The business side of photography
Should you peruse some of the job “opportunities” for Toronto photographers on LinkedIn, you may see these glittery gems:
1. The job: Go to a few dozen used car lots each week and photograph cars for a publisher’s used car web site and print magazine.
Required: an “awareness of fumes, odor, gases, compounds or dusts related to the automotive industry.”
Not required: any photo experience.
Benefits: may get free parking at one of the publisher’s offices.
A few nights ago, I was assigned to photograph celebrities arriving for a fundraiser at an exclusive home in Toronto. The event had set up an arrivals area in a small parking lot off the front driveway of the home, (did I mention it was a large house?). The red carpet was nice and wide, and the area was covered, lit and heated. Perfect, considering it was a cold, dark November night.
The three largest wire services in the world were there specifically to photograph the two main celebrities attending. The headlining entertainer for the event would also make for a usable news photo. Other photo agencies and TV were there as well.
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What do restaurants and photographers have in common?
When it comes to choosing a restaurant, or a photographer, a consumer in a larger city usually has many hundreds of choices. In the eyes of the customer, most restaurants, and most photographers, are more or less the same.
Why choose one restaurant, or photographer, over another? Convenient location? A positive previous experience? Price? Good word-of-mouth? Maybe the web site looked nice?
Restaurants rely on their menu to entice customers. They usually post menus online and near their front entrance. But compare how restaurants present their menu.
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In case you missed the memo: it’s a waste of your time and money for your business to use cheap stock photos. A company that chooses cheap pictures is fooling no one but themselves. Cheap photography can harm both your business image and your bottom line, (which means “cheap” actually costs too much).
Here’s some proof pudding:
A study using eye-tracking technology was released yesterday by Jakob Nielsen, titled “Photos as Web Content”. Important points to note:
• Bland stock images on web sites are completely ignored by users.
• Feel-good images that are purely decorative are mostly ignored.
• Stock photos of generic people are intentionally disregarded.
• Photos of real people, (as opposed to stock pictures of models), are viewed as important information.
• Pictures of key people at a business are very important. Business portraits are always a win for the company.
Conclusion of the study: “Invest in good photo shoots: a great photographer can add a fortune to your Web site’s business value.”
Do your business a favour and call your local corporate or commercial photographer today. A professional photographer is worth much more than what they cost.
Between 2001 and 2010, I bought six Nikon SLR digital cameras: two D1X’s, two D2X’s, one D3 and one D700. Total cost for these cameras was about $30,300 plus about $3,000 for memory cards, $480 for card readers and many thousands more ($21,000 to $26,000) for computers and software.
For comparison, from 1991 to 2000, I bought six Nikon SLR film cameras: two F4E’s, one F90X, two F5’s and one F100. Total cost for these was about $14,000 and no memory cards, no card readers, no computers and no software.
Yes, digital cameras are fantastic and the technical quality of digital photography is far better than that of film.
Although the equipment cost of running a photo business is at least triple that from ten years ago, (not to mention all the other expenses), fees paid by editorial publications have gone down and the rights-grabbing has gone up.
Interesting blog article by Paul Melcher on this topic.
For his visit to Toronto, the Dalai Lama has come and gone. Some of his events were open to the media and some others were closed to the media but open to the public and their cameras. It also appears that some closed events weren’t really closed. Organizers just forgot to include them in the media itinerary.
The organizers released almost five dozen handout pictures all at once, covering all three days of the visit, at 11 PM on Sunday, the last day of the visit.
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If you search the web for the most powerful words used in marketing, the most cited word, as you might guess, is the four-letter F-word, “free”. Certainly, the word free can get customer attention but is it really effective in making sales?
The F-word is so overused these days, that we almost automatically tune it out. We know that any e-mail which starts with “FREE” is spam and any web banner ad that yells “FREE!” is a waste of time. We also know that nothing is really free, there’s always a catch. Free will get attention, but it’s never taken seriously.
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