EP 82: Using AI In Your Photography Business

Ep 82 AI in our businesses === Alison: [00:00:00] All right. Welcome back guys. Today we’re talking all about AI in our own businesses and how we’re using it, so. I’m a bit of, uh, slow to adopt. I’m not an early adopter. Um, but AI is everywhere. It is in your inbox, it is in your web searches, it is in your social media. Um, and even myself, um, as not an early adopter as I am, if I’m using it. might be time for you also to be looking into how this can, can, uh, can positively affect your, your business. So we’re gonna jump into the ways Melissa and I are each using it in our own photography businesses and backend. Um, and hopefully maybe you get some ideas of how, how we can help you too. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Um, I, uh, so I was not Allison. I am, I was definitely an early adopter on ai. Alison: has taught me most of this. Melissa Arlena: Um, but I will say guys, like, you know, this is coming out January, 2026. Um, I am feeling like super annoyed with how much AI is out there and how little people are doing, and I’m like, okay, that, that’s gotta [00:01:00] stop y’all. So while I do love ai, um, it’s not meant to replace you, it’s meant to enhance you. So keep that in mind. Alison: Amen. Melissa Arlena: so some of the ways, yeah, no, go ahead. Alison: No, we were just giving, uh, my husband last night ideas. We were out with some of his coworkers on ways he can use AI to summarize the influx of emails and notes he gets from one particular coworker who is very good at his job, but he cannot, my husband cannot keep up with him. And Melissa Arlena: Uhhuh, Alison: just funny, like, no, create a GPT name it after this person feed all of his emails into it. And like GPT, your Melissa Arlena: some summarize. Alison: Yeah. Summarize, summarize, summarize. Melissa Arlena: Yeah, well it’s interesting ’cause my husband’s now teaching at a high school and so they utilize AI for a lot of things. So now he’s coming home and talking to me about things and it just is cracking me up. So, um, but for me, honestly, my number one favorite AI tool, and I pay for this one, is fathom for recording meetings and taking notes Alison: Yeah. If Melissa Arlena: like. Alison: a lot of meetings, Melissa Arlena: [00:02:00] Yes. Or guys, if you’re having a client consult, like that could be something of, it records the meeting and it provides you notes, um, so that you’re not sitting there having to look down to write notes while your client’s looking at you like, oh wait, is she talking to me right now? Or is she, is she listening? Like, you know, and I would even. Preface it ahead of time, of like, Hey, do you mind, I like to record the meeting because I don’t wanna forget anything you said, and I wanna make sure I co, you know, I’m paying attention to you and we’re covering all the important points, or something along those lines. Because then it can provide like a little print, you know, a little thing afterwards of what did you guys talk about? You know, what are your tasks per se? Like maybe you told her you would follow up with her or something, but I love it because I’m in so many meetings. Meetings with clients, you know, meetings with other photographers, um, you know, just all of that stuff. And so it’s just so easy to not, I mean, I still take some notes and everything here and there, um, but just getting all of that and having those little tasks, um, set up and my fathom just automatically records things. Like it’ll show up to me. It’s [00:03:00] not as bad. There’s another one I know that, um, I think it’s Firefly. If you don’t make the meeting, it’ll show up for you. Like take notes. And I was like, whoa, that’s a little sketchy. Um, Alison: Wow. Melissa Arlena: but, but I do have mine turned on, um, for, for all of that kind of stuff and I really love it. So that’s probably my number one. And I think I paid, oh, like for a blogging club and group coaching, I have it record those and then I can just post that link and they get the video. And like some girls, the other day, I was walking them through stuff in the blogging club that was individual to them. And I was like, Hey, don’t worry about taking notes. I was like, I’m gonna send you the link and you’re gonna get all the notes and you can find everything there. I was like, so don’t, don’t stress that you’re missing anything. And so I was like, that’s where it’s like super helpful. Um, but yeah, I think you could do it for client meetings. Um, I think you could do it for, um, like, uh, when you do like your reveals and stuff like that, even recording that. And then honestly, if it’s recording and you’re, you know, as long as your clients are cool with it, you wanna get permission ahead of time. Um, but as long as your clients are cool with it, like. What about, you could have at [00:04:00] that point, like an on-camera reveal, Allison, where you’re getting people’s reactions. Alison: Oh yeah. So I, I do that, but I have to screen share, like I screen share my entire. Screen so they have the best, largest view of the images possible. So I Melissa Arlena: Uhhuh. Alison: their, I can’t see their reactions Melissa Arlena: I wonder how that would work with her. Oh, okay. Alison: full screen on on my end. So Melissa Arlena: Yeah, Alison: they can see me, but I cannot see them. But I get to hear ’em. And that’s fun too. That’s fun Melissa Arlena: yeah. Yeah. Alison: like I do a lot of discovery calls, so I was wondering how that would work, even if I had it on my end. Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: but I don’t know because it’s, I’m, I’m using, my calls are on the phone, not on the internet, not on my computer. So I don’t know. Melissa Arlena: Oh, I gotcha. Alison: So that would be nice if I could just talk and not actually, because I talk and type. Melissa Arlena: Uhhuh. Alison: but it would be nice if I could just talk and then some not, you know, just do one less thing. That would be Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that’s, again, that’s the whole thing of like. Uh, Alison: We’ll see. Melissa Arlena: yeah, using AI to make some things in your life easier. Um, so with that, I, I’d mentioned on our last episode, [00:05:00] like using AI to help with writing alt text. Alison: Yep. Melissa Arlena: of that one day, I was like, oh my God, this is brilliant. And so that’s just where I have a folder of images. I will screenshot the folder. I’ll upload that photo of the folder of images with their file names to Claude or chat GBT. I’ll give it my list of keywords for the page and I’ll ask it to help me write alt text that describes the image and incorporates the keyword naturally. Um, and it’s variations of the keyword, so it’s not the same one over and over again. There’s probably like five or six variations, so it doesn’t come across as like. S you know, spamming or stuffing your keywords and stuff. Um, but then that’s nice. ’cause then I can just sit there and copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste, instead of sitting there and going, look at the cute mom holding the baby. And the, you know, I’m not coming up with all that. Alison: Baby girl. This baby Melissa Arlena: Yeah, Alison: Mm-hmm. Melissa Arlena: I would say too, um, research, definitely a lot of research stuff. Um, fine tuning my writing. Uh, so like the other day I had to write an email that was gonna go out to a bunch of [00:06:00] affiliates, and so I wrote out what I wanted it to say, but it definitely was like very choppy. I’m like, not polished. And so then I basically put it into Claude with my brand tone of voice and said, Hey, can you help me? Like, you know, make this sound a little bit more personable. And it kept all the information. Some of it was a little bit of formatting stuff, um, but it just pep it up just a little bit. But it, I wrote it. I just wanted a little polish on it. Alison: yeah. Melissa Arlena: Um, Alison: same thing with a little snarkiness. You wanna add a little Melissa Arlena: yes. Alison: wanna add a little sweetness, or if you wanna tone something down a little bit, Melissa Arlena: Oh yeah. I was gonna say, that’s the other thing. If you’re like, can you remove the snarkiness from this? Like, that’s another way, like, Alison: many feelings about this. Please Melissa Arlena: I mean, that’s a, that’s a great way, guys. If you’ve got a client who’s pissed you off, man, like, I think you could, you, you could write the post or write the email like with all of your them and vigor or whatever it is, and then ask it. Okay. Can we back this down? Alison: yes. Melissa Arlena: I can’t send this email, but let’s write a version I can [00:07:00] send. Alison: may or may not have done that this week, uh, with, with some things going on on our street. And Claude reprimanded me about local ordinances and be Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: and be careful. And I was, it was too soon. I was not happy with that. We didn’t use it, but it was fine. I did it’ll be fine. Melissa Arlena: Yeah, but those are just like fine tuning, that’s a big thing. Um, re oh, researching new locations for like, local vendor blog posts and stuff like that. Like I, I mean, anytime you guys are doing, you know, one of a more long form in depth blog posts, like, um. Like, I’ve done ’em here for, uh, restaurants in Charlottesville. So I crowdsourced with the local Facebook group to find out all the restaurants in Charlottesville that are kid friendly. And then I put those names into Claude and asked him to find me their website address and their address, maybe their hours and like something, you know. But I then now all of that is copy and paste. Dude, when I was in Florida, I had to manually do that. I had to go look this up and then copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And [00:08:00] so, Alison: For the Melissa Arlena: yes. Alison: For the doulas, Melissa Arlena: I mean that’s an, it was an hour worth of work easily for me to do all that. And it took him like, you know, 30 seconds. So Alison: URLs. Melissa Arlena: yes. URLs, all of that. Alison: favorite boutiques in Kailua. A recent Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: Um, and Melissa Arlena: The But the addresses. Alison: Mm-hmm. