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Interview with Jared Bauman

We are going to be talking with the president of shoot dot at a good friend of mine and also has my same name jared salman and he is right there well voila gonna side with you looking so how was the show uh did you watch it from here? Yes, I did just that here quietly well for a little bit for a little bit they brought me in to stuck me in they kind of held me back in the background for a while we didn't distract you uh you are distracting very distracting for a multitude of reasons I s so welcome. Thank you looks like you're talking a lot about workflow and already been some great questions about how you can apply this and I know what you're saying about how it really applies and a much broader scale the idea of incorporating partner in your business isn't really just for a wedding pro it's really for any type of photographer anytime business owner well sure I mean in the end everybody applies that principal with their accounting roy there doctor like I have outsourced my doctor relat...

ionship my whole life I've never tried to do any operations on myself I've never tried to do any kind of like blood work on myself none of that always outsource my sister is a doctor and I think she would fully support exactly that I think so same with accounting I did try my accounting for a couple of years and then I was audited by the state of arizona and I realized I'm not the one to be doing the accounting I had payroll and so I would pay employees and do payroll filing in payroll taxes, and I noticed for the first year I tried to do it myself and I noticed that I was actually at the end of the year I spent mawr in fees late fee's filling out the form wrong all those different things and I would have if I just hired a company to do the payroll there's something I should definitely not be doing payroll, right? Yeah, so I mean, we've all dealt with outsourcing just because we do that on a regular basis everything that we do that we don't do well, we outsource I have people work on my car, I have people bake my bread for me and then I buy it from them it's all outsourcing but there's been an interesting shift from film to digital when we're film we always outsourced are postproduction because we would send the film to somebody who would then work on it and then they would print it up and every single print that they made was actually scientifically adjusted by a computer and by a technician to make sure that all those prints looked right and then we all went to digital and everybody thought I have to do this myself because you could because you could because you could doesn't mean you should butt and actually in fairness, we all could have set up a dark room and we could have done it ourselves, but it was so impractical because of the technology and because of the time commitment now the time commit still is arguably there, but the technology is so much more available now that you can do it yourself doesn't mean you should do it yourself, but you can, right? And so we have this switch and it's been a long go of people complaining and crying to me mostly about how long it takes him to do post production and not understanding how tow and a lot of people, you know, like how do I get the right color? I can't see the right color, etcetera, etcetera. I understand that you guys actually do a colorblind test. We do. You heard about that? Yeah, a colorblind test to make sure that everyone who who at it is not code line, we realize that the hard way one time I was really roundabout circumstances one of writers was not actually seen all the colors in the coming of the color spectrum, so he needs to be tasked to the counting right something different, so I've never taken a dust actually myself, I probably should well, but you don't work on going, so you're safe even if you are color blind. Yes, so some people just don't have that ability or their slow at it, and so we kind of ran into this issue. Everybody hated being a digital photographer, and there are even people jumping ship going back to film because they thought that would be the solution to the problem. But then they were just out sure thing, that's why it was easy because they started gave them permission to outsource and so my I've been on a kick for a couple years trying to give people permission toe let go some of that stuff and realize they're things that air valuable for you be doing on things that aren't valuable for you to be doing. And one of those things is the science of correct exposure. Yes, and that's, you know, you bring up an interesting point because we're artists, you know? I mean, I'm a photographer myself from my own studio for over a decade. You're a professional photographer, artist, and the interesting thing about the color correction component of what we do is that a lot of us feel like we have to do that as an artist. We have to put our stamp on the images and wait to see the images all the way through and by the way, I agree with that statement, but I think color correction isn't one of the areas that we need to have the our art color correction and you say it best I've heard you say is a science, whereas the rest of what we do is an art and a company like shoot dot at it, the work flows that that you put together things like that that save you time and trust other people to do things that aren't indicative of your art color, corrections of science, it really is it's a matter of, of coming up with the right color profile for you and then doing that every single time, getting those images to be consistent every single time, and then you get to go in and put together your artistic touches and add your signature style to it. And so what you do is you have to look at in your business. This is in your business in general is opportunities to plug specialists in to plug partners in that don't rob you of your creative freedom, and I think that there's a kind of a misconception there, I mean, nobody would say that processing the film back in the day was an artistic endeavor that was a scientific thing right? And so likewise looking at color correction as we caught the ninety ten model, we'll do the ninety percent of heavy lifting so you could do the ten percent that you enjoy and still have all that artistic freedom. But nobody really wants to try to get every image even across the