It's Facebook time!

So I finally bit the bullet and built a facebook page for my work. I've been avoiding doing it, to be honest, because I don't like having two audiences on facebook. There are loads of people that have sent me friend requests that don't know me from a bar of soap, but that added me so that they can see more of my work, and that's cool. There are often spikes of these sorts of friend requests, in fact. I had a massive spike when I put up that photo of Louis & Meghan. I got about 150 friend requests after I put that up. The number of followers I have on my personal account is also growing, and I think I'm being a little careless by having all of this tied to my personal account. So I went ahead and did the business-y thing. It makes a little more sense, from a business perspective, to have a page. Things like having analytics is going to be great.

Anyway, here it is!

​So that's it! Like it, Share it, Link it! And please let me know what you think about it :) 

ETT VENTER PHOTOGRAPHY - FACEBOOK

A new approach to Street Photography

Street photography is actually where this all started for me. I picked up my first camera and lens (Nikon D80 with a 50mm f/1.8D) and drove into a city to take photos of strangers. There's just something special about street photography, and I absolutely love it. It was on the streets of Pretoria that my passion for this craft started to explode.​

​I've always had a really conventional, traditional approach to it, though. It's always been the usual "Try to steal the shot without the person knowing", or "Take it without asking, even if they see you". That's the normal approach to street work, and that's totally fine. I've gotten some really great shots taking that approach.

​For months, I've been wanting to do it differently, and I've decided to start taking a different approach now. I've decided that instead of taking a "Steal the shot without even asking" approach, I'm going to take a "Spend time setting up lighting in a chosen environment and then shoot as if I'm shooting it for a magazine" approach. I want my street photos to have a far more refined, commercial feel, and I've started with this sort of work already. Here's a shot I took yesterday morning:

​Now, this particular shot doesn't really capture exactly what I mean, as I had a minute to set up and 15 seconds to shoot, because this lady was in a hurry, but the idea is that I'll put the same effort into every street portrait that I do, that I'd put into a high-end portrait client or model. 

I'm excited to see where this goes. 

Reini & Melany Wedding

I shot a wedding with such a fun couple last weekend. The groom was one of the tallest guys I've ever met.

The chemistry that these two had was just amazing. If I had another two hours with them for the couple photos, it still wouldn't have been enough. Amazing.​

​Check out the bottom of the post for some exciting details about the traffic one of these photos got!

500px

Alright, so you saw this photo above, but let me quickly single it out before I tell you about it:

So I posted this shot to 500px, a massive social network specifically ​for photographers, and the shot pushed through the levels of traffic into the "Popular" section of the site within a couple of minutes. I was quite excited about that, but I've had a couple of shots hit "Popular" on 500px, so it wasn't CRAZY, but still great! Yesterday morning, however, the shot featured on 500px's official blog, in what's called the "Week In Review", in which they post 40+ of their favourite shots from all the shots that were uploaded to the site in the last week. That alone had me almost fall over. I feel so honoured to have my shot featured amongst such amazing work. You can read that specific blog post right here.

​Then I got an email yesterday afternoon on my way to a meeting that totally caught me off guard:

So I've been feeling so, so excited about this shot! I wasn't expecting such a crazy response, but I'm so glad. Here it is, Editor's Choice. 4th shot:

I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the response. Thanks to everyone that's supported me with this shot. Can't believe one of MY photos has gained so much traction.

Reini and Melanie: Thanks ​for helping me make this photo. I couldn't have done it without you guys!

​Cool.

Growth.

Coming in to 2013, one of my biggest new year's resolutions was that I wanted to grow. I wanted to grow as a person, I wanted to grow as a photographer, and I wanted my business to grow. Growth was the thing I was aiming highest for, for 2013. That, and exercise. Haha.

When I just started taking photos, I knew that portraiture was what I was passionate about, and I somehow happened to fall into wedding photography. I put zero effort into getting into wedding photography - it just sort of "happened". I was keen, though, because it's just another form of portraiture. If I get to take photos like this, I'm happy:​

​As time progressed, however, I realised how passionate I was about intentional portraiture, and not "just taking photos of people at a wedding". I found that I really enjoyed taking a photo of one person at a time, making sure that it's really, really good, like this:

I never stopped the portraiture side of my photography, I just got so tied up in shooting weddings that I didn't really get time to do much portraiture. This year, that's all changing; it's already started. ​

I still really enjoy shooting weddings, and I have no intentions to stop shooting them, but I have a desire to shoot more portraits, and I'm going to do so. I've started working really hard on the portraiture already, with shoots like the one I did with Devin (right).​ This is the growth part I'm talking about. This push in the right direction is what I'm chasing.

I have a few more things I'd like to share with you that are part of this growth:​

New Website!

​If you're familiar with my website, you'll see that it looks quite a bit different to how you remember. Not a whole lot, but enough you make a pretty significant different in its usability. This is the old site:

​The new site gets rid of a few design issues I had, and also reduces my galleries to ONE image per page. I prefer this layout. And ultimately, I think the new site is just better looking than the old one:

Mobile

​The old site was great, but there were a few flaws that were pretty groundbreaking that needed a change. The most concerning of those is that my site was not mobile friendly. Not being able to easily view the site on your phone or tablet is a serious concern for me, because more than 30% of the traffic my site was getting was mobile traffic. The new site fixes this. In fact, the new site is solid on any platform you throw at it. Have a look!

​Makeup Artist!

I've just formed a business relationship with a really, really good makeup artist. Her work is absolutely incredible, and I'm really excited to get her on board. Here's an example of her work:​

​Pricing

In the last 2 weeks, I've lost 4 wedding clients because of conflicting dates. This is all because people are looking to book me to do work for them on days I'm already booked, and I'm not too stoked on that. Furthermore, my pricing is already far too low. So I've set up a new pricing scheme for the most of my work. I've done a bit of work on pricing setups for portraits, since that's what I plan on chasing.​ These changes to my pricing should even things out a little. 

New Gear

I've also invested in some new equipment. I've been using great equipment until now, but it was time for a bit of an upgrade. The first for me to mention is my new set of camera bodies - the Nikon D3 and the Nikon D700. I'm happy to be using such fantastic camera bodies for my work. ​Here's a shot of the D700:

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I also replaced the Octabank I was using with a much much better one. The new one is bigger, and it's also a whole lot stronger. My previous Octa was a cheap 1.2M octa I picked up on eBay. It did the trick perfectly, but it wasn't a durable unit. The new one is a really solid, 1.5M octa. The light from this thing is so, SO soft. I love it.

​New Portfolio

Portfolio is a thing that photographers always have to have at the ready, but it's also a tough thing to keep up to date. Ideally, you'd want a large, high quality book with prints in it. The problem with this is that a book like that costs a few grand to print, and it's not something you can update. So it doesn't make much sense from a financial standpoint.
A digital portfolio is always annoying because you have to work to upload your photos to the right apps and have them scaled, etc. It's really just a hassle. I've come to a great solution though. I'm using my iPad for portfolio and the App I'm using is tied in directly to my ​website's galleries. So any changes I make to my galleries will be automatically synchronised to my iPad's portfolio. This way, clients are constantly seeing up-to-date portfolio work from me, and I literally just need to keep my site updated. I really like how that works. 

​That's it. I set out for growth, and I'm glad to be chasing after it. The gear, doesn't mean much for growth (what good is a new camera if you're not taking photos), but everything else is good, and I'm happy to be growing.