As a teenager growing up in Indonesia, Carolina Tumpal was fascinated by photography and the way cameras could document the world around her.
It’s a passion that led Tumpal to join her high school’s photography team as well as a private photography club where she spent weekends taking pictures in Jakarta’s suburbs or the small towns and villages outside of Indonesia’s bustling capital city.
These days, Tumpal spends most of her days shooting photos for clients around Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, Burbank, and the San Fernando Valley as the owner of Thruviewfinder Photography.
“It moves you when you can capture emotions and feelings in an image, such as happiness, joyful expression, or even sadness, and you can see the emotions in the pictures,” Tumpal said in a Jotform interview.
“For example, I photographed a family of five, and when I see their pictures, I see everybody’s smiling, hugging, and laughing. Those portraits make me smile. I can feel their happiness through those images. Being able to capture emotions and turn them into photographs warms my heart. For me, a camera can capture that memory — I can freeze those memories, and people can cherish them forever,” she said.
Her journey as a small business owner began in 2008, when she started taking photo shoot requests from Facebook friends and took some photography classes at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.
By the time she started Thruviewfinder Photography two years later, Tumpal had built up her list of faithful clients, a reputation as a professional photographer, and a going rate for her services by implementing small, incremental rate increases as she gained more experience.
“If I have a good relationship with my clients, they become my long-term clients,” Tumpal said. “They call me to document every single event in their lives.”
Tumpal uses Jotform to collect client registration information and contract approvals for all of her photo sessions, including those for quick shoots, cake smashes, newborns, and events.
Build professional, customized forms
Since she began using Jotform in 2014, Tumpal has created professional-looking photo agreement forms for prospective and returning clients.
“You want your clients to respect you, so you want to look professional,” Tumpal said.
With Jotform, you can build a customized online form from scratch and make it unique by adding a company logo, changing the background color, or altering the fonts. If you need a little inspiration, you can choose from hundreds of photography form templates.
With Jotform’s drag-and-drop form builder, you can place specific elements — or questions — such as names, addresses, phone numbers, dates, and times, onto your form for people to fill in.
Stop by Jotform’s widget library and try out some of the software tools that are designed to make your forms more user friendly. For instance, you can use the terms and conditions widget to create a link to any fine print.
When clients fill out a photography session agreement form, Tumpal discloses key details about her services, such as retainers, liability waivers, fees, location costs, reshoots, refunds, and rescheduling options.
Create polished PDFs with submitted data
After building your form, you can use Jotform’s autoresponder feature to set up an automated thank-you message that will go out once someone fills out and submits your form. This feature can also be used to send someone a copy of their completed form.
You can go a step further and use archived form responses to generate polished, professional documents in Jotform PDF Editor. Much like Jotform’s form builder, just use PDF Editor’s drag-and-drop functionality to place responses from completed forms onto a blank PDF document — you can modify the text without altering the original responses.
You can customize the PDF document by adding a company logo, adjusting the page margins, or changing the background color, just to name a few options. If you like the PDF you’ve created, you can save it as a template.
This allows you to save a plain copy with notes for your records and share a polished, branded version with clients.
This Jotform product is particularly helpful for Tumpal, who saves PDF copies of submitted forms to an external hard drive for safekeeping.
Jotform PDF Editor is also safer than manually transferring archived data from submitted forms and sending it to clients, Tumpal said.
Organize and automate the appointment process
Scheduling photo shoots and client meetings is now easier than ever with Jotform’s new Google Calendar integration.
With this integration, all you need to do is create a form using the “Full Name,” “Address,” “Email,” “Phone Number,” “Date Picker,” and “Time” form elements. Once someone fills in the information and submits it, that data will automatically be used to create an appointment on your Google Calendar.
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