The Official We Shoot Blog
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015
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Hats for sale on display by Seattle Commercial Photographer We Shoot.
Wednesday, July 29th, 2015
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Aerial view of the Port of Olympia, Washington by Seattle commercial Photographer We Shoot.
Monday, July 27th, 2015
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A pair of straw cowboy hats on display by Seattle Commercial Photographer We Shoot.
Thursday, June 18th, 2015
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Selective color in a tinted black and white image by Seattle Commercial Photographer We Shoot.
Monday, June 15th, 2015
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Image by Seattle commercial photographer We Shoot.
Thursday, May 28th, 2015
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Slider hamburgers and French fries created for restaurant by Seattle Food Photographer We Shoot.
Thursday, June 5th, 2014
The definition of “rebranding” from http://www.whatis.com is as follows:
“Rebranding is the creation of a new look and feel for an established product in order to differentiate the product from its competitors. Rebranding efforts may include a name change, new logo or packaging and updated marketing materials that includes the latest industry buzzwords. The goal of rebranding is to influence a customer’s perception about a product or service by revitalizing the brand and making it seem more modern and relevant to the customer’s needs.”
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But, really. Rebranding. I mean, please. Is anyone as tired of this word as I am? Every way I turn I see it. I even think about it when meeting other business people. As a professional photographer, what often comes to mind is, “you definitely need to upgrade your imagery and do some rebranding.” I mean some of them SCREAM for it in the way they present their business. It is definitely apparent in the photography of their product and service presented from their website and collateral material. But does this mean that everyone in business needs to rebrand?
Sure, we can all use an occasional evaluation of our business. Who is our clientele? What is our focus? When do we exercise a new strategy? Where are we going with this business? Why did we start it? Yup, somewhere in there is the good old “who, what, when, where, and why.” The nucleus of journalism may apply to a business as well.
But should we hire a rebranding specialist? How about just sitting down with ourselves on occasion – say every 3 months – to ask five questions like the ones above. Make it fun. Be your own journalist. Set up an appointment with yourself every 3 months to conduct an interview, or interview your business partner, upper management, middle management, or your administrative assistant. Oh, wait a minute. This sounds like an old tried-and-true marketing meeting. How ‘bout that? You may have been doing it all along. Rebranding. And it didn’t cost you a penny.
For those of you – like me – who don’t schedule a weekly marketing meeting or a quarterly meeting to evaluate your business, begin now. Consult with the people you work with, the people who want your business to succeed as much as you do. From top to bottom. Involve everyone you work with, and you’ll not only come up with improvements to your business, you’ll come up with improvements to the most important business relations of all. The people you work closely with every day.
And don’t forget the maintenance people – or anyone in the business of making something look its best. If this last suggestion sounds funny to you, then you’re missing out on one important factor to a successful business. Objectivity. And you don’t have to hire a professional. Maybe it could be someone you know in an entirely different business than yours. Get their objective input. Or anybody who isn’t as close as you are to the challenge you face. This is especially applicable for a really small business.
Now get away from that computer and ask this simple question of the next person you see. “What do you think?”
– Dione Benson
Monday, October 1st, 2012
In the days of film, a professional commercial photographer had to be very careful of the backgrounds that would be used in his/her images. Retouching was expensive. Shooting an item for use against another background from the one it was taken with could be a labor-intensive multi-step process. A spot on a high-key (pure white) background could be touched out on the negative, and a nightmare undertaking on a transparency. Today, of course, images are taken digitally and manipulated by editing programs, like Photoshop. One of our most recent shoots involved large, heavy industrial products. In film-days past, we would have probably used a seamless white background to shoot the product and spent a lot of time with product placement. The items to be photographed were round, between two and three feet in diameter, and each weighed 500 or more pounds. Five views were to be taken of each. That means that either the item would have to be moved on the background, or very carefully lifted by a hoist onto the background. We would have to be careful of marks left by the items where they rested on the paper, and some method of keeping such round items from rolling off the surface would have to be employed and kept out of sight.
