save on valuable time while importing. Yes, and that was really proved in my test! As long as I just imported one image folder from the CF card to the internal SATA drive on my computer (just a plain copy-paste process done with normal OS capability). The transfer speed was between 20 and 30 MB/s! Wow! But then I did the test again. Not just copying the files onto the internal SATA drives, but at the same time also importing them directly into Lightroom. And the transfer speed dropped down to 10 MB/s. The same I normally got with my old USB 2.0 cardreader…

This test gave me another point of view of the transfer speed.

About the Firewire 800 speed, you may be interested to read this test and do your own test. Post your results in the comments, I’m interested to hear what you found out!

My pricelist is now also available in English. Download it from my website www.danielzihlmann.com as PDF file. You find it in the section INFORMATION.

If we can be of any further help please let us know!