Toronto photo retouching for headshots, portraits, website images

Importance of Marketing Collateral

January 31, 2012 No Comments

The key to enhancing business image and winning consumer trust is through the use of marketing collateral.

Marketing collateral refers to the various forms of communication a business publishes on its own. By contrast, paid placements, such as advertising, are not a form of marketing collateral. Advertising is part of the sales process whereas marketing collateral supports the sales process.

Advertising often fails because consumers simply don’t trust ads. Claims made in an ad are not always backed up by any information. Customers are skeptical because they know advertising is only concerned with taking their money.
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How to insult a photographer

January 31, 2012 No Comments

One of the more popular ways to insult a photographer is to look at their pictures and say, “Nice pictures! You must have a good camera.”

Here are a few gentle ways to insult a fellow photographer:

He’s a few pictures short of a slideshow.
She’s obviously not working with a full frame.
His zoom doesn’t extend all the way.
Her flash isn’t firing on full power.
Her shutter speed is a bit slow.
His aperture isn’t exactly wide open.
She’s dragging her shutter.
He’s been spending way too much time in the darkroom.
He’s working with a shallow depth of field.
She’s not exactly high definition.
“Low resolution” is his middle name.
His lens cap is on.
Her memory card is empty.
She’s not exactly the sharpest lens in the bag.
He’s not exactly the fastest lens in the bag.
His camera is clicking but nothing gets recorded.
Her camera is firing but her film isn’t advancing.
He’s a couple stops short of a good exposure.
The carousel is in place but the projector isn’t turned on.

Higher prices make customers happy

January 30, 2012 No Comments

The key to helping your customers better enjoy your photographs is to raise your prices.

A 2007 USA study, with the catchy title of “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness”, showed that marketing actions, such as changing the price of a product, can affect consumer enjoyment of that product.

The study used functional MRI to observe the brain activity of test subjects while they sampled differently-priced wines.

The subjects were told that five different wines were priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90. But unknown to them, there were really only three different wines: the $5 and $45 wines were the same; the $10 and $90 wines were the same.
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Drink Up

January 18, 2012 No Comments

In this blog’s About Us page, I mentioned some of the ways my pictures have been used. I jokingly mentioned that my photos have never appeared on a coffee mug or mouse pad. Well, one of those has changed.

Companies often have an employee lunchroom or staff lounge. A not uncommon problem is that some employees leave behind dirty cups or other mess on a table or in the sink.

Enter behavioural psychology.

A small Toronto company has given each of its employees a free coffee mug with their business portrait on it. Their mug on a mug. The office will no longer buy disposable cups.

Since each person now has their own coffee mug with their face on it, the company hopes that the employees will be motivated to clean up after themselves. If someone leaves behind a dirty cup, everyone in the office will immediately know who the culprit is.

The employees may think they got a free coffee mug but they really got entered into a psychology experiment.

Identity Crisis

January 17, 2012 No Comments

A recent Black Star blog post by Jim Pickerell gives advice to photographers who want to licence their stock pictures. He’s been involved in the stock photo business for over 40 years.

Pickerell writes that since there’s such an oversupply of stock images, photographers need to get their pictures seen by photo buyers. He then goes on to list some numbers and statistics.

The interesting takeaway from this article is for any business that’s thinking about using stock pictures instead of commissioning its own original photography.
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No cheque in the mail

January 15, 2012 No Comments

From time to time, newer professional photographers ask what they should do when a client is late to pay. The answer is easy: remind the customer to pay.

Okay, maybe it’s not quite that simple although it can be.

When a client hasn’t paid within the time period set by the photographer, often the reason is that the client has lost or misplaced the invoice, or they’ve simply forgotten to pay it. (Yes, it would be nice if we could “forget” to pay our bills.)
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Photographically Speaking

January 9, 2012 No Comments

From A to Z, here are some lesser-known photography phrases:

Aggressive pixels – A picture shot extremely tight. For example: when all others are using a 70-200mm lens, the photographer using a 400mm lens is said to be shooting aggressive pixels.

American Idol Effect – A reference to photo sites like Flickr.

Autotard – A photographer who always uses their camera on the “Auto” setting.

Available darkness – Shooting in a dark location without flash.

Baby zoomer – A wide-angle zoom lens.

Bacon assignment – A job that pays much more than it’s worth.

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Lines of Sight