For Customers

An OK Photographer

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You might be thinking that you can save a few dollars by hiring a good enough photographer. After all, good enough is okay, right?

US phone company AT&T did a series of commercials about hiring just okay people (and here and here).

But would this apply to photographers?

Many companies shop price first because they assume that all photographers are the same. They wrongly think that it’s the camera that makes the photos.

Hiring an experienced, professional photographer is about finding a photographer who has enough experience with customers like yourself so they can understand your photo needs and can do the work confidently.

Professional photographers should have enough experience to know what the risks might be and what problems might arise and then know how to minimize those risks and prevent those problems from happening. This level of experience is necessary to make your photography project a success.

Experienced photographers charge more because they know more and can help you more. Or would you rather save a few dollars by having an okay photographer “figure it out” at your expense?

 

Toronto Film Festival 2018 Review

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My annual, very, very long rant about the recent 2018 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) from a photographer’s point of view. If you’re not somehow involved with TIFF then it might be better to skip this post. I’m just trying to reach a certain audience. The reason is that each year, TIFF sends out a survey asking for journalists’ thoughts about the film festival but there are no questions for photographers. The film festival treats photographers as an afterthought and never bothers asking for their opinions.

 

TL;DR: This year, some things got better, some got worse and a few things sadly haven’t changed. TIFF has no real focus as it tries to be everything to everyone. Middle age is showing as TIFF just reiterates what it did the previous year. Final rant at the end of this post.
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Keeping Up With The Times

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September is the start of a new school year and every student will be getting new school portraits done. When is your company planning to get new pictures?

Every business needs to refresh the photos on their web site. Refreshing your web site shows that your company is still alive and it keeps customers interested. It also helps your site rank higher in web searches.

The second most popular search engine after Google is Google Images. This image search engine is used more than all other search engines combined excluding Google itself.

This means that people using Google Images are searching visually (because we process pictures much faster than text) and they will click on the best looking or most interesting pictures. Stock pictures are rarely interesting because stock pictures look like stock pictures. Of course, having no pictures means you’re invisible.
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Customer Photo Guidelines

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Another view-from-my-office photo taken during a tennis tournament, 11 August 2018. The approaching rain storm really did look like that. The sun (top-right-rear) was shining through the dark rain clouds.

British photographer Neil Turner wrote a post on his blog about customer expectations and customer-supplied photo guidelines.

Almost every commercial and PR client had a prepared guide that let you know what they wanted from a commissioned shoot and a few pointers of what they, or their end client, liked and didn’t like in their pictures. These ranged from really helpful pointers about what kind of clothing should be worn for portraits or whether or not images should have unfussy backgrounds through the obvious such as “images should be properly exposed” to the mildly bizarre “avoid any and all references to money”.

– Neil Turner

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How Will You Know?

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Many companies measure what they do so they can determine what works and what doesn’t. So how do you measure the success of the pictures produced by a corporate photographer? How will you know that you hired the right photographer?

Is it as simple as whether or not the pictures are in focus? Is it enough that the photos look nice? Is the price you paid all that matters?

Businesses want results for the money they spend on corporate photography. Just having pretty pictures isn’t enough. They need some way of measuring the effectiveness of the photographs.

You can measure the effectiveness of pictures on social media when viewers “like” or retweet a photo. On some web pages, you might count page impressions or the number of clicks on a call-to-action link.

But how do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of the business portraits on your “About Us” page? How do you know that your photos are sending the right message?
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2,000 Portrait Customers Can’t Be Wrong

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I’ve shot at least two thousand portraits over the past thirty-three years. Business portraits, environmental portraits, editorial portraits, magazine portraits, author and writer portraits, political campaign portraits, athlete and team portraits, headshots for actors, models and musicians, some family, children and pet portraits, a couple dozen prom portraits, a handful of bride and groom portraits and two maternity portraits.

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin (L) and goaltender Curtis Joseph pose together for a poster in 1999.

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