Following on from last weeks Commissioning a Pro Photographer post, we have the interview itself.

Here’s Camilla Stoddart in the witness stand, ready for questioning…

Hi Camilla, thanks for making the time for this interview. Can we start with a brief run down on your experience behind the lens?

“As far as experience goes, I did go to a swanky top London Art School (St Martins) but I didn’t study photography. I am all self taught, and really believe in getting out there, shooting as much as you can and rolling with it. Sure there are lots of technical things that I should know, but over the years I am slowly teaching myself out of trial and error and reaping the benefits, making mistakes, learning from them and experimenting. I find this has helped me grow into a more creative and free-thinking photographer.”

Nice. So a lot of people fancy themselves as a bit of a photographer. Tell me, why should someone commission your services rather than shoot it personally?

“This is where I try not to sound like a ponsy photog right? I really believe that you have an eye or you don’t. As harsh as this sounds, I think it is very true. A singer is born with a good voice, as much as an illustrator is born able to draw. You can teach yourself how to become better at these things, and learn how to get the skills, but to truly thrive in your field I think you have to have natural born talent. Having never been taught how to shoot photos, I feel that I have developed my own style, taste and way of seeing. There are many people out there who can take photos for sure, but to be able to get an image ‘that speaks a thousand words’, takes more than just point and shoot. Told you I was going to sound ponsy…!”

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With the best intentions of continuous posting we began a photography series last February. Blogging plans often seem to elude us mid-series, but never-the-less the final posts in this series are almost complete.

It’s actually a good thing we waited to write this post, as we’ve since performed a fun social media project for our friend, and the interviewee in this post, Camilla over at Whiteroom Pictures.

WRP blog project

Camilla was in the process of re-designing her web site and wanted to develop her brand within the social media world. With a strong Facebook following already, this was easily done with a Wordpress blog. We designed the blog to fit alongside her new web site with very similar aesthetics and layout, but just a few subtle differences. We also created a blogging strategy to assist her as time goes on.

For more information about the project we performed look out for the case study, coming soon on Tactic Group.

In the meantime, let’s get back to the topic at hand…

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Following on from our last post on the different methods for sourcing photographic material, this week we’re bringing you Tactical Thinking’s 5 best web-based photography resources.

As a group of individuals we’ve been creating and applying web imagery for quite some time now and during the course of our web careers we’ve come across many different image resources. In fact, there are so many to choose from that this post was actually much harder to write than we first anticipated.

Gone are the days when you would send away for a stock photography CD and hope they had what you needed. Now it’s simply; ‘find a site that caters to your needs, sign up and start downloading’. What an easy life.

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The year was 1993 and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released a new web browser called Mosaic. This wasn’t exactly front-page news to many, but in certain geeky circles it was a watershed moment.

The breakthrough of Mosaic was its ability to display images embedded on pages (rather than in a separate window) – paving the way for the web to metamorphasise from a black-and-white, Times New Roman world into the colourful, visually-rich medium it is today.

Fast-forward 15 years—through the rise of e-commerce, dot-com boom and bust, the blogoshpere, web 2.0 and the social-web—and good imagery is one of the most important aspects of success on the web.

If you are on the web to do business high-quality, relevant photography goes a long way to promote your products or services to potential customers. Along with killer content it can persuade and influence, turning visitors into buyers.

However, one of the trickiest (and often most time consuming) decisions marketers have to make when producing a new publication, whether it be print or web based, is the sourcing and selecting of photographic material. Of course, this becomes even more problematic when it’s a specific ‘niche’ that you’re promoting.

Not that winter tourism can be described as ‘niche’, but the particular image your business is looking to portray within this industry may be just that.

Finding appropriate shots is the first and, in most cases, the hardest step. There’s just so many considerations; quality, file size, colour scheme, cost, legalities of use, the list goes on.

Many of our readers will have come across at least one of these problems before. So we’ve decided it time the Tactical Thinking team bring you a series on how to source, select and utilise photographic images. To kick it off, this first post discusses the different methods of sourcing photographs and the pros and cons of each. (more…)