What I did (and learned) on my summer vacation
...an inadvertent, powerful marketing lesson

A few weeks ago, I spent a week at an in-the-field photography workshop. I was reading a marketing book right before that and the intersection between that book and what I learned at the workshop have already made a profound difference in my sales, profits, and the overall way I look at my business.

A bit of background

I'm a novice nature photographer and my favorite subject is birds. I've been dabbling at this for about a year and a half. Through reading a number of books, talking with other photographers I meet when I'm out shooting, and reading a couple of online forums, I've gotten fairly competent at photographing birds that are perched in a tree or in the water.

To show you what I mean, here's a picture I took last weekend of a long billed curlew cleaning itself:

Can you believe the size of this bird's beak! And it has gorgeous plumage as well.

So far, so good in my education as a budding nature photographer.

Here's where it gets ugly

After becoming reasonably competent at shooting birds that are essentially still, I decided to take a stab at photographing birds in flight. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that it's far more difficult than I thought it would be.

All of my shots were blurry, got only part of the bird (usually its butt) in the frame, or I missed the bird completely. Let me tell you, trying to catch a small object that moves at 60 to 200 miles per hour and dips and dives without any warning can get frustrating really quickly.

While there were a couple of books that touched on photographing birds in flight, the advice they gave didn't work. And the more experienced photographers essentially told me that "it's hit and miss, you just have to keep trying".

Sorry, but that advice just didn't cut it.

Fortunately, on one of the photography blogs I read, I discovered that two of the best bird flight photographers in the world were going to be conducting an in-the-field workshop. Their work has been featured in National Geographic, various Audubon publications, the best-selling app iBird, and many other places.

The workshop had a limited attendance of just 10 people, so the enrollment fee was pretty high. I immediately applied for one of the 10 spots and was able to lock one in. This meant a lot of juggling of my schedule, but I knew it would be worth it.

Let's shift gears a bit...

About a week before the workshop, I had picked up a copy of an excellent book, "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman. The author's premise, backed up by abundant research, is that getting an MBA is an enormous waste of time, effort and money. And that in any field, including any aspect of business, you don't need to know nearly as much as you might think. Instead, there's always a small set of core principles that provide most of the value.

Once you understand these core principles, making progress is much faster and easier. So I decided to apply this new approach and focus only on the core principles — which I personally call Cornerstone Principles — at my bird flight photography workshop.

You can actually do this with just about any book, course or live program. All it takes is a Table of Contents or Agenda and paying close attention to the introductory chapter or session.

Start by glancing at the Table of Contents for a book or the Agenda for a course or live program. Get an idea of what the major topics are. That's your beginning roadmap.

Even more telling is the introductory chapter of a book or the first session of a course or live program. That's where the author or instructor will "tell you what they're about to tell you". They nearly always describe the major topics of the material and show you where each topic is covered.

From these two resources, you can easily create your own short list of Cornerstone Principles.

Bob, the living guinea pig

With thousands of dollars for the enrollment fee and a week of my precious free time at stake at this workshop, I decided to put this philosophy to a real world test. My goal was to identify three to five Cornerstone Principles that would create a powerful, lasting foundation to build my flight photography skills upon.

Sure enough, the program started with the instructors handing out the Agenda for the week. And, following the structure of any Agenda or Table of Contents, it broke down the week into the core areas we'd be covering.

Next, I paid close attention to the introductory session which lasted about one hour. True to form, this session listed each topic that would be covered and called out particular attention to a few of these topics.

At this point, I had my own list of Cornerstone Principles for successful flight photography. To my surprise and delight, there were only three CPs:

1. Understanding light and how to maximize the use of it
2. How to get the proper exposure before your subject flies into view
3. How to track and acquire a fast moving subject in your view finder

How this process optimizes your skills for anything you
want to learn and accelerates your expertise

In applying this philosophy of Cornerstone Principles, I discovered that it was extremely effective — and I'll show you the proof in just a minute. But it's even better than it appears on the surface.

Not only did I discover that this approach works extremely well, but I also discovered that the Cornerstone Principles are easy to learn and master quickly. Even with topics that I thought would be complicated, like the three points I listed above, learning them was far easier than I thought it would be.

