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Voting For A Business Headshot

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Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)

If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?

 

Liberal Party

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s headshot was cropped from a five-year-old picture. It uses window light and some type of reflector to give it a natural look. The image on the Liberal site is low resolution and was upsampled to give it visible blur and jpeg artifacting. Why would they do this?

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Campaigning For A Public Relations Photo Op

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A CBC video shows how political parties stage campaign photo opportunities. Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election.

A tired cliché photo opp is a politician standing in front of a group of “average” citizens and a big flag. Another cliché is having people in the background hold up signs with political slogans.

The most important part of any political campaign event is the visuals, specifically the photographs. Visuals are the easiest and fastest way for people to see and understand what’s happening. Sound and text may help fill out the message but the image is noticed first and remembered most.
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Toronto Film Festival 2019 Review

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My very long, annual rant about the recent Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) from a photographer’s point of view. If you’re not somehow involved with TIFF then you might be advised to skip this post.

The point of this is not only to vent my frustrations with the 44-year-old film festival but also to make suggestions to the folks that run TIFF. It seems that someone at the film festival reads this blog because some of my suggestions get implemented the following year. Thank you very much.

After the film festival, TIFF sends out a survey asking for journalists’ thoughts about the event. There’s no such questionnaire for photographers. This post provides my answers to a nonexistent questionnaire.

 

TL;DR: As always, some things got better, some got worse and a few things haven’t changed. You’d think that after four decades the event would be a smooth running, polished machine. But no.

 

The red carpet area at Roy Thomson Hall has seen several changes over the past few years. This was probably due to all the complaints from photographers like me :–)

Changes have included an actual red carpet, three sets of lights, blue gels for some of those lights, a clear roof on the media tent, white-only barricade covers and letting photographers wait under the tent before an event if it’s raining. All of these necessities were obvious to everyone except TIFF.

But the covered photo area is still too small and too narrow and there are no photo risers (at any venue).

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Marketing Fools

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Toronto’s first cannabis store opened this week on April Fools’ Day and it pulled a prank on everyone including itself.

The store’s very first customer was fake. A pretend customer. Someone who works for the store as its publicist.

When found out, their excuse was that they wanted to make sure its first sale, which was being recorded by the city’s news media, didn’t have any “issues.”

Every other cannabis store in the country, since last October, has managed to open and sell to their real first customers without any “issues.”

This Toronto store is now getting publicity for all the wrong reasons:

It may have violated Canadian advertising standards:
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The De-skilling of Photography

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De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.

– Merriam-Webster

Many tasks today require less skill to perform due to advancing technology. But when something requires less skill, some people wrongly assume that it also requires less creativity, less expertise and less talent. A good example of this is photography.

For the third time in seven weeks, a company sent me business headshots they wanted fixed. It was plainly obvious that all of these companies had used amateur photographers (or a really bad professional).

Fixing Cheap Photography

A small law firm today sent two business portraits and a list of what they wanted fixed:

– fix the uneven brightness of the faces

– make skin colour better

– the eyes are too dark. Make brighter.

– replace the [office] background with a plain background

– add shoulders to each person and make the pictures square

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The customer is right even when they’re not

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This photo has nothing to do with this post. It’s another view-from-my-office photo.

If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.

A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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A Tale of Two Houses

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(With apologies to Charles Dickens)

It was the best of houses, it was the worst of houses, it was the age of beauty, it was the age of squalor, it was the epoch of style, it was the epoch of simplicity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of disrepair . . .
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