business photography

Hello, this is me

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It should be no surprise to anyone that many celebrities and politicians don’t actually make their own tweets on Twitter. They either have an assistant, an employee, a small staff, or a PR company, who write and send each message.

It might come as a surprise to some that not every “selfie” posted online is actually a self-portrait taken by that person. A new(?) trend is having someone else shoot one’s “self-portrait” as this provides for more picture possibilities. This probably defeats the concept of a selfie.

Some folks will even use a professional photographer to shoot their selfie. But this is now a portrait rather than a selfie, unless you define “selfie” as being a picture of yourself.

If a professional portrait photographer does a self-portrait, is it a selfie or a portrait? Some of Yousuf Karsh’s most well-known portraits are self-portraits (also here, here and here).

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Cheap photographer strikes again

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Today I received an e-mail from someone who runs a small clothing store. The subject title of the e-mail was, “I was mislead by a photographer.”

This person had hired a photographer to shoot some advertising pictures for their store which sells children’s clothing and accessories.

It appears that the photographer didn’t deliver any usable images or even the promised number of pictures. The photographer also didn’t deliver the promised, model-released pictures of children wearing the store’s clothing. So at this point, the business has nothing it can use.
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Photo Editing Skills

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Customers know which pictures they like to look at but they may not understand why. Very few people understand the art and craft of photo editing.

Few publications today have a real photo editor. It would be surprising if any non-media business has a photo editor. Instead, photographers are left to edit their own work and then someone at the client-end selects the pictures they like to look at.
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The most dangerous phrase

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According to former US Navy Rear Admiral and computer scientist Grace Hopper, the most dangerous phrase in the English language is: “We’ve always done it this way.”

Hmmm…

We’ve always used stock pictures.

We’ve always done a big group photo.

We’ve always done our business headshots against that wall over there.

We’ve always had our president photographed at his desk.

We’ve always done a cheque presentation ceremony.

We’ve always done our product shots on white.

We’ve always used only small pictures on our web site.

We’ve always had little media interest in our press releases.

We’ve always thought business portraits were like passport pictures.

We’ve always chosen the cheapest photographer.

 

Underspending is overspending

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Charles Mortimer was the CEO of the former General Foods from 1954 to 1965. During this time he doubled the company’s sales and tripled its earnings. Mortimer’s background was in marketing. He was once quoted as saying:

The surest way to over-spend on advertising is not to spend enough to do a job properly. It’s like buying a ticket three-quarters of the way to Europe; you have spent some money, but you do not arrive.

If you replace the word “advertising” with “professional photography”, the saying would still hold true.

When a company seeks the lowest cost corporate photography, that company is shooting itself in the foot, or more accurately, in the wallet. When spending on photography for business marketing, it’s not what you pay that’s important but rather it’s what you get.

Cutting corners and paying just enough to get ineffective or low quality business photography is a form of overspending because you’ve bought a ticket to nowhere.

If a job is worth doing then get someone to do it properly. – anonymous

 

Memorable (part 2)

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In his 2011 book, Moonwalking with Einstein, science writer Joshua Foer describes how someone can increase their memory. He learned of a technique while covering a national memory competition. The following year, Foer won that same competition using this very technique.

To improve one’s memory, Foer learned that one has to associate an image with the information that needs to be remembered. The more memorable that image, the better the chance of remembering. It’s possible that Allan Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory (visual explanation here ;-) ) might help explain this.

Alexandra Horowitz, a PhD in cognitive science who teaches psychology at Barnard College in the US, wrote, “… a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. … The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images.”
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Memorable (part 1)

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A university study recently published in Psychological Science concluded that taking pictures may impede one’s memory. The press release is here.

A brief summary of this study: one group of people were asked to take some general pictures during an art museum tour. The next day, these people had difficulty remembering exactly what they had seen. But a second group, who were asked to zoom in and photograph specific details of what they saw and to pay more attention to their photography, had better memory of what they had seen during their tour.

Sadly, the study uses the silly phrase “photo-taking impairment effect”. The researcher wrote, “In order to remember, we have to access and interact with the photos, rather than just amass them.”
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