What studio management software should I use?

“I’m starting to get a lot of inquires and feel overwhelmed replying to them all. Do you have a system to make it easier?”

That is an awesome question. We thought we’d start off with that because it’s something that happens. As photographers, we end up being in front of the computer so much, so Taylor and I were just chatting about this and the way Charlotte and I handle it is actually creating email signatures. We use Macs, so we’re on mail with the standard system, but I’m sure you can do signatures with everything, eh?

Taylor: Yep. I use Gmail, and I just have a bunch of canned responses. It’s one of the Google Beta items that you can activate, and then you just kind of save anything that you commonly type. I have a pretty good response to almost anything, and then I just kind of edit it from there and try not to include wrong names because that’s unfortunate.

Dave: Not ideal. Something that Brian (?) said to me that he does is even if he’s booked for a wedding, he refers to his list of photographers that he likes – that they share work with – and what we do is the same. We’ve got about five people on our list, and then we also say that if you’d like the engagement shoot or you want to get together, we still leave the door open for them because a lot of people just love the engagement photography that we do or whatever it is. So whatever type of photography you’re doing, don’t close the door completely.

Taylor: And even if you’re not available that opens the door for other things, too.

Dave: Yeah, like down the track they might like baby photography.

Taylor: And even post-shoots. Say there’s a wedding or something, but they’re just like “yeah, we just wanna have a fun little fashion shoot downtown” or whatever, you’re still available for that and it’s not just like “nope, not available, see you later” – kick you out the door.

Dave: Absolutely. And another thing too, just building on that – it’s funny because once you open that door – it happened recently – we said we’d love to do an engagement shoot and this couple said “well we travel a lot” – because we always ask with engagement shoots “what do you guys do together?” – and these guys said they traveled, so [we said] “we’re in Mexico for two weeks do you want to come down?”, and they’re like “yeah, that sounds awesome”. . . . These guys weren’t going to book us as their wedding photographers because we’re booked, but we ended up having an amazing shoot in Mexico, so it happens.

Taylor: That’s awesome. Alright, so I guess I’ll go for the next question here, and it’s: “I have a family photo shoot next week at 1 pm. Where do you suggest I do the session?” And I think that’s a ridiculously good question because I know that I kind of give them a time – I give clients a good idea of what time is the best light. If it’s overcast that day, perfect, most [of the] time it’s usually sunny and/or raining, but I don’t really shoot in the rain.

Dave: Or patchy, and then you’re dealing with crazy exposures up and down.

Taylor: Oh yeah. I actually haven’t had a patchy day in quite some time, actually.

Dave: Welcome to Toronto – summer from April onwards sort of.

Taylor: It rained every Saturday last year.

Dave: Oh did it? Last year was crazy, yeah.