Ever since the first camera was invented, people have used it to take photos of everything from war images to fashion photography to every day snapshots and even bad Facebook photos. Photography is an important part of advertising. Use the right photo and drive business, use the wrong one and it could be a long year! An ad needs to be simple with one message, pick the message you most want to get across, then use a photo to drive the point home… Period! Do you have a special on custom coffee mugs at your store? Great! Show a few custom mugs, give them the price or special discount, jazz up the ad and call it a day! Don’t throw in your entire store list. The ad is about the custom coffee mugs that you want to sell.
The photo you use should be a nice one and if you want quality, pay the extra for a professional photographer, don’t snap a pic with your iphone and use that….. It’s going to look terrible. You want the best representation of your company you can get. Your image says a lot about your company and a bad photo just says that you don’t care enough to look your best. If you need different kids of photos and you can’t pay for a photographer, there are a lot of quality websites that sell royalty-free stock images, most of which are professional photographers. The one downside to that is that it may not be the exact photo you were looking for and you may have to search for quite a while to find something that suits your needs. If you are looking for a boy pulling a wagon with potted plants in it for your landscaping business, you are probably not going to find that. That would be something you need to set up and pay a photographer for. If you want a couple walking on the beach……. yeah! You have a myriad of choices for that one.
A number of years back a real estate agent was trying to sell a condo with a beautiful view. He wanted to showcase the view for his ad and he wanted to save a little money on the advertising budget……. soooo……. he got his little 1.3 megapixel camera and set up a shot on the porch at sunset and emailed it to me to place in his ad. When I looked at the photo I burst out laughing as did my boss and co-workers. He had taken a few lawn chairs…… yes, lawnchairs and placed them on the lanai with a small table between them. On the table was a plate, two bottles of wine and two glasses. The glasses had red wine in them, but the red wine bottle had not been opened, the bottle of white wine was open. The plate had Triskets laid out and American cheese still in the wrapper. Oh the horror! The sunset was so muted out due to the screening in the lanai that it was really unusable. We decided to use another photo all together. He went back and took a shot of the front of the building and sent it to me. To my surprise….. well, maybe not, there was a cat liter box leaning against the garage door that he asked me to Photoshop out! Ahhhhhh yes! The 2 seconds it would have taken him to move that box translated into an hours worth of extra work. Unfortunately this was a newspaper that did not charge to build the ad, so it was time well spent.
So, I have covered some of the dos and don’ts in photography and hopefully you will see a pattern here. I’m not going to do surgery on myself to save a few bucks. I leave the blood and guts to the professionals. So leave that iphone for bad Facebook photos and hire a photographer to make your business look good. CHEESE!
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. – Ansel Adams
Ever since the first camera was invented, people have used it to take photos of everything from war images to fashion photography to every day snapshots and even bad Facebook photos. Photography is an important part of advertising. Use the right photo and drive business, use the wrong one and it could be a long year! An ad needs to be simple with one message, pick the message you most want to get across, then use a photo to drive the point home… Period! Do you have a special on custom coffee mugs at your store? Great! Show a few custom mugs, give them the price or special discount, jazz up the ad and call it a day! Don’t throw in your entire store list. The ad is about the custom coffee mugs that you want to sell.
The photo you use should be a nice one and if you want quality, pay the extra for a professional photographer, don’t snap a pic with your iphone and use that….. It’s going to look terrible. You want the best representation of your company you can get. Your image says a lot about your company and a bad photo just says that you don’t care enough to look your best. If you need different kinds of photos and you can’t pay for a photographer, there are a lot of quality websites that sell royalty-free stock images, most of which are professional photographers. The one downside to that is that it may not be the exact photo you were looking for and you may have to search for quite a while to find something that suits your needs. If you are looking for a boy pulling a wagon with potted plants in it for your landscaping business, you are probably not going to find that. That would be something you need to set up and pay a photographer for. If you want a couple walking on the beach……. yeah! You have a myriad of choices for that one.
A number of years back a real estate agent was trying to sell a condo with a beautiful view. He wanted to showcase the view for his ad and he wanted to save a little money on the advertising budget……. soooo……. he got his little 1.3 megapixel camera and set up a shot on the porch at sunset and emailed it to me to place in his ad. When I looked at the photo I burst out laughing as did my boss and co-workers. He had taken a few lawn chairs…… yes, lawnchairs and placed them on the lanai with a small table between them. On the table was a plate, two bottles of wine and two glasses. The glasses had red wine in them, but the red wine bottle had not been opened, the bottle of white wine was open. The plate had Triskets laid out and American cheese still in the wrapper. Oh the horror! The sunset was so muted out due to the screening in the lanai that it was really unusable. We decided to use another photo all together. He went back and took a shot of the front of the building and sent it to me. To my surprise….. well, maybe not, there was a cat liter box leaning against the garage door that he asked me to Photoshop out! Ahhhhhh yes! The 2 seconds it would have taken him to move that box translated into an hours worth of extra work. Unfortunately this was a newspaper that did not charge to build the ad, so it was time well spent.
So, I have covered some of the dos and don’ts in photography and hopefully you will see a pattern here. I’m not going to do surgery on myself to save a few bucks. I leave the blood and guts to the professionals. So leave that iphone for bad Facebook photos and hire a photographer to make your business look good. CHEESE!
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. – Ansel Adams
