National Portrait Week

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Another Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone. The day after the US Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday in November) is “Black Friday” (for in-store sales) and the following Monday is “Cyber Monday” (for online sales). Although, some stores now stretch out their sales to last an entire week. In fact, the Thursday before Black Friday (i.e. US Thanksgiving) is now called Gray Thursday.

While these special shopping days are predominantly a US event, they do get some attention here in Canada. Several Canadian retailers hold their own similarly-themed sales on the same days.

What gets little attention, and absolutely no media coverage whatsoever, is that the Saturday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is “Small Business Saturday”. The Canadian Small Business Saturday, like Canadian Thanksgiving, occurs in October. On Small Business Saturday, the public is urged to shop at a local small business.

However, none of these special shopping days benefit photographers. One could even argue that these shopping events don’t really benefit consumers (also here, here and maybe even here).

Perhaps photographers should create National Portrait Week which could run during National Photography Month (aka May). This would encourage people to get their portrait made, even a business portrait. This might help many photography businesses and it would most definitely benefit consumers.

The lasting value of a portrait is unmatched by any mass-produced, store-bought item.
 
(The Irish Professional Photographers Association has an annual National Portrait Day, which lasts a week. Customers can get a portrait for a nominal fee and all proceeds go to charity.)

 

Contract Negotiation

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How does a photographer negotiate their contract?

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, has a Rolling Stone magazine exhibit which includes two letters from 1982 between Rolling Stone magazine’s (then) chief photographer Annie Leibovitz and its publisher Jann Wenner. No idea why the letters are dated March 1982 and Leibovitz signed the contract as being March 1981 (perhaps a typo or bad handwriting?).

Not sure if it was related but Leibovitz left the magazine the following year.

On Wenner’s web site, (9th thumbnail), there’s a self-portrait of Wenner and Leibovitz from 1973 when she was named the magazine’s chief photographer.

 

USB flash drives for photographers

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In case another photographer is looking for a supplier of custom USB flash drives, here’s a follow-up to a previous post about the inevitable(?) switch from optical discs to USB flash drives for delivering client photos.

After looking through many sites, I went with Flashbay (flashbay.ca or flashbay.com). The account manager I dealt with was very helpful. The only hard part was deciding on a style of drive. I chose 4-GB “Kinetic” drives with medium-sized magnetic boxes. There are much fancier boxes but I’m assuming that most of my clients will throw out the box anyway.

The Kinetic drive works like a ballpoint pen: click on the end and the USB connector pops out; click again and it retracts. Pulling the drive out of a USB port automatically retracts the connector.

The medium-sized, clear plastic box, about the size of a deck of playing cards, is big enough that I can insert a business card (or maybe I can create a small thank-you card?). A smaller-sized box would make the overall presentation look too small. The little magnetic snap on the box is surprisingly effective.

Another option, although not as good from a marketing point of view, is that stores like Staples and Best Buy sell various branded and unbranded USB flash drives. Staples also sells tiny plastic boxes (meant to hold paperclips?) that can hold a USB flash drive or two.

 

Fast, cheap and good

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A common saying is “Fast, cheap, good. Pick any two.” Here are some exceptions to that rule where you do get all three:

Photographers often have to resize pictures smaller or create thumbnail-sized images for their web site. For Mac users, there’s a free application called ThumbsUp, from DEVONtechnologies, which makes this resizing process fast and easy.

Also free from DEVONtechnologies: (i) EasyFind searches your hard drive better than Apple’s Spotlight because it doesn’t have the restrictions that are built into Spotlight; and (ii) WordService is an indispensable tool when working with any text in any application.

Another tool that photographers may find very handy, especially when designing web sites, is this wonderful free ruler for Mac.

Photographers who want to create a favicon for their web site or perhaps some custom desktop icons should consider the free ICOformat.plugin for Photoshop (Mac and Windows) and the free version of Img2icns (Mac).

The ICOformat plugin accepts only 256px, or smaller, images. Img2icns can create 512px which is the current Mac standard (except for apps being submitted to Apple’s App Store which requires 1024px icons).

 

Flash Forward

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Over the past two months, I photographed in a few Toronto offices, from small to mid-sized. Here are a few random observations:

• Businesses seem to be much more paperless. I can recall when offices had entire walls, and even hallways, lined with filing cabinets.

• Fax machines are pretty much obsolete.

• Just over half of the offices I was in had their employees working on laptops. This may make sense in terms of cost and portability but one wonders about the health cost. Many employees’ necks and shoulders were hunched over as they were working on their laptops.

• No desktop computers meant that the office lacked the familiar sound of keyboard (and mouse) clicking. I guess this sound will disappear like that of a typewriter.
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Thoughts about business portraits

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Over the past two months, I photographed a total of 49 business portraits for a few small to mid-sized Toronto companies.

What never ceases to amaze me is how different each person looks. If you walk along a street and casually glance around at other people, you may think that everyone looks about the same. But, as with snowflakes, no two people are alike.

Face shape, eyes, ears, nose, smile, hair, skin colour and skin texture are quite different from one person to the next. This is very noticeable when photographing people up-close and later when editing and retouching the pictures.

Speaking of retouching, it’s always better to use a makeup artist and hair stylist before the picture is taken rather than relying on retouching afterward.
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Photographer’s web site maintenance

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Yes, a boring blog title.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping some photographers clean up and reorganize the “back end” of their web sites. Here are a few important things that every photographer should do with their web site (in no particular order):

• Change all usernames and passwords. A username of “admin” and a password of “1234567” are a disaster waiting to happen. Using the same combination of username and password for everything is foolish. Never, ever use the default username or password.

• Back up the web site regularly. Really. Keep a copy of the entire site on a local computer and/or on a CD/DVD. Most photographers’ web sites are not that large and can be easily backed up. Web hosts often provide a way to do site backups through cPanel (or similar). Or, just use FTP to download the site’s files.

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