2009-11 Meeting with Gary Fong

What an exciting year for the Jacksonville PUG! We started out with Denis Reggie, shot a high fashion shoot, talked about the business, grilled out for July 4th. How can this year’s PUG meetings get any better? Well, we finished out the year with an incredible speaker, Gary Fong!

Gary was in Jacksonville to speak at our PUG on November 9th.

State of the Industry
For 20 years, Gary Fong operated one of the most financially successful photography studios ever. Starting by charging $150 to shoot a wedding (with no time limit!) he began selling large wedding albums with a simple premise, pre-designing the album and emphasizing album design over anything else. In an era of shoot-to-burn price competition, Gary will carefully explain how to achieve ravingly happy clients and how to grow your business exponentially with no advertising.
Gary will explain the system he relied on to allow him to enjoy remarkable financial success even through two deep recessions, and will explain why consumers distrust advertising in difficult times, and how to price reasonably and effectively.
Gary retired from photography at 42, just after co-founding the lab at Pictage. He then went on to design the Lightsphere family of diffusers, and controls a multimillion dollar empire including real estate, plastics manufacturing, warehousing and distribution.

Bio
As a professional photographer Gary ended his 20 year long career in 2002 to pursue other interests, including creating the solution to unflattering images lit with direct flash lighting called the “Lightsphere.” Since introducing the Lightsphere in late 2004, more than 400,000 Lightspheres have been sold worldwide.
After inventing the Lightsphere, Gary built a veritable cottage industry around variations on his popular dome-shaped Lightsphere light diffuser including variations called, “The Origami” and “The Puffer.”
Gary has expanded into extensive real estate holdings with properties in the U.S. and Canada, a shipping and distribution warehouse in Wisconsin Rapids, WI and a plastics manufacturing company in Columbus, Indiana specializing in environmentally-friendly plastics made from corn and other bio materials. His most recent book THE ACCIDENTAL MILLIONAIRE: How to Succeed in Life without Really Trying,” has been described as “a humorous, poignant memoir of the man said to have revolutionized wedding photography.”