[00:00:08.28] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.08] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.23] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.17] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.18] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back. It's been a busy week. It's been a week of weird weather as well. Sort of been raining really hard, and then it's been sunny and quite warm. You don't know quite how to, how to dress for the day, do you?
[00:00:35.11] - Taylor
No.
[00:00:36.17] - Gordon
And we've had the football this week. There we go. Let's not talk about the football. So let's get straight into our topics. Any news, first of all?
[00:00:48.26] - Taylor
No.
[00:00:49.11] - Gordon
No. Okay, let's get straight into our topics. Shall I go first?
[00:00:52.03] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:52.21] - Gordon
So last week I spoke about the fact that I was doing a weekend of photography and I was testing it out because I hadn't done this type of event where I sell prints afterwards, before. And I did it. It all happened. It was long. The Saturday I was there from about ten to eight until about 7 o'clock-ish, which is a long day. And the second day I was there from about 9 o'clock until about half past five, and I had to set everything up. So I took along my backdrop and my screen, I brought my lighting, and we had a room where we set all that up. I set all that up. And there were time slots for the different groups who were coming in to do their tech rehearsal. So the group would come in, they would do their tech rehearsal for half an hour or so. They would then all come to me where we did portrait photos in front of a black backdrop. And then they would go off and they would either wait or go and see their parents. And then once all the groups had done their tech rehearsals, we then did the show. And then I watched the show and took photos of the show. You can hear my dog. He's obviously not impressed with my photography. Marty, quiet now. Good boy. I think there must be someone at the door. So we did all that. And then there were three shows on the first day, which was the Saturday, and then I was able to leave everything there so I didn't have to pack it all away, which is so good. I didn't really want to do all that. Come back on the Sunday, we did it all again with another two shows. And then I packed everything away and, you know, came home and it was a very long day. And I ended up taking just over 2000 photos for the two days, which is a huge number of photos. And because I was selling them as prints, I had to have a system in place to allow me to upload these photos once they'd been edited. And that took most of the week. That's what I've been doing this week, editing photos. And they needed to be uploaded so that they were available for sale. So very quickly, let's just go through the editing process. There were a few things I needed to do with each photo. So for all the portraits, I needed to add a vignette, which is like a black graduated frame, if you like, so that it focused all the attention on the middle of the photo, which is where the person was. And because I had a black background, it just focuses the attention right on the centre, which is the face. And I needed to do that for all of the portraits. And I also needed to white balance them all. And so I set up... Oh, and also make sure that the lens settings were correct for every photo. So I did all that in an action and then applied that to all of the photos that required it, all the portrait photos. Which was a huge time saver because there's about six or seven clicks that's needed to do each photo. So by doing it all in one go, I saved myself that number of clicks per photo. So that sped things up a lot. And then for all the show photos, again, I needed to do the lens correction. So I did that on import. But I also had to make sure I added a little bit of noise reduction, because under stage lighting, you've always got low lighting and you've got to sort of compensate by boosting up the ISO. For those who aren't into photography, it just means that you're making the sensor more sensitive so you can get more data in, more light in, but it does leave noise, which is like little dots everywhere. So I needed to try and reduce that. So I set up another action and we did that for the whole of the photos that required it. And again, that saved a lot of time. And then I went through and just cropped all the photos, every single one individually. Deleted the ones that I didn't want. For portrait photos, I took about four or five photos of each person, brought that down to two or three, as long as they were different, you know, either different crops or different poses then I kept them in, so that there was a variation and a choice. And then every photo was cropped, every photo was colour balanced and any sort of little touch up that was needed. So if there were sort of light streaks or little dots that appeared or things in the frame that I wanted to get rid of, I would edit those out. So it was a huge task and it took a long time, as I said, but the results were really good. I was really pleased with them. So Taylor was involved in the website side of it. He did a great deal for that. He worked out that we could import them all as WooCommerce products, so each individual photo became its own product, and they had a variation for sizes, so you could have a 10x8 or 5x7 at different prices. And so again, that's a huge amount of work. But he figured out a system where I exported each show, because each show had to be password protected. And then each show's file names were then created as a CSV file. So a comma separated file with all the file names in them. Taylor then had a way to create another CSV file that would take all of those file names and put them all into this spreadsheet so that it sorted everything out. I could then upload all the photos, once they were watermarked and reduced in size, to stop people from basically doing a screenshot. And then tailored in a bulk import with the CSV file to create products. And, you know, again, there was, by the time we'd finished, there was about 1600 products, which is a huge number if I was to put them in manually. But because Taylor had worked out this bulk import, it was actually really quick and easy to do once we'd figured it out, because there was a few issues, weren't there? As far as orders go, I don't know yet. The principal and the teachers have been sent all the login details so that they can send them on to their parents. And so I've no idea yet what's going to become of this. I have my attendance fee that I charged, but the profit is in the sales of the prints. And so I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that there's going to be quite a few and we will see. I'll report back to you next week. Anything you want to say on the process?
[00:08:14.02] - Taylor
I don't think so. It was interesting and fun to figure out how to get the website configured and set up and stuff like that. There's a bunch of interesting parts to it that required a bit of custom code.