In fact, I'll show you what I learned for each point to demonstrate exactly how this works.

CP #1: Understanding light and how to maximize the use of it

There are only three points to understand about light. The first point is that all photography depends on light, how much there is of it and the direction its coming from. Because without adequate light, you can't take a decent picture.

The second point is that softer light, the kind you get the first couple hours or last couple hours of the day is far superior to the light you get the rest of the day. When the sun is high and beating down harshly, you get glare and shadows. But as it rises or sets, the sun is lower in the sky and the light is softer with less glare.

The third point is that the light must be on your subject, not behind it. That's all you need to know to master the use of light. Pretty simple, right?

CP #2: How to get the proper exposure before your subject flies into view

With a subject that's stationary, it's easy to get a proper exposure value. You just point your camera, press the shutter button down halfway and the camera gives you the proper exposure or allows you to adjust it manually.

But how do you get the proper exposure if the subject is nowhere to be found and you can't focus on it? Every book I've ever read teaches you how to do this for stationary objects, but is completely wrong when it comes to subjects that are moving, regardless of whether the subject is an animal, bird, car, or athlete.

But the trick we were taught by our expert instructors is so simple, it's amazing. You simply find something in the surrounding area that has about the same color value as the subject you want to photograph and expose for that. For example, if a bird is primarily brown, you can get your exposure by focusing on some dirt, the bark of a tree, or some medium toned shrubbery.

Now, I realize that this sounds almost obvious when you see it here. But as I said, I've never seen any book that covers this and every photographer I've ever talked to in the field, including some experienced professionals had no clue about this.

CP#3: How to track and acquire a fast moving subject in your view finder

The first two Cornerstone Principles were easy to grasp and put into practice. But I must admit that this final CP was where I had my greatest degree of doubt. You see, I've been trying for well over a year to capture some good photos of birds in flight. And up until now, I have never produced even a decent shot. So I was a bit nervous about whether I'd be able to master this.

As it turns out, the solution the instructors provided was another winner. First, you have to understand that trying to track a small, fast-moving object through a long telephoto lens is the equivalent of staring at something through a drinking straw. That's roughly the field of vision that's available to you.

So how do you master this difficult task and track a bird's erratic movements at the same time? First, you stare at a fixed object and try to put your camera to your eye without moving your head and acquire the image as quickly as possible. In the beginning, even this is difficult. But after about an hour, you gain the ability to do this fairly consistently.

Next, you move up to slower moving objects. In my case, I tried to focus on ground squirrels or pelicans, because they both move pretty slowly. This took me another hour or two to master.

Finally, you step up to the smaller, fast-moving birds you're after. In this case, we were photographing Elegant Terns, which fly as fast as 60 to 80 miles per hour.

So the key to success is this progressive form of practice. And lots of it.

Yep, a picture really is worth a thousand words There was certainly a lot more instruction during this workshop, but as I said, I decided to go for broke and concentrate only on these three Cornerstone Principles. How well did this work?

Here's the proof. First, take a look at this picture that I snapped toward the end of the first day of the workshop. You can see that even after 5 hours of practice, it's lousy &mash; out of focus and the subject is not in the center of the frame and is barely recognizable.

Despite the fact that I wasn't capturing any decent shots, I could actually see my progress - and you wouldn't believe how much worse my shots from earlier in the day were! So I kept on practicing for another two hours.

Now, take a look at a picture I took just ten minutes into the morning of the second day. Without any additional class room training and only a couple more hours of practice, I captured a fantastic image of the same breed of bird, an Elegant Tern.

Not only did I capture this image, but I captured dozens more high quality images that same day and I've continued to do so ever since. Because once you learn and begin to apply just a few Cornerstone Principles, at some point, they all kick in and begin to produce results.

Quite frankly, because of the previous frustrations I encountered in my attempts to photograph birds in flight before the workshop, if you would have shown me this picture and told me I would take it after just one day of instruction, I never would have believed it.

But in my case, just one day of training from experts who really know what they're doing, coupled with focusing on the Cornerstone Principles, resulted in my being able to acquire the skills that will serve me for years to come. And there's very little else I have to learn to add any significant gain to what I learned in such a short time.

