Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer is a good book for photographers since it delves into creativity and inspiration and where that all comes from.

Since many photographers are also small business owners, the same creativity and inspiration is also useful for running and growing a business.

Some of the insights that came out of the book make a lot of sense and having done a lot of work with the companies and folks profiled in the book, we’ve found things to incorporate into our own studio and agency as well.

One such thing is the focus on a “Third Place” and traveling.  Most of this relates to getting out of your comfort zone, which helps to create more creative pathways to come up with better ideas/solutions to problems.  When you’re not at home or work (and hence at a Third Place) or when you travel, especially internationally, you are put into a different way of experiencing things from culture, to language and more.  When you are in this type of a situation outside your comfort zone, your mind has to work in new ways to figure things out and when it does so, inspiration can often strike.  By doing this on a more regular basis, you put yourself in situations that might offer a greater chance of thinking of new ideas.

Other chapters discuss the best way to brainstorm and generate ideas. Lehrer finds that debating ideas instead of a straight brainstorm dump works best. Criticism makes everyone better and like the Toyota thing where anyone can pull the stop on the assembly line – Jidoka – change gets affected quicker and more efficiently when you debate the merits of ideas.  The myth of brainstorming working is also debunked with stats but a key area when using debate instead of brainstorming is to only debate/criticize with “plussing” – you have to have an idea on how to fix or improve and idea when you debate it’s merits so that you’re being constructive instead of just destructive.  Also, requiring plussing means that the debater will have to think about not just what’s wrong, but also how to make it better.

Lehrer also points out that the best innovation comes from people with lots of loose connections (having many acquaintances vs. a tight-knit group of close friends) .  There’s an example of how at Pixar, they purposefully created open spaes where employees have to run into each other (all the bathrooms are in the center area).  We actually worked at the company that helped Pixar during their design of the building and although we weren’t working directly on the project, its neat to see the thought behind it.

Cities do the same thing because of the mix of people and density of folks.  You might run into a friend or meet new ones when you’re out randomly and these face-to-face interactions are key. With random folks especially, you can help spark ‘a-ha’ moments since it might be something totally unrelated to what you are working on, but because of their different perspective, that might get pathways in your brain to fire differently and give you a much better chance of coming up with a totally unrelated but useful idea or fix to something in your own business/art.  Since we do a lot with the hospitality and events/meetings industry this means that meetings and conferences are still key because they enable those ‘random accidents’ to occur and help spark creativity!

So Woody Allen was right, “eighty percent of success is showing up” – whether it’s to a casual meetup, conference, or just talking to folks on the street – you never know where your next spark of creative inspiration may come from!

The post Book Review Imagine How Creativity Works appeared first on Orange Photography.

In case you didn’t fly Emirates Air last month, you might not have seen the May 2013 issue of Open Skies Magazine which featured one of our photos on the cover for a piece entitled Pinball Wizards starting on page 46. As you might know if you’re a reader of our blog, we’ve been seeing pinball trending in popularity and this is yet another article supporting that. If you flew Southwest Airlines you might’ve seen the profile on one of us that also mentioned pinball and in the next issue of San Francisco Magazine there will be another article on the resurgence of pinball and it will also include a photo from the Orange Photography team.

Here’s where you can see some of our other blog posts about pinball!

The post More pinball… on the cover of Open Skies magazine appeared first on Orange Photography.

Orange is excited to announce our third year as the official photographer at the World Education Congress 2013, being held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas this year! If you are unfamiliar, WEC is THE international meeting planner’s event of the year, showcasing industry trends, while cultivating key education and networking opportunities for meeting planners, suppliers and vendors.

Last year, Orange was tasked with over 100 hours of comprehensive conference coverage, complete with onsite delivery of assets for immediate use in the conference daily magazine, One+. It was at WEC 2012 in beautiful St Louis where Orange debuted our Headshot Studio Booth, a high-speed professional studio setup offering high-quality professional headshots immediately onsite. What a hit it was! Orange photographed more than 300 meeting professionals during the four-day conference to glowing reviews from both organizers and attendees alike.

“We partnered with Orange Photography as our official photographer at our annual conference last year and they brought to the table the idea of offering complimentary professional headshots to our members as an added benefit of attending the event. We set up the booth in the main area of the conference in the middle of our partner-driven branded booth spaces, and it was a huge success. The booth was wildly popular with our members and the activity at the booth increased traffic for the other branded booth spaces nearby—it was a win-win for everyone involved. It was such a success that we are planning for two headshot booths this year!” said David Basler, Editor of One+ magazine

 We are super excited to be a part of this great event this year, and for years to come! Keep checking back with us on new developments on this budding relationship!

The post MPI World Education Congress & our Headshot Studio Booth appeared first on Orange Photography.

A few of my personal photos from visiting Denmark are below…

The post Visit Denmark! appeared first on Orange Photography.

Summer movies will be upon soon and we’ve already started having some fun photo booths starting with this Iron Man 3 premiere party.

