8 strategies to improve your photographic workflow

When you’re doing well and your workload starts to grow, one of the first things you need to do to avoid getting overwhelmed is to establish a photographic workflow to make your working day much more productive. The idea is that, even if you have to spend 10 hours working in the studio, your day-to-day work is not focused on answering the phone all morning, creating every contract from scratch or finishing the work of a single client.

For your photography business to run better and better and for your working hours to be really productive, you need to organise a profitable photographic workflow and that’s why, in this article, we are going to give you 8 tips to create it. Don’t miss the last 2 recommendations, they are the best of all.

 

Get the most out of your day-to-day life by implementing an efficient photographic workflow.

Reasons why you should review your photographic workflow

 

The photographic workflow is the set of actions and steps you have to carry out in your work from the first contact with a potential client until you finally deliver the photos and finalise your services. As you well know, this process does not only include the capture of images, but also aspects such as: communication, planning, editing, file management, final delivery, etc. And although it may seem that this process is a procedure that should be well defined for any photographer, the reality is that it is not always carried out in a totally efficient way.

Often, not having a proper workflow can waste too much time on certain processes, energy and, most importantly, opportunities to improve your business. If you don’t have a well-defined list of actions, perform each step in a haphazard manner or don’t evaluate the time and results of each task, it is almost impossible to know if you are really managing your business effectively. A clear and organised photographic workflow not only ensures the quality of the service you offer, but also allows you to identify areas for improvement, save time and offer a more professional experience to your clients.

And if you are one of those who have already defined your own workflow, this small guide with 8 recommendations will help you to validate if you are doing it correctly and if your work planning is really effective. But before we give you these tips, let’s take a closer look at what a workflow is.

What exactly is a photographic workflow?

Explained in a simple way, the workflow could be said to be all those processes that you have to carry out from the moment a potential client knows of your existence until you deliver all the photographs of their photo shoot and you finish the job. You could say that it is like a map that guides each stage with a client, from the first contact to the final delivery and includes tasks such as:

• Capturing potential customers and communicating with them.
• Information about your work creation of dossiers, web pages, blog articles, etc. to explain to your clients what your photographic services consist of.
• Planning photo shoots and organising the workflow through the preparation of a script of how the day of the photo shoot will run.
• Shooting and equipment management.
• Creation of a list of steps to define the post-production work you have to do, such as selecting, editing and organising the photographs.
• Deliver the final product efficiently.
• Follow-up in the future for possible new recruits.
• Etc.

8 habits that will make you more productive in your work as a photographer

 

When planning all these actions, it is important that you polish each step so that, on the one hand, your customer service is much more satisfactory and your time spent with each of them is less and less. The idea is that, once you have created your task flow, you can gradually polish each of them as you put them into practice to get the most out of your working hours.

Here we are going to share with you 8 recommendations that will help you to improve your photographic workflow.

1# Organise your working day

When you start a new working day, it is essential that in just a few minutes you know exactly what tasks await you that day. This way, as soon as you walk in the door of your studio, turn on your computer and open your calendar, you will have a clear overview of all the appointments you have to attend that day, photo shoots you have to deliver, administrative tasks you have to deal with today, etc.

In order for everything to run according to plan, it is essential that you have previously spent some time planning your work week, for example on Friday afternoons. This way, you will only have one day a week to organise your next sessions and pending work, otherwise you will have to spend valuable time every day planning that day’s work.

Once you have all your tasks well distributed and organised, using a calendar such as Google Calendar or similar ones will help you to have your agenda always on top, ready and up to date.

On your Arcadina website, you will be able to connect your booking system of sessions that customers will be able to book through the web (Booking) with this Google calendar or the one you usually use. In the following article of our help we explain the whole process.

>> Arcadina Help. Integrations – Google

2# Define the methods of communication with your potential customers and save as much time as possible

When you have to explain to users what your work consists of and you have to solve their initial doubts, you can use different means, for example:

• Telephone calls.
• Sending emails.
• Sending WhatsApp.
• Creation of a dossier with all the information.
• Website with information.
• Articles in the blog.
• Etc.