Another lesson learned

Another aspect of the workshop that was invaluable was learning from the other members. Since they were all as interested in flight photography as I am, I picked up a lot of great advice on equipment, clothing, different spots all over the world to visit for photographing wildlife, and much more.

The lesson is simple — educated peers are an exceptional resource. In fact, it has proven to be so valuable, that many of us have stayed in touch with each other and plan to continue doing so.

Valuable lessons you can apply to your business

As soon as I got home, I began to apply this concept to my business. First up was applying it to the product development process. Instead of all the complex elements that go into creating a new product, I focused on the top four Cornerstone Principles that I determined held the most value.

The result is that we've already pre-sold as much of that product in about 10 days as we did the previous six months. And it was easier to do.

So here are the lessons I learned that you can apply to your own business and benefit from immediately:

1. You can learn more in a short time from expert instruction and mentoring than you could from years of reading books or talking with others who are essentially at the same level as you are
2. When you isolate and focus on a few Cornerstone Principles, you can accelerate both your learning and your actual growth to the shortest time possible
3. Peer groups made up of people with similar goals are an excellent success accelerator

Now that you've seen how easy it is to make a dramatic change in a very short time, give this a try for your own business. I can guarantee that you'll be elated with the results.

A final word

Based on the lessons I learned from my "summer vacation" and then applying it to developing a new product for my business, I'm considering presenting a combined mentoring/master mind program built on the Cornerstone Principles necessary for increasing your sales and profits in any economy. This would be a year long program that would include live workshops, mentoring, and a master mind group focusing on these Cornerstone Principles:

• Product Intelligence
• Customer Intelligence
• Marketing Intelligence
• Financing Intelligence
• Profit Growth Intelligence

As I'm sure you noticed, there are only five Cornerstone Principles here. And once you understand them, it becomes remarkably simple to apply and benefit immensely from them, just like it was for me to make a quantum leap in my photographic skills.

Similar to my experience in the flight photography workshop, much of what we'll be covering is counter-intuitive and cannot be found in books, courses or other programs. So you can be assured that you'll be gaining new, invaluable skills as rapidly as possible.

The program will be called 5 Cornerstones of Profit and will run for an entire year. There will be three live meetings in San Diego, an ongoing Members Forum, conference calls and special advanced materials, and much more. If there's enough interest in this program, I'll conduct two different groups, each with limited seating.

The first group will be for businesses that have annual gross revenue of one million dollars or more. The fee for this program will be around $30,000. If you'd like to get on the Early Notice list for this group, you can sign up by clicking here:

www.ProfitAlchemy.com/5CornerstonesPlatinum

The second group will be for businesses that have annual gross revenue of $250,000 to one million dollars. The fee for this program will be around $22,500. If you'd like to get on the Early Notice list for this group, you can sign up by clicking here:

www.ProfitAlchemy.com/5CornerstonesGold

An unprecedented guarantee. I realize that the fees for this program are sizable. However, the very real gains you'll immediately see are worth the fees many times over. But I insist that you be the "judge and jury" on this. And that you judge me and this program solely on tangible results.

So here's my offer to you. Attend the first two-day kickoff weekend. Within the first few hours, I'll show you: (1) How hiring one part-time, minimum wage employee will increase your profits by 30% or more; (2) How to create an immediate sales surge equal to 15% of your annual revenue with just 20 minutes of effort, the minute you get home.

Then stay for the entire two days. If you aren't thoroughly convinced that what you get during this weekend alone is easily worth at least twice the program fee, just let me know and I'll  refund your entire fee on the spot — plus, I'll give you an additional $1,000 for your trouble. That's how confident I am that this program will change your business forever.

I do have one favor to ask of you. Please do NOT sign up for either program unless you have a serious interest in joining.

There will be a screening process to receive further information for both levels of the program, so you don't gain anything just by signing up. And at this point, since I'm trying to measure whether or not it makes sense to move forward with this, it would help me greatly if you only sign up if you are serious about joining.

And whether you sign up or not, I hope you enjoyed and benefit from this issue!

Regards,

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