This Iron Man photo booth was interactive with a real live Iron Man, who as you can see here, wasn’t using his full powers…

However, we predict one of the popular themes for events and parties will be The Great Gatsby.  If you’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, you know that those parties looked awfully fun.  We’re looking forward to a few Gatsby parties coming up to see what our local event professionals can come up with similar to that!

What other summer blockbusters (or just movies, film or TV) would you like to see as themes for events?

The post Iron Man photo booth and movie themed photo booths appeared first on Orange Photography.

We are forever grateful of the loyalty and genuine referrals we have received throughout the years. Now, we want to give back.

With our new referral program, you can become an Orange Ambassador and start collecting points by referring friends, family and colleagues. They book with Orange, you get points. Collect points to redeem awesome gifts!

Click here to join: http://www.orangephotography.com/amb/become

The post Become an Orange Ambassador! appeared first on Orange Photography.

Time lapse and photo booths can go quite well together.  We do regular time lapses (as shown above, for the 2011 ISES-NCC Gala at the Bently Reserve) as well as regular photo booths of all sorts, so setting up a time lapse photo booth is a fun merge of the two.  We’ve done this quite a lot for private parties as well as corporate so if you haven’t thought of a fun way to recap and share images from an evening, the time lapse is a lot of fun.

Below is a time lapse photo booth from the First Exposures benefit auction event.  We do this each year and it’s a lot of fun and after the event, anyone who wasn’t even at the event can watch the quick time lapse and get a kick out of it.  Add it on to your next photo booth or studio booth experience!

Another fun thing to do is to create animated GIFs from a photo booth.  This mini time lapse works well on web pages where the embedded video looks static (as it does here), but with the animated GIF, it makes a mini time lapse photo booth image that can catch someones attention to make them take notice and hopefully click through to the full clip.  Check out our photobooth website for more details!

The post Time Lapse Photo Booths appeared first on Orange Photography.

We talked to Luiza Flodr of Video Amusement, which is a company that rents video games, pinball machines and more.   Flodr told us “the pinball machines are making a resurgence. We have rentals just about every weekend for pinball machines. Also, the pinball machines are the most requested item for corporate long term rental.”  Rental rates start at $295 for a single day, but package discounts are available.

You can see all the pinball machines that Video Amusement has in their collection on the pinballowners.com website (they currently have 77 machines available).

More evidence here in the Bay Area are the growing number of people you see at bars or other venues playing pinball.  Just this past weekend, I was at Molotov’s just to play their Attack From Mars and had to wait for one group to play and during my second game another group of folks came by just to play (they were disappointed that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was out of order).

There were already a few leagues in the Bay Area, but San Francisco now has one called the San Francisco Pinball Department (SFPD) and I myself have started playing in the league.  You can check out some photos from the league on our site here.

At many conferences we’ve also seen ‘relaxation lounges’ or chill zones where they have some video games and pinball.  I think almost every large tech conference we’ve shot recently has done this and the pinball machines are always a hit.  If you’ve got an event upcoming, consider some pinball.  We can even give you some expert (er, well, enthusiast) tips on the games that makes them even more fun to play!

The post Event entertainment trend: Pinball machines appeared first on Orange Photography.

Venue: Fort Mason Center
Event Design: Hartmann Studios
Rentals: Hartmann Studios Rentals
Lighting: Impact Lighting 
Photography: Orange Photography

Cocktails & Beverages: Best Beverage Catering | BBC Elite

Caterers:
Back to Earth Organic Catering
Barbara Llewellyn Catering and Event Planning
Betty Zlatchin Catering
Componere Fine Catering
Elaine Bell Catering
Fork & Spoon Productions
Global Gourmet Catering
McCall’s Catering and Events
Melons Catering & Event Planning
Patina Catering
Small Potatoes Catering & Events
Taste Catering & Event Planning
Thomas John Events
Tout Sweet Patisserie
Union Street Catering
Wine Valley Catering
Wolfgang Puck Catering

Floral Designers:
Alicia K Designs
Amy Burke Designs
Asiel Design
Fleurs de France
Hunt Littlefield
Mandy Scott Flowers
Michael Daigian Design
Montbretia Floral Design
Nancy Liu Chin Designs
Nicole Ha Designs
Passiflora Designs
Spiral Hand Design
Waterlily Pond Floral Design

Staffing: The Party Staff

Entertainment: Innovative Entertainment

Other Partners:
Admac Digital Imaging

The post Hartmann Studios Client Appreciation 2013 appeared first on Orange Photography.

As you probably know if you’ve followed our agency or this blog, we love instant photography and have been happy to promote it to our clients as well often shooting vintage Polaroid cameras with Impossible Project film.  Well we lucked out and got a Christmas/Holiday present from the Impossible Project folks of a Polaroid Close-Up Stand this past December and it’s a great tool to push your creativity with.

The Existential Monkey blog also has a nice post about the Close-Up Stand here.  Still need to play with it more, but macro photography can be a lot of fun so stay tuned for some samples from this new toy!

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