The business side of photography
Today I received a request from a small company to do a group photo. They wrote that their staff has changed and they needed an updated group photo of their seven employees.
The email said the group must be posed in a single row, everyone evenly spaced apart and no one overlapping the person next to them.
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Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)
If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?
De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.
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).
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
If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.
A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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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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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
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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