For Photographers

A leg to stand on

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I just finished post-processing 1,017 images. Many of those, but not all, will be used for marketing and public relations both in print and online. At this time, the client isn’t able to do any post-processing except to crop and resize the pictures.

Since the client doesn’t know which images will be used in the coming year, all these photos had to be processed now. About 2,300 images were originally shot and those were edited down to 1,017. Yes, I probably should’ve edited it down a lot more but I wanted the client to have a broad selection to cover all future possibilities.
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Timing is everything

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A couple of weeks ago, Editor & Publisher posted statistics from its sister company, Nielsen Online, showing the average time-on-site for the top 30 newspaper sites in the USA. These numbers compare June 2008 with June 2009. Go ahead and take a look.

Some news sites like NYTimes.com experienced a 50% drop, whereas the Boston Globe’s Boston.com enjoyed a 300% increase. With only four exceptions, all the news web sites had numbers far below the average time a reader spends with a daily newspaper. According to the 2008 Readership Institute Study, the average American newspaper reader spends 27 minutes with a paper.

What does this show, if anything?
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Adding Value

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The phrases “added value” and “extra value” are tossed around by many businesses these days. Some companies use these terms not because they know what they mean but because they’re nice-sounding catchphrases that might lure in customers.

Value is determined by the customer and not by what a business might say. If a customer needs 24-hour service, then free parking is not an added value. If a customer wants a salad, then an “extra value” meal with large french fries has no extra value.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

– Warren Buffet

Adding value means a business goes beyond customer expectations. This is a relative scale because different customers have different expectations and needs.
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Fortress Journalism

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Three weeks ago, the BBC College of Journalism released a 92-page document titled “The Future of Journalism”. The information in the report is the result of a journalism conference held in London in late 2008:

Today, as technology changes the lives of both journalists and their customers, assumptions about what journalism is and how it is practiced are being re-examined.

The eight chapters include:

  • The End of Fortress Journalism
  • Introducing Multimedia to the Newsroom
  • Multimedia Reporting in the Field
  • Dealing with User-Generated Content: is it Worth it?
  • Video Games: a New Medium for Journalism
  • The Audience and the News
  • Delivering Multiplatform Journalism to the Mainstream
  • Death of the Story

If you are a journalist, this might be of interest to you. Although, ironically, much of it is old news so the report might serve as reminder.

If you’re a corporate photographer, this document might be worth reading or at least skimming. Your business clients have news and information they want to get out to the public and the news media. So perhaps there’s something to be learned from this report.

 

Illegal Motion

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Football has a penalty called “illegal motion” which applies when an offensive player is in forward motion before the ball is snapped.

Speaking of offensive, there is a contest currently being run by a Photoshop magazine (not affiliated with Adobe). The winner gets to pretend to be pro media photographer on the sidelines at a USA college football game. The contest is open only to amateurs.

The prize is “a dream sports assignment of a lifetime” and includes: the winner will be loaned the necessary gear (with which they probably have no experience using); they will go into the stadium’s media room to get a “big spread of all kinds of food”, a “full blown buffet”; they will “mingle with other media folks”; and finally, the winner gets a media pass to shoot on the sidelines.
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Rules of Photography

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If you are an experienced photographer then you probably know all of this. But if you’re just starting out, here are some of the rules of professional photography (in no particular order):

There’s no such thing as a simple shoot.

The layout will change after the photo shoot is done.

The CEO always has a bad hair day.

Size of the group to be photographed varies inversely with size of the room.

The only time you need a reshoot is when there’s no time for one.

Gear always works at home. Gear always fails on location.

The chance of a piece of equipment breaking is proportional to its importance for the shoot.

The chance of a memory card failing is proportional to the importance of the images it holds.

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A word to the wise

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With huge apologies to Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich who wrote the 1997 column later made famous by Baz Luhrmann.

 

If I were to address the graduating class from a photojournalism school here in Canada, it might go like this:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, autofocus would be it. The benefits of autofocus have been proven by photographers, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

Enjoy the technology and power of your current camera model. There’s no need to always upgrade to the latest gear. Oh, never mind. You won’t fully appreciate the capabilities of your camera until it’s long obsolete. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at your photos from today and recall in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay in your hands and how amazing that camera really was.
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