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. And. Alison: the URLs, the hours. Melissa Arlena: Yeah, I mean, you could even ask it for like, grab me the link to the driving direction so I could hyperlink the address to the drive. Like, there’s so many things with that, um, that just cut down on your workload. Um, I know for me, I repurpose our podcast transcripts because for Alison and I, this is part of our content. This is our weekly content that we create. Um, so very much like a. Alison: we’re Melissa Arlena: Yeah, we write an outline ahead of time, y’all. We do try to come into these with a plan. Alison: We Melissa Arlena: We don’t, we don’t wing it entirely, but you know, I will take that podcast transcript and then when I go to write my email to tell you guys about it, I will have it pull things from the podcast. And sometimes I’m not writing the EI mean. Here, Alison, I [00:09:00] try to record like ahead of time, so if it’s a month from now I’m like, shoot, I don’t remember exactly what we said, but if I can pull that transcript and have Claude like go through it, gimme a quick summary, refresh my memory of what we talked about, then that’s gonna be a whole lot easier. And I think Alison and I are gonna have to figure out now like creating a GPT where when we mention a podcast episode, he can give us the URL for it instead of her and I digging through episodes. Alison: We’re, I think we’re on the right track with that. That’s gonna, Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: our next Melissa Arlena: Yeah, because otherwise we’re like, what episode was that? Alison: I do the same thing with those transcripts. I take that transcript and I say, write the show notes. Um, we write show notes based on that. We have the same links we always Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: on the format, what it needs to have, the Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: to be in there for every episode, Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: boom, Melissa Arlena: Yeah, and then I’m turning them into blog posts because again, I’m telling it I’m okay with creating a blog post from a podcast transcript because this is Alison and I creating original content. Alison: right. Melissa Arlena: So I’m just telling him to take that and turn it less [00:10:00] into a transcript format and more into a conversation flow or a, or a, you know, a topical authority type thing. Um, and so we do, I do that with the transcripts? Alison: Absolutely. And yeah, Melissa Arlena: yeah. Ad copy, like I’m not good at ad copy y’all. Alison: no. Uhuh hooks calls to action. Melissa Arlena: Yes. Alison: writing a story, wah, wah, that sounds miserable to me. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Yeah. Ad copy is one of those where it is not so much about you and your expertise as it is knowing what’s gonna catch somebody’s attention. And I’m like, I was never that. Yeah. I’m like, I’m not the cool person that like people gravitate towards. Like, I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t a popular kid, Alison: Um, Melissa Arlena: but I feel like. That’s where it can really help with that. And then we were talking about too, like add creative ideas. Um, I was doing a reel. Yeah, I was, I wanted to do an enrollment reel for the motherhood anthology because I, I do their marketing and stuff and I was like, I knew in my head some ideas I had about what I wanted for the reel. And so I put those out there and then it gave me like, okay, hey. [00:11:00] This is what you need to show shots of this, this, and this. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Alison: Mm-hmm. Melissa Arlena: I created the graphics, like I didn’t use it to generate anything besides the idea of the flow and what, you know, what we needed to cover. And I put together the reel and um, Allie made it magical into a video. ’cause I actually just put together the graphic slides. Alison: Yeah, Melissa Arlena: She made the magic with like, you know, putting it to music and everything. And the first day we posted as an ad. We got two sales that day from just that reel. So I was like. Sweet. Like more of that? Alison: That’s a great segue because although it’s not business, I did the Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: same thing for some soccer fundraising. So Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: son is on the high school soccer team. Coaches. Were paying a lot of, I am heading up the fundraising for it, and I just said, write me a 32nd video to help raise money for a high school soccer team where this is what we’re raising money for, this is how we’re doing it. Boom. And in 30 seconds it gave me timestamps. It had player, uh, scripts and it gave me ideas for [00:12:00] B roll. And it had it all formatted in a way that said script B roll idea script player two says this B roll idea. And it was, Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: timestamps to, to prove that it was gonna be 30 seconds. I was, it was way more than I was expecting. