The business side of photography
Do you have a business? Then you’re involved in marketing.
Do you have a business web site? You’re involved in marketing.
Is your company active on social media? Yes, more marketing.
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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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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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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
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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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.
If you’re about to hire a photographer then remember that you get what you pay for. Low price always gets you low quality.
Business headshots never cost anywhere near $15 each no matter what the volume. Expect *at least* quadruple that amount for a high volume shoot with minimal editing.
When you hire a photographer, you’re paying partly for the photography and partly for the photographer. The experience and quality of the photographer directly affects the success of the photos. Pictures do not create themselves nor do cameras create pictures.
If one professional is saying they will do the work for $100 per hour and another is quoting you $200 per hour, your instinct shouldn’t immediately jump to the one offering the lowest price.
As an example, maybe the higher-priced solution has the learnings from a 20 year career vs. a 5 year career, to help you avoid more known pitfalls that you don’t even see coming. Or, they have helped 20 clients succeed in similar situations, vs. 2 clients succeed . . .
