A Photography Business Can Improve Information Systems to Increase Capacity

You are a busy photographer. Your business is expanding. Your time with your family is decreasing. You know it can be a headache to hire employees. In addition, you don't know how long this high demand for your services will persist.

If you are a photographer in this situation, you may consider expanding the capacity of your business by increasing the capacity of your computer information system. This article offers suggestions on ways to do this for the benefit of a photography business.

1. Automate commonly performed tasks. There are many ways in which this can be done. Both Photoshop and Lightroom allow a photographer to create macros. If you have a signature look put the steps required to create that look into a macro so you can easily apply it to all of your images. For commonly performed tasks that can be done outside of these programs and are performed in the general windows environment try creating macros using a generic program like ActiveWord.

2. Increase your hardware capacity. If you are frequently waiting on your computer to apply a technique to an image, a hardware upgrade may solve this productivity killer. A professional photographer should have a minimum of 4 gigs of RAM, a quality video card with its own RAM, and a relatively fast processor. A MAC might be a better option than a PC as its graphics capacity and reliability is usually better than most PCs.

3. Setup or increase the speed of your network. Today a network is essential for an efficient photography business. A photographer can waste an enormous amount of time transferring images back and forth on an external drive. In addition, with a network a photographer can take advantage of specialized workstations. Work that is best done on a specialized workstation can be pulled up on the network and applied to the images. The photographer can then access the images on another specialized workstation and perform the next round of editing.

The photography industry is extremely competitive. In order for a photographer to compete and expand effectively and still have time to spend with his family, a photographer needs to setup and use an effective computer information system.