Focus Summit is a 3-day event, which you can join from the comfort of your studio, home office, or even on your couch.

Have a look.

As you can see, the photography summit has been well thought out and planned. There are a lot of incentives to join and learn.

And rumor has it that if you download their free eBook you will receive a really nice discount code of $50 off the cost of the event.

Join Rachel Brenke, Ben Hartley, The Youngrens, Christine Tremoulet, Blake Rudis and many others at Focus Summit.

Learn more or get started here.

List of Contributors (in no particular order):

1. Lindsay Adler – Designing an Image & Studio Lighting Guide, Subscription to NEW website
2. Jared Platt – Comprehensive Collection of 400 Lightroom Presets & Lightroom Webinar
3. Mylio – 1 Year Subscription
4. Dave Cross – 1 Year Subscription
5. Tony Sweet – 13 Videos Covering Macro Photography, Texturing, Infrared, Mirroring plus more
6. Rick Sammon – Master the Art and Craft of Bird Photography Video
7. Simply Color – Simply Cash
8. PhotoshopCafe – Photoshop Destination CC LIVE
9. Lee Varis – Online Course in Mastering Image Creation & Photo Illustration in Photoshop
10. Bobbi Lane – Posing & Directing Video
11. Craig Minielly – Retouch Toolkit & BeautyBar Pro set of Actions for Lightroom/Photoshop
12. Phlearn – PhlearnMethod Bundle, Photoshop 101 & 201, Beginners Guide to Levitation
13. SharkPixel – Landscape Photography Presets for Lightroom
14. Lesa Snider – The Skinny Ebooks Series
15. Scott Wyden Kivowitz – E-Book: Time Is On Your Side: Exploring Long Exposure Photography
16. Lance Sullivan – Architecture Power Pack of Presets
17. Tyler Meade – 73 Sports and Commercial Photography Lightroom Presets
18. Sean Duggan – Photoshop CC Essentials: Selections, Masking & Compositing Video
19. Nik Pekridis – Video Training Course: Wedding Photography in Action
20. Gavin Gough – Photographers Workflow: Ebook & Videos
21. Perfectly Clear – Photoshop and Lightroom Plugins
22. Cris Duncan – Photography Business Starter Set: Ebooks & Video
23. Dane Sanders – Fast Track Photographer Audiobook
24. Andrew S Gibson – Mastering Photography & Understanding EOS Ebooks
25. ViewBug – 1 Year Membership
26. Eyefi – 1 Year Cloud Subscription
27. Peter Eastway – Subscription to Better Digital Photography & Photoshop Layers Class
28. David Ziser – Ebooks and Training Videos
29. Stephanie Cotta – Mastering the Art of Newborn Photography
30. KelbyOne LLC. – KelbyOne Photoshop and Lightroom Creativity Bundle
31. Richard Sturdevant – SturDaVinci Art Tools Photoshop & Corel Painting Bundle
32. Photofocus – Develop Great Images in Lightroom & 72 Essays On Photography Ebooks

If this interests you then please head over to The Big Deal website and grab a bundle for yourself!

This starts at noon today!

Last year the photography industry was introduced to a new concept called the 5 Day Deal. Some people were turned off by the amount of promotion that came from it, but not everyone. In fact, the 5 Day Deal raised thousands of dollars for charity. So this year the stakes are higher and now the deal is back with a vengeance. The goal is to do far better than last year’s charity donation, with over $100,000.

There are many amazing contributors, including our very own Scott Wyden Kivowitz offering his presets and two of his ebooks. How it works is simple…

The deal lasts for 5 days long (that’s the obvious part), and for the 5 days you have the ability to purchases over $2,000 worth of products for under $100. When purchasing you have the choice to choose which of the charities you would like to donate to. Or you can have the 5 Day Deal team split it evenly between the charities.

There will be a live counter showing how much money was raised for charity. At the end of the 5 days an announcement will be sent to all purchasers with the total donation amounts. It’s pretty cool!

