The Youngrens | For Photographers

Cut Your Culling Time in Half
Using Photo Mechanic Effectively

Have you ever listened to a This American Life podcasts from NPR? If you haven’t, then I congratulate you on your cool-ness.

If you have, then you are either an uber-nerd or a photographer that’s editing. I happen to fall into both categories. Welcome to my geeky world where an hour of listening to investigative reporting on the effects of toxic investments on the economic meltdown sounds like a pretty good time while achieving natural skin tones.

When it comes to processing images, podcasts have become my life-savers. I have found several sixty-minute, thirty-minute, and fifteen-minute podcasts that I basically use to time myself during afternoons of culling and editing. Cull an engagement shoot? That’s an hour-long This American Life. Edit the blog images from a wedding? A thirty minute interview from Fresh Air. Receive a wedding back from ShootDotEdit and finalize for proofing? I’ll cue up a fifteen minute 99% Invisible podcast with Roman Mars.

But this wasn’t always the case. Before we started using Photo Mechanic to cull our images, I needed an entire AUDIOBOOK to finish a job. Watch my quick screencast and see how we use Photo Mechanic to quickly and effectively cull, sort, tag, and prep our images before editing them in Lightroom 4. Our culling time was cut in HALF with this simple, easy, and inexpensive program!

Get Your Chic On!
Join Erin for Image Critiques

Filed Under: Chic Critique | Shooting

About six months ago, I was approached by a couple of cute girls that run the Chic Critique forum for woman photographers. ‘What’s the Chic Critique Forum?’ I thought. Come to find out, it’s pretty a stinkin’ awesome place for talented female photographers to build skills and improve their photography. I was immediately hooked!

Which is why I am so excited and honored to be a Celebrity Photographer on Chic Critique during the entire month of April!

Chic Critique is THE elite resource for women who love photography. Their Celebrity Photographers (I’m one of them!) encourage, inspire, teach, and critique members. This forum is so stinkin’ cool so at the very least I would go get your CHIC on and join the forum to increase your confidence and improve your images!

During the month of April I’ll be doing Image Critiques for photographers via video! What better way to improve your images than from somebody you trust? Eh, eh?

Ok, so what exactly is a “4-week Critique”? A “4-week Critique” is a private class where Chic members simply post images once a week for 4 weeks and get VIDEO critiques from a Celebrity Photographer.

All critiques are given in VIDEO format so that you can listen and watch what the Celebrity is referring to
Lessons & assignments are not given, simply critique
Each 4-week critique starts the first Monday of every month
Each active student posts 3 images once a week anytime between Monday-Wednesday
The Celebrity Photographer responds to each active student’s image post anytime between Thursday-Saturday
Each Critique class will consist of only 10 active students
A private classroom on the forum will be setup for each 4-week Critique
Offered exclusively to members and costs $89 per active student and $45 per “Chic Peek” silent student

My Photo Critique begins April 1st-April 28th, 2013. Only 9 spots left!

CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO SIGN UP.

On Success and “Making It”

We’ve finally “made it.”

Okay, not really. But we had an experience not too long ago that I debated about sharing, but in the end decided that it might be helpful and encouraging for my friends. This isn’t a look-at-us sort of post, but more of a what-we-wish-we-had-known-earlier sort of post.

When I was first starting out, I sat down to write some lofty business goals and came away with a pretty good list (I say “I” because when The Youngrens started it was actually Jeff Youngren Photography, and Erin’s only role was listening to my crazy stories and wiggling her way into being an assistant from time-to-time. I’m glad times have changed).

One of the goals – which at the time was completely serious – makes me laugh when I think about it now. Continue Reading

Why Our Workshop Has a 100% Money Back Guarantee

Filed Under: Two-Day Workshop

Jeff and I have been wanting to host a workshop for the past three years. Others have wanted us to as well. We would get nagged by friends at conferences and events, asking us when we were finally going to put one together. It’s long overdue, they would say.

But that’s just the thing. We didn’t want to put a workshop together just for the sake of doing a workshop – in order to feel good about ourselves or gain respect from a crowd. We didn’t want to treat workshops as if they were an unspoken and inevitable ‘next step’, like a rite of passage into a higher level of success within the industry. We knew that this kind of rockstar mentality wouldn’t get us very far for very long, and until we could teach something from our hearts – until we knew in our gut that we were in this for the right reasons – we wouldn’t move forward.

So for those three years, instead of doing workshops, we focused instead on our clients and learned how to make them happy. We built systems, analyzed costs, and navigated the swiftly changing wedding market. And over those years we discovered something that changed everything about the way we did business. We discovered our ideal client, and we learned how to help others discover theirs. Continue Reading

All about the Two Day Workshop

We’re SO EXCITED to be bringing our Two-Day Workshop to 6 across the US this year – we can’t wait to share this content with you guys because we think it’s super transformation for people’s lives & businesses. When you’re able to know who your ideal client is – beyond the typical things like brands they like, cars they drive, vacations they take, etc. – it changes everything.

Our workshop is chalk full of awesome content, but we thought we’d spend 2.5 minutes and tell you all the stuff you NEED to know about the workshop.

Hope to see you there! Click here for dates & to register.

How We Edit Our Images in Lightroom 4

Filed Under: Subscriber Exclusive

Not too long ago we posted a tutorial about how we get such beautiful, consistent skin tones in our images using Lightroom 3, and at about the same time Adobe released Lightroom 4 which works differently and has all kinds of different sliders, so we decided it was time to record another tutorial. (If you like, you can check out the Lightroom 3 tutorial here)

In this screencast, I demo how Jeff and I edit our wedding and engagement images in Adobe Lightroom 4. This isn’t a tutorial on how to use Lightroom, it’s simply an explanation of the editing process we use to achieve our natural style for our wedding and engagement shoots.

I even give away our ‘secret ingredient’… Continue Reading

Cut Your Culling Time in Half Using Photo Mechanic Effectively

Get Your Chic On! Join Erin for Image Critiques