Office Space (Rik)

For our business we will need an office to work in and edit are photographs. I had a look on a few websites specializing in selling office space and came across officialspace.co.uk. This site had an inbuilt search engine which let you put in details about where your office would be located and how many workspaces you will need. I typed in our details with a bogus name and waited for a reply.

After a day I had received a few emails from a few different companies that had been advertised on the site. This is what they said;

Bourne Business

21st May 2010



Dear Mr Taylor,

Serviced Offices, Bourne Business Centre, Carlisle.

Further to a recent on-line enquiry received from Office Broker I understand you may be looking for office accommodation in the Carlisle area. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Bourne Business Centre to you in the hope that the facilities we have to offer here may be interest.

Bourne Business Centre is a three storey office complex located in Milbourne Street a short distance from Carlisle City Centre. We offer high quality, fully serviced and equipped office accommodation with private parking on flexible terms enabling companies to trade without large or long term financial commitments.

Rental prices start from £170.00 + VAT per workstation per month. Offices here at Bourne Business Centre are fully serviced and prices include.

• Rent

• Rates

• Office Furniture

• Heat & Light

• Cleaning

• Reception Facilities and Personalised Call Handling

• Voicemail

• Visitors Coffee Lounge

• Use of Kitchens & Refreshments

• Security and Fire Alarm Systems.





We also have several additional rooms available for tenants use. Firstly we have two meeting rooms that can seat up to 6. These rooms are furnished with a meeting table and chairs and also benefit from high speed broadband access. Use of these rooms for up to 1 hour a day is available at no additional charge.

We also have a consultation room available furnished with up to 6 comfortable chairs for more informal meetings or discussions.

In addition to this we do also have a large conference room available for hire at discounted rates for tenants. This room can seat up to 20 and benefits from the latest in presentation equipment and high speed broadband and internet access.



Many additional facilities are available here at Bourne Business Centre including:

• High Speed Broadband Access

• Telecommunications Equipment

• Provision of Telephone Lines

• Private Parking

• Conference Facilities

• Word processing, Photocopying, Faxing & Admin Support

• Franking and Posting of Outgoing Mail

• PA Services

• Bookkeeping

• Colour Printing





Bourne Business Centre is the ideal choice for the professional serviced office with everything required for the successful running of your company from that personal touch provided by our receptionists to state of the art telecommunications technology.

Further information and images can also be found on our web site at www.bournebusinesscentre.co.uk

If you require any additional information or would like to arrange a viewing of the premises and the facilities available please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards



Jo Kyle

Lettings Manager



Pacific House Business



Good Afternoon



Thank you for your enquiry for a Serviced Office that has been passed on to us by Office Broker.



We would like to introduce you to Pacific House Business Centre.



Pacific House is a purpose built Serviced Office Centre and is situated just ½ mile from Junction 44 of the M6 therefore offering easy access from the Motorway (North and South) and from the A69 (East) and with the Northern By-pass now under construction and due to be completed in 2011/2012 we shall be easily accessible from the West.



The building is new and finished to a very high standard and the offices are let on a flexible license. The fee includes:- Rent, Rates, Power, Heating, Building Insurance, Cleaning, Office Furniture, Car Parking, Staffed Reception, Breakout Area, Tea and Coffee. You also have 24 hour access, 7 days a week to your office.



The Business Centre has two meeting rooms available for you to hire should you wish to entertain your clients. The Boardroom can accommodate up to 20 persons in a boardroom style, 20/25 in a theatre style, 16 in a cabaret style and 12 persons in a classroom style. The Boardroom is equipped with Free WIFI, ceiling mounted OHP with an inbuilt audio system, flip chart whiteboard and air conditioning. The smaller meeting room can accommodate up to 10 persons in a boardroom style. You will receive a complimentary tea or coffee on arrival and further refreshments and quality catering can be provided, upon request, at an extra charge. We also offer admin support (such as typing, copying, laminating, binding and mailing) for your meeting, at a small charge. These rooms can be hired on a full or half day basis and the smaller meeting room can be hired by the hour.



We would like to offer you a three person office at the rate of £ 425.00 (excluding V.A.T.)



Pacific House Business Centre office hours are 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. Monday to Friday and we welcome you to come and take a look around the offices to see what we have to offer.

If these times are not convenient a more suitable time can be arranged by appointment.



I have attached some information for your perusal.



Please do not hesitate to contact us ion 01228 406363 if you require any further information and we look forward to hearing from you soon.



