This Friday’s B2B Tip regarding photography usage in your business is the importance of hiring the right photographer to the specific job you need.
What is differences in the jobs?
First let me explain what I mean by hiring a photographer for the specific jobs you need. Every job may or may not be the same for your photographic needs from a photographer. People and many businesses not familiar with the photography industry and assume a photographer can photograph anything and everything the best. Sadly in reality this is not true in vast majority of cases excluding the very rare occasions where a photographer may have mastered every sector, genre, and skills in photography.
Specialties
In photography most established professional photographers choose a few specialties to master and deliver a service based on their mastered specialties.
What do I need to do to ensure I choose the proper photographer for my photography jobs?
There are many different ways which are all dependent on what are budget is too. Here’s a list of what you can do.
- Hire or have an in-house full/part time or freelance photo editor or art director to have the ability to select the right images, direct and communicate to the photographer to ensure the vision is created with imagery to the exact needs of your business.
- If you cannot do the above – Hire or have an Advertising and/or Public Relations firm/agency.
- If you cannot do the above – Hire or have a photographer who can self-art direct the production. Note not many can as their expertise is in photography only generally not knowing your brand and industry, so take caution. As well the photographers who are very highly skilled and known to as well have art direction and photo editor tasks they have done or even worked in will not be cheap and very likely at a premium price since you are saving the cost of hiring another person or firm to handle that task. If you do not have a photographer who can do this or have any art director and do it yourself it is very likely without the proper training, skills, and experience they’ll be very costly mistakes in running your advertising campaign(s). It can cost you potential growth and impact from the campaign and to your entire brand depending on the type of mistakes.
Tips to finding the right photographer for you.
If you’re a firm or agency such as advertising, graphic design or public relations generally you’d be getting tons of solicitations from photographers so the following is likely unneeded for you unless those solicitations are not fulfilling your specific needs.
Many or all established professional photographers today are online, follow below tips of searching for the right photographer in the specific areas you need them at and you should have your photographer.
- Search Keywords: Such as if you’re looking for a product photographer in a popular region or city like NEPA, or NYC, or Philly you use keywords like “product photographer nepa”. If you’re looking for a specific kind of product photographer like eCommerce product photographer in NEPA you simply put ” eCommerce product photographer NEPA”, or other words (synonyms).
- If you’re looking for someone savvy with social media as well search on that social media platform with similar keyword searching methods as above.
- Directories on institutional website such as PPA, ASMP, etc. there are many.
- If you’re or have a photo editor or art director they would be doing this step… study the photographer’s website/portfolio before contacting the photographer for an in-person interview or meeting for further assessment or gathering rate info. Also note commercial photographers will not generally have a set flat rate for all types of jobs, some are dependent the amount of time, effort, cost of doing business/goods, etc. so they will need a week or weeks depending the size of the production to generate a bid.
Next post in this blog series 11/13/15: Legal Notes
Future Topics on the series.
- Teaming up with a Photographer
- Choosing a type of photography to help tell your branding story and sending your campaign message concisely.