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How Commercial Photography Benefits Corporate Marketing

Commercial Portrait Photography is essential. There is no doubt about it. Corporate headshots are amazing tools that are used to represent who you are, not what you do. If you establish a reputable business portrait, you can instill the values of quality with your potential customers.

Corporate Headshots

Professional corporate headshot

You have numerous studios to choose from. You can set up a mini studio yourself and make a professional portrait in no time, but if you want the very best results you should plan on hiring a professional headshot photographer.

For corporate headshots, you need to make sure that you’re using proper equipment, adequate lighting, with appropriate lenses. And you’ll want to ensure that the images match your company’s brand and style.

Corporate Meeting and Event Photos

company holiday party portrait — Holiday party portrait

Corporate meetings and events can make for some good photos that paint a fun, dynamic, and strict picture of your company. It is important to photograph these events accurately. An event management company needs to be very proficient and smart about how they handle photos of these events.

Planning corporate meetings has never been a simple task but planning it the right way could lead not only to some fantastic portrait photography but to some improved business practices.

Corporate Offices

Almost all your corporate portrait photography needs are going to be taken care of in your offices. You need to know how to make the office a fantastic photography place. To make sure that you always have a proper photo option, you can utilize the services of a mobile studio. Either hire someone to do it or do it yourself.

William Morton Visuals photographs business portraits on location

Bringing professional lighting, tripods, lenses, and cameras is a great way to turn any place into a quick and efficient photo studio. The only thing left to do is posing, and that is best done on the spot.

Corporate Parties, Outings, and Retreats

A UoA rep greets a NACE member at the BP Career Fair — Event photography is about people.

If you’re working hard or hardly working, it’s crucial to capture the experience of all corporate parties, outings, and retreats. These are not only good team-building opportunities but also prove themselves to give great photo options.

Photographing your parties and outings is integral to painting a picture of your business as a fun, modern, and progressive one. Numerous different firms offer their outing and party service to companies, such as this one.

Commercial photography

Commercial photography includes, amongst several other specialties, the following:

Food Photography

There are numerous different ways you can improve your food photography game. Soliciting the services of a food stylist, a professional photographer, and a prop specialist is a great place to start.

Food photography can make use of models to demonstrate the qualities of the food product. Finding a model for your food photography is as simple as contacting your local modeling agency.

Product Photography

The only way you can paint an accurate picture of your product on your e-commerce website is by giving it a good photo. A good photo paints a picture of reliability, trustworthiness, and quality. The product is mostly judged by the way it looks. You can’t touch or feel the product through the internet, so manipulating the visuals is a fantastic way to present it.

However, stores can have numerous products, and photographing them can prove to be very expensive. DIY-ing this method is far simpler and cheaper and takes only a fraction of the cost.

Interior Photography

Interior Photography is a science, and takes a lot of time to create. Time of day can be critical in many locations, adding (or minimizing) daylight as appropriate. That nice sunset shot of a building can only be taken at one time of day, and all other images must be scheduled before or after that key shot. Some spaces may need morning light or late afternoon light, depending on elements such as windows and what side of a building a space may be on. It’s important to allow for these variables.

Industrial Photography

Industrial photography, while not glamorous, is very important, fun, and challenges. Taking good industrial photos can be a challenge. Inspiration is key, and you need some excellent industrial photo subjects to make a good photo.

Safety is the number one priority when it comes to this type of photography!

Some common subjects in industrial photography are:

Welders working
Processing plants
Shipyard and factory workers
Gas terminals
Nuclear reactors
Machinery
Assembly lines

Brochures and Catalogue Photography

Brochures and catalogs are not that challenging to photograph but are essential to document. Marketing tools are very important, though! You need to keep a couple of things in mind when doing so to best showcase your skills and paint the picture of the catalog and brochure in a fun and friendly manner.

Benefits of Commercial Photography

Corporate and commercial portrait photography together gives a better visual presentation for the visitors.

Enhances your corporate image

They improve your corporate image, and these days, image is everything! Be it on your website or any marketing collaterals, good corporate image speaks more than words.

Be Active on Social Media

A fantastic way to enhance your corporate image is by utilizing the services of social media. Look at what Wendy’s has done with a single twitter account. With their new laid back and modern perspective on social media, they have documented the growth of 10% in a couple of months.

You need to get into this. Create an engaging conversation about your service or products, be active in your community, and you’re going to be a social media professional in no time.

Increases your brand awareness

Raising your brand awareness is integral to creating a long-lasting impression on your potential customers. Awareness is everything, and you should work to improve it in any way you can. Commercial photography is a fantastic tool that works for this like a charm. There are numerous ways to do this, such as this one.

Improves your brand eminence

Consider hiring a professional to photograph your team at events to enhance your brand eminence. You can post these pictures on your official website for better promotion.