[00:08:30.09] - Gordon
And what was really interesting is we said we were just going to use sort of like an off the shelf system, which we tried to do, and that just didn't work at all. And we also said that we were going to do something just for the time being, just something that would put it up and allow it to work the way we wanted, just for this one. But I think, in fact, we've actually hit upon a system that's really quite good. And I don't see any reason why we shouldn't use this same system in the future were I to do more, because it seems to work quite well. The nice thing about it is, once the event is over and the orders are finished, I can just remove everything off the site because they don't need to be there. I've got all my backups, I've got all my originals. I'll have a note of all the orders, but we don't necessarily need to have all the photos and all the galleries and everything up there, so I can just remove them all. Which means that every time there's a new event, I can just sort of pre-configure, quite quickly as well, each new event with each show or category as needed so that it can be a one off for that event.
[00:09:39.28] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:09:40.14] - Gordon
Yeah. So that's how my photography weekend went. Very tiring. Not only the days, but also the editing afterwards. But hopefully, once I know what the sales are going to be, I'll know if it was something that I want to do again or not. What would you like to talk about?
[00:10:00.19] - Taylor
I am going to talk about making kind of connections and friends with people and, yeah, just kind of using people that you know, to build your business. I think that BNI has had a really big effect on my business and kind of the success of it, really. And a lot of that comes down to the referral marketing, that is how kind of BNI works, really. But not just BNI, but also friends that I've made online. Now, I have made a lot of friends online through communities that I'm part of and without having to look or go out looking for work, I have had people approach me and ask, "can you help?" you know. And a lot of this comes down to originally just helping people for free. So this is part of the reason why I am the community manager for WP Manage Ninja, because I would just hang out in the Facebook group and just answer people's questions, because I had answers and I kind of knew how the plug-in worked very well, that I was able to answer more technical questions.
[00:11:20.23] - Gordon
Or you quite liked the challenge of figuring out if what they were looking for could be done. Which is part of you, isn't it? The challenge part?
[00:11:29.07] - Taylor
So without having to go and look for work, people were approaching me and saying, "can you do some custom work for me?" for different types of plug-ins and things. And again, that's part of how Snippet Club came about because I had people requesting, and then also stuff that I was creating myself. And it kind of goes to show the power of being helpful and kind of just making friends and being, you know, being in the community. There are a lot of people that kind of use online communities as a place to find work, but instead of just trying to be helpful, they look at it from a "how can I make money?" And so their replies are less helpful and more "come to, you know, the private message" and they're kind of trying to get the work that way. And it's like, actually you need to establish yourself as an expert first before people are willing to kind of ask and look for the kind of paid work that is obviously what people want, what we want. And so, yeah, if you're an expert in your field, see if you can find communities and places that you can hang out in, both in real life and also online, and just try and be helpful. There's lots of people that when I was starting, were very, very helpful and kind of gave me the time of day when I didn't know as much. And so that's part of the reason why I like to give back and try and help and give free kind of comments and replies to people, because I was in that situation at one point and someone was kind enough to help me when I was like that. And there are people, or there have been people when I first started that didn't, they kind of just assumed and was kind of like, "oh, you're not smart enough, you know, I'm not going to bother trying to explain to you" and things like that because sometimes people just don't know what they don't know kind of thing. And that kind of stuck with me and it always annoyed me because it's like I don't know where I'm supposed to go. And so when people were very vague with their comments or assumed kind of that you had an understanding of something that sometimes was complex or even basic to everyone else or just to them. And yeah, you've got to always take that into consideration about when you're replying is that people are at completely different stages of their journey, of their knowledge. So, yeah, that's kind of what I wanted to touch on, really.
[00:13:59.19] - Gordon
And really good things have come out of it for you, haven't they? Because, I mean, networking is a really important thing and this is a form of networking, I would say. Sort of spreading your net and spreading your knowledge to other people. But also you touched upon the important bit and that is be seen as the expert. And if you're the expert, people will come to you for help. And because you're the expert, they won't mind paying probably more than a normal client would pay for normal work. They're coming to you because you know what you're doing and you've proved it.
[00:14:34.29] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:14:35.08] - Gordon
And that's a really good way to get work. It's like word of mouth, but it's sort of a knowledge based version, isn't it?
[00:14:43.10] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:14:43.28] - Gordon
Yeah, that's really good.
[00:14:45.08] - Taylor
So, and it's, you know, it can be a lot of work up front to give your time, but it's kind of the long run that you're kind of doing it for rather than short term game. It's long term gain.
[00:14:57.16] - Gordon
Well, it's a form of marketing, isn't it? I mean, you don't, when you're doing it you don't view it as marketing, but you are, you're sort of, you're laying the seeds for future work from people, aren't you?
[00:15:09.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:15:10.22] - Gordon
Fantastic. Very good. Anything else you'd like to say today?
[00:15:13.25] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:15:15.08] - Gordon
So that's it for our show. Thank you very much for joining us. As always, you can find us on YouTube. Facebook will come after the YouTube is up and done. We're having problems with that still, but please, like, share and subscribe.
[00:15:30.05] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:15:35.17] - Gordon
And you can find us on all the major podcast platforms if you would prefer to listen to us instead of watch us. Thank you for joining us. As always, we will look forward to seeing you next week. Well, not seeing you because we can't see you, but we look forward to welcoming you to our show next week. 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:15:59.16] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:16:02.03] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:16:02.21] - Taylor
Bye.
