understand what photography can do for your practice it's going to grow you as a clinician and
it's going to grow your staff and it's certainly going to grow your bottom line of your office as
well well like i said you got to have a camera you got to start off with at least a digital slr
i think if you had the least amount of money to spend and said doctor
i want to do this but i can't afford a budget of three thousand dollars if you invested three
hundred dollars for it i started on my journey to figure that out and i bought my first camera
i think i just went to either the photomed or lesterdyne booth and i put down my two
thousand dollars and got my camera and i went back into my office and this is what i came up with
so i laugh at this because i'm laughing at myself all right uh because i'm like everybody else we
think that if we buy two thousand dollars worth of something super fancy that somehow or another
i spent the two thousand dollars that's going to make everything solve itself and and and
here i am and i can't even get the patient's whole head in the photograph first of all
the lighting is completely wrong there's flashback coming back from his eyes right there and this was
this is one of my first images and this actually resided on my website as my marketing plan
i look back on it now and think boy that was a a pretty silly move there but nonetheless i'm
sharing with you all my mistakes okay so then i got a little bit of training and i was still
in search of that perfect black background so you can see you know here it's not perfect it
looks kind of gray i was like well maybe i need to paint the door black so i painted the door black
that clearly wasn't the right answer because it's reflecting off the back of the door but now at
least figure out the camera settings enough to get the whole patient's head in the photograph
but once i figured out and went to a class on photography that i needed two sources of light i
needed a soft box to create this portrait you can see what we ended up with on the right hand side
everything that i'm going to show you in this one hour video can be bought on amazon
or wherever you want to go could you go down to the local camera shop absolutely get some account
hand-holding absolutely i think you're going to pay about triple the price and if you just get the
entry-level items that i'm going to show this is the same exact equipment i have at my office
so i'm not telling you to go buy something that i don't use every day all the time taking this kind
of photo that you see on the right hand side right there so do you see the difference that
we now can show our patients if a patient came in who's a middle-aged man that needed implants
and fixed teeth if i showed them barry and said this is very at the beginning and this is barry
at the end and he was about the same age do you think that would resonate with the patient i
mean this is high quality photography right here this is going to separate you from the previous
pictures that i showed you and certainly separate you from the other 90 of the dentists who don't
even have a photo to show their patient i would be super proud of you guys and excited for you
not for any other reason but except for you've taken a little bit of education and applied it
and made that first step to actually understand what photography can do for your practice
it's going to grow you as a clinician and it's going to grow your staff and it's certainly going
to grow your bottom line of your office as well what about an older woman i would love if i had a
another 65 year old woman come in and say you know dr patel i saw your picture on your website
and i i i would like to have what you have just you have dentures and i say well half and half
she's got an upper denture that is a cosmetic lifelike denture and then she's got a fixed bridge
on top of implants for her lower teeth but i'm glad you saw that picture let me show you her case
so for as simple as just changing out that upper denture and giving her teeth that don't
slip and slide around the bottom can you sense the difference it's made in her i mean i think
you can look at those two pictures right there and just see the drastic change i mean when she
sees that before of her she's like oh my gosh i just don't ever remember looking like that
and then you know the last thing is your investment i mean is this going to be
something that is feasible for you to do well like i said you got to have a camera you got to start
off with at least a digital slr i think if you had the least amount of money to spend and said doctor
i want to do this but i can't afford a budget of three thousand dollars if you invested
three hundred dollars for a canon rebel ti or t5i you're gonna spend a 10 bucks 20 bucks for an hd
sd card you're going to spend about 300 dollars for the prime macro lens you're going to need
what i call the controller this is the brain that sits on top of your camera that's going to control
your speed lights and you're going to need two speed lights for your soft boxes and by speed
lights i mean these little flashes so flashes and speed lights can be interchangeable used
this is what goes inside the soft box to create that portrait photo that i was talking about
and if you want to get that really soft light you're going to need to get those bouncers from
lumiquest l-u-m-i-q-u-e-s-t and you're going to need two of these soft boxes i think if you did a
two foot by two foot soft box that is plenty so if i had to put three hundred dollars for the camera
if i had to do three hundred dollars for the lens and if i had another four hundred dollar
budget for my two speed lights my controller my two soft boxes and my two uh tripods i think
you would you could get everything you needed on an entry level budget of about a thousand dollars
there should be no reason why you cannot get into photography for dentistry for
intraoral and high quality photography for portraits for less than a thousand dollars