Support the Artists to Support the Arts - The Consortium

One submission to the Topeka Photowalk contest

This week I have felt the need for the Consortium to be a fully-operating organization quite heavily.

Julie and I, against considerable odds have accomplished some significant, gritty work in establishing our photography business, but through all of it we strained against limitations imposed against us by my demanding full-time job and unpredictable life circumstances like a baby nephew going to the emergency room and staying up all night to help his mother, and Julie having some sick days afterward.

Practicing and improving our photography received only a sliver of Julie’s time and none of mine. Instead we spent our time communicating with potential clients, building web pages during lunch breaks, and trying our inexperienced hands at graphic design. It’s been quite a full week!

Worldwide Photowalk

The small bit of photography that Julie got to enjoy was on Saturday morning, when she participated in the Topeka chapter of the Worldwide Photowalk. She strolled around the downtown area with a number of other photographers, capturing any bit of beauty or intrigue she could. Julie posted a few of her favorites on Facebook and asked our friends to vote for their favorite two – and received a much larger response than anticipated.

Afterwards, she submitted the two “winners” to the Topeka Photowalk contest on Flickr. She had a great time stepping outside of portrait photography to explore the beauty in our urban surroundings. The photos will also make a great beginning to the Consortium’s stock photography library that we have plans to develop in the future – stay tuned for that!

Submission #2 for Topeka photowalk contest

Taking clients in waves

We are setting up photo shoots in the Oklahoma City area for the last weekend in August, and possibly for that whole week. I will have to take vacation time to make the trip and still reserve enough to go to OKC two more times this year. We have two shoots set up already, one of which is for the cover art of Aaron’s novel Gods Tomorrow, and we potentially will be doing up to three more shoots that week. So far it seems to keep happening that way, potential clients contacting us in waves!

Artists attempting to be salespeople

We’ve also been working diligently on creating sales pages for julievphotography.com for each type of photo session. We are carefully and thoughtfully creating each page to be effective at converting visits into inquiries, and inquiries into clients.

I published a post on Conscious Me about writing effective sales pages last week and also asked for feedback on my rough draft of a single sales page. The feedback I received combined with our own ideas have given us a lot of work to do in creating an effective sales page flow, which led to the intensive revision work we’ve begun on it.

Making our site pretty

Julie put hours into creating a design theme for the site to liven up the place. Taking the tree artwork that Courtney created for us, she has put together a simple, artistic design that should work quite well on a functional level with the structure of our site. We are eager to get the new theme up on the site but with my time for web development limited to lunch breaks and sometimes an hour or so before work, it must wait until the critical work of publishing information and content to our site gets to a stopping place.

The newest addition to our family – Zooey the Ukulele

Lastly, amongst all the hard work, and stressful health concerns we did manage to find some time to have fun exploring and practicing a bit of music. Julie recently purchased a ukulele (which she named Zooey) to pursue playing as a hobby in place of photography which has become her business. While I’ve never played ukulele before, I have played guitar for 10 years and quickly realized that the skills are very transferable – it’s just a new set of chords to learn.

We’ve spent a bit of time each day, wherever we could fit it in, to practice together. We’ve picked a few songs and I have helped her learn how to tune the instrument, play the chords, and given her a few tips to make the learning process easier. Like every art form Julie has tried her hand at, she is picking it up quickly and impressively. We are both looking forward to the fun we’ll have playing and maybe writing songs together, and enjoying every step along the way.

Though limited in our most valuable resource – time – we’ve managed to accomplish many significant things to further our artistic goals and get us closer to the goal of being full time artists. I am anxious to see what we can accomplish with that kind of freedom!