Part Time General Manager

Location: Indianapolis, IN

Type: Part Time

Description: As a General Manager, you will use your talents to manage the day-to-day operations of IPC.  This includes responsibility over hiring and managing staff, class scheduling, P&L controls, marketing, curriculum development and delivery among other assigned duties.

Organization: Indy Photo Coach is a unique photography school focused on offering personal instruction and exciting photography opportunities to Greater-Indianapolis area residents at an affordable price. IPC is creating a community of photographers by implementing our instructors’ passion for photography and face-to-face learning.

We are an organization that prides itself on providing affordable, personal photography instruction and producing confidence in amateur photographers.  Join us and take part in a rapidly growing company!

As a successful General Manager, you will:

Grow IPC:

• Coordinate the sales process of new and potential enrollments, including successfully addressing inquiries from students.
• Maximize efficiency through scheduling classes and workshops with high student demand.
• Grow existing revenue-generating services.
• Engage in marketing activities to increase exposure, reach, and awareness of IPC.
• Monitor and track business performance, revenues, expenses, and fee collection.
• Establish and maintain collaborative relationships with local photography stores, “meet-ups” and clubs.

Manage & Train:

• Observe and coach staff while establishing development plans for each employee.
• Select, train, and manage IPC employees (instructors, administrator and other staff).
• Effectively lead team meetings with all employees; motivate and continually develop staff.
• Demonstrate and uphold a high level of staff motivation and morale; ensure the professional appearance of your staff and the organization.

We require:

• Bachelor’s Degree
• 1-2 years of related experience (sales and marketing), with a strong focus on customer service
• Excellent track record of success in sales.
• Excellent verbal communication and persuasive skills, and the ability to build relationships
• Organization and math skills necessary to monitor and track business performance, analyze/interpret progress.
• Effective problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work 2-3 days per week and evening hours periodically.
• Home-office environment with internet access.

We prefer:

• A Bachelor’s degree, management experience and business development experience.
• 1-2 years at a startup business.
• Basic photography experience.

What you get in return:

• As an IPC team member, you will work in a rewarding, fast-paced environment while making an impact on our business and watching the IPC organization grow!

Compensation includes:

• Flexible work environment
• Base Salary
• Lucrative incentives for meeting company objectives

Additionally, through on-the-job training and learning opportunities, you can develop your career at IPC and succeed with us in future roles!

To Apply:

Click here to be redirected to the application / resume upload page.

We are pleased to announce our next few months of classes.  We plan on posting more offerings of classes in the future, so make sure you receive the IPC newsletter each week and are connected to us on Facebook.

Click “Learn more” next to each class or click here to enroll.

May:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Adobe Lightroom for Photographers Learn more.
Beginning Wedding Photography  Learn more.
The Art of Sports Photography  Learn more.

June:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Beyond the Fundamentals  Learn more.
Exercising Creativity in Photography  Learn more.
The Principles of Lighting  Learn more.
Experience Builder  Learn more.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) Workshop  Learn more.

July:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Beginning Wedding Photography  Learn more.
The Principles of Lighting  Learn more.
The Art of Sports Photography  Learn more.
Speedlighting On-Location  Learn more.
Adobe Lightroom for Photographers  Learn more.
Adobe Photoshop Elements  Learn More

August:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Experience Builder  Learn more.
Adobe Photoshop for Digital Photographers  Learn more.

September:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Beyond the Fundamentals  Learn more.
The Principles of Lighting  Learn more.
The Art of Sports Photography  Learn more.
Adobe Lightroom for Photographers  Learn more.

October:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
Beginning Wedding Photography  Learn more.
Experience Builder  Learn more.

November:
Fundamentals of Photography  Learn more.
The Principles of Lighting  Learn more.
Adobe Lightroom for Photographers Learn more.

Last week we talked about some things you can do to determine if someone is misusing your images online. This week we’ll cover some ways you can prevent this from happening in the first place.

First Things First

The first thing you need to know is that there is no fool proof way to protect your images online other than not posting them at all. To date, the protections sites like Smugmug and Flickr employ can easily be circumvented by looking at the source code of a page. Flash galleries and slideshows are also susceptible to screen capture programs. Protecting your images online is a lot like installing a home security system whereby you take practical measures to make your property a less desirable target.

Strategy #1: Resize Your Images Before Posting Online

Resizing your images used to be a requirement on the web but now sites like Facebook and Flickr allow you to upload a print quality images and do the resizing for you. This is convenient, but by default they also make that high resolution copy available to anyone on the web. High resolution images are easier to repurpose for other uses and thus are more desirable.  When I post images online I never make the longest edge of my image more than 700 pixels. This isn’t fool proof but it does at least guarantee no one will be able to make a quality print at that size.

Strategy #2: Add A Watermark

Most everyone knows what a watermark is. We see them all of the time. Sometimes they’re inconspicuously placed in the corner and sometimes they can cover most of an image. I personally have mixed feelings about them. On one hand they are a good preventative measure but on the other hand they often take away from the viewing experience.

For me personally, if there’s a watermark on an image it is the first thing my eyes go to and diminishes the initial impact an image has on me. As I said before nothing is foolproof and even a watermark can be circumvented with a little knowledge of Photoshop. Most of the time they sit in the corner of an image where the background is relatively solid so people can read the text and that’s also the most convenient place for someone looking to misuse an image too.

Above on the left is a watermarked image from my Smugmug page. After about a minute in Photoshop I ended up with the image on the right. Not perfect, but passable in a lot of situations. Admittedly, removing the watermark would have been much harder if there were a more complex background, but not impossible. If you are going to use a watermark to prevent theft and not just to get your name out, I do suggest a large semi-transparent one like the image on the left. This at least made me go into Photoshop to remove vs. a small watermark in the corner which could simply be cropped out.

