sustainable

McKay’s Photography has continued the quest to decrease the carbon footprint in the wedding photography industry with some cool new product lines! As many of you know, I have been a life long self-described “dirty hippy”, well actually only my friend Tony calls me that, but there is some truth to the name. Since attending the Rochester Institute of Technology in the ’90s, I have been very interested in sustainable practices as just plain common sense. This was a HUGE drive toward my vegetarianism and for years and years I have been invested in keeping my waste to a minimum. While there is always room for improvement, especially in a consumer society, I do my very best. No where has this been more apparent than with my Wedding Photography business.

The new Green trend makes me happy if only because there are more and more green options everywhere I look. From my super awesome brown canvas frame and album bags (Wegmans plastic bags in the winter were just tacky anyway)… to my new line of framing and albums, there have been a lot of changes in my studio this year. I am the first Photographer in Rochester to switch from DVDs to Jump Drives (USB drives) for the High Resolution image files! I’ve been scouring conference trade shows for these, and EVERYONE still promotes DVDs! It has been a frustrating journey, but I found some pretty brown ones to put my logo on!

Another awesome change was to Sustainable Framing! Not only is my framer less than 2 miles from my house, but I FTP the images to them and they print and frame whatever I need! I secretly call it the “stay in my jammies” special, because my buddy, Pat, does all the work! He found me a special line of frames that are reclaimed from: wood shavings, chips, sawdust, wasted trim, pallets, construction materials etc. The frames are a solid material with a smooth, fine texture! A bonus is that Pat is awesome at picking out mats and frames and I am terrible at it…. I just tell him to do whatever he wants and he always makes me happy that I delegated to the expert.

Next up is my GORGEOUS and BEAUTIFUL  and LUXURIOUS new eco-friendly album! Can you tell I’m a little excited about it????? I’ve been wanting to order a sample from this company since I first began looking into albums. I’ve been too cheap to do it and also too afraid to pick the images to go into it. I needed images worthy of the album, and realistically I knew that I didn’t have the clientele that spring for such an album. Worse still was that I knew that past clients would want it as much as I did! I was OK teasing me, but not them. Well, now is the time to offer this one of a kind, handmade, eco-friendly album with Japanese book cloth covers and a custom presentation box to store it in. All of my other albums are delivered in a cardboard box. OK, a fancy cardboard box, but still. So, I will also offer the handmade clam shell box as an upgrade to my regular albums as well.

Well, this post is way too long and I still have a LOT more to say, so I’m ending it here with a few images….

By Michael Escalera

One of the best decisions you can make to manage your time, reduce pollution, and lower costs is to have a daily plan.  We call it economy of motion.

It's something I was taught at a young age by my parents, and to be honest, it makes sense!  The principle is to combine energy and effort so that more can be accomplished with less.  To put it in practical terms, here is how economy of motion relates to daily life.

For our business, if we have packages that are ready to be shipped Wednesday afternoon and we know more packages will be ready Thursday and early Friday morning, we will wait until Friday morning to ship all of them together.  This saves the energy, time, fuel use, and pollution from what would have been three separate trips!

The concept sounds simple but can be difficult to implement if you don't plan ahead.  You can help this policy work in two distinct ways:

1.  Manage your client's expectations

2.  Forecast needs and plan your time wisely

Managing your client's expectations is crucial to using economy of motion.  One of the most common questions we get regarding this policy is doesn't “delaying” packages when they are ready to go affect our clients?  The answer is no – it doesn't affect them at all!  We inform our clients that it will be approximately four weeks before they receive their order.  When we receive an order it is always processed within two business days, and back from the lab within another three business days.  We then package the order and place it in the queue for shipping.  Even if it doesn't leave our studio with other packages for two to three days, we are still two weeks ahead of schedule from when the clients expect their order!  We would never jeopardize our relationships by needlessly delaying orders, but by managing our client's expectations we can save energy, time, fuel use, and pollution by this simple workflow.

The next way to implement this policy is by forecasting and planning your time wisely.  When we know on Tuesday that packages will need to be sent on Thursday, we start to plan our other needs around that trip.  Whether it's office supplies, on location meetings, or a quick personal grocery run, anything that we can combine into one trip is fair game.  We are saving so much by having multiple errands accomplished at one time.

Economy of motion is a simple task that can translate into savings for your time, health, finances, and very importantly, our environment.  Just think of what an impact it would make if everyone thought this way!

Michael Escalera is a Christian photojournalist who documents weddings throughout the world.  His images have been published nationally and he teaches workshops and offers consulting services to other businesses.  You can learn more about Michael by visiting http://www.escaleraphotography.com