The business side of photography
If you’re a new photographer who does business headshots and other corporate portraits, may I offer some brief advice? I just spent an hour looking at a few dozen Toronto law firm web sites and most of them had poor quality business portraits.
This is just another view-from-my-office photo.
Corporate customers don’t buy photography, they buy an end result. How much is that end result worth to the customer? Or to rephrase that, how much does your photography contribute toward achieving the customer’s goal?
Joseph Pasonault’s family moved from Newfoundland to the US, circa 1882, when he was six years old. In 1896, a twenty-year-old Pasonault opened his first photo studio in Cando. He later moved his studio to a larger town in North Dakota.
Canada’s pandemic case numbers today (April 2022) are the highest than at any time in the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic when everyone was panicking and hoarding toilet paper. But no one is panicking today and, figuratively speaking, the news media is no longer reporting in all caps. What’s changed?
You can see an adjustable reflector on the left edge of the picture. The darker fabric was lowered or raised in front of the white reflector to control whether light was reflected full length or just on the upper body of the subject.
It may have been lucky that William Notman was born the same time photography was born.
Cameras have a changed a lot over the past hundred years. They got smaller and lighter, became more electronic, film gave way to digital sensors, and we now have flying cameras commonly called “drones.”
Aerial photography started at least as early as 1858 by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) who photographed from a hot air balloon in France. But most photographers didn’t have a hot air balloon handy so they had to find other ways to get a high camera angle:
I’ve always wanted a panoramic tripod head to do real estate photography. A stitched panorama will have much less lens distortion than a single image shot with a very wide-angle lens.
High-quality panoramic heads are priced from about $400 to $900 and they have many features. But I only need to occasionally shoot a horizontal row of photos which can be stitched together.
Before buying an expensive panoramic head, I bought a 240mm nodal rail with a sliding camera mount for $35. There are shorter rails but a longer nodal rail can work with a wider range of lenses.
It turned out that this cheap, little attachment works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Did I mention it was cheap?
