Category: Training

5 ways to quickly get more out of Light Blue in 2020

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Your business is constantly evolving as you introduce changes and improvements, investing time now in order to enjoy benefits well into the future.

Let’s explore a few ways that Light Blue can make your business easier to run and to be more effective.

Light Blue is a flexible and powerful tool that offers a great deal of value to photographers. Read on to discover a few of the ways that it could help you.

1.     Email templates

Keeping in touch with your clients is important, but it doesn’t have to take ages! Light Blue’s email and text message templates save you time and mean that you don’t forget to say the important things. There’s no need to type the same messages out again and again, and our powerful mail-merge tags automatically personalise your messages with the relevant details.

Email templates are useful because they can save you a lot of time sending out standard responses to your clients’ queries, help you to use consistent wording, and present yourself with a professional image. You can use email templates whenever you create an email to a client from Light Blue, and you can also use them in workflows to send automated messages to your clients: for example, to remind them about a booking.

Learn how to make your messages more efficient.

2.     Workflow messaging

When you’ve only got one or two shoots to worry about, it’s easy to remember all of the important things that you need to do. However, once you’re at the stage where you’re dealing with multiple jobs that are all at different stages, keeping track of what needs to be done next can be a headache!

Whether or not you’ve planned it that way, every successful photography business has a series of steps that you need to go through to make sure that you’re delivering the best possible service to your clients. Light Blue’s powerful workflows can add a list of tasks and automated messages based around the date of the shoot, so we can remind you when you need to do something and important emails and text messages will get sent automatically.

Discover Light Blue’s time-saving workflows & automated messaging.

3.     Using forms

Receiving new enquiries is great because it means that your marketing’s working well and people want to work with you! If you install one of Light Blue’s contact forms on your website, all of the useful details of your new enquiry will flow straight into Light Blue – no need to type anything into your database. Your client can get an immediate, automated reply, and you can follow it up with a personalised email or text message template as soon as you’ve checked your availability.

In order for you to deliver memorable pictures and outstanding service to your clients, you need to have the right information. Sending questionnaires to your clients is a great way to capture the important details. Light Blue’s forms can be sent out as a questionnaire from a shoot record and will update your records with the details that you need. Your clients are essentially doing your admin for you, while you appear to be really thorough & organised. There’s no limit to the number of different forms that you can use, so you’re free to ask the right questions at the right times.

Gather the important details from your clients.

4.     Online contracts

Converting enquiries into paid bookings is great, but it’s even better when the booking process is effortless for both you and your client.

Confirm bookings with ease by sending contracts from Light Blue. It’s easy to present pricing options to your client, gather additional details, have them agree to your terms and conditions, and even take payment for a booking fee or session fee in one nice, simple flow!

Confirm bookings with ease.

5.     Powerful reporting & queries

One of the great advantages of using Light Blue is that all of the information that you need is in one place. That data can tell you a lot about how your business is doing, and help you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

That’s where Light Blue’s reporting features are invaluable, allowing you to use everything you’ve entered into it to give you an overview of how your business is performing and where you need to focus your efforts so that you can hit your goals.

You don’t need to spend ages collating the data, there’s no need to be copying and pasting things, formatting spreadsheets or setting up complicated pivot tables in Excel!

Reports & queries pull up your live data, so you’re always seeing the most up to date information.

Take the guesswork out of running your business.

Not currently using Light Blue?

If you’re not already using Light Blue to manage your business, we’d be delighted to set up a free, no-obligation demo!

Book a free demo

Get the year off to a great start with Light Blue

Reading Time: 2 minutesWe hope that 2019 is going to be full of happiness and success for all of our customers, and that enquiries have been coming in thick and fast over the Christmas and New Year period.

Light Blue is full of tools that can help you respond to and follow up on those enquiries, quickly confirm bookings with your new clients, and get your invoices paid quickly. We’d love to help you get the most out of those tools!

Free, personalised training

We’re always keen to make sure that you’re getting as much as possible out of Light Blue, and you’ll find loads of helpful resources on our website: excellent video tutorials, in-depth webinars, and responsive email support.

We also offer one-to-one training via screen-sharing software, which allows us to offer personalised help to make sure that you’re getting the most out of Light Blue. Whether you need a hand with setting up a particular feature, or want to ask our advice about how to approach a particular situation, we’ve got experience of working with thousands of photographers around the world.

