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!”
This is a view-from-my-office photo from a cold, rainy-snowy soccer game.
From the past two weeks:
• A Toronto professional photographer does family portraits for $500 according to his web site. The price includes a 45-minute session and 50 “fully retouched” pictures.
Fifty images in 45 minutes? Fully retouched? Ten dollars per photo?
At that price, who should have low expectations, the customer or the photographer?
If you’re a new photographer who does business headshots and other corporate portraits, may I offer some brief advice? I just spent an hour looking at a few dozen Toronto law firm web sites and most of them had poor quality business portraits.
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This is just another view-from-my-office photo.
Corporate customers don’t buy photography, they buy outcomes or end results. How much is that end result worth to the customer? Or to rephrase that, how much does your photography contribute toward achieving the customer’s goal?
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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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