board that's something that you could have a technician dio right exactly. And so it's just a matter of choosing the person or the I called the grunt work I mean, it really is the labor and tens of horrible work that no one want is to dio get that done because it doesn't. All of that underlying base image is is all scientific and then we just add style and we were just showing how to spray stiles, right? I love spring styles like I just it's just it's like I'm a graffiti artist. How long would you say it takes you to do the work you do when you get the light room catalog back if she got it? I mean, how many hours do you spend is compared to hole? I don't spend hours right now maybe maybe an hour at the most, spraying the basic styles and deciding what it's going to be is fairly simple. I mean, with four hundred some odd images it might take, you know, thirty or forty minutes toe to decide what everything's going to be and do a little tweaks on crops and stuff, and then and then where my time has really spent is on a couple images that needs retouching or I need to remove something or whatever. I'll spend some time on those and maybe spend another twenty minutes on those, but the time that I really spend is in thinking about the images, blogging about the images, interacting with the images themselves. In fact, I know a lot of people, you know, try and get their images to their clients super, super fast and I get that I think that's great, but my model's a little bit different because I I am very much I want to be in tune with the images and so I spent I I won't even look at the images for several weeks after the wedding I wanted to look at you know my thoughts on that think fast best I know you do not know, but the beauty is that fast is great when it's time to go, I was going to say and you are being the artist in the business owner deciding what's best for you, you don't need you don't need it, you don't want just your partner. To take their time somebody a partner you wrote in your business you want that to be us fastest politics my time you do what you need to just exist, right? And so my my preferences toe wait a few weeks, kes, and then look at those images because I look at them as though I didn't shoot them, and that way I can really decide which images air correct, which images right? Which ones really speak? Because what happens is too many people I think, go right into editing the weddings and they're so married to their darlings they're so excited about a specific image that they can't let go of it and then they that's when people choose to many images on dh they they picked five of the same image and they can't let go of any of them because they think that they're all really important babies that they if they let one go and be like throwing their own child in the trash, you know, and so they can't do it. But if you step back and you become an objective observer of your images, then suddenly start making good decisions about which images were really good in which images aren't so good and you bring up a great point about loving your images and what the conversations I have with a lot of stars is that ah fringe benefit of of using somebody like a shoot dot edit of using a partner in your business is that you go back and you fall in love with it all again, you know, you can have the permission to fall in love with it again because, you know, you don't have to dread some of the process is that you used to have to do you don't have to worry about that anymore, so it sounds like you have found, which I think is great because every business owner needs to do this for their business for their clients. But as an artist, you need to find what makes you attuned to the image is what makes you attuned to your work. What keeps you inspired throughout the years in the years in the years, and if you don't figure that out, then you run the risk of getting bogged down of getting buried of your workflow, taking over what you're doing of related, not meeting your clients, demand and not be inspired, and all the different things that go along with that right agreed so so. Now I want to transition into the hard questions than because I'm telling people that I send stuff to shoot got at it, to do my post, which is interesting, because I actually have the ability faster than you can, probably. Like, I'm better I'm better than your technicians at doing it, but yet I send it to you, yes, on dh, the reason I do that's because my time is better spent doing other things, lecturing, coming to create live writing articles, even tinkering with new software to see if it's any good, like those kind of things are things that I do with my time, I would rather waste two hours tinkering with some plug in to decide that it's, crappy rather than working on images and so it's better use of my time. And so and then, of course, the really good use of my time is hanging out with my children, which I don't get enough time with them. So, um, but why? Why use an outsourcer like, okay, so I'm gonna ask couple questions, and we've been asking people to send in question great, we're gonna pepper you with questions, bring it. I know you told me you were gonna just nail me here, so so so my first question is this I'm going to pretend to be a doubter because I don't think I ever doubted. But anyway, I'm going to pretend to be a doubter, and I'm going to say, you know what the thing is that I don't know the person like if I hired a person in house and I could sit and watch our the shoulder and train them and work with them and tell them what to do and the double check on him and micromanage them, I would be able to trust what they're doing, but if I send my stuff to you, I don't know the person that's doing it, I can't talk to them like directly and sit over their shoulder and hang out with them and make sure that they, you know, I understand the way I think about images. So how is it that I can get a good job out of someone that doesn't know me as a person? Well, it's science, like you say, I'm going to steal your phrase, so we've realized that your style can be communicated twice on we develop what we call a color profile for you, you tell us the way you want your images at it, and we do that every single time, you know, and we went through that color, we went through the color profiler on the way in, so we made our color profile, and I was telling people