Kind Regards

Elaine Dodd

Office Manager



From looking at both emails and the cost from both of them the price would be around £400-£600 inc VAT. This is much cheaper than I thought and there is all sorts of facilities for us to use as well such as meeting rooms for clients and a kitchenette.

Lightroom 2.0 (Rik)

Lightroom would be a fantastic piece of software because it can batch edit hundreds of photographs at the same time. This will be extremely handy for our business because of the amount of photographs that we will be taking during a wedding. Lightroom can apply the same changes to a lot of photographs at the same time, so if there was one annoying technical difficulty during a shoot such as a piece of dust on the lens, we could edit it out of all the photographs with one easy click. We can also separate photographs from different shoots by using the many systems it has in it such as the rating or flagging system.

Because of how useful Lightroom is we will be using it as our primary software but in sync with Photoshop in case we need to make some major adjustments to the photographs.

Photoshop CS5 (Rik)

For our secondary piece of editing software we will be using Adobe Photoshop CS5. This will be the software we will use for extensive editing such as getting rid of any marks on the pictures due to technical problems or problems we found on the day. Photoshop also holds many filters and vignettes which the client could find interesting and may want them added to the picture.

Photoshop is quite pricey but worth the cost due to the amount of editing it can help with. We would use Photoshop in sync with Lightroom for the photographs that need majorly editing because it is known as a "destructive" piece of software due to the massive changes it makes to the pixels of the image.

Insurance Quotes (Rik)

After looking into how much our equipment will all cost I looked into how much I could insure the equipment for. For this I looked at a compare site specialized in checking the market for photographic equipment insurance.

This site was called http://www.camerainsurance.co.uk/

This site generated many insurance sites to pick from but the top two were Photo Guard and E&L. First I checked out http://www.photoguard.co.uk/

This site was quick and easy to use and generated a quote as soon as I entered the details. Because we will be travelling round with our equipment I got the full cover quote which covered outside damage and theft as well inside.

With Photo Guard there is many benefits that come with the professional insurance quote such as covering portfolio damage. This could be handy if a problem with our portfolio ever occurred. The price of the insurance came up to around £827.00 for year or £77.88 monthly.

The next insurance provider I looked at was E&L insurance. http://www.eandl.co.uk/

E&L's website was also very easy to use and also provided an instant quote. I put the same details in as the last one and got my quote.

When I got my quote I wasn't quite sure if I had typed the details in correctly because it was so low so I double checked it again and found that I hadn't clicked the outside insurance as well as indoors so I re-did the details.

The quote I got back had almost doubled but was still cheaper than Photo Guard. At E&L it was £438.01 a year.

This was much cheaper than Photo Guard but covered less in its policy such as the portfolio insurance. If a problem with our portfolio ever happened we would not be covered although it may be cheaper to replace it with our own money.

After looking at both policies and what they both cover I decided we should go with Photo Guard because they covered a few more things than E&L which were worth the extra price.

Amended Wishlist (Rik)

Heres the amended wishlist for our business. I have taken off the studio equipment and costs becuase we have decided to stay just in the wedding genre of photography.

Item Brand and Model Cost




Camera Equipment Camera x2 Nikon D700 £3,529.98

Prime Lens x3 Sigma 50mm HSM £1,100.97

Telephoto Lens x3 Nikon 18-200mm VRII £1,617.00

Battery Grip x2 Nikon MB-D10 £518.98

Tripod x2 Swarovski CT101 £878.98

Polarizer Filter x2 Hoya 55mm SHMC £129.98

Reflectors Interfit INT227 £39.14

Flash Gun x2 Nikon SB-900 £651.98

Light Meter x2 Sekonic L-308S £257.98

Camera Bag x2 Crumpler Muffin Top £298.00



Office Apple Mac x2 Apple iMac 27 inch £3,188.00

Colour Management Colorvision Spyder pro 3 £89.99

Lightroom Adobe Lightroom 2 £214.99

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop CS4 £614.00

Printer x2 Epson 3880 £1,958.00

Camera Cleaning Kit Green Clean LC7000 £8.99

Stationary Various £50.00

Phone/Internet Sky £168.00 per 6 months

Desk x2 Cantilever Rectangular £502.00

Chair x2 Decodo Designer Chairs £190.00

Kitchenette B&Q £450.00

Photographic Paper PPD Super Premium £60.00 200 sheets

Printer Ink Epson K3 £200.00

Clients Frames Kenro Ambassador £49.99 12 sets of 3

Brochures Inkylittlefingers £472.59 for 500

Business Cards Vistaprint £3.74 for 250

Frames (Own Work) Kenro Ambassador £82.99 6 sets of 3

Frames (Certificates) Kenro Ambassador £49.99 12 sets of 3



Professional Bodies AOP Per 6 Months £157.50

SWPP Per 6 Months £50.00

RPS Per 6 Months £50.00

Grand Total: £17,633.76

Equipment List and Cost (Rik)

A print screen of the list of all the equipment we will need and cost;

Workflow For Studio (Rik Parks)

Workflow for Studio

1) The client contacts us, we take the details such as date and what kind of portrait they would like (Fashion, Family portait, Commerical products etc) We tell them the cost and take a 20% deposit.