So, pre-planning for the shoot is still important, even in this digital world. We opted to not use any type of manufactured background per se, but to only use white reflectors in strategic places to reflect light or add a highlight where we desired. Not using a background simplified the lighting somewhat in that a roll of paper or fabric didn’t block out the light from behind each item. We were going to photograph the items in the factory environment with the idea that we would isolate the image in Photoshop, and put it on another, more desirable background.
Lighting was done with our powerful studio strobes, and the modeling lights on the strobes gave us an idea of how the lighting would look in the finished image. We shot with soft-boxes to give a square look to our lighting in the highlights, as umbrellas just wouldn’t cut it here as these products were light-reflective. We planned to keep the camera stationary, move the lights as necessary, and rotate the product for the five different angles the customer required. Since the objects were circular, and we wanted to keep all the images the same size, we had to plan how to keep that proportionality. Think of a coin stood on edge. The widest the image would have to be is a little more than the diameter when one of the faces of the coin is toward you. When the edge of the coin is nearer to you, the size of the image could change, but we wanted to make them all the same size for the client’s ease of putting together several views of their product. Also, we had to be far enough away to assure depth of field when we were shooting the views that showed part of the object furthest away. Editing programs have great sharpening utilities, but a severely out-of-focus image cannot be brought back. You can easily blur parts of a sharp image and make it look good if needed for the effect, but the reverse isn’t the case. So all this had to be figured out in advance.
Now, let’s go on to the backgrounds for the images. Since the area or table on which the items were shot was in a fixed location, the background for each image (as produced by the camera) would have been a toolbox and other parts of the assembly plant. So we made it so that we and our client could “lift” the item off the background and put it on any other background or even a video. This is done by means of a “clipping path.” This is a very labor-intensive process. It means that I use a Photoshop tool to painstakingly trace out every edge of the product at anywhere from a 100% to a 300% enlargement. Once I have outlined every hole, edge, and cranny, I “select” the item alone and make a layer of it to put on other backgrounds. I include this clipping path with the image, so the client is able to do the same. Now, you may ask why I do so much work, as some of the editing programs have become pretty sophisticated and make an easier selection with other, faster tools. Well, the answer is this: I have used these editing tools, and sometimes there are errors in the program choosing what is part of the item and what is not. It may not be noticeable on a small jpeg on a website, but it will stick out like a sore thumb on a 30X40 enlargement at a trade show. That is what separates a pro from an amateur. Below are an original view of one of the products, and a few different backgrounds that I feel work well. Each background below was created in Photoshop, but other backgrounds could be used, as well. Remember that whichever one a client chooses, I include the clipping path so they can put it against another background if that is their need.
As you can see, the product image looks at home with any of the backgrounds. Keep this in mind as you plan your next shoot.
– Gary Silverstein
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Shooting a new product is something commercial product photographers face all the time. Sometimes the client has ideas about how it’s supposed to look, sometimes not. At times, it is easier to give the client the look he or she wants, if they spell it out, as opposed to “You’re the photographer. You come up with a great image. You’re the pro. That’s what you’re being paid for.” Or something to that effect.
The following product shoot fits the latter scenario more than the first:
I had three bottles of an inexpensive nail polish to shoot. The bottles contained glitter. I wanted to show the bottles to be more powerful than they are. After all, from my perspective, if one is seeing the nail polish in an ad, it should appear to be, well, more than nail polish. The bottles themselves were less than perfect. In a big money promo shoot, a photo stylist will sift through many bottles to find the perfect ones. Sometimes the manufacturer supplies the products, and sometimes the stylist has to go to several retail outlets to get the most perfect props for the image. In the case of the nail polish, it was three colors of glitter nail polish – a red, an orange, and a green. In this case, it was a low-budget shoot, meaning no stylist. Also, I found only one local outlet for the product, and they had a limited supply. So, I picked out the “best” bottles.
Next, I had to prepare them for the shoot. Cleaning dust and fingerprints off needs to be done. It is harder to remove these blemishes with editing software than cleaning the bottles physically. I used an anti-static cloth, and a can of Blow-Off to remove the aforesaid marks and dust.
