Photoburgers

No Comments

Do you enjoy eating a hamburger from a fast-food restaurant?

If you’re a teenager, you probably do. But if you’re older then you probably don’t.

The reason is that younger people generally don’t have sophisticated tastes or they haven’t experienced the hamburgers at higher quality restaurants. If they did visit a better restaurant, they would realize what a good hamburger tastes like.

A Big Mac costs about $5, a burger from a five-star hotel or restaurant might cost $35 or more, and other restaurants charge somewhere in between. But when you buy food, what’s more important, the cost or the taste?
Continue reading →

Getting What You Paid For

1 Comment

A Canadian TV network, for several years, used to hire five photographers to cover an annual live event that it hosted and broadcasted. The photos were used for its web sites, media handouts and its annual report. The photographers were each paid $2,000 to cover the four-hour event.

The photo procedure for the event is that full-resolution pictures are posted online within 15 minutes after they were shot. These photos are for third-party news media use. Lower resolution images are also quickly posted to the TV network’s various web sites. Photo editing and file handling occurs continuously throughout the duration of the event. Two photo editors are hired to do this work.

Someone at the TV network last year decided to save some money. They hired only two photographers and filled the gap by using three of its employees. The network rented three pro cameras, three pro lenses and one pro flash for these employees to use. The cameras were set to auto-everything by the rental store.
Continue reading →

Conference Notes

No Comments

There are many online articles offering tips to photographers on how to photograph a business conference. The authors of these articles usually give such wonderful photo advice as: bring a spare battery, carry an extra memory card, take pictures of the people speaking, etc.

For something completely different, may I humbly offer a few suggestions to conference organizers who plan on hiring a photographer to cover their event. Not only am I a photographer who has covered many conferences and conventions, both local, national and international, but I’m also someone who has helped organize a few small conferences.

Conference photography is of secondary importance compared to the conference itself and your attendees. But a few changes can make the photography better and more effective.
Continue reading →

Memory Lane

No Comments

Remember the old days when soft drinks came in glass bottles? After the drink was gone, you could return the bottle to the store and get a few cents back. When you were young, you might have collected a handful of bottles and returned them to a store to get your “reward”: three bottles returned = one free Popsicle; five bottles returned = one free chocolate bar.

What do you do with old compact flash memory cards – 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, etc?
Continue reading →

A Bit of Noise

No Comments

It’s common to shoot business portraits against a seamless background. Photographers will often add a tonal gradient instead of using this flat-toned background. This gradient helps create depth, making the subject stand out more distinctly from the background.

But when the final image is saved as a JPEG, the file compression can cause the gradient to posterize, especially if the gradient was steep. Posterization occurs when the smooth transition of tones is replaced by abrupt colour shifts or banding. A small amount of posterization won’t be noticeable to the customer and won’t be visible in print or online images.

Low JPEG settings (high compression) make posterization more apparent, while the highest JPEG settings can minimize it. But if a customer needs a small file size, using a high-quality JPEG setting may not be feasible.
Continue reading →

Lasting photo memories

No Comments

Last week, I went to a funeral. As is common these days, the family had a photo gallery on their son’s online obituary page. The pictures covered almost the last half of their son’s life.

Many of the photos were either out-of-focus, badly exposed, had heads partially cut off, or the boy was so far in the background he was barely visible. Most of the recent photos appeared to have been shot with a cell phone due to the obvious low resolution and low quality.

Pictures are important, especially personal pictures.

If you’re a parent with young children, please buy a real camera and learn how to use it.
Continue reading →

Mission Creep

No Comments

A potential commercial client e-mailed to say they needed “a few product shots” and they’d do all the post-production work on the images. Their budget for “a four hour photo shoot” was quite small but it could be doable if there was only a few products and the production value was kept low (no assistant, no big lights).

I called the company to get more information.

Yes they wanted a few product shots. In fact, they wanted all of their products photographed with full studio lighting. Since some products were big and heavy, the lighting would have to be moved from location to location within the building (i.e. at least one assistant would be needed).
Continue reading →

css.php