Strategy #3: Don’t Give Your Images Names That Make Them Easy to Find

If you’re trying to get noticed this strategy can backfire on you but if you’re not worried about making your images easy to find this method does work. The way it works is simple, if you take a picture of a beautiful sunset don’t name the file “beautiful-sunset.jpg” or something like that. This makes it easy for someone looking to steal a picture of a sunset to find yours.

Hopefully these strategies will make your images a less desirable target for misuse while still allowing people to see your work!

Written by Trevor Warren

I don’t spend too much time worrying about “image theft.” Most of my pictures wouldn’t blend in too well on the average business website. However for colleagues of mine shooting landscape and stock photography this is more of a concern. Image search engines make it simple to find an image that perfectly suits one’s needs and despite copyright disclaimers it’s become far too easy for the uneducated and unethical to take your images without permission.

While every now and then there’s a sensational story about a persons image from Flickr ending up on a billboard or in a magazine, the most common scenario of image theft is from inexperienced or unscrupulous web designers going to Google Images and taking what they want vs. going to a stock company and paying a usage fee. Below are two methods you can check to see whether your images are being used on the web without your permission.

Method #1: Web Site Access Logs

If you have your own web site, almost all web servers will keep a log of every file someone accessed from the internet. Normally this happens when people have visited your site but if someone visits your website via a link on another site, an “access log” will track this and list the file that was accessed. Usually this is an HTML page but if the file being accessed is an image is could be an indication of misuse.

The entry highlighted in yellow (apologies for the columns not being completely visible) shows an image on my site being accessed today via a link from Facebook. The other entries (blank or from trevorwarren.net) is how entries should look if files are being accessed by a visitor to your site. In this case, I am the one who posted this link however if someone else had linked to one of my images this is how I would find out. If you’ve purchased a Flickr Pro membership Flickr provides logs similar to this as well.

Method #2: Reverse Image Search

For Method #1 to be effective the person misusing your image has to be too lazy or cheap to host the image on their own server. If they do, this approach is useless. Reverse Image Search is a fairly new technology where search engines actually analyze the appearance of an image and search for matches elsewhere on the internet so even if your image has been resized and moved to another site there’s a good chance you’ll still be able to locate it.

TinEye.com is the first Reverse Image Search Engine I discovered. To test it I used a portrait of Pablo Picasso and it found over 100 other instances of that picture being used on the internet. It’s still early but as this technology matures I expect more and more companies will be getting bills from photographers for unlicensed use of images.

If you’ve ever worried about your images being misused hopefully this will help find out for sure!

Be sure to follow IPC on Facebook for more tips and early-bird announcements of upcoming classes and private lessons.

Written by Trevor Warren

Indy Photo Coach is excited to announce a new offering for Private Lessons:

$99 two-hour introductory private lesson

Think of an introductory lesson as our way of saying: “Hi! Welcome to the world of personalized photography instruction.  We have a lot to offer, so let’s see where you’d like to go and the best way to get you there.”

Introductory Lesson includes:

• Consultation – we want to get to know you and your photography goals, to customize your lessons
• Personalized instruction – understand the concepts by learning at your pace, on your equipment
• Hands-on shooting – photography is meant to be learned with a camera in your hands
• Ongoing growth – “homework” and practice to continue your lesson after it is over

Introductory Private Lessons are limited to 1 per student.  Everyone is welcome to schedule an introductory lesson: new, past, present and future private lesson students.

Also, talk to your instructor about the benefits of an IPC Private Lesson Membership

Like most educational efforts, private lessons are most effective when engaged in regularly. Indy Photo Coach membership plans provide access to all of our Private Lesson perks at a reduced rate, allowing you to unlock the true benefits of an ongoing private lesson program without breaking the bank.

In addition to the ongoing personalized instruction, members are entitled to:

• One pre-paid 2-hour private lesson per month (rolls over to next month if not used)
• Additional lessons at a discounted rate
• Guest passes for only $20
• Phone & Email access to an instructor for quick troubleshooting, even after the lesson is over

If someone has ever commented on one of your pictures saying something like “this picture is too dark” or “this picture is washed out” and you couldn’t figure out why, it could simply be because how an image appears can vary dramatically from monitor to monitor.  An image’s appearance can even vary depending on the angle the a person sits. This week will cover a some ways you can handle this problem.

The biggest contributor to this problem are LCD flat panels. While they’ve gotten much better many of them, especially the one’s you find in inexpensive laptops, produce inconsistent brightness, contrast and color. Even the way a person sits could affect the appearance of an image as illustrated below.

In the above example I’ve taken three pictures of the same image on the same laptop. The only difference is the viewing angle (left: slightly below, center: straight-on, right: slightly above). Most people find it hard to believe that slouching can change the way an image looks but it’s very common.

What You Can Do

• One thing you can do is nothing. If you’re only going to show your images on the web there is always the risk that your picture won’t look perfect on someone else’s monitor. Simply being aware of that can at least save you from obsessing about what you did wrong.
• If presenting high quality images on the web is very important to you my best advice is to look at your image on more than one monitor. Between desktop PC’s, laptops and phones many of us do have multiple screens we can check. For the web I personally use an old laptop along with my main monitor to compare images. If an image looks good on both I assume it will work for the majority of people.

Some people may recommend calibrating your monitor which is a great thing to do if you’re planning to print images, but on the web unless everyone else calibrates their monitors it could only make things worse.

Hopefully this saves you a little future head scratching!

Written by Trevor Warren