I placed them on a translucent white square mounted over a studio strobe. This lights them from underneath and eliminates shadows. It also provides white light behind the clear parts of the glass. See setup image below, example 1.
After adjusting three studio strobes and the camera for the exposures I wanted, I then captured the image you see in example 2. As you can see, the color is way off due to the lighting changes, so color correction was in order.
With numerous changes made in Photoshop, including adding more glitter than I could get from lighting alone, I created the image in example 3. Glitter comes from adding a small light source to shine on the glitter. I used a bare bulb on one strobe and shut off the strobe part so the modeling light would act as a small light source (hence the yellowness in example 2). I increased the time exposure to allow that bulb to put enough light on the subject to appear bright against the instantaneous strobe light. I also used a “mine flashlight” (the green object to the left front of the nail polish bottles in example 1) to shine on the bottles. I additionally added small specs of glitter to the bottles with a “bling brush” in Photoshop in several colors. I had to add the colors and rectangles and shadowing to the background.
What if I told you that given the “You’re the photographer . . .” speech above that once the image was shot, there were several tries with internet communication about colors and backgrounds before the client was happy. Like I said, it is sometimes easier to make the client happy when they have a clear image of what they want, and they convey that idea to the photographer. Otherwise, it is a real challenge to guess what the client will like, and it may take several tries.
In the end, it is nice to see the finished product. But very few know how much work and dedication go into that finished product. Now you have an idea.
-Gary Silverstein
Example 1 - Click on image to enlarge.
Example 2 - Click on image to enlarge.
Example 3 - Click on image to enlarge.
Monday, July 5th, 2010
My partner and I frequently hear, “Professional photography is not in the budget.” Or, “We have no budget for photography in our marketing.” But the issue that keeps cropping up for me is that I think these companies lose sight of what is really important.
First, if a company is marketing itself, how many of them think that prospective clients really have time to read a lot of text about their company? Since most marketers know that time is of the essence, photographs say a lot more than words do in a short period of time. If the company markets itself with substandard images, e.g. underexposed, blurry, or just plain amateurish shots, what does the prospective client think? The client subconsciously thinks that what this company does is shoddy work and it is mirrored in the substandard images! The real problem is that the selling company sees gre at photography in the light of what it costs as an expense instead of what it costs for the bottom line. Why do you think Target spends so much money and time on those TV ads? Great photography translates to a fatter bottom line for Target.
The other day, I received a brochure in the mail from a local hospital. It had a number of what I would say are stock shots: happy, smiling people dealing with the hospital as patients or employees. To the untrained eye, this was acceptable. However, the only image of the hospital exterior itself was taken by someone who could best be described as a novice amateur. While the image appeared sharp, it appeared severely underexposed under the awning in the area of the front door. It looked for all the world like someone ran outside with their point-and-shoot camera and got an image to be used in the brochure. It was free, a no-cost shot. But, was it really? The people who took this shot were either unwilling or unable to get something better. As a pro, I would have taken several exposures of the entrance, at different exposure settings. This would have allowed me to cut the contrast and make the entranceway almost as light as the building by combining the shots to make a good one, either by HDR or masking techniques. The resultant image would have made the doorway a much more inviting look. Do you want to walk into a doorway in darkness? Hospitals are scary enough, without making the image appear foreboding. How many patients won’t contact this hospital, just because this image puts them off psychologically? If they lose just one, it will cost them more than hiring a good pro photographer, considering what healthcare costs these days. And I’ll wager they’ ve lost more than one client.
So, the end result is that while the hospital saved on not hiring a pro photographer, it cost them much more out of their bottom line. All because they forgot one thing. Good marketing isn’t about how much you spend on it, it’s about how much you get back from its execution.
If you are going to spend money on any marketing pieces, make it count. Go for the best paper, printing, graphics, and text. But above all, don’t stint on the photography. It can make or break the rest of what you are trying to do.
-Gary Silverstein
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