As you can see, there are many options available to you to inform people interested in your services about how you work and what services you offer that may be of interest to them. Although it is true that direct communication methods, such as telephone or WhatsApp can be very good, the idea is that you waste as little time as possible in these processes.

As an idea, you can take advantage of all the potential offered by Arcadina’photography websites s to create a complete service page with galleries, opinions and information pages so that users can answer all their immediate questions without having to wait to contact you. This action, in addition to saving you a lot of time, will allow you to capture the attention of many customers who, if they had not found all this information on your website, would not even have contacted you.

3# Plan your photo shoots in detail and in advance

There are photo shoots that are easier to tackle than others and for the more complex ones, such as a newborn shoot or a reportage that includes several wardrobe changes, it is essential that you have a well-developed script of how the shoot is going to run from start to finish. If you don’t, you will probably spend a lot more time taking the photos you are looking for or, on the contrary, you won’t even get to take them because the shoot will have run out of time.

To prevent this from happening, it is important that you spend some time organising the day of the session. If you have several sets, plan the order and the time you can dedicate to each of them. If you write down all this information in the form of a script on the day of the photo shoot, on the one hand you will be able to follow it and, on the other hand, you will be able to validate at that very moment if you have planned it correctly. Once you have everything well measured and planned, this script will serve as a basis for future photo shoots.

4# Optimise your post-production hours

Another task that you have to organise very well within your photographic workflow are the moments in which you are going to edit your photographs, this task, if you don’t plan it well, is where you can lose the most work time. We know of many photographers who invest a great deal of their time in this type of process and in the end their clients, when they receive the images, do not have enough knowledge of the techniques to appreciate all that effort and work. By this we don’t mean that you deliver photographs without retouching or of poorer quality, but simply that you look for a way to carry out all these processes in the shortest possible time and that you keep in mind to what point of perfection you want to reach in the different images you deliver to your clients.

Another point that you also have to take into account is the price at which you want to charge for all those hours of work. Think that the more time you spend on these processes, the lower the final profit you are going to get for this work.

5# Automate communications with your customers

From the moment a client first contacts you to ask you for information about a photo shoot until you finalise the work with them, you will have to send them many emails:

• Not yet a client: to inform them about the type of reports you carry out, available dates, if they are undecided to follow up until they make a decision, send them a budget proposal, contract conditions, etc.
• You are already a client: to communicate the dates and conditions of the photo shoot, send reminders a few days before, notify the sending of photographs, future offers, launching of other photo shoots, etc.

To make the process of sending all these emails really fast and not waste half a morning communicating with your customers, a very good idea is to create a series of predefined emails resolving all these issues. This way, when you have to send an email like this, you will only have to copy the text and change the client’s details.

In Arcadina you will be able to send a series of personalised emails and WhatsApp messages through the Management Panel to your customers and you will also be able to create your own templates to optimise your workflow. In the following article of our help we explain how to do it.

>> Arcadina Help: Email

6# Keep your equipment ready and up to date to optimise your photo shoot time

As you know, for photographers, the equipment and software they use every day in the studio are not just another working tool, they are extensions of their creativity and productivity. Having the right equipment and optimised software will not only allow you to capture and edit images with professional quality, but will also help you work more efficiently, save time, offer your clients a quality service and reduce technical frustrations.

These are some of the processes and details you need to take into account before facing a photo shoot day:

• Clean your lenses with specific cloths and compressed air to avoid scratches or dust build-up and always have your equipment ready before shooting.

• Check your camera’s sensor as dust accumulated on this part can ruin your photos. And if you notice recurring stains, consider hiring a professional cleaning.

• Update the firmware. Regularly check your camera manufacturer’s website for firmware updates to improve performance or add features.

• Organise the accessories you will be using on the day of the shoot. Keep batteries, memory cards and other accessories in a specific place and in good condition. Be sure to charge batteries and format cards before each shoot.

• Keep your computer up to date, tidy and with enough space to work. All this planning and order when working must also be transferred to your PC. This space has to be an extension of your studio and it has to work perfectly so that your management times are shorter and shorter.

