Keeping Up With The Times

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September is the start of a new school year and every student will be getting new school portraits done. When is your company planning to get new pictures?

Every business needs to refresh the photos on their web site. Refreshing your web site shows that your company is still alive and it keeps customers interested. It also helps your site rank higher in web searches.

The second most popular search engine after Google is Google Images. This image search engine is used more than all other search engines combined excluding Google itself.

This means that people using Google Images are searching visually (because we process pictures much faster than text) and they will click on the best looking or most interesting pictures. Stock pictures are rarely interesting because stock pictures look like stock pictures. Of course, having no pictures means you’re invisible.
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Customer Photo Guidelines

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Another view-from-my-office photo taken during a tennis tournament, 11 August 2018. The approaching rain storm really did look like that. The sun (top-right-rear) was shining through the dark rain clouds.

British photographer Neil Turner wrote a post on his blog about customer expectations and customer-supplied photo guidelines.

Almost every commercial and PR client had a prepared guide that let you know what they wanted from a commissioned shoot and a few pointers of what they, or their end client, liked and didn’t like in their pictures. These ranged from really helpful pointers about what kind of clothing should be worn for portraits or whether or not images should have unfussy backgrounds through the obvious such as “images should be properly exposed” to the mildly bizarre “avoid any and all references to money”.

– Neil Turner

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Stop Being A Freelancer

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Photographers, stop calling yourself a freelance photographer. “Freelance” suggests temporary and, perhaps in the worst case, even fly-by-night.

Always refer to yourself as a professional photographer. It creates a much better image in a customer’s mind. For better or worse, titles are important in business.

So while “freelancer” may be more akin to how you see what you do, it might be selling you short. After all, your livelihood doesn’t depend on your own self-perception, but on how potential clients see you and your work.

– Suzan Bond

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How Will You Know?

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Many companies measure what they do so they can determine what works and what doesn’t. So how do you measure the success of the pictures produced by a corporate photographer? How will you know that you hired the right photographer?

Is it as simple as whether or not the pictures are in focus? Is it enough that the photos look nice? Is the price you paid all that matters?

Businesses want results for the money they spend on corporate photography. Just having pretty pictures isn’t enough. They need some way of measuring the effectiveness of the photographs.

You can measure the effectiveness of pictures on social media when viewers “like” or retweet a photo. On some web pages, you might count page impressions or the number of clicks on a call-to-action link.

But how do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of the business portraits on your “About Us” page? How do you know that your photos are sending the right message?
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2,000 Portrait Customers Can’t Be Wrong

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I’ve shot at least two thousand portraits over the past thirty-three years. Business portraits, environmental portraits, editorial portraits, magazine portraits, author and writer portraits, political campaign portraits, athlete and team portraits, headshots for actors, models and musicians, some family, children and pet portraits, a couple dozen prom portraits, a handful of bride and groom portraits and two maternity portraits.

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin (L) and goaltender Curtis Joseph pose together for a poster in 1999.

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Turning Down Congestion

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The Globe and Mail today published an article titled, Fed up with traffic, contractors refuse to work in Vancouver, which stated:

[Vancouver] homeowners are facing the high cost of renovation and maintenance as tradespeople either opt out of working in the city entirely, or charge extra for having to go there.

A big reason for the premium cost of hiring the trades is the city’s traffic, contractors say. Vancouver traffic is so congested, and so time-consuming, it makes working there a losing proposition.

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Negotiating Need

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I received an email from a local photographer about my previous post. This photographer couldn’t see anything wrong with doing 70 business headshots for $1,000 (i.e., $14 per portrait). She said she “would be thrilled” to make $1,000 in one day. She said she’s been a professional photographer for ten years.

Sigh.

After a couple of e-mail exchanges, it was clear this photographer didn’t know the difference between revenue and profit. She knew nothing about overhead costs, didn’t track any of her expenses and didn’t even have an Ontario business licence. But yet she’s a “professional”.
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