Increases Sales & ROI

Innovative photographs drive consumers to your product or service, thus increasing ROI and sales. Sales and ROI are significant and should be improved in any aspect available.

Conclusion

While pictures and good commercial photographs might sound expensive, you can’t afford to have shoddy ones. Another important facet to highlight here is the photo editing which can add life to your images. Hire a professional photographer to improve your photos, and you will reap the innumerable benefits of excellent commercial photography, and get your business on the next level, while also gaining an edge on the competition.

Stock Photography – Can You Really Afford It?

Why Use Stock Photography?

For many years advertisers have taken advantage of lower pricing for generic stock photography for their marketing efforts, whether for print advertising or for website use. Professional photography costs money, and stock photography is cheap. But there’s a dirty little secret in the use of stock. You may have no control over who else is using the same image to represent their company. This can lead to customer confusion and marketing embarrassment. Just ask the marketing departments at Dell and Gateway computers.

In the earlier days of stock photography it was harder to track who else was using an image. In one particular season, both Dell computers and Gateway computers selected stock images for their back to school advertising. Unfortunately they selected images of the same model, in the same wardrobe, in front of the same building, from the same photo shoot. And the ads ran at the same time! It somewhat waters down your advertising message when the same girl appears to endorse your competition!

How To Use Stock Photography

So how do you avoid this type of embarrassment? There are two primary ways. One method would be using rights-managed (RM) images rather than royalty-free (RF) images, and the other would be to use custom photography.

Royalty-Free Images

RF images are by far the cheapest. They are sold to anyone and everyone, and you have no idea who else may be using that image. You may use an online source like Tin Eye (https://tineye.com/) to search for other websites hosting your same image. Alternately you may use Google’s Image search to look for the same thing. That will give you an idea of how many times that image is being used online, although neither may know of all uses of an image.

Rights-Managed Images

Alternately you may purchase RM images, which come at a higher price. The benefit of RM is that you can ensure that either no one uses that image for a set length of time, or at least that no one else in your industry uses it. Pricing varies based on how much exclusivity you want and for how long. This is usually considered to be the best compromise between bulk RF images and custom photography.

The Safest Solution: Custom Photography

The other option would be to contract custom photography by a professional photographer. There are numerous advantages to this option, although it will come at a higher price tag. You have total control over all elements of an image – colors, style, your own colors or branding, and more importantly the usage. A professional photographer can create images using your own employees, or models you select, and can guarantee that only you have the right to use those images. Further, the models can be contracted to not work (or have their images used) with a competing company. Recent advertising showing the former “Can you hear me now” guy representing a competing telecom beautifully highlights this problem.

What message does this give your customers when a (now) well-known spokesman leaves your company to go to the competition?

Custom photography can and will reinforce your brand, and over time build a familiarity with which your customers can relate. Is it worth it? Only your customers and accountant can tell you that, but (in my humble opinion) images that are created specifically for your company are going to resonate more, which should lead to a greater ROI for you and your bottom line. To learn how custom photography can help your company give Morton Visuals a call at (888) 239-6213. We’ll be happy to brainstorm with you and your marketing department.

Look Your Best For Your Business Headshots

William Morton Visuals photographs busy executives in San Diego — William Morton photographs investment executives in downtown San Diego

Shooting professionally since 1991, William Morton has specialized in commercial and corporate photography for the last 8 years. Now relocated from San Diego to north Dallas, Morton Visuals offers professional business headshots in our Farmers Branch photography studio or in the convenience of your own offices.

Morton Visuals wants to ensure that you look your very best for your headshot session. To that end, we consulted with professional Makeup Artist Mary Erickson, a 30-year veteran in the world of commercial print and advertising. Recently retired, Mary now focuses on her highly successful professional makeup store. Her recommended tips are listed below. (The photographer’s comments are added in italics.)

Bring shirts with a collar as well as different necklines.
Women should bring at least 6 different tops to choose from. Men should bring several (3-4) different shirts.
No sleeveless shirts for headshots, they can make the arms look big and distracts from the face.
No solid white. If you’re very light-skinned you may want to avoid solid black.
Solid colors are ideal; stay away from busy patterns and busy prints. For men, a dress shirt often gets “scrunched” under a suit jacket or sports coat. If the shirt is striped or patterned, retouching those wrinkles will be virtually impossible.
Bring a lint brush or lint roller, fuzz will show on dark colors.
Make sure your clothes are pressed and clean – very few photographers have irons or extra time. Photo retouching on soiled or wrinkled clothes will usually cost extra. Bring your wardrobe to the shoot on hangers.
Stay away from clothes with big buttons or ornaments that shine and compete for attention.
If you wear earrings they should be small studs. Keep jewelry at a minimum, because anything flashy will distract from you.
Men should be clean-shaven, and a recent haircut is recommended.
If desired, we can recