The business side of photography
There used to be a newsroom term called a “Hey, Martha!” I’m not sure if this is still used today.
The phrase comes from an old editors’ tale, (not unlike an old wives’ tale), that said if a story or photo was so unusual, offbeat or funny, a husband reading his newspaper would look up and yell to his wife, “Hey, Martha! Come and see this!”
This is a view-from-my-office photo from a cold, rainy-snowy soccer game.
From the past two weeks:
• A Toronto professional photographer does family portraits for $500 according to his web site. The price includes a 45-minute session and 50 “fully retouched” pictures.
Fifty images in 45 minutes? Fully retouched? Ten dollars per photo?
At that price, who should have low expectations, the customer or the photographer?
If you’re a new photographer who does business headshots and other corporate portraits, may I offer some brief advice? I just spent an hour looking at a few dozen Toronto law firm web sites and most of them had poor quality business portraits.
This is just another view-from-my-office photo.
Corporate customers don’t buy photography, they buy an end result. How much is that end result worth to the customer? Or to rephrase that, how much does your photography contribute toward achieving the customer’s goal?
If you’re new in town and need to buy groceries, you can go to any supermarket because they all sell the same products and same brands. Most supermarkets even have the same store layout. So people usually shop at whatever grocery store is closest to them.
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Joseph Pasonault’s family moved from Newfoundland to the US, circa 1882, when he was six years old. In 1896, a twenty-year-old Pasonault opened his first photo studio in Cando. He later moved his studio to a larger town in North Dakota.
Canada’s pandemic case numbers today (April 2022) are the highest than at any time in the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic when everyone was panicking and hoarding toilet paper. But no one is panicking today and, figuratively speaking, the news media is no longer reporting in all caps. What’s changed?
The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.
Early advertising illustrations for newspapers, billboards and posters were created from drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. The first use of halftones to reproduce a continuous tone photograph was in 1869 in Canada but it took several decades before it became common practice.
