1. Use a black or white background.

Using a solid color background really makes your baby stand out in the picture. The background doesn’t have to be professional or expensive. A white sheet laid across a bed or a black blanket on the floor provides the perfect backdrop to take photographs of your baby.

2. Feelings are good.

Taking a picture of your baby crying is not just good for blackmail when they’re 15, but also good to help you remember what your child was really like on certain occasions.

3. Get down to their level.

If your child is learning to crawl, a picture from directly above them will be boring and won’t show the story. Dropping down to the floor will really give you a view that is memorable. Even setting the camera on the ground will make for a great picture.

4. Take a lot of pictures.

My daughter is 7 months old and what I’ve learned is that for every 10 pictures I take, one of them is worth keeping. In the other 9 she’ll be making a funny face, drooling or doing something else that didn’t show the picture that I wanted to capture. That’s OK because digital cameras allow you to take as many pictures of your baby as you would like and delete the ones you don’t want to keep.

5. Use natural lighting.

Whenever possible, go outside or open some windows to let in the natural light. Natural lighting looks better and is more forgiving than the flash on your camera or your fluorescent and incandescent lighting in your home.

Using those 5 tips I’ve really made my photos much better, so good that many people have asked, “Where did you have those taken?” They were shocked when I told them I had them printed by a great place online and I took them myself!

Whenever I tell a client they need one, they look like I just told them they were being audited, kicked them in the weiner, and dry humped their dog. (See photo)

The reality is that there are different types of business plans. Yes, there are the voluminous ones with reams of research and data, but those are usually reserved for projects where a source of funding is required. And I believe in these cases, a solid justification is both understandable and necessary. After all, if you are giving me $10 Million to launch a new business, you deserve to know exactly what I am going to be doing with it and exactly how I am going to be providing a return on your investment.

But for most entrepreneurs, a huge business plan is just not necessary.

For the majority of entrepreneurs, a business plan is simply a target that keeps your focus and the top level strategies for reaching that destination. This is where a 1 page plan is enough. It is designed to serve as a tool to keep you on track and to aid in decision making. That’s It. And in EVERY case I have seen it implemented in, it is a giant help. The 1 page plan provides the who, what, where, why, and how of your business at the 10,000 foot level.

Here’s what it should include.

Business Description: This section is a top level view of what your company does.

Company Mission: This is the most touchy-feely section of the plan. Your plan is to of course make money, but this is the section where you explain your values and why you are doing it.

Product/Service: Pretty self explanatory. This is the products or services that you plan to offer

Competitive Advantage: In this section you need to describe WHY someone would buy your product over someone else’s or why your business will succeed where others won’t. Key point, if you don’t have any competition now (brand new concept) you will. Otherwise it is probably not a niche you want to be in. Highlight your real advantages over anyone else. If you don’t have any, you had better find some.

Markets: This can be expanded or changed, but try to be as specific as possible. This will help you jump into the shoes of your prospects more easily. The “Putting a face to your target market exercise” is very useful here. [[/caption]

Revenue Channels: This section will most likely change as your experience with the business grows. That’s OK, but it is important to have a focal point to help you make better decisions.

Distribution Channels: For information marketers, this section will be easy. For physical product retailers or eCommerce sites, this will become a very important section. If you fall into the latter group, you need to make sure to take time to work out the fulfillment phase in quite a bit of detail.

Competition: It is important to spend a good bit of time analyzing your competition. You need to know what products they offer it, price points, how they market, profit margins, what they are good at, and what they stink at. A keen understanding of their core-competencies is crucial to exploiting your own. It is also important to constantly keep current on what you competition is doing.

Financial Goals It is understandable that this step may have some discomfort, especially in the early stages. While it is not important to have an exact figure early on, it is extremely important to have SOME challenging figure. You can always readjust up if you are more successful than planned (and I hope you are). There are several schools of thought on how to best use sales goals to motivate you. My personal philosophy is to make these numbers very challenging, but obtainable under ideal circumstances.

How to use your One Page Business Plan

In the initial stages, you should be re-evaluating and repurposing this document at 6 month intervals. Any more often and you risk losing focus (the main reason you are doing it to start with) less frequent and you could be missing valuable opportunities. Keep a copy on your wall or someplace handy and review it often. Whenever you are facing a tough decision, pull out this document to keep you on track. Below is an actual 1 page plan that I used with a client who was expanding their current Karate school to include at-home study program for women’s self defense.

Sample 1 Page Business Plan – InYourDefense

Business Description: InYourDefense creates, designs, develops, information products, videos, and seminars in the market niche of women’s self defense.

Company Mission: Our goal is to help our customers feel secure and in control at all times. We will do this through a system of education, training, and peer support.

Product/Service: information products, videos, and seminars about Women’s Self Defense Competitive Advantage: President is 6th degree black belt in Tae Kwan Do with 15 years of experience teaching. Wife of president is also 2nd degree black belt and can serve as the “face” of the company as well as providing first hand insight into buyers needs and desires.

Markets: Buyers are women aged 18-55 of all socio-economic backgrounds interested in personal safety. [/caption] Target must be easily reachable via internet and ready/willing to buy. In addition, the constant churn of natural new interest in this space make customer acquisition an easier task

Revenue Channels: Fundamental revenue comes from three streams: dvd instructional videos, personal coaching systems, and affiliate sales.