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: a hundred percent little edited, like, okay, say this instead. You know, we’re saying Mahalo instead of, thank you. Like it was. I was so impressed. So, so Melissa Arlena: yeah, those are pretty much for me, like the ways I use it. I know Allison’s gonna talk about like, um, more of like blogging and stuff like that. ’cause we definitely, um, you know, using it in the right way for blogging. So, we’ll, we’ll cover that. Alison: Yeah. So one of the ways I like to do, you know, I spent a lot of effort and I’m sure you do too, on your website copy. And so what Melissa Arlena: Mm. Alison: is I took screenshots with Go Go full page. It’s just a Chrome plugin, Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: those full page screenshots and I uploaded them and it read it, it read the entire image. Um, and so. I use that as memory so that it could take those highly crafted words and, [00:13:00] re repurpose them in the content that I wanted to do. So it would create stories, create blog posts, and it has, it has that in its memory to keep pulling from. Right? Melissa Arlena: Hmm. Alison: So, um, when I take a blog post and I have put in my stories, I’ve put in my information, whatever, you know, whether or not it’s, um, local travel stuff or whether it’s photography and client education. It will take that blog post. I’ll take the content and then I’ll have it rehash it, just like we teach into an email into a social media post. Or just like we were talking about, like not only just give me some, uh, post some static post captions. Take this, take this concept and give me some ideas for reels. Gimme some Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: a carousel. Um, give me the creative ideas on the B-roll that could be attached to this. Or the pull quote to make a graphic. Or give me the, you know, gimme some hot tips, hot takes action items out of this blog post that I can share in [00:14:00] small bite-sized pieces. Melissa Arlena: Yeah, actually we have a whole episode, episode 27, 1 week of marketing from a blog post, and that’s, that’s talking about how we use AI in that. Alison: 27, we’re gonna link that into, it Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: to redo that. We might need to do that again. Um, we’ll have that link in the show notes. Um, and then I already, I told you about my 32nd That was fantastic. Um, and then, um, some fine tuning client responses. So we kind of mentioned with neighbors, but you can do it if you’ve got a difficult client Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: you got what you wanna say. And then Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: you should say, right? Like you can have your therapy and hash it out, um, in your GPT and then say, remove all emotion, remove, it sweet and kind and approachable and understanding, and you’ll have your therapy and then you’ll have your response and Melissa Arlena: Well. Alison: be work. Melissa Arlena: I think too, talking about like client responses, like you could pull all of your, um, all of your current, like emails that you send to clients and have it review everything and make sure [00:15:00] you’re not missing something. Um, another thing, one thing that I wanna do is, and I think this could work for inquiries, like what if you had all of your inquiry information, like questions that clients ask you and you just. Yeah, like anything that they’ve sent you an email during an inquiry, you know, where they fill out that description box or whatever. If you start just copying and pasting that into a doc, that could actually be sales and marketing copy for you. If you start seeing like what they’re looking for or what their questions they’re asking, that could help you create content. Um, and really you’re just gonna drop it into the, the word doc or whatever, but then you would go back and give it the prompt of like, Hey, look through this word doc. Alison: Yeah, Melissa Arlena: what are the common questions that a client is asking, because maybe that’s a hole in your website or a hole in your, um, in your emails to them and stuff, your onboarding sequence, things like that. Alison: And that’s, that’s great content that your FAQs, your real posts, your blog posts, you just go back and create that. Um, and then, uh, the last thing, this is, it’s a little business adjacent, but [00:16:00] as, um, I’m also on the board for our. Local spouse group out here in Hawaii. And so I’ve, I’ve taken to just doing some live videos in our Facebook group. Um, ’cause it’s the easiest and fastest way is just to speak to people to get information out, right. And so what I’ll do is I’ll do that on my phone, but then I’ll have my Google meet and Gemini up on my, um, laptop right behind me. And it’s taking notes for free. Uh, and so then I can take notes on what I just said, and that’s a digital form, and I can send that over to our communications girl who’s gonna then reformat it, um, into an email so that everybody can have it. And it’s, you know, it’s referenceable. People don’t have to listen to the video if they wanna listen to the video. Um. And it just, and so you can do that out of that same concept if you did an Instagram live Melissa Arlena: Mm. Alison: if you just talk to your phone and do a voice memo and then have that con created into a email or then to a blog post or vice versa. Like I think that’s probably my fav, my most favorite hack here recently is not just using the ai, but using it on my phone so I can do voice [00:17:00] instead of typing. That has Melissa Arlena: yes. Alison: biggest game changer for me is just Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: to Claude and, Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: stream of consciousness. It Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: miraculously, Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: we move on. It’s fantastic. Melissa Arlena: Yeah, I love being able to just like talk to it instead of typing things out Alison: yeah. I. Melissa Arlena: because it just makes it so much