hiring a photographer

Procuring Photography

No Comments

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.
Continue reading →

The De-skilling of Photography

No Comments

De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.

– Merriam-Webster

Many tasks today require less skill to perform due to advancing technology. But when something requires less skill, some people wrongly assume that it also requires less creativity, less expertise and less talent. A good example of this is photography.

For the third time in seven weeks, a company sent me business headshots they wanted fixed. It was plainly obvious that all of these companies had used amateur photographers (or a really bad professional).

Fixing Cheap Photography

A small law firm today sent two business portraits and a list of what they wanted fixed:

– fix the uneven brightness of the faces

– make skin colour better

– the eyes are too dark. Make brighter.

– replace the [office] background with a plain background

– add shoulders to each person and make the pictures square

Continue reading →

An OK Photographer

No Comments

You might be thinking that you can save a few dollars by hiring a good enough photographer. After all, good enough is okay, right?

US phone company AT&T did a series of commercials about hiring just okay people (and here and here).

But would this apply to photographers?

Many companies shop price first because they assume that all photographers are the same. They wrongly think that it’s the camera that makes the photos.

Hiring an experienced, professional photographer is about finding a photographer who has enough experience with customers like yourself so they can understand your photo needs and can do the work confidently.

Professional photographers should have enough experience to know what the risks might be and what problems might arise and then know how to minimize those risks and prevent those problems from happening. This level of experience is necessary to make your photography project a success.

Experienced photographers charge more because they know more and can help you more. Or would you rather save a few dollars by having an okay photographer “figure it out” at your expense?

 

Keeping Up With The Times

No Comments

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.
Continue reading →

How Will You Know?

1 Comment

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?
Continue reading →

It’s the photographer not the price

2 Comments

If you’re about to hire a photographer then remember that you get what you pay for. Low price always gets you low quality.

Business headshots never cost anywhere near $15 each no matter what the volume. Expect *at least* quadruple that amount for a high volume shoot with minimal editing.

When you hire a photographer, you’re paying partly for the photography and partly for the photographer. The experience and quality of the photographer directly affects the success of the photos. Pictures do not create themselves nor do cameras create pictures.

If one professional is saying they will do the work for $100 per hour and another is quoting you $200 per hour, your instinct shouldn’t immediately jump to the one offering the lowest price.

As an example, maybe the higher-priced solution has the learnings from a 20 year career vs. a 5 year career, to help you avoid more known pitfalls that you don’t even see coming. Or, they have helped 20 clients succeed in similar situations, vs. 2 clients succeed . . .

– George Deeb, Forbes

Continue reading →

css.php