For Photographers

Experience or just service?

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With many other photographers in your area, all using the same equipment as you and perhaps offering the same photography as you, how do you set yourself apart? After a few clicks of their mouse, a potential customer may think that all photographers are the same.

What can you do about it? Get a fancier web site? Offer more price discounts? Buy some gimmicky photo background or trendy lighting accessory?

None of those are long term solutions.

Instead, you have to know the customer more. Know what they’re really looking for when they search for a photographer, know their concerns and business constraints when they hire a photographer, know what they want when they work with a photographer, know how they can best use the delivered pictures. None of these have anything to do with shutter speeds, pixel counts or focal lengths.

This isn’t about customer service but rather it’s customer experience (link to PDF) and the two are different.

The short explanation is that customer experience is what a customer takes away from a business transaction. For a photographer, that transaction usually starts when the customer first visits the photographer’s web site. Customer service, which can be part of the customer experience, is what a business does to or for the customer.

Improving your customer experience by more thoroughly understanding the customer’s business can make you the photographer of choice more than any new equipment you might buy or any price discount you might offer.

 

Choosing cheap photography

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Two examples of bad photography decisions:

• The City of Toronto’s web site has a page promoting its new Pan Am BMX course that was used in the recent 2015 Pan Am Games. The photo shows a number of female competitors lined up at the starting gate.

The problems with the photo are that the event shown is not from the Pan Am Games, the track is not the city’s new BMX course and the location isn’t even in Toronto. Oops.

Some sports web sites in South America assumed this really was a Pan Am photo and used it in their news articles about the Pan Am BMX event. To be fair, those South American web sites were probably confused since the Toronto Pan Am Games itself initially used the same handout(?) picture on its BMX pages. Oops.
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Canadian readership numbers

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A couple months ago, the Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank) and the Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) released their Spring 2015 survey of readership numbers for its member newspapers and magazines.

If you need readership (not circulation) numbers of some Canadian newspapers and magazines to help with your photography pricing, then have a look at this list which uses 2014 data. Readership numbers are typically much higher than the corresponding print circulation numbers.

This is more for commercial photography that will appear in these publications and not so much for editorial. While many publications have “fixed” rates for editorial photography, some do have wiggle room to negotiate higher rates.

The days of pricing photography based on circulation still exist but it may be more accurate to price based on readership especially since that’s how some publications charge their advertisers.

 

Pricing photography for social media

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In the old days, photographers priced their photography based on its type of usage. Generally speaking, editorial has the lowest price, public relations and corporate have a mid-range price and advertising has the highest price.

This worked quite well for 45 years or so. Then someone invented Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

With social media, the line between editorial, corporate and advertising can be nearly invisible. When a company publishes pictures on Facebook et al., is that editorial, public relations or advertising?

Every type of business communication is a form of marketing. At the very least, social media should be considered public relations rather than pure editorial even though it may use an editorial style of photography.
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Let the Games finally end

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Over the past 17 days, I drove 1,554 kilometres, ate 9 lunches and 14 dinners, paid $124.50 for parking and shot just over 7,000 pictures. I was covering the Pan Am Games in Toronto.

As expected, the Pan Am organizers, politicians and various Pan Am sponsors are claiming that the event was a runaway success and they’re now giddy with anticipation of hosting a Summer Olympics and even a World Expo. The Pan Am Games were a success only in that no disasters happened (not counting the billions of dollars spent).
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Talking a good picture

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Most portrait photography advice is technical such as what lens to use, how to position lights, what pose to use, etc. This is the easiest advice to offer but it’s also the least valuable.

You can do a good portrait with almost any lens in almost any type of light. The reason is that the content of a portrait always trumps the technical aspects of the photo.

Viewers don’t look at a portrait and say, “Wow, look at that lens choice!” or “I really like that 3:1 light ratio.” If a viewer notices the technique before the subject then the photographer has failed.

The most important factor in creating a good portrait is the ability to capture the moment when the subject’s character, personality or, to be overly dramatic, their soul, is reflected in their face.
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Fade to Blacks

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Every Canadian news outlet today reported that Blacks, a 67-year-old Canadian retail chain of 59 photography stores, will shut down within two months.

[Update: It didn’t completely shut down. See end of post].

(To be accurate: In 1930, Eddie Black opened a Toronto radio and appliance store, “Eddie Black’s Limited,” which later sold a few cameras. In 1947, his sons opened a section in the store that sold guns, fishing tackle and cameras. The following year, in 1948, the sons took over the business and launched “Eddie Black’s Camera Store.”)

Today’s news stories repeatedly mentioned that the increased use of cell phone cameras has killed the photo store. The irony is that Blacks is owned by a cell phone company.
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