Some of the products included come from photographers like Zack Arias, Trey Ratcliff, Nicole S Young, Joel Grimes, David Duchemin and so many others.

These amazing photographers have compiled together 39 different photography products; including training, tools, and much more, into an awesome deal only available for the 5 days.  Included in the bundle are:

• Over 70 hours of training video
• 14 Photography ebooks
• 300+ Lightroom Presets
• 500+ Textures

and so much more.

The deal starts today, October 15 at 12pm EST and ends October 20 at 12pm EST.

We really hope that you take a good look at the deal and either pick one up for yourself or gift it to someone because either way you’re donating to charities that could use the donations.

Learn more here.

10 incredible photographers shared their thoughts on how you, as a photographer, can improve your website.

In the eBook, you will learn from:

• Jamie Swanson
• Andrew Funderburg
• Angela Pointon
• C.C. Chapman
• Zach Prez
• Brian Matiash
• Chris Frailey
• Justin Balog
• Rosh Sillars
• Jodi Friedman

“A highly informative book without being overwhelming. It’s back to basics for the modern age.” – Traci Law

“Great tips for photographers of all sorts – whether you shoot people, artwork, or landscapes, these website strategies will apply to your site.” – Aaron Hockley

“I am now working on a new, and better, web strategy after digesting these tips and tricks for a third time tonight!” – Chris Nitz

Thanks for reading and enjoy the eBook,

Scott & The Photocrati Team

PS.  If you’re interested in contributing to the second volume of the free eBook, get in touch with us.

This past October, I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards in London. My camera trap image of a black bear in the Redwoods of California had been given an award. Last year, my close friend and former assistant Steve Winter had won the big prize with a camera trap image of a snow leopard. We both have invested years in finding ways to make elusive, wild animals photograph themselves by crossing the path of an infrared beam, triggering a disguised camera nearby.

The awards are presented in the fantastic main hall of the British Natural History Museum, under the giant dinosaur; a fabulous setting with all the mood that a great award ceremony should have. This year the winning image was another camera trap image, an Iberian wolf. Iberian wolves have come back from the brink of extinction and this image had the added energy of the wolf jumping over a fence. I was stunned by the image and immediately asked to meet the photographer.

VIEW THE “STORY BOOK WOLF” IMAGE HERE

Jose Luis Rodriguez was gracious and told me he had made the image over many months and many failed attempts by making an arrangement with a sheep farmer. He relayed that he had put “bait” carcasses inside the vacant sheep paddock for many nights while he attempted to get the image he had dreamed of. It is a perfect image. The wolf is in mid-air at exactly the right point. This is very hard to do with camera traps because the beam and the speed of the animal give results that are not perfect. Remember, the photographer cannot be there to adjust anything and most wild animals do not come back and do the same thing twice.I have a well-known image of a wild tiger jumping from a cliff directly into the camera. I got one frame in three months. One.

The jumping Iberian wolf image seemed impossible, but I accepted it because I was proud of the photographer for disclosing that he had “baited” the animal.

My stance on ethics has always been that there is an issue if you cannot stand up and tell the world what you did. The ethics line can blur, it is not black and white. Each situation is different. Full disclosure is always the best approach.

Today, a few months later, the image has been disqualified, the photographer banned, and a wonderful award has been tainted. The wolf was tame, the wall and fence was inside a Madrid wildlife park. After the award was announced, intense scrutiny came down from Spanish photographers who revealed proof that it was Ossian, an animal actor, and that the scene had a distinct tree line that existed in the wildlife park. A sad day.

I have often struggled with the methods wildlife photographers use to make images in contrast to my upbringing as a photojournalist. I once attended a heated ethics discussion in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The panel on the stage made up of wildlife documentary producers finally answered my question about disclosure with the edged: “they will turn off the tele” if we tell them what we do. I have personally tested this. The audience does want to believe what it sees. I was stunned to the point of tears by this exchange.

