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Door-to-door energy scams

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(This post has nothing to do with photography).

If you received an e-mail saying you just won a million dollars, would you believe it? If an e-mail said your bank account or credit card was compromised and you needed to “click here” to verify your information, would you do it?

Someone came to my front door today saying he was with the “Ontario Energy Safety Board”. He was here to do a furnace safety inspection. Of course, he was lying. There’s no such thing as the Ontario Energy Safety Board. The company name he used was meant to be confused with real Ontario Energy Board.

Now that warmer weather has begun, many homeowners will be receiving similar knocks on their front door. This will go on for many months. Sadly, all levels of Canadian government have refused to fix the problem of door-to-door scams. We have Do Not Call and CASL but we don’t have “Do not knock” like Australia.
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Print it or lose it

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As you might know, the most archival storage medium is paper. It’s also the most common and the cheapest. (Yes, rock is more archival but paper is easier to carry around.)

Yet we still digitize almost everything in the belief that this will preserve that information. But as file formats, storage formats, software and hardware become obsolete, this information may be lost.

Vinton “Vint” Cerf, recognized as a founder of the Internet and currently vice-president of Google, this week stated:

In our zeal to get excited about digitizing, we digitize photographs thinking it’s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong.
(…)
We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artifacts that we digitized. If there are photos you really care about, print them out.

In 2013, the Photo Marketing Association launched its Print it or Lose it campaign to encourage consumers to print their valuable photos rather than risk accidental loss of those digital images.

 

Is your business ready for its close up?

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When a business spends tens of thousands of dollars on a full-page newspaper ad, why would it spend $0 on the photography for that ad? With the company image at stake, why would a national company get an amateur to do a quick snapshot with a cell phone?

The Globe and Mail today published an ad supplement about franchising. The online version isn’t quite the same as the print version but it does have many of the same photos. The back cover of the print version has a full-page ad for a large pet care company. The amateur point-and-shoot photo missed the purpose of the business and it also missed everything needed in good photography.

What readers don’t know is that some “normal” sections of a newspaper are also advertorials produced by the ad department and/or outsourced to freelancers. This includes sections for new cars, new homes, gardening, education, investing, travel and any other “special section.” I spent almost two decades at a Toronto daily newspaper and was involved with many advertising supplements.
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Professional Value

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Two days ago, the Victoria News, in British Columbia, published this:

The page was taken down the next day, just minutes after news radio station CKNW asked the newspaper for comment.

It’s bad enough to lay off news photographers, which many newspapers are doing these days. In fact, the Victoria News laid off its very experienced staff photographer last year. But it’s sheer stupidity when a large, international, for-profit company asks people to work for free.
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Go Pro

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A corporate client in Toronto recently said that they’ve always used amateur photos taken by their employees and cheap stock pictures for their annual report. But this year, the company wanted something better so they hired a professional photographer (me).

I overheard the annual report designer telling the client that a professional photographer isn’t just about better quality equipment. It’s also about the fact that “a professional photographer knows what to shoot. They see things that you don’t even think about.”

The company’s 2014 annual report isn’t finished yet but the client is “extremely happy with the pictures” and “can’t wait to get them published.”

This post isn’t about me bragging about my photography. It’s about the proven fact that professional photos are more effective than amateur pictures when it comes to earning reader attention and communicating a message.
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Cheap stock pictures fail yet again

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Was the federal “Department of Canadian Heritage” named ironically?

The National Post this week pointed out that the cheap stock pictures used by Canadian Heritage are from a foreign-owned picture agency and were shot by foreign photographers.

Why does this federal agency use foreign photos to promote Canadian culture? It suggested that Canadian photographers are too expensive.

Unfortunately, the National Post article is many years behind the times. The federal government’s practice of using cheap stock pictures from foreign photographers has been going on for a long time. That’s correct: the Canadian government avoids Canadian photographers and buys cheaper work from abroad.
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The not so deep freeze

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Today in Toronto, it was about -8˚C. A normal winter day. My cameras worked just fine outdoors. My flashes worked as normal. After less than an hour outside, I reached into an inside coat pocket to retrieve my cell phone and my iPhone 5 said:

Of course, it probably meant to say that it needed to warm up. The phone was completely useless. Thank goodness it wasn’t an emergency.

It turns out that an iPhone doesn’t like to work below 0˚C. Not even this will help.

I know that cold weather affects all batteries and can freeze LCDs. But I don’t recall having any previous cell phone freeze on me. My digital cameras have never failed even at -20˚C. The iPhone seems to be my only electronic device that fails when the temperature is less than ideal.

Perhaps today’s smartphones are wimps or maybe they’re just turning us into wimps.

 

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