easier. I think the other day I was trying to do, uh, a checklist of, for some, for an onboarding thing and I was like, I’m gonna tell you all the things for onboarding and then you’re gonna just create the checklist for me. Alison: Yeah. Melissa Arlena: it’s literally my transcriptionist. And here’s the thing, like a lot of this stuff we’re talking about, these are very basic stuff. I mean, you can get into some of these AI groups where like. You know, they create all these things to do all this stuff. Um, so I’m not as far into all of that. You know, I’m trying to kind of do the little things. Alison: that you’re not at, like, that’s Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: Like I can’t fathom there’s that much out there to do because I’m just not into it, but Melissa Arlena: so much. And the thing is too, I mean, I think what we go, we were gonna talk a little [00:18:00] bit too about what we don’t use AI for. Um, and kind of, I think it really all comes down to, we were gonna talk about blogging and, and content creation like that. But the biggest thing is just asking it to create something from scratch, um, without you putting any input in. I know there are people who are like, well, I’m just gonna tell it to write a blog post on what to wear for a newborn session, and it’s gonna come up with stuff that it pulls from other people that may not match your style. It may not match what you do. Um, and without personal stories and stuff, it’s gonna be boring as hell. Y’all like, that’s the thing that annoys me about. Yeah, it annoys me when there’s nothing that connects me to the person who wrote it. Like when you’re a writer, even a journalist and stuff like that, you are supposed to connect with your audience. And AI does not connect you with your audience when you don’t give it any information. Um, you’ve gotta give it stuff. Alison: that goes back to, I think we got an episode on this from Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: are the secret sauce. Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: separates you from other photographers. Yeah. Your CH style. Yeah, your genre. But Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: day, [00:19:00] hiring a photographer’s very personal. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: down to personality. Who are you comfortable with, who Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: with your family? Melissa Arlena: Yeah. Alison: all comes down to you. And if you are not in your marketing, if your voice, your philosophy, your values are not in your content, Melissa Arlena: Mm-hmm. Alison: online, personal emails, or Instagram, you’re losing. Melissa Arlena: Yeah. And if you don’t check it too, like that’s a big thing even. Alison: huge. Melissa Arlena: When I talk about like, okay, hey, I’ve got, you know, we’re taking the podcast transcript and turning it into blog posts. I have one girl who’s doing all of the stuff with Claude and then she gets everything format and gets it posted and I have another girl who goes and reads it and reviews it to make sure it’s correct. And I have a funny story this week of like, I was doing this to kind of show TMA how we do it, and I took one of their transcripts. And Claude completely got it wrong. It had, the whole thing about it was that the girl was a teacher turn photographer. Turns out she’s a pharmacist turn photographer. And I only found [00:20:00] this out when I submitted it to basically, you know, my client over at the motherhood anthology. And they went, Melissa, she wasn’t an teacher. And I went back to Claude and I said, Hey, are you sure that’s her profession? And he literally started citing examples of things he said, were in the transcript. And when I pulled the transcript. None of them were in there. And I was like, if you were an actual person standing in my office, I would fire you for lying to me. So keep that in mind, guys. I gave him the transcript, told him to read it, gave him parameters to turn it into a blog post, and he still like completely hallucinated stuff. So always, always, always double check the stuff that’s happening. So I then. Alison: I’m on podcasting. Okay. Sorry. Melissa Arlena: it’s okay. No, that’s fine. I was gonna write down the minutes. It was around 20. Um. Okay, so we’ll go. So yeah, guys, don’t just blindly trust it, even if you’re having it right. Ad copy, even if you’re having it like with ideation and stuff like that, you know, run it through your filters. Make sure it sounds right, make sure [00:21:00] it’s accurate, um, and put your personality into it. For the love of God, I’m so tired of dry, boring stuff. I wanna hear your stories and why you recommend that. You know, maybe I wanna tell the story about why you don’t wear hot pink in a session, because I don’t wanna spend eight hours making a baby’s face not be hot pink anymore. Like those are the things that it’s like, oh, well that’s a good reason not to wear hot pink in a session. Like that’s gonna stick in my head. Alison: Absolutely. Well, awesome guys, we’ll call, let us know. Reach out to us on Instagram and tell us how you’re using ai. Um, we wanna hear it till Melissa Arlena: Yeah, if there’s anything new that we, uh, haven’t covered, you know, I’m always interested to hear more so like what you got. Tell us. Alison: Awesome. Melissa Arlena: Bye guys. I.