For Customers

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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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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