The business side of photography
Someone sent a business portrait of themselves and asked for it be retouched. The person wanted the brick wall background replaced with “something serious or dramatic.”
What exactly does that mean?
What makes a photographer good?
Getting pictures in focus? Having proper exposure? Good colour balance? Accurate flash exposure?
It’s none of those things because cameras have auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto colour balance and auto flash exposure.
Producing technically perfect photos does not make a photographer good. So what’s left?
There used to be a newsroom term called a “Hey, Martha!” I’m not sure if this is still used today.
The phrase comes from an old editors’ tale, (not unlike an old wives’ tale), that said if a story or photo was so unusual, offbeat or funny, a husband reading his newspaper would look up and yell to his wife, “Hey, Martha! Come and see this!”
If you’re new in town and need to buy groceries, you can go to any supermarket because they all sell the same products and same brands. Most supermarkets even have the same store layout. So people usually shop at whatever grocery store is closest to them.
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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.
Early advertising illustrations for newspapers, billboards and posters were created from drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. The first use of halftones to reproduce a continuous tone photograph was in 1869 in Canada but it took several decades before it became common practice.
It may have been lucky that William Notman was born the same time photography was born.
Cameras have a changed a lot over the past hundred years. They got smaller and lighter, became more electronic, film gave way to digital sensors, and we now have flying cameras commonly called “drones.”
Aerial photography started at least as early as 1858 by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) who photographed from a hot air balloon in France. But most photographers didn’t have a hot air balloon handy so they had to find other ways to get a high camera angle:
