CCG Creative Studios, LLC offers high quality photography at very affordable prices. We invite you to take a tour at your leisure to learn more about us. You can review details about our pricing and view a PDF copy of our wedding brochure on our pricing page.

And feel free to check out our Client Galleries to see some of the work we’ve done for other clients.

We would love to meet with you and share ideas as well as some photos from our portfolio. If you’d like to visit with us in a totally free, zero-pressure conversation, please use our online scheduling system to book an appointment.

We were there. I used to write my own HTML, Javascript, PHP, and other code to run my web site. When it was time for a fresh look, I started researching flash sites and so on. WordPress was originally a blogging platform. It is certainly still that, but it is so much more now. It is a comprehensive content management system, too.

The folks at Elegant Themes (opens in a new window) have figured out how to design very clean and classy themes at very affordable prices. I will admit that I am a skeptic when it comes to paying for a web site design. But, the cost of these themes is more than reasonable and the value is beyond description.

I recently implemented one of their themes (the one you’re looking at right now) and our visitors and customers have made many very kind comments about the fresh, clean, professional look of the site.

Some brave folks came out to Fish Lake in Maple Grove to shed their clothing (not all of it) and jump in a freezing cold lake to raise money.

Please feel free to visit our gallery at http://galleries.ccgcreativestudios.com/2012-deep-freeze to view and purchase prints. Every penny we receive in sales from this gallery go to the program. Enjoy the show below…

We are truly blessed by these great people doing this great work for the great people of Haiti!

You and your family can enjoy a similar gallery and slideshow on our site. Sit back and enjoy!

Enjoy!

Here is a version of the sampler gallery that we have posted on our GALLERIES site (use the menus at the top of the page to take you to the galleries). You can have a private gallery very much like this one that you can share with YOUR family and friends…

Enjoy!

Local Christian Radio Station KTIS puts on a fantastic music festival each year called the “Joyful Noise Family Festival“. You can read more about this awesome event on their web site at http://www.joyfulnoisefamilyfest.com/. This is a music-packed full day of fun for the entire family with child-safe play activities, excellent food, and even charity activities (this year, attendees helped to pack over 100,000 meals with “Feed My Starving Children“).

The music is an exceptional mix of up-and-coming artists as well as industry award winners. This year, Peter Furler of Newsboys fame made a return visit to Minnesota in his new solo act (along with his wife and a highly gifted team of musicians) and played some excellent new selections as well as some old crowd favorites. The headline band was the always spectacular Casting Crowns, led by Mark Hall. Other artists included Brandon Heath, Go Fish, Mike’s Chair, Shawn McDonald, Laura Story, and more.

I had the remarkable privilege of attending both as a patron and as a media guest. We had decided early on this year to buy wristbands, so we had already purchased them when I ran into a friend at the radio station. When she asked me if I wanted a press pass to help capture some moments of the day, I simply couldn’t resist. This is, after all, one of the most inspiring blends of interest and passion… Fantastic praise and worship music and snapping photos!

So… take a look at our galleries when you have a few minutes. Sit back and enjoy. (I’ll try to add some relevant background music soon)

http://galleries.ccgcreativestudios.com/joyful-noise-2011

It was our pleasure to capture these special moments with this adorable couple! Congratulations Erin and Tom!

• I can turn it off whenever I want. I always have my mute button, of course, but I’d prefer a couple of simple and intuitive controls on the slideshow.
• It should not be “obnoxious”. I know that obnoxious is relative to the ear of the listener… I could write a whole new post on this topic alone.
• I would like to be able to “select” the style of music myself rather than relying on the web page owner to choose for me… See bullet above.

So… what do we do about this as the owner of a photography web site? Do we put music on our slideshows or do we not? Currently, we do add music on most of our gallery slideshows (check out our Galleries site), but we try to be somewhat selective about the music choice based on the client or event. And most of the time, we try to avoid vocals and stick with instrumental pieces to minimize distractions.

Some of our visitors have said that they really enjoy the music that we’ve included on both the public and private galleries. We’ve heard from others in our industry that not everyone appreciates music in the background, but this seems to be a minority.

We’re curious… what are your thoughts on this issue?

For the past several years, I was doing order fulfillment myself. We had a very nice system (“Photo Cart” from Pictures Pro [opens in new window]) that I was able to customize to fit the look and feel of our web site. This system served its purposes well and gave me a very high degree of control over the ordering process when a client would order prints or products from our site.

However, what also comes with a system like that is a high amount of configuration and maintenance. If I wanted to offer a new item (a coffee cup or other similar photo product) to our clients, it would take me quite a bit of time to configure the system to offer those items in the shopping cart. In addition, this high degree of control meant a high degree of hands-on work on each order. And not to go unmentioned, in addition to the amount of time I would spend on each order, I still had plenty of component costs involved in each one, as well (print costs, credit card processing fees, etc.).

Perhaps most important, the image files that we would upload to our site were resized to manage space on the web site server. Most standard web hosting arrangements (at a reasonable monthly cost) do impose some limits on space. Even the ones that say “Unlimited Storage” don’t often mean that literally. So, in an effort to manage the amount of disk space we consumed, we would resize the images before uploading them. Of course, we always kept all of our original files locally, but we did not upload those to the site.

Recently, we encountered a rather serious outage on our web site. A disk drive on the server that hosted our site experienced an unexpected and catastrophic (in relative terms) failure. Our entire site was gone. All images, resized or not, were gone. When we checked in with the web host, they informed us that our site was not being backed up because we had gone over their “limit” for automatic backups. Based on the size that they indicated was their “limit”, I’m sure we were not being backed up for quite some time. They had not contacted us to let us know that. So… we were off line for a little while.

As a result of this experience, I was back to deciding if I should continue the self-fulfillment strategy or consider allowing a service provider to take over some of this work for me. After doing a fair amount of research (albeit in a short period of time), I decided to move to a service provider model. The chosen service provider (click on any of our “Galleries” menu choices to visit the new shopping cart site) has a robust platform for hosting our original (high resolution) images as well as selling them at a cost that is affordable when compared to the time and costs we were incurring using the self-fulfillment model.

The costs of a service provider model are typically the print (or product) costs plus a fee which is intended to cover their credit card processing and hosting/technology/storage costs. Doing this cut our own costs for credit card processing to near zero (we only use it now for session fees and in-studio purchases) and took my labor from 15+ minutes per order to less than one minute per order. The costs are (only very) slightly higher under this model, but the peace of mind is substantially higher.

The chosen service provider also offers a large number of photo products via the shopping cart including cups, magnets, greeting cards, clothing, canvas wraps, and more. Doing this in a fully integrated shopping experience should prove to be rewarding for the customer experience, too.

There are a few minor downsides… I don’t have a means of offering my clients a “Customer Pickup” option. I may have to work on that as some of our local clients really prefer that to paying for shipping. On the other hand, since the service provider incurs a shipping cost either way (just as we used to), it is hard to justify not charging anything if we’re incurring a shipping cost of some sort anyway. In addition, the ability to offer other items that are not already in the list (though the service provider product list is comprehensive) is a little clumsy.

But… by and large, this studio has flipped sides. From self-fulfillment to service provider fulfillment. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. But we’re very happy with the switch at this point. Let’s see how we’re feeling about it in another three months or so.