corporate photography

Business Photography of Yesteryear

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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.

 

An advertisement for the McLaughlin Carriage Company of Oshawa, Ontario, circa 1907. Early advertising used drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. (Library and Archives Canada)

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.

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Balancing Act

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There are three types of colour photographs: those with bad colour, those with accurate colour and those with pleasing colour.

If the skin tones in your business portrait don’t look good or if your pictures have an overall colour cast, then your photos have a bad colour balance.

Accurate colour is required when the colours in a photo must match the real-life colours. For example, clothing colours in a catalog should match the actual colours.

Pleasing colour is for pictures that have to look nice rather than be absolutely accurate. Portraits often have pleasing colour because a nice skin tone is usually preferred over accurate skin colour.
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Procuring Photography

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Another view-from-my-office photo. I was photographing a parade a few days ago and lots of people came out just to watch me work :-)

Someone this week asked for a quote to photograph “a one day corporate business event” they were hosting on a specific date “at a downtown Toronto location.” No further information was provided.

The person used a Gmail address with a rather silly username instead of a business email address. Surely an organization big enough to host a “corporate business event” would have its own company address.
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Keeping Up With The Times

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September is the start of a new school year and every student will be getting new school portraits done. When is your company planning to get new pictures?

Every business needs to refresh the photos on their web site. Refreshing your web site shows that your company is still alive and it keeps customers interested. It also helps your site rank higher in web searches.

The second most popular search engine after Google is Google Images. This image search engine is used more than all other search engines combined excluding Google itself.

This means that people using Google Images are searching visually (because we process pictures much faster than text) and they will click on the best looking or most interesting pictures. Stock pictures are rarely interesting because stock pictures look like stock pictures. Of course, having no pictures means you’re invisible.
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Customer Photo Guidelines

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Another view-from-my-office photo taken during a tennis tournament, 11 August 2018. The approaching rain storm really did look like that. The sun (top-right-rear) was shining through the dark rain clouds.

British photographer Neil Turner wrote a post on his blog about customer expectations and customer-supplied photo guidelines.

Almost every commercial and PR client had a prepared guide that let you know what they wanted from a commissioned shoot and a few pointers of what they, or their end client, liked and didn’t like in their pictures. These ranged from really helpful pointers about what kind of clothing should be worn for portraits or whether or not images should have unfussy backgrounds through the obvious such as “images should be properly exposed” to the mildly bizarre “avoid any and all references to money”.

– Neil Turner

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How Will You Know?

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Many companies measure what they do so they can determine what works and what doesn’t. So how do you measure the success of the pictures produced by a corporate photographer? How will you know that you hired the right photographer?

Is it as simple as whether or not the pictures are in focus? Is it enough that the photos look nice? Is the price you paid all that matters?

Businesses want results for the money they spend on corporate photography. Just having pretty pictures isn’t enough. They need some way of measuring the effectiveness of the photographs.

You can measure the effectiveness of pictures on social media when viewers “like” or retweet a photo. On some web pages, you might count page impressions or the number of clicks on a call-to-action link.

But how do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of the business portraits on your “About Us” page? How do you know that your photos are sending the right message?
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Composition Wise and Whys

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There are many online photography tutorials offering technical tips and advice. Much of this information is simplistic and superficial.

For example, when doing a portrait, they’ll tell you not to have harsh shadows on the subject’s face. The problem with information like this is that it isn’t scalable. It’s more beneficial to have information that you can use in any type of photography no matter what your subject matter.

Why do people look at pictures and how do they look at pictures? If you can answer these two questions then you can scale this information across any type of photography.

This post is long but the concepts are simple. Spoiler alert: this isn’t really about photography but rather it’s about human nature and how we perceive things around us.
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