That’s a good question, but to tell you the truth, I haven’t come to a real conclusion on that yet… On the one hand, it’s all the rage and you’re just not considered “hip” unless you tweet. On the other, I just don’t know if it’s really that useful, from a promotional point of view. The same thing could be said of photo-blogging, but at least with blogging, there’s the ability to show your pictures. With twitter though, there are no pictures to show-off your work. Not being able to display your photography is a real negative for a professional photographer’s promotional needs, but there are some advantages, to go along with all the disadvantages.

As I see it, here are the advantages of disadvantages of twitter for professional photographers. I’d be interested in your opinions.

Advantages of twitter:

Reading tweets – Gain information about your clients – If you choose to follow your clients or perspective clients, there are things you can learn that you can use in your relationship with them or in your marketing efforts. You can learn about new clients, new employees, awards that the client has received, and many other things that may come in useful to help develop a relationship that might in time, be to your advantage.

Reading tweets – Grow as a photographer – If you choose to follow people in the photography industry, you may learn about new techniques or trends that may affect you or your photography. It’s good to keep up on that stuff.

Writing tweets – Spread info about your work – The old saying, “out of sight, out of mind” may come into play here. It works on the same principle as keeping in touch my email. It’s soft sale. You’re hoping that all those little tweets will happen to remind a client that you’re still alive and that you still do some damn good photography and there might be a time when a project lands on the client’s desk just as you’ve bragged about doing such a good job on another project. Bingo… Maybe that client should give you a call! Being at the right time at the right place, is a major advantage of tweeting.

Writing tweets – Directing clients to your web page – In my opinion, my main objective in tweeting is to get clients and potential clients to my web page. The key is to figure out how to guide the right people to the site so that they can see how wonderful a photographer I am. Tweeting is one more way to get that to happen.

Writing tweets – Developing a relationship with clients – After you’ve read your clients’ tweets, you have an opportunity to act or respond to those tweets in a way that helps you develop a relationship with those clients. You can make friends through twitter and people tend to like working with their friends.

Writing tweets – You look “hip” – Okay, I guess using the word “hip” illustrates that I’m not… but to appear so, I tweet, therefore, I am. (or at least I hope people think so… :+)

Disadvantages of twitter:

Time! It takes time to find people to follow and it takes time to read and write the tweets. It takes time to do all that stuff and it might be better spent doing other things like shooting for your portfolio or taking your portfolio from client to client, attempting to get more work.

For me, the verdict is still out. I’m not sure that tweeting makes sense for my commercial photography business, but for now, I’ll give it a chance. I’m willing to dedicate some time to it, but I’m not really sure if it’s worth the effort. So as long as I have the time to experiment with tweeting, I’ll continue to give it a try and don’t worry, I’ll report back to you. And besides, I really like being “hip”. :+)

Tags: Business, Social Marketing, Twitter

In my quest for discovering what makes a headshot look like a headshot and not an ordinary portrait, I’ve come to the conclusion that shooting horizontal helps… If you shoot a face really tight and vertical it tends to look like a portrait,but if you shoot the same face, lit the same way, horizontal, I think it tends to come off more as a headshot. I mean lets face it (pun…) a picture of a face looks like a face, and it’s tough tell sometimes what the photo was taken for. You would think that headshots were portraits, but you and I know that they have a certain look and I want to know how to create that look. I do realize that not every photographer’s headshot has this classical headshot look, but enough do that I recognize that there is such a look, and hopefully you do to. I’m going to continue to work on the subject and I’ll let you know what else I learn.

This one looks more like a headshot to me… They’re both nice pictures, but the horizontal reads a little more “commercial”.

Don’t you agree?

Tags: Headshots

One thing that many headshot photographers often do, that I can’t bring myself to emulate, is lighting from below. To me, the main light should come from above camera axis. Maybe I’m being old fashion, but I have to draw the line somewhere… :+)

So here are two different treatments of the same shot. The first image is pretty much a raw exposure, with the exception of a little exposure adjustment, which I did to makeup for slight oversight on my part. Actually, I’ve been getting a little sloppy with my exposures. When I’m shooting “raw”, I know that all you have to be is close, and because of that, I’ve been a little slack on making sure that the exposures are correct. I blame this on the fact that I’m trying to pay more attention to the people and less to the camera, but when you’ve been in business as long as I have, you should be able to do both… I’m just getting sloppy.

Raw file with only a little exposure adjustment

File after the application of "the headshot" look - Notice how much "cleaner" and "high-key" the photo looks.

The second image is the same picture with a few Camera-Raw tweaks. The major tweaks are:

I increased the brightness a little and to compensate for that, I needed to drop the exposure a little. The brightness control seems to expand the exposure on the right-hand side of the histogram more that on the left side. What that does is raise the mid-tones toward the highlight side. That seems to help with the high / bright skin tones that modeling agencies like some much.

Besides the brightness control, I find that the “clarity” control really helps to clear up the complexion of the models. Models can’t have zits, ya know… :+) So when the “clarity” is lessened and the brightness is increased, the resulting photo is more model-like. At lease that’s what I’ve come up with so far. But I’m not done experimenting. Stay tuned…

BTW – I also increased the “vibrancy” control too. I don’t know if this really contributes to the “headshot look”, but I liked it in this photo. Actually, I’ve seen some nice model or actor headshots that are either B&W or de-saturated quite a bit.

Here are the two control pannels and the differences in the settings

Tags: Headshots