2) We set up the studio ready for the shoot leaving at least an hour before the client arrives. Get the make-up artist and props ready if applicable.

3) Take the pictures for the client and make them as comfortable as possible without overdoing it.....

4) Once the shoot has finished send it straight to lightroom and if the client wishes to stay, have them help pick out the photographs they like best. Edit the best on photoshop if need be.

5-1) If the client is still around and has paid the full amount, print the pictures straight off with the Epson 3880 and provide them frames or portfolio book etc.

5-2) If the client hasn't paid on the day, print a contact with a watermark and send it to them. Once they have paid send the prints to them with the portfolio book or frame etc

6) Enjoy our money...

Workflow For Weddings (Rik Parks)

Workflow For Weddings

1) Client contacts us with details about the wedding, location and date etc.
We tell the client the base cost and take a deposit of 50%.

2) We check out the location first hand and get an idea for the pictures.

3) Load up the equipment ready for travel. Make sure batteries are charged and do a full inventory check.

4) Appear at the location before all the guests arrive and set up. One of use stays behind to get pictures of the preperation for the wedding if the client wants.

5) Take some candid shots and portraits of the guests and happy couple.

6) When the wedding comes to a close or how ever long the client wanted us for, we head back to the office and begin editing the photographs using lightroom for batch edits and photoshop for extensive editing and certain filter or vignettes the client wants.

7) Print the pictures off using the Epson 3880 and arrange them into the into albums for the client depending on the type of package the client wants.

8) Express deliver the photo's to the client on the date the client asked after recieving full payment.

9) Spend the hard earned money!!!!

Equipment-Lenses-Portrait (Rik Parks)

For a good portrait lens we needed something small so we could quickly pop the lens on and get some of the guests, either during or in preparation of the wedding. It still needed to be a quality lens though because we want the quality to mach the D3's and D700's.
For this lens I chose;

Sigma 50mm f1.4 EX DG HSM Nikon Fit lens


It is a small quiet prime lens ideal for portraits. Because of its size it could quite easily fit into a photographers pocket and be ready to shoot whenever needed.

The cheapest I found the lens was £366.99

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/buy-sigma-50mm-f1-4-ex-dg-hsm-nikon-fit/p1026830

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/75546/show.html

Equipment-Lenses-Telephoto (Rik Parks)

For our business we will be taking candid shots of both people and landscapes. I have looked into good quality lenses which will produce pictures to the quality of the D3 and D700 at an affordable price. I came up with a telephoto lens and a small portrait lens.
This is the telephoto lens;

Nikon 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 G AF-S DX ED VR II Lens

I chose this lens because it is a high quality telephoto lens which will fit the D700 and the D3. We can use it to zoom in on the happy couple or wedding guests without disturbing them. This will be great for taking a candid photo.

The cheapest I found this lens was £539.00

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/buy-nikon-18-200mm-f3-5-5-6-g-af-s-dx-ed-vr-ii-lens/p1032955

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/categories/products/Nikon/AF-S%20DX%2018-200mm%20f3.5-5.6G%20VR%20II%20Lens-76462/Show.html?tduid=8e34119fd4ccc2fda14866bda805a4ce&url=http://www.jessops.com/online.store/categories/products/Nikon/AF-S%20DX%2018-200mm%20f3.5-5.6G%20VR%20II%20Lens-76462/Show.html

Equipment-Camera-Nikon D700 (Rik Parks)

For the camera to use in our business we decided to use 2 Nikon D700's and 2 Nikon D3's.

Nikon D700
The Nikon D700 is a top of the line, mid range DSLR. It has a full frame sensor like the Nikon D3 but is a lot more affordable. The sensors sensitivity ranges from ISO 200-6400 and creates noise free images even at a medium ISO. This will come in handy in case we are moving from indoor locations to outdoor locations during a wedding shoot. Like most Nikon cameras it is built incredibly sturdy and light.

The cheapest I have found the Nikon D700 is at £1764.99.

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/75127/show.html

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/buy-nikon-d700-digital-slr-camera-body/p1027395