Senior Portrait Product Roundup

A distinctive look is one way to ensure you stand out in a crowded and in an ever-growing market. While some photographers compete on price, many of the more experienced and successful photographers choose to develop a “look” for their end product that seniors will be attracted to every year.

With instant communications via email, text messaging and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook, seniors can quickly pass along their excitement about how happy they are with their senior portraits to every one of their friends faster than ever before. Having a unique product for your senior portrait market each year goes a long way to gaining an advantage and increasing your potential sales.

Let’s take a look at some of the interesting products on the market that can help photographers create a contemporary look for seniors.

Books
The Master Guide for Photographing High School Seniors by Dave, Jean and JD Wacker (www.amherstmedia.com). Price: $34.95. This new Amherst Media publication by the Wacker family, a fourth generation photography studio, explains how to create top-quality senior images. Features include: creating senior marketing campaigns; maximizing sales from each session; boosting the variety and personalization of images at each session to help increase the size of each order; five popular poses for guys, girls and senior couples; simple ways to add outdoor portraits to your studio’s repertoire; streamlining your sales efforts to seniors; and increasing your image-processing artistry for enhanced sales.

Retouching Services
Retouchup.com. This retouching service, once called SeniorFotos.com, was renamed retouchup.com in 2005 to appeal to a broader audience, even though senior photographers continue to be a large part of its clientele.
Retouchup.com allows senior photographers to outsource their retouching needs for a simple low price of $2.50 per file. The company’s standard retouching service includes facial glare, stray hairs, whitening teeth and eyes, removing blemishes, softening or removing bags under the eyes, even fixing spots in the background. This charge is per image, not per head! The company also offers braces removal and eyeglass glare correction. There is even an option for underclassman and yearbook retouching.

Software
Kubota AutoAlbum V3 and Dashboard (www.kubotaworkshops.com/store). Magazine-style albums are an extremely popular item these days, and although a primary vehicle for wedding photography sales, Kevin Kubota’s elegantly styled designs can also provide a unique look for senior portraits. The new Kubota AutoAlbum layout software includes over 500 layouts. You select your layout, choose your images and create your portrait page.

All page designs are kept as completely modifiable layers and use Smart Object capabilities so you can quickly alter, transform, and/or warp your photo, without fear of altering the original. AutoAlbum allows you to design layouts in 5 x 5, 7 x 7, 8 x 8, 10 x 10, 11 x 11 and 12 x 12 sizes, and panoramic layouts in 5 x 10, 6 x 12, 7 x 14, 8 x 16, 10 x 20, 11 x 22, and 12 x 24 formats. A printed AutoAlbum Book is included showing the available templates in the library. Autoabum V3 also includes the new Kubota Dashboard, a timesaving interface that allows you to search for and launch templates and Kubota actions quickly and easily. Price: $399.

OnOne Software (www.ononesoftware.com) offers plug-ins for Photoshop designed to help photographers spend more time behind the camera and less time in front of their computer. You can buy them individually or as part of their new Plug-In Suite 4.5. The Suite includes the products described below plus Genuine Fractals image resizer, PhotoTune color correction tool, and MaskPro, a tool that allows you to mask out or remove a subject from the background of a photo. There are video tutorials for each on their respective product page on the website. Price for Plug-In Suite 4.5: $499.

PhotoFrame 4 Professional Edition (www.ononesoftware.com) PhotoFrame 4 provides users with a huge library of professionally produced edge/background enhancements accessible through an intuitive interface. Users can use PhotoFrame 4 Professional Edition directly from Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom; although Photoshop is still required, even though you may access the program through Aperture or Lightroom. Users have the option of previewing each treatment on their actual image before the effect is applied to a copy of their image in Photoshop/Aperture/Lightroom. You can adjust size, transparency, color, alignment and more of each element directly within PhotoFrame 4. Full version: $259.95; upgrade: $99.95.

PhotoTools 2 Professional Edition PhotoTools 2 is a plug-in that utilizes the power of Photoshop Actions to provide a complete library of effects created by onOne Software and professional photographers such as Kevin Kubota and Jack Davis. The effects offer a number of different photographic scenarios you can quickly access and apply, including black-and-white conversions, darkroom effects, color enhancements, skin corrections, lens simulations, and much more. Effects can be previewed and stacked and blended together. PhotoTools 2 also has a built-in batch processing engine that can increase productivity and includes the ability to mask-in or mask-out the effects, allowing you to apply them to specific portions of your image. Pro edition: $259.95; standard edition: $159.95.

FocalPoint 1 (www.ononesoftware.com) is a tool that gives the photographer the ability to simulate selective focus or tilt-shift lenses. It can blur and/or vignette to provide the user selective focus to draw the viewer’s eye to the subject. FocalPoint 1 is accessible directly from Aperture/Lightroom. Price: $159.95.

