why spend money on a professional photographer in the middle of a worldwide recession?
January 2nd, 2009 | Published in business
High quality professional photography can seem expensive. So why spend your budget on commissioning photography for your business when there’s all those other “more important” things you have to try and find the money for? After all, we’re in the middle of a recession, so we’ve all got to cut costs, right?
Look at it this way – everyone else is already thinking the same thing, but most companies will decide to cut back on their budget for commissioning photography, either by hiring cheaper photographers, or by trying to do it themselves with the office camera.
The first option seems attractive – find someone cheaper. There’s a massive oversupply of photographers in the market these days and you will always be able to find someone cheaper than the last quote. But how cheap do you go before quality suffers?
And that’s the reason why the second option – DIY photography by the person with the office digicam – is also a bad idea. Quality is paramount, and here’s why…
If all your competitors are cutting back on photography budgets, then that’s precisely the time when you can make your photography, and therefore your marketing and promotional materials, stand out from the crowd of mediocre (or just plain bad) attempts that everyone else is making.
Take press releases as an example. I shoot a lot of photography intended for release to local and national newspapers and magazines as a press handout. Publications are inundated with press handouts and, at a time when those publications themselves are struggling financially, a good press handout is going to find its way onto a page – its free content. Publications love free content. But even the most hard up newspaper is going to look at the press handouts they have available and publish the one with the best, most interesting, most eyecatching picture. You win – your release gets published, and your competitor who tried to DIY the pictures, got their release filed in the bin. Or at the very least, published smaller and without a picture.
The same holds true for corporate publications, annual reports, brochures and web sites. If you’re trying to get noticed in a sea of other competitors, fighting for the same eyeballs, make your stuff look better than all the others and the eyeballs are yours. High quality photography and production of your material will get you noticed, which is half the battle.
How many times have you seen an advert, PR photo, brochure or website and thought to yourself that it just didn’t look very good? A bit boring? Badly executed? Even blurry and underexposed? Well, other people are probably thinking exactly the same.
So, if a pictures says a thousand words, what do you want those words to say about your company?
