For Everyone
23
Dec 2011

Christmas Wish List

Dear Santa,

Here’s my list for this Christmas. Please read it carefully so you don’t mix it up like you did last year:

• Less stress and more success.
• More spare time and less spare tire.
• Less grey hair and more grey matter.
• Big bank account and small credit card bills.
• Pay rates go up and camera prices go down.
• An idle vacation and a busy vocation.
• Large photo budgets and small copyright demands.
• Faster computer and slower deadlines.

I’ll be leaving some gluten-free, sugar-free, fat-free, nut-free, taste-free cookies on the front table along with a glass of soy milk. If things go well this year, I’m sure we’ll see the return of the frosted double fudge chocolate chip brownies and the grande caffé mocha with extra whipped cream.

 

— No comments yet. Your thoughts are welcome.

For Everyone
21
Dec 2011

Title Role

While looking through LinkedIn, it’s interesting to see how self-employed people describe themselves. While corporate employees are often given a title by the company they work for, self-employed folks can make up any title they want.

It’s a safe bet that anyone who declares themselves to be an “expert”, “evangelist”, “guru”, “life coach” or even “ambassador”, probably isn’t.

The words “analyst”, “strategist” and “specialist” could likely be replaced by “clerk” or “office worker”.

What exactly do the titles “innovator” and “visionary” mean? One might wonder if “self-employed” is somehow related to “self-important”.

There’s a difference between blowing your own horn and blowing hot air. We all know that any business that uses words such as “best”, “honest”, “qualified” or “high quality” in its slogan is probably fooling only themselves.

Perhaps commercial photographers and corporate photographers should use a title such as:

Visual Communications Strategist

Chief Imaging Officer

Visual Opportunity Research Analyst

Pixel Control Specialist

Visual Innovator

Photon Optimization Engineer

Digital Light Technician

Optical Solutions Developer

Creative Communications Visionary

Principal Visualization Wizard

Titles are used to create certain expectation. But the only title that matters is the one that a customer gives to the business.

For a self-employed photographer, this title will ideally be along the lines of, “Wow, what a great photographer you are!”

Self-invented titles are just words on a business card. But earned titles are memorable, especially to the customer.

 

— No comments yet. Your thoughts are welcome.

For Everyone
19
Dec 2011

Picture This

On this blog, I’ve repeatedly mentioned that a company should never use stock pictures for its business image or marketing. Well, a photography business is also a “company.”

There’s at least one commercial photographer here in Toronto whose web site uses cheap, stock pictures taken from other web sites. In a slideshow to showcase their “talent”, none of the pictures were shot by the photographer. (Through the magic of the Web, stock pictures are easily traceable back to their sources.)

If a photographer has to use someone else’s pictures, what does that say about their own work?

Not only does this make the photographer look bad, but one might wonder if it’s legal. Ontario’s Consumer Protection Act (14(2) s.3, 8, 14) seems to suggest it isn’t.

Using stock pictures in place of real corporate photography or other custom business photography always costs too much. It can harm a company’s reputation and even land the business on the wrong side of consumer laws.

“We used stock pictures to save a few dollars,” is not a legal defense.

 

— No comments yet. Your thoughts are welcome.

For Clients
14
Dec 2011

How to fail at media handouts

Earlier this week, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab announced their development of an imaging system that can capture the equivalent of half a trillion pictures per second:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. (…) Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.

From an easier-to-understand article in the New York Times:

To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. (…) If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion … the resulting movie would last three years.

To help promote this first-in-the-world announcement, MIT has media handouts. If you scroll down the page to the three pictures of the scientists behind this research, you’ll find that one link is dead due to bad page coding and the two other pictures are virtually useless.

The four-person picture is grossly out-of-focus with poor exposure, bad colour and poor composition. The two-person photo is out-of-focus with bad lighting but, to some extent, it can be corrected. Neither picture has any IPTC information. Full and proper IPTC info is mandatory especially for media handout photos.

Similarly, on MIT’s own news page, there’s a metal pole going partly through the face of one of the two lead researchers as they look at a glowing soda bottle.

A huge institution like MIT couldn’t be bothered to get it right the first time. Too bad it doesn’t do any research into public relations photography.

— One comment

For Everyone
10
Dec 2011

Does creative mean dishonest?

Last week, an interesting psychology paper was published, titled “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest”. Written by Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University, the paper’s abstract includes:

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals’ ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior.

In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (…)

The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.

The full, 47-page study can be downloaded from Harvard (note: PDF file) but I doubt you’d want to do that. It’s a long and technical read.

Harvard Business School has a short review of the paper that’s much easier to read.

— No comments yet. Your thoughts are welcome.

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