We’re offering all of our customers a free 30 minute screen-sharing session. All you need to do is book your one-to-one session by the end of February!

Click here to book a free screen-sharing session!

Farmers’ Market

Reading Time: 3 minutes
We’re excited to announce that we’ve been nominated for an award for Best Software for Photographers in the Farmers’ Market awards. There’s a variety of other categories to vote in, with many worthy nominees, too. We’d be truly grateful if you could spare a moment to cast a vote:

Vote for Light Blue as ‘Best Software for Photographers’

There’s a whole host of really interesting & worthwhile talks being held at The Farmers’ Market and we’ve shortlisted a few that we thought were especially useful.

Protect yourself: Contracts & Dealing with negative situations – Emilie White

As well as being a busy UK based Wedding Photographer, Emilie White used to be an intellectual property Lawyer. So she has a detailed knowledge of the law and what is required in a contract. She will share her insights as to what should be included to protect yourself and be clear as to what happens with our images.

Learn more & book tickets here.

Fix it in Photoshop – Tigz Rice

Tigz Rice is the Photography Farm’s resident geek girl on all things Adobe. Expect a rattling two hour demo of quick tips and tricks in Photoshop, like swapping heads in a group shot, creating panoramas, creating droplets for resizing images, reducing redness in skin, quick selections and cut outs, changing the colour of an object, using content aware tools, sharpening an image, creating actions… Tools to handle absolutely anything a client might throw at you!

Learn more & book tickets here.

Shooting as a Duo – The Twins

More and more photographers are choosing to shoot as a twosome or upselling a second shooter to clients. But how do you make the partnership work?
The Twins, who have been shooting together since 2012, will take you through the business – branding, marketing, website, and how to divvy up the admin.
Then there’s the wedding day itself. The Twins will tell you how they plan the day, define their roles, and how they work together to ensure seamless storytelling.

Learn more & book tickets here.

Nailing the Candids – Lee Allen

As both a music industry and wedding photographer, Lee Allen knows the power of a good candid shot as well as techniques for insuring that you get some killer ones. So we asked him to lead a class on shooting them at weddings. This session is both an examination into what elements form great candid shots and a practical hands on class with shooting elements.

Learn more & book tickets here.

Teen portraits – The Next Big Thing in Portraiture in the UK – Christina Lauder

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Leicestershire family portrait photographer Christina Lauder is originally from Toronto, Canada. She moved to the UK 20 years ago for a job transfer in software consulting & eventually found herself starting a new career as a portrait photographer, something she’d wanted to do since she was a child.

I’ve had the chance to try pretty much every genre there is within portraiture, from newborn to boudoir and everything in between, however what has captured my interest most is the teenage market. I love that I am still working with children but they tend to be with me of their own free will and therefore willing to cooperate which makes my job a whole lot easier and much more interesting.

Teen portraits are becoming a genre in their own right here in the UK. Much like Prom has reached this side of the water, the ever popular teenage portrait industry that has swept across North America is coming to the UK too.

And why not? This is an important milestone in our children’s lives. I for one want to capture this time in my child’s life and I suspect I’m not alone here. Teenagers have strong personalities, they have hobbies and interests worth documenting and moving away from home is well within their sights so we have to capture them while we can.

We’ve had the pleasure of hearing Christina hold seminars at the SWPP Digital Imaging Roadshow and she talks about the challenges of bringing a previously unknown genre of photography to the UK market.

I’m not going to lie, this market is going to take some selling. It won’t happen simply because we offer it. This isn’t typically an age that parents think of taking their kids to a portrait studio. But it is an age where children can ask for such a service. We just need to show them how wonderful their portraits can be and how amazing it will be for them to share in their social media. Then we can let the kids do the selling for us. Of course showing them how wonderful their portraits can be means we need to create portraits that are wonderful. These must be more than your average studio portrait. Thankfully teenagers provide so much scope that this is relatively simple and its one sure way of separating an average photographer from a great photographer.

Christina’s delivering a series of workshops which will provide a solid foundation in lighting that can be applied to any genre of portraiture, although the focus and subject matter for this workshop is teenagers.

You can find more information on Christina’s site about the workshops in Fife, Chester le Street & Somerset.