Templates, Backgrounds & Mats
Templates are a quick way to create memorable images for the senior. Several companies provide templates and here are a few new products for this market.

JensFabulousStuff.com. Jen Hillenga and business partner Kate Thram operate jensfabulousstuff.com, a brand new company that was launched earlier this year with a wide range of products for the senior portrait market. The company builds on the success of products used by their Momento Images studio in Minneapolis, MN. Jensfabulousstuff.com offers everything from marketing tools and educational DVDs to posing guides and Photoshop actions/tools. In just a few short months their website has had more than 2.5 million hits.

A wide assortment of senior graduation announcements, press-printed cards, and announcement books are available for purchase individually or in bundles. Prices range from $29.99 for printed cards to $129 for a senior graduation bundle.

PhotoDUDS (www.photoduds.com) (photo Digital Unique Designs) is senior photographer Beth Forester’s commercially licensed series of DVD volumes containing products designed to “dress up” your photos. They currently offer four different Senior Fresh Collections with various overlays, backgrounds, templates and brushes and their newest product for the senior portrait market, the Wild! Senior Card Set v.2. This set includes a DVD containing press products such as graduation announcements, invitations, thank-you cards, 411 cards, address labels, stickers and a signature board. Plus, the set comes with five coordinating papers, six Wild! overlays and embellishments used in the cards as separate files to customize these layered templates even further. All of the Wild! pattern colors used in the templates are on separate layers, so you can easily change any of the colors to coordinate with your photos. Wild! Senior Card price: $115; collections: $125 each.

QuickMats4 (www.jhartman.com) is a fifth-generation update to the highly successful matting program developed by John Hartman. Designed for use in John’s own studio, QuickMats is a program that can help the user easily create new image products for the senior client. With more than 500 pre-designed mats that can be sized to fit any image, the mats can be customized for each client and sold as add-ons, bonus incentives, order builders, speculation sales, or as standalone products. The program includes a “prebuilts” folder, allowing you to select and then customize a mat to build your design in any size with up to 40 openings in a single mat. You can also save your mats as templates for use in future projects. The set includes a video explaining how John markets his QuickMat items to help raise his average senior sale over $200 along with an interactive video tutorial detailing setup, operation and troubleshooting. Price for Basic QuickMats4 is $239; or $339 for the Plus version that includes a bonus DVD with additional Mats.

Senior Template Collections (www.suzetteallen.com) provides the user an infinite number of looks and colors to suit every senior’s taste. Each Series has templates for 8 x 10, 10 x 10, 10 x 20, 12 x 18, 16 x 20 and a grad card design that can be populated in seconds using the easy Clipping Mask Method. The flexible design of the templates includes multiple openings, layered ornamentation, textures, color adjustment layers and other design elements for complete creative control in creating unique designs for seniors.

There are a total of eight senior collections in 12 themes, each providing 14 to 24 customizable templates as PSD files to provide more than 150 different templates. Each series has a price of about $99.

Elegance Template Collection (www.suzetteallen.com) is a series of four sets that provide the user with about a dozen templates each in four different themes. Themes include SaraBella, Fountainess, Asian Fashion and Old World. There is a PDF booklet to show the layout of each collection at www.suzetteallen.com. There are also a number of related products available including 12 Senior Grad Card collections in 12 themes available in either 5 x 7 or 5 x 5 sizes, double-sided and designed for press printing with a 1/8-inch bleed area added to edges. There are also various Photoshop actions and brushes available. Prices vary among items.

Organizations and Marketing Products
Senior Portrait Artists (SPA) (www.spartists.com) is specifically for senior portrait photographers and provides information in a creative, artistic and innovative form from both inside and outside the photography industry. SPA has been specifically designed to reach the needs of senior photographers. They provide members with a quarterly publication and other materials to help them with their senior portraits and also host the annual SPA Event, a hands-on, interactive environment designed to meet the needs of today’s senior portrait photographer. There is also “SPA Talk,” an online forum offering members collaboration and comments. Non-members can still view the SPA Blog written by spa’s director, Andy Bondurant.

Senior Ideas 1 and 2 (www.jhartman.com) are a set of CDs that provide PDF file books designed as a resource for posing, lighting, backgrounds and post-production ideas. More than 1600 pages of information along with 550 different senior portraits created by master photographer John Hartman provide an easy to see and learn way of how effective an image can become as retouching, special effects and other treatments are applied.