Distribution Channels: Internet distribution of digital content, postal mail of dvd and training packages. Partner/affiliate distribution will be evaluated.

Competition: Several competitors exist in the internet place including xxx, xxx, and xxx. However pricing strategies, poor marketing and execution, and relative weak experience in training makes this an open market. We will advance beyond the competition due to position as experts in this field , our knowledge of marketing best practices , and pre-exiting catalog of teaching content.

Financial Goals

• Year 1: 20,000 (transition into full time)
• Year 2: 75,000 (now full time position)
• Year 3: 150,000 (start growth, few outsourcers)
• Year 4: 500,000 (Begin full time employees, migration from worker to leader)

Wrapping it up

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. As I said earlier, tape this up on your wall and refer to it whenever you are faced with a difficult business decision. Another benefit of this document is that it provides a tangible action plan for tasks and a basis for your marketing plan. Whenever you are unsure on what you should tackle next in your new business, review this plan again. As you can see in the example above, there are numerous examples of areas that you need to explore fully before your business can become a success!

Hope this helps some of you. As always, feel free to post a comment with your thoughts or any questions you might have, and I’ll be happy to respond.

When you look at duplicate photo finder software, consider its ease of use. If the software is bloated, slow and packed with features that you’ll never use, no matter what a great bargain it is, how enjoyable will it be to use? If you don’t like using it because it’s overly complicated and difficult, how often do you think you will use it? Software you don’t use isn’t a bargain, even if it’s free-it takes up valuable disk space unnecessarily and can drag down a computer’s performance.

So duplicate photo finder program should first of all be simple enough for you to use easily. You won’t want to spend too much time having to read manuals or work your way through complicated tutorials just to get rid of duplicate photos on your hard drive. Look at screen shots to determine its complexity. Maybe even read the available tutorials-most software will have some sort of quick-start guide or tutorial available whether you’ve purchased the software or not.

While professional photographers might appreciate programs that allow for hundreds of different adjustments and settings, the casual user probably won’t need or want any of those things. You should be able to make adjustments with the duplicate photo finder software to let it flag photos properly, but if this process is so complicated that it’s easy to make a mistake and end up with lots of false duplicate flags, you’ll become frustrated, and the software will go unused.

Next, look at all the information you can find about the duplicate photo finder software. Read user testimonials. How many updates has there been to the software? This is important in determining whether the company is actively improving on their photo software.

Those companies the most interested in improving their duplicate photo finder software and customer relations will usually offer user forums for questions, comments and general interaction. If you ever have trouble with your duplicate photo finder software and the company has these things available, you know you’ll always be able to get a response and find the answers you need.

Lastly, I want to suggest you to try Image Comparer program by Bolide Software. It is a photo duplicate finder program with ability to highlight image differences for each image pair found. Easy to use Comparison Wizard will guide you through the entire process from the folder or image selection to getting the comparison results. You can move, delete or rename image files from the comparison results, it makes your image collection organizing a really fun and easy. A unique image comparison algorithm used in Image Comparer will find even simiar looking images, not only exact duplicates. Give this program a try today.

If you’ve ever snapped your weekend outing, family reunion, or a special vacation getaway with your buddies or family, you know that outside photography can present some deeply special challenges. Direct sunlight can beintolerable. Unwelcome objects can meddle with your composition. And many times, good old mother nature is just not feeling co-operative. These are some outside systems that may benefit :

Keep It Simplistic. The sophisticated pattern and colour of an adobe wall, the straightforward repeating pattern and muted tones of planks on a fishing pier, or the uniform color of a patch of blue bonnets, snapdragons, or yellow primrose can serve as dazzling backdrops for your outside portraits. When you’re composing your portrait, you want your subject to be the focus that all eyes are drawn to. Busy patterns,can truly distract from the point of interest of the picture.

Control The Depth Of Field… The fringe of a forest, or mountains in the distance may render superbly as a background for your subject with correct control over the depth of field. If you have an SLR camera, you can adjust your depth of field to bring the background sort of out of focus relative to your subject. This serves as eye control for the observer of your portrait. The eye is naturally drawn to what’s brightest and most sharply centered.If your subject is sharply focused relative to the background, she’s going to be intensified as the focus of your portrait. Controlling the depth of field is realized by adjusting your aperture setting ( the dimensions of your lens opening, recounted in f-stops ). The more small the f-stop the bigger the opening of your lens, and the more little the depth of field will be.

Be Aware Of Distracting Objects Behind Your Subject. What’s obviously a bush, a mailbox, or a birdhouse to your eye, can appear like an extra member growing out of the apex of your subject’s head in your 2 dimensional portrait.

Control The Light. Down light ( e.g. Thanks to the shadow patterns it creates, it can bring out the worst in your subject. Lateral light ( e.g. Lateral light can be controlled and directed to form gorgeous shade patterns across the face of your subject.Before the digital age, corrective filters or special films were regularly used for color correction in outside portraits. With digital cameras, the color can be corrected using your white balance setting ( color temperature in degrees Kelvin ). Most digital cameras today do a good job of immediately changing the white balance for outdoors exposures.

Keeping your composition simple, controlling the depth of field, and eliminating objects that may distract from your subject, all help to increase your subject as the focus of your portrait. Controlling the available natural light and correcting the white balance of your photos can exhibit and enhance the true sweetness of your subject.

To find out more about outside digital photography look at this video, Outdoor Portrait Ideas