Dancing On The Ceiling

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The Live 8 concert in Barrie, Ontario, 02 July 2005. Live 8 was ten simultaneous concerts held in ten countries on 02 July 2005, plus one more concert on 06 July. The concerts, held on the 20th anniversary of the original Live Aid concert, were meant to send a message to national leaders at the 2005 G8 Summit in Scotland.

This is another view-from-my-office photo.

All products, except luxury items, have a maximum price set by market conditions. A loaf of bread costs up to about $8. A bakery can’t increase the price to $20 or $30 no matter how good that bread is. The price of bread has a ceiling. To make more money, a bakery can expand into products that have a higher price ceiling such as cakes and pastry (which might be considered luxury items).
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The Art Of The Estimate

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There are plenty of clients who don’t actually want the cheapest choice. They want the best one, and a powerful estimate is the clue they use to choose.

– Seth Godin, author and marketing strategist

An estimate doesn’t have to be just a page of numbers. You can use an estimate as an additional marketing tool to help persuade a potential customer. Customers need more than numbers to understand you and your business. If you can sell yourself as being more knowledgeable, more reliable, and less risk, then price becomes secondary.

Differentiate yourself from other photographers not by having a lower price or even a similar price, but by being exactly what they’re looking for. And this is done with words, not numbers, on an estimate. Sell yourself and not the numbers.

Seth Godin’s full blog post about estimates.

 

Retouching Business Conference Photos

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Most business conference photos need editing to fix at least the colour and contrast. Hotel conference rooms with a mix of room lights, spotlights, and accent lights, can have an odd colour cast. There’s also too much contrast between the dark conference room and the stage lights and bright screens.

Photo retouching isn’t just for portraits. Retouching is almost always necessary for any picture that’s going to be used in a newsletter, an annual report, or any similar business publication, in print or online. Properly edited pictures always make your project look more professional.
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Prompt For Business Portraits

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You don’t have to look too closely to notice that there’s something wrong with these business portraits.

Artificial intelligence image generators are so much fun. The above images were created using a simple text prompt of “business portrait of company CEO.” Every time the prompt was run, the Stable Diffusion image generator kept creating very similar looking images of white males.
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Photo Retouching Makes You Look Good

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A vinyl banner on the side of a van belonging to a company that makes and installs glass shower enclosures. The centre shower has blue masking tape left over from the installation. The shower on the right has reflections of a nearby window. All three photos are crooked and distorted.

Today I saw a big, shiny van belonging to a company that makes and installs glass showers. The sides of the van had large photos of glass-enclosed showers. But apparently no one bothered to look at the pictures before they were printed on vinyl and attached to the sides of the vehicle.
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Retouching Business Headshots

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Prison mugshots from Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario, 1913. (Library and Archives Canada)

I’ve retouched a lot of business portraits, a few actor headshots and even some family portraits. Common retouching requests include removing stray hairs, brightening eyes and teeth, minimizing facial wrinkles, eliminating double chins, fixing skin issues, and repairing clothing malfunctions.
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Pricing for Business Event Photography

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If you’re lucky, the conference that you’ve been hired to photograph will be held in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and big skylights. The afternoon light will let you shoot at ISO 400 and a reasonable shutter speed.

A few months ago, I was asked to quote for a three-hour business event. So I quoted for a three-hour event.

Two days before the event, the event organizer said they needed me onsite 45 minutes sooner to do some early photos. They also wanted me to stay after the event so I could edit “one or two pictures” right away for their social media.

On event day, I arrived one hour before the start and, as requested, I was ready to go 45 minutes before the start. But the event was 45 minutes late getting started. It also ran 1-1/2 hours longer than planned. After the event they wanted some group photos. Then the “one or two pictures” that they needed right away became 16 images. What was originally supposed to be three hours onsite turned out to be more than 6-1/2 hours.
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