about the time that I mistakenly put in the wrong program, yes, yeah, and unfortunately, I had told you to send me an example, backs others, there is the option to be able to just like send a test back right and I can approve it yes on dh so fortunate had done that and you and your guys sent back the most amazingly wrong I love the story image because I had the bride was an indian east indian bride and I had chosen the the one that looked like me just you know super super caucasian like super bright white person which is ironic because you live in phoenix you think you'd be a little tanner yeah, I know I'm not just going yeah I grew up there's a toe head like I was blonde hair and and she literally looked like she was caucasian well and I looked at it and that's not the way she looks yeah and so then I went back to see what profile had chosen in sure enough so I took a screenshot of it and I took a screen shot of her and then I sent you the real profile back and then I got and I asked for another test right send it back and then I had her and she looked the skin tones were perfect and she looked like herself perfect and then I I I pulled the two up and it was amazing because nothing had changed about the photo except her skin tone was different it's like she literally became a different person exactly and that's the way talk about in photography about having a style and the idea for us is that we want to give you an opportunity to add your style to the images, but there are a lot of there's only three dials on it and there's only three positions on each style, so it doesn't seem like there's a lot of choices as to what is also for skin tones for skin tone options so that's over one hundred different profiles you could have not changed them per job so as you shoot a different type of event, obviously you know what you need out of the images is going to be different, but it can still be broken down to having an accurate color profile. We've matched it with what you're talking about the dot preview, which is free to get a test you can get a sample of those edits back within twenty four hours, but what it does is it allows you to you know, the bigger question was how do I trust this to someone who I'm not looking over their shoulder and I'm not there with them and I think you have to look at it by what are we doing? We're providing consistently awesome image ed it's for you consistent and weaken do that based on something like a color profile for you and then you avoid having to have somebody in house you avoid having payroll you avoid managing you avoid what happens when they call in sick what happens if they want to go on vacation? What happens when they quit in the middle of your busy season what happens when you have to fire them and then you have to pay unemployed unemployment all those things go away so you can find a way to get consistently awesome images every time and the color profile things like that are the way we do it for our photographers you have questions out there for jared some hard hitting questions to wonder in twenty five questions okay all right you hear you hear about me? I'm going to start with this yes or no's people are going to know you specialize in weddings that's correct you also work on architecture no so anything based think of it like in terms of skin tones okay, so we specialize in the wedding pro and everything the wedding pro shoots wedding approaching portrait's engagements you know brides boudoir maturity seniors things like that great and seniors good problem has skin skin skin waken just break it down to its most basic begin we're not good at race cars or you know dear great perfect k g p would like to know do you only work on color correction? Do you also do spot removal and how far into really hard core bill in boca wanted to know how far into riel manipulation taking out garbage cans that kind of work you d'oh so we are a full, full post production company we can do, you know, something we haven't talked much about? It is the cold process. I mean, have a shoot three, four thousand images at a wedding or five hundred images of a portrait session. We do the coal we do all the different will be call artistic editing. So from a spot removal or moving, you know the trash can or the exit sign that got stuck there on the perfect image all the way across, stephen, you know, touching images up for like, a slide show or for albums or things like that so there's a variety of things that will do and we actually included on the free side of this site. I included the catalogue, the light room five catalog already ready to go s o if if you're interested in using shootout at it, download that catalog and that catalog actually has little collections in it that tell the folks that shoot out at what to do. So you anything you want color corrected, you drag into the color correction collection and anything you want artistically edited you dragged, you know, two or three photos into that, and then they will use that as a no. We need to make a photocopy of this and work on this and move this or do whatever and so all of that stuff can be communicated directly inside of the catalogue so that's on the free side of the creative live workshop here cool and lets talk a little bit about the process so your calling I'm going to send you all my photos you're going to call them, you're going to send them back to me and then I'm going toe choose which ones I want extended edited, extended editing, basic color corrections so and then how do I communicate back to you? You know that stuff most of our pros uses for color correction and then maybe some artistic at it's after that that once uses for cole what we recommend the best solution is is to go through and find the good ones first find the best ones and put them in one of the different collections that jared set up in the light room. Five workflow and you probably I already found those on the day of the wedding you found you know your best and so do find find those first put them in a folder that says do not get rid of you know don't don't call those out, but then those air also typically the ones will go back and we'll do the extra edits on perhaps touch him up for a slide show or putting together for for an album that you might want designed and so we recommend doing it that way because going back and forth just kills your productivity and makes it so