Remember, I’m not taking the ethical high ground as if I’m a magician and can speak to the animals. Great wild images are hard to make and I have the luxury of time paid by my patron. In Congo, I once put a dog inside a hastily constructed cage and left it in the forest as bait for a leopard. My hope was that the dog would not die and that I could get the very elusive leopard on film, the central character in the ecosystem I was trying to document. I did this with the idea that I would always tell my audience what I did. It turned out to be a very long, funny story but the dog escaped unscathed and we didn’t get the image. Next, I sprayed leopard urine from a zoo on a trail near some leopard dung and we got one frame of a male cat. That became a double page spread in the magazine.

One must be willing to declare the process of making their images; it is an act of essential self-awareness. I firmly believe that not revealing the process leads to darkness whether or not the truth is eventually exposed.

I got my first job in this business because the photographer that hired me didn’t understand the concepts behind digital imaging. He knew f/stops and shutter speeds and watt/seconds like the back of his hand. He could estimate flash exposure (without a meter) within half a stop, and his client relation skills were out of this world. But he had just mortgaged his house to buy a digital camera (Kodak DCS460) and he needed help.

That was 15 years ago. Digital imaging was just beginning to become an acceptable alternative to film for some uses. Royalty free stock photography had just entered the market and pulled the rug out from under a lot of photographers. The global economy was finally starting to come out of a recession. Fifteen years later – we’re (hopefully) coming out of recession, microstock has showed up, pulling the rug out from a lot of photographers, and integrated video is once again, to use a phrase from the ’90’s, shifting the paradigm.

Looking at the past few years, newspapers and magazines have struggled horribly as advertisers have cut back ad budgets and shifted to digital marketing. It’s pretty likely that advertising supported print publications are not long for this world. Second, recent product prototypes by publishers like Conde Nast© and Time/Warner show that e-readers are coming fast. And if Apple launches the iSlate (or whatever they decide to call it,) later this month as predicted, and it’s the game changer it’s expected to be, it’s entirely possible that the newsstand and bookstore as we know it are headed the way of Betamax and CD’s. Right now publishers are simply converting their print publications to electronic versions. But that’s soon to change. Audio and video embedded into magazine, book and newspaper articles are only a software upgrade away.

Those photographers outside of the commercial field are by no means exempt. Moving pictures embedded into family snapshots (a la Harry Potter) are currently technologically possible, but economically unfeasible – and we all know how that curve works. Wedding and event photographers are already combining their stills into slide show movies with transitions and background music. Making the jump to embedded video is a logical next step.

As with any monumental change, there will be those who resist, those who adopt early, and those who go with the flow. It’s probably too late to be in on the early adopter phase, but it’s certainly never too late to be a resistor. After all, there are those of us who still shoot film, and are sought out because of it. There are those who make images using oils and watercolors and etchings, and make livings doing so. I expect that there will always be those who make a living exclusively doing still images with a camera, but they’ll be a minority. What’s left is the middle ground of going with the flow. Usually, it’s said, that standing in the middle of the road is a good way to get run over, and it’s true. But what may be worse is not crossing the road in the first place.

A lot of the skills that we’ve learned as still photographers translate to video very well. Composition, lighting and attention to detail are still important. New skills like capturing quality audio, maintaining continuity and compression codecs steepen the learning curve – so get on it and learn. As with still photography, specialized help is needed in some instances. We hire food, makeup and prop stylists all the time in the still world. It’s no different in the motion world, other than you need more people. Freelance editors, script supervisors, line producers and audio technicians may come into play.

ASMP has just published the results of their research here. It’s well worth reading.

Fifteen years ago I got my start because an industry veteran realized that he knew a lot, but didn’t know enough. So he hired some help. That’s a lesson worth taking to heart. We know a lot, but we need to know more. Either learn, hire some help, or get run over.