Can 'Professional' Photography take your company to new heights

In Quality Photography, it's what you don't see that gets results.

Why would you not use 'Professional' photography for your construction project?

One - I suspect the first answer is cost (Only because there is one other answer) See Two

Two - I can do it myself

 In best Bake-Off tradition.Here's one we made earlier

Lets deal with the first issue

One -  How much does it cost?

We get approached by 'Professional' Photographers who assume we dont do it ourselves or 'to help us out'. I have had rates of ￡350 per day plus expenses which is not unreasonable but far more than we usually charge.

Many of our clients charge out labour and my suspicion is that if they are charging ￡60 - ￡80 an hour then they may think we would charge the same       (I wish). 

So to answer question one - Not a clue?

We get asked for our 'rates' but every job is different so we try to price projects up on their merit. We recently photographed the cleaning of The Bank of England. It was a weekend and it actually didn't happen on the weekend that it should have done but it is the sort of project you would jump at, as we did. I wouldn't dare mention what we charged but it certainly wasn't expensive by anyone's standards.

We don't get that many enquiries on photography prices so we have to assume we are considered expensive even though we havent given a price.

This image for one of our clients secured a front page AND 4 page editorial

Two - I can do it myself.

This falls into several camps. Someone uses a camera phone. No problem but this produces a relatively low resolution and quite a bit of distortion. Uprights are generally not upright and horizons can be a touch wonky. Its only Social Media, does it matter?

Well, probably Yes. The whole ethos of Social Media is that it is going out into the great unknown, so you have no idea who might see it. The image is a lasting impression and in fairness even with a very basic bit of editing could be straightened up. There are plenty of free editing software packages on the internet.

The second camp is the enthusiast. Someone with a real camera and I don't always use our best cameras on site so I have come across clients with a good a camera as I have. To be honest, that is great because we want to see good images and the better the camera the better the picture!!

Well I used to have a very good set of golf clubs, let's just leave that particular argument there.

This is a great image taken on site by an operative who certainly knows how to take a photo. I think it was taken on a Blackberry. Its great but the file size couldn't be used in a brochure, magazine or in any PR. It really limits its use despite the photographic quality

However, how much does taking your own pictures cost. Sometimes one of your guys on site will take a few pictures and almost every project now has thousands of images, usually to prove a certain procedure has been done, great. Much of our work is to produce an accurate and actual record of the project. We very rarely use photoshop because that then wouldn't be a true record. We have on occasions digitally mopped up a coffee stain on a floor but much of our work is to produce a pretty accurate record of colour, texture, gloss level etc. So if you have someone on site taking images we can say the cost is very little.

However we came across one company who said we were too expensive as they do it in-house. Their MD had a morning off, visited site in his Range Rover, even in London, parked up at a meter, came on site took a few photos, had lunch and went back to the office. I don't think anyone wanted to add up the real cost here, especially the company owner.

This is only around 5MB in size but plenty big enough to print out in A3 or really zoom into so that the real craftsmanship can be seen. It would easily be OK for a magazine cover, in fact in some instances they look far better in real size than squeezed into a PC, let alone phone.

So far we haven't really outlined any positive reasons to use 'Professional' photography, so I will try a few in no particular order.

We could try insurance. We do of course carry the correct insurance cover in case we damage anything or anyone.

How about authorisation? We make every effort to make sure authorisation to take photographs is in place, where it is our responsibility AND we also check that authority to USE the photos is agreed. Quite genuine mistakes can happen of course but its probably not known that there is an, apparently legal, embargo by the owners of The Shard against using ANY images of the project i,e, inside, outside or materials for any marketing purpose to promote your services or products.

I am only guessing here but I suspect their lawyers don't deal in ￡ thousands so popping your project images on facebook or on your website may not be too smart. I am not sure how 'legal' that is but I don't want to be the one to find out.

So let's go onto Equipment. I am not anti camera phone and there are hundreds of websites with just camera phone images with absolutely stunning pictures, in every respect. We however use Nikon DSLR's and I will demonstrate why a bit later but these record high quality images which can be zoomed into without pixelating. this is very important for architects who want to zoom in.

Editing - I don't intend ploughing through 500 images in the hope of getting a dozen decent photographs but taking 100 on a project is not difficult or particularly time consuming. In the majority of cases we can use the images 'straight out of the camera' but there are occasions where wide angle lenses create a bit of distortion or maybe lighting wasn't ideal, where we may need to edit a few 'keepers'

Convenience - Many of our clients give us the project address and the project managers contact number. We do the rest, organise the time and date and in some cases organise the authorisation. As we have been doing photography for many years, especially in London, we have contacts with Land Securities, Crown Estates and some of the major institutions. It is never a formality but at least we know who to ask, especially as London is still on high alert for terrorism (Although if you ever speak to Mark Styles, MD of Thomann-Hanry he might tell you about us photographing The Bank of England). Basically you let us have the project details and we get on with it. We have one project in Ludgate Hill which we have now photographed for FOUR different clients. We are now on first name terms and almost popping in for coffee.

Publicity - Now we are getting to the nitty gritty. We have thousands of viewings and visitors to our website and facebook pages and we always post our photos on there. Front Elevation have 2,000 followers on Linkedin representing the great and the good in UK Construction. We quite often post two or three images from the same project over several weeks so with a few Comments and Likes can be kept current for quite a while.

Meta-Data. We are getting a bit technical here but we can pop in tags within the photograph data so that anyone searching, lets say Westfield, Stratford in Google images might well come up with a photograph of your company putting up a Steel Canopy or your company cleaning the floor in said destination.

I want to give you one last example of what has happened with one client, which would not have happened with a camera phone.

 We were approached by an Access Machine distributor who had just sold a new machine to a client and felt it would be a good idea to get some photographs. We spoke to the client who was letting out the machine overnight to be used for cleaning a large window in a shopping development. It turns out that this machine has a series of unique features which enables this window to be cleaned which was previously deemed inaccessible. We carried out the photography (overnight) and secured an afternoon shoot elsewhere from the same client. Again at a very reasonable cost.

The machine was fully logo'd with the hire company name, website and telephone number, absolutely un-missable, especially as we were obviously focussing on the logo. We took the images, sorted and edited them before sending over to the client. Because these images are high resolution and were deemed 'pretty good' by the manufacturers, one of them is going in the manufacturers sales catalogue to be distributed throughout the UK. Now the image of their machine and full contact details, plus our details as photographers, will  be printed out in hard copy and no doubt in pdf and circulated throughout the industry.

That is what you don't see but that sort of publicity is priceless. (We also threw in an A4 Project Sheet Case Study on the project for them.)

So remind me again, exactly how much are you saving by doing it yourself?

Our photography services are not expensive and who knows what might happen. The cover of the Rolling Stone might still be up for grabs!!

At least contact us for a price, let us explain what we can do for you THEN decide if we are expensive.

Paul Scott

[email protected]

www.frontelevation.co.uk

I would have popped a few more images in but Linkedin rather lost the plot