Ok, so you all now know that Our Man inside offers professional digital photography and other new media solutions… Well if you didn’t before reading this you should do now.
But why use me and not just take the picture yourself?
Now, how am i going to say this like I want to and make it a blog post not a blatant advert..?
It’s a sorry state of affairs at the moment in the UK if you are starting out as a photographer. According to the BBC TV program Question Time.. “There are more photographers studying in the UK now than are needed in the whole of Western Europe.”
It doesn’t surprise me. Everyone seems to want to be a photographer. Most of us all have a decent camera and as a result it’s becoming easier for everyone to get pleasing results for apparently little cost.
However, using an amateur to take an important picture can be a false economy.
The impact a professionally taken image has on a client’s market is far stronger than that of a quickly grabbed snap from any old digital camera. Professional photography will sell your product or your company, amateur photography on the whole will not.
I was recently asked if I could ‘dial down’ the quality of some of my inside shots of a corporate publication because they made the cover look bad. The cover photo was shot on a compact camera by a guy in the office. If you do want to use a low res image shot through a camera with a lens as transparent as a full milk bottle, then you could at lest put it on the inside of the mag where it might get missed and save the cover for your nice images.
I am trying not to sound elitist over kit or technique here and yes you could get really arty and start out wanting an amateur looking campaign but then you are relying on your design team and you are still without any consistency other than being consistently amature.
Photographers are not just technicians. I would like to think I know how to capture images that are right for my client’s business and convey the message required. Much of this is done with talking and communicating to the subject, explaining what is needed. I would like to think that my experience enables me to obtain successful results in any situation. It is as important for the photographer as it is for the client that the images are right for their business and convey the message they require. Taken as a proportion of most media/print budgets, the cost of getting the original imagery as good as it can be is tiny.
In addition, when commissioning a photographer the images they produce will be exclusive to the client. Images bought from a photographic library will only be exclusive for the specific area you have bought a licence for. Unless that is you negotiate an exclusive deal with the library, other companies will be able to licence the same image and use it for their own products or company. Negotiating exclusivity with a library is often more expensive than commissioning a photographer. It would be more expensive than using me that’s for sure!
Couple this exclusivity with an up to date knowledge of how imagery can be utilized in new media promotional techniques and I am confident professional photography will give the client far more of an edge than when using the office happy snapper.