• Etc.

7# Use tools that allow you to automate processes

Once you have acquired a client, you have done their photo shoot and you have finished all the editing processes, you may think that you only have one last action left to send them their photos. If you just send them a download link with the images of their shoot and that’s it, you will be missing out on a lot of opportunities to do new business with this client.

If you automate processes with the help of public and private sales galleries and also add a session booking system to your website that users can manage themselves, you will not only save valuable time, but you will also be able to increase the chances of new sales from your existing customers.

Private galleries

We have already told you this many times but it never hurts to repeat it again. With private sale galleries, your clients, in addition to being able to view the images of their photo shoot, will also be able to: select the photos for their album, download the images already retouched, buy prints or prints in more special formats, select extra images, share the link to the gallery with their family, have the option to buy pre-determined packs, etc. The options are many and so are the possibilities to increase your income.

>> Private galleries: the best tool for delivering photos to clients

Public galleries

It’s a similar story with the online shop. If you take photos in your spare time of landscapes, nature, love to document your travels or simply like to create stock photography, you can now sell them independently of your photo shoots through the online shop. The great advantage of this system, apart from the fact that you will have practically no involvement in the process, is that interested people will be able to make purchases any day of the week through the device they have at hand (Mobile, Tablet, PC).

Booking

And to continue automating tasks, what could be better than implementing the booking calendar option on your website where your clients will be able to consult your available times for a session, make a booking for the day and time they are most interested in and leave the payment made.

>> Want to improve your sales? Discover the 5 advantages of Booking

And now you can also organise bookings without a date and time in this section of your website, ideal for special sessions, such as newborn sessions, or to give as a gift at any time of the year.

>> Help from Arcadina. Booking. Campaigns

Contracts

If you have contracted the booking calendar, another of the tools that you can use to save incredible time, offer a more complete service to your clients and, on top of that, protect your business, is the possibility of creating contracts for your clients through your website using a series of templates endorsed by professional associations. Thanks to this new business solution, your clients will receive all the information of their contract by email and will be able to sign it digitally. If you want to know more about this new service, be sure to visit the following article of our blog.

>> You can now create and send contracts from your Arcadina website!

 

8# Establish a photographic workflow for each photo shoot

When it comes to defining your photographic workflow, especially when you offer different types of photo shoots, although it may seem that you do the same type of work in all of them, the truth is that, especially if the prototype of clients is different, this flow of tasks will vary slightly. To give you an example, it is not going to be the same when you do a wedding shoot from start to finish as when you are hired for a pre-communion session.

Although at the beginning you will dedicate more time to this work, the ideal is that you create a different work schedule for each type of session. In this way, once you have them all defined, we can assure you that your execution times for the different processes will be considerably reduced, as you will know at all times which step you are going to have to take next.

Fine-tune your photographic workflow and squeeze more time out of your working day

If you aim to improve your photographic workflow, in addition to offering your clients a much more controlled service where even the smallest of details will be under control, you will be able to have a number of extra hours a week that you didn’t have before in which you will be able to do more photo shoots and thus increase your income or simply dedicate them, at certain times of the year, to rest and take care of yourself.

At this point in the year when there are only a few days left to finish one stage and start another, it is the best time to stop the pace of work, analyse how the year has gone and apply all possible strategies to make the next year much more fruitful and productive, for example, improving the photographic workflow you have at the moment.

If you still don’t have a website with us or you would like to see what the rest of the business solutions we offer at Arcadina are like, we encourage you to try our services for 14 days for free.

 

Today we want to share with you the testimony of Enrique Medrano from Tonos Fotógrafos, a fantastic photographer and friend who knows very well what it means to have a correct workflow in his various photographic businesses.

>> Video: Enrique Medrano from Tonos Fotógrafos tells us how his Arcadina website has increased his sales

And to finish this article that we think you should read carefully before the end of the year, we would like to ask you a question: Have you used any kind of photographic workflow so far? We’d love to read your answer in the comments.

 

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