For Customers

Is Your Business Ready For Its Close-Up?

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Why spend $0 on ad photography when you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars for a full-page newspaper ad?

Why would a national company use an amateur cellphone snapshot when its brand image at stake?

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. It also missed everything needed in good photography.
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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).

The annual report designer told 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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The National Post this week pointed out that the cheap stock pictures used by the Department of 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.

This National Post article is years behind the times. The federal government’s practice of using stock pictures from foreign photographers has been going on for a long time. 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.

 

Photography Production Value

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Let’s say you’re planning to have live music at your business event. You might hire a soloist, a duo, a trio, a quartet or maybe even a symphony orchestra.

The music from each type of ensemble will sound different depending on the amount of musicians and instruments. A soloist will never sound like a quartet, a duo will never sound like a symphony. It goes without saying that the bigger the ensemble, the higher the price.

The exact same thing applies to photography.
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If it’s on the Internet…

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Let’s say a photographer owns the copyright to a photo. Without any other agreement in place, if that photo was published in a newspaper, would the photographer still own the copyright to that picture? Of course they would.

What if the photo was used in a book, on a billboard or on TV? Would the photographer still own the copyright? Yes they would. The medium in which the picture is used doesn’t affect copyright. Surely this is obvious.

So why do some folks think that a picture “found” on the Internet would have no copyright?
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