it's, not a process you want teo okay, fantastic. So do you guys do? Teo de vita would like to know do you guys do bass changes? Or do you work on each end image individually that's a that's a great question. I mean, a lot of ways we asked me, and I even forget sometimes to remind people that so we don't do anything with presets we don't weigh don't have presets internally it's not like the color profile that you select, spits out a certain precept that we apply it and send it back to you it's all custom color correction so every single image is going to be is going to be edited for the basic six different sliders that I'd be that six that aaron light room, the exposure and basically the basic slider sex exactly that section's every single image is custom color corrected, it's done by hand it's all done individually, it's not matched and you're not using you never using the autos in there, are you? No, no, no, that doesn't work. If that works, then we wouldn't be in business that's, right that's the beauty of that the fact I always see that auto button and I think and if they could get that tow work I hope they never do but you know how long we've been using cameras and auto doesn't work in the camera either yeah you know because it just they just haven't gotten to the point where they can get away from the neutral gray issue so auto exposure just never really works kind of work sometimes but it's fooled very easily and very yeah one hundred percent agree the auto button just isn't good enough for anywhere near good enough unfortunately okay mr b jared mentioned earlier that he shoots dark he likes to shoot a little bit darker eso question do you prefer photographers to shoot lighter dark portrait photographers and dende um to that do do you guys have a back and forth conversation advice with photographers about what they're doing and how they can improve their photography and so on and so forth you know first question is we don't really care how you shoot it I would say that shooting in raw is going to be significantly better for the editing process we can really work magic not me I don't even know it open light room you know but you know we can figure that out raw makes it a lot more gives the range way have a lot more options there within that range second question yeah there's there's usually a lot of back and forth and let's be honest the first couple jobs are pretty overwhelming, teo think I'm going to be handing over like, I like how you describe it is your baby nobody hangover my seven hundred images by seven hundred babies, and I'm gonna entrust somebody else to color correct them for me. And these are my images and that first process, even the first job or to take some time, you know you're going to probably picked the wrong color profile or you're gonna pick a color profiling, maybe going to need some help, you know, with the whole color consultant department if you're having trouble picking the color profile, if you're not liking what you're what you're going back on that dot preview, that preview that george was talking about, you know, we have a whole team of people that all kind of say, okay, let's, let's drill down let's look atyour website let's look at your block and get you assigned to the right color profile and get it figured out. Cool. Okay, j b I've got two more questions for you before we wrap up that we had two hundred twenty five we do and that's and actually that's my first question. We have a ton of questions here what's the best way for people to get in touch with you to get all these questions answered after this well, I'd go teo you know the live chat feature is my favorite okay, I've got a shoot out at dot com they're probably getting slammed on live chat right now so email phone are all great options I have no problem I'ii madrasas jared at shoot dot dot dot com and have a personal question for me you can email me and that's a r e d that's the way that's the correct jared everybody else's jarod is is the derivation of that I've been having fun on my facebook page lately, posting all the different ways that starbucks reese to spell my name my latest one that v I was german I don't know how they got that out of here it's so there are a zillion different ways to spell jared and you're right we have the right way to spell it that's correct and one last question before we go out I love this question what is the one thing that photographers don't realize they're getting with shoot down at it? Well making me think here yeah, well, I've been on a kick this year in talking about this because I've done a lot of research on it with our clients are photographers just trying to figure out what are some of the what are some of the intrinsic benefits that come from not just using she doesn't but really going bigger that from trusting a specialist to take over a piece of your business and we have solidified it as our our mantra which is fast fast is best and I think that the benefits of fast in your business just go so far and I've been overwhelmed by hearing from our photographers how much not having to do this portion has increased their speed of delivery increased their speed internally they don't have to do is much now they don't have to have a cz many things in the queue in the workflow q thie effect that's having their clients the effect that had on their business is the effect that had on their on their personal lives you know there's so many benefits from for example taking advantage of us you doubt it not only is there a business benefit that you talked about I don't have to worry now about carving out those ten or twelve hours in a week there's also the benefit their clients get there's also benefit that you get but the speed is what really is amazing because it gets off your workflow quicker it gets out to your client's quicker and that has far reaching benefits and how they utilize those images on social media how they share them how they talk about them how your referrals end up coming back it just is one of these things that continues to cycle down the chain, if you will. And it creates with the way that people like to interact with images today, it gets them to them in a quicker environment, which allows them to interact them in the way they prefer. And it just it allows their businesses to really explode from not requiring themselves to do every element of the cycle of the process.