Great Expectations

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You’re probably out of a job if anyone else can do the same pictures as you, even an amateur with a cell phone.

Every customer expects that you own the necessary camera gear and the appropriate computer and software. They expect you know what you’re doing.

Customers expect that you can do more than just take pictures. After all, anyone can take pictures.

Customers also expect that you:

– Are self-motivated and have up-to-date skills.

– Know something about the legal, moral and ethical issues surrounding photography.

– Understand picture usage and licensing.

– Have suitable people skills.

– Have project management skills.

– Can think and act in the best interest of the customer.

They also expect that you know their expectations.

As a professional photographer, you’re expected to be the expert when it comes to all things photographic. You’re expected to be more than just a camera owner and operator.

Are you marketing yourself as a camera owner and operator or as a photography expert?

An owner and operator markets what equipment they own and their technical abilities. These photographers are essentially nothing more than a human photo booth.

A photography expert markets their experience, their management skills, their willingness to be a team player, their trustworthiness and their effectiveness. This is the best way to show that you’re not just someone with a camera.

Customer expectations are more than just pictures.

 

Toronto Conference Photography

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A very long post with some suggestions for photographers planning on shooting business conferences, conventions and other similar corporate events. To save you time, there’s nothing here about cameras, lenses or how to take pictures.

Before the event

• Corporate events want a dependable, well-mannered, nicely dressed photographer who can produce decent pictures. They don’t want a photographer who produces wildly artistic images, always tilts their camera at a 45° angle or who can’t expose properly.

You have to know what the “bread and butter” pictures are and how to get them. Sure, go ahead and include some creative pictures but always make sure you have the expected pictures.

 

• You are *not* the most important person at the event. The food person carrying the tray of chicken skewers is more important and more popular than you. The people who paid hundreds of dollars to attend the conference are more important than you.
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Next-day photo delivery

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“And we need the pictures delivered the next day!!!”

A business conference organizer will sometimes want finished pictures delivered the day after the event. It’s no problem to deliver a handful of images the same or following day, if the event needs them for a press release or its social media. But when a day-long event expects hundreds of pictures to be delivered the next day, or even the next morning, then there’s going to be a problem.

Let’s do some simple arithmetic. If you’re expecting 100 finished pictures and the photographer spends a minimal editing time of three minutes per image, then that’s 300 minutes — five hours — of work. If you’re expecting 200 or 300 photos then that can amount to a few days of work.
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The Photographer Kings

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Two decades ago in a television documentary, legendary US photographer Richard Avedon said:

Images are fast replacing words as our primary language. They define our ideas of beauty, truth and history. In our age, the photographer, not the philosopher, is king.

Today the Internet is the dominant means of communication and images are the most effective, most powerful, most universal language. People don’t read, they look.

What does this mean for you and your business?

If you’re not using photography to market your business then you’re not worth looking at, you’re not part of the conversation, you’re pretty much invisible.
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Photography value and quality

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When hiring a business portrait photographer or other corporate photographer, you might be tempted to shop by price. You may think that the lowest price means the best value.

With some tangible products, the lowest price can be the best value. But this doesn’t apply with services like photography and especially not when quality matters.

What’s the difference between value and quality?

Value: Usefulness or importance.

Quality: How good or bad something is. A degree of excellence.

Ideally a photograph has both high value and high quality but that’s not always the case. For example, a poorly exposed, out-of-focus family photo can be very valuable to you.
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The (F)utility of Low Prices

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Photographers, how much would you charge to deliver 24 business headshots, 12 full-length environmental portraits and 4 environmental group shots?

Well, a Toronto photographer quoted $800 for this recent corporate job. This works out to $20 per delivered picture. The corporate client turned down this quote because even they knew the low price was ridiculous.

Photographers who try to discount or lowball their way into a job only hurt themselves. It’s been shown that customers are not fooled by bottom-end prices. So why do some photographers keep doing it?
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Product Photography Standards

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Many commercial photographers do product photography and it’s usually done on a white background. This style of product photography is very common. Web sites, catalogues, newspaper ads, brochures, and billboards, all frequently use “product-on-white.”

A white background is popular because: it reproduces easily and consistently in any medium; it doesn’t distract from the product nor cause any colour cast; it won’t go out of style; it’s easy to drop out or overlay with text; and it’s easy to merge multiple product photos together. White is the most versatile product background.

Crazily enough, in 2014, Amazon was granted a US patent for product-on-white photography. This caused quite an uproar. Tens of thousands of photographers petitioned the US Patent Office to cancel the patent. But photographers can still shoot products on a white background. Amazon’s patented technique is somewhat specific in nature and it’s also unenforceable.
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