Senior Ideas 2 comes with a 200-page posing guide in a 6 x 6 format, designed as a reference for new ideas during the shoot. The book contains photos only and can be used to solicit pose preferences from your senior clients prior to and during the session. Additionally, there is a CD with more than 700 pages of information covering everything from camera and lens selection to image and post-production enhancements with related instructional videos. Price: $199.

Senior Marketing X (www.jhartman.com) is a complete marketing and merchandising solution developed by John Hartman for the senior photographer. The program contains over 100 templated marketing and sales files you can customize with your name, studio information and your own images. This year’s version was completely redesigned by well known graphic designer Charmaine Check. All materials were created using Adobe InDesign with the same graphic elements and fonts for a unified and professional look and feel. This product is licensed on a calendar year basis with yearly upgrades.

Props, Backgrounds & Books
Background by Maheu (www.back
groundsbymaheu.com) is a company founded and operated by David and Julie Maheu that offers a wide range of backgrounds used by many professional photographers in the industry. Custom backgrounds painted to your own specifications are also available. All are hand-painted on ether canvas or muslin. For the senior portrait market they feature their Two-Ended Designs line that provides the photographer two unique backgrounds within one. Each end has a different design that can be used for wall/floor interchangeably by simply rotating the background. It’s basically like getting two background choices for one price. Price: 10 x 20-foot muslin: $500; 12 x 20 muslin: $650.

Virtual Backgrounds (www.virtualbackgrounds.net) is a company specializing in digital backgrounds that offers a set of backgrounds designed for the senior market. Using its Scene Machine and Spectravue projection system you can take any ordinary transparency or slide and project it onto a screen behind the subject. The image is then flashed simultaneously with the studio strobes used to light the subject(s), thus creating a backdrop during the exposure. The Scene Machine is compatible with any camera and there are a huge number of background galleries to choose from.

Wicker by Design (www.wickerbydesign.com). With nearly a dozen different products designed specifically for use with senior portraits, Wicker by Design remains popular among professional photographers. Two of the most popular products for the studio include the Adult Fainting Couch Solid with flowing lines and wicker weave at the armrests. This 4-foot long couch has a 30-inch seat and includes a long cushion and bolsters pillow and sells for $389. The Art Nouveau Gates are made of rust-resistant metal and comes in a muted antique green finish with graceful curves to make it a charming addition to a “garden” setting for a price of $189.

American Photographic Resources (www.aprprops.com). Specializing in children, senior, family and executive props, APR offers the largest selection of props in the industry. With nearly 100 products designed for senior portraits, the photographer can chose from backgrounds, to posing stools, to caps and gowns. PhotographyProps.com (www.photog
raphyprops.com) is a company offering a wide variety of studio props, including posing props, bench props and wicker studio props, for every area of photography with a number that are specifically designed for the senior portrait market. They also sell photography backdrops and backgrounds, including muslin, canvas and seamless paper as well as photography equipment such as studio lighting kits, tripods, light meters and softboxes.

Taprell-Loomis (www.tap-usa.com) manufactures a wide assortment of photo mounts, folios and albums for both traditional and digital markets. They currently have a number of items targeted for the senior market including: Senior Tassel Frames, Grad Frames, Academic Frames, Graduate Memory Cube, Superior Accordion Albums, Folios such as Achievement and Commencement, Folders such as Graduate, Commencement and Magna, and more.

Denny Manufacturing (www.dennymfg.com) manufactures and sells a wide variety of backgrounds on canvas and muslin, as well as digital backgrounds, stands, roller systems and much more. They have a number of hand-painted, flexible textured backgrounds, and digital backgrounds specifically for senior portraits. There are also a number of studio-type photographic props from banisters to columns to boxes that are ideal for senior portraits.

PictoBooks (www.pictobooks.com). The new Bijou Series by PictoBooks offers an ideal solution for the senior portrait photographer looking for a high quality professional album with a budget in mind. The series features a senior portraiture cover with an optional cover monogram. Photographers can customize from 26 different cover materials by submitting their own custom monograms. Graphics can include anything from text to school mascots or the portraits themselves. The Bijou Series utilize flush mount, lay-flat technology and feature true panorama binding printed on photographic paper. Available in four sizes, 8 x 8, 8 x 10, 10 x 8 and 10 x 10, the Bijou Series has a capacity of 10 spreads and a maximum of 35 pages, all at an economical price.

Photo Labs & Service Bureaus
Many of today’s photo service bureaus offer a variety of products for the senior market. These include everything from press-printed cards and albums, rep cards, and even templates for senior grad announcements. Contact your own service bureau for details, or take a look at the Rangefinder Product Gallery found in each issue to learn more about products that would fit your needs and budget.

Peter Kotsinadelis is a writer/photographer living in Pleasanton, CA. Email: [email protected].