A Few Tools to Help You Plan, Before We Ever Talk

I built these tools to help clients prepare for a session, before they're even ready to book. They're useful on their own. They also help me, because an informed client is a good client.

Most free tools on a photographer's website are a trade. You get a checklist, the photographer gets your email address, and a week later you are in a funnel you never asked to join. I never liked that arrangement, so the three tools I put at tools.michaelklothphotography.com don't run it. They're free, and they do one job: make planning your session easier. Use them and close the tab if you like. Each one also gives you the option to send me what you've done, but only if you're ready to keep the conversation going. Nothing is required, and nothing happens if you don't.

Every session starts with a conversation anyway. We work out the details, and just as much, I get a read on who or what I'm photographing, a nervous rescue dog, a CEO who would rather be anywhere else, a blank wall waiting on a print. These tools take the front half of that conversation and hand it to you early.

Here is what's there.

The pet guide reads the animal, not a checklist

The pet session prep guide asks a few questions about your animal and writes a guide for that specific pet. Not dog versus cat. You would expect that much. A fearless six-month-old puppy and a fifteen-year-old who hides under the bed when the monsoon rolls in need very different plans, and the guide knows the difference.

It adjusts for energy, temperament, and age. The high-energy dog gets told to burn the edge off with a long walk first. The anxious one gets a slower approach with fewer surprises. A senior gets a gentle pace built around the good hours of the day. Along the way it tells a dog owner to skip the bath, because a clean coat photographs flat and the natural oils are what catch the light, and it tells a cat owner to skip the catnip, because it trades the alert expression a portrait needs for a glazed, faraway stare. If you are going to be in the frame, it flags the outfit you already know shows every loose hair.

None of that is filler pulled off the internet. It comes out of the sessions I run across greater Tucson. If you want, the guide will also send me your answers and a photo of your pet, so the planning starts before we even have our pre-session consultation.

Headshot prep, minus the dread

Most people don't love being photographed, and a good portrait does not ask them to. The headshot session prep tool asks what your portraits are for and how you feel on camera, then writes you a short guide to showing up as the relaxed version of yourself. Looking comfortable is my job to draw out, not a thing you have to manufacture.

It gets specific where it counts. Solid jewel tones and neutrals over busy patterns and bright white. A haircut booked a week or two ahead, not the day before, so it settles and still looks like you instead of looking like a haircut. The point is a professional portrait that matches the person who walks into the room, because that match is the whole job.

See the print on your wall before you spend a dime

The hardest part of buying a fine art print is picturing it on your own wall. A size that sounds big on paper shrinks to nothing once it's hanging, and almost everyone makes the same mistake, going too small to play it safe.

The wall visualizer takes the guessing out of it. You upload a straight-on photo of your wall and tell it the real dimensions, so everything after that is true to scale instead of a rough approximation. Then you choose your prints, set the frame and mat colors, and drag each piece around until the arrangement looks right, whether that's one statement piece or a whole grouping.

When you save the mockup and send it to me, it comes with the exact print sizes you need, standard or custom. You never have to guess what fits, because you will have already seen it on your wall. It runs on a laptop or tablet, not a phone, because you need the room to see it properly. That is the one thing it asks of you.

One conversation behind all three

Pets, executives, and framed prints look like three different businesses. They are the same one. Every tool here ends the same way, by offering to send me what you have, your answers, a photo of your pet or your office, the mockup of your wall. That is not a lead magnet. It is the start of the design consultation I would have with you anyway, moved a few days earlier.

I built these so the planning could start without you waiting on me. Whether you ever book is a separate question, and an easier one to answer once you have already pictured the thing.

(If you're a photographer wondering how tools like these get made, that is what I write about in my newsletter.)

You can find these tools here. You are welcome to use them without ever sending me your information. And if you ever think, "this is great, but I wish it did this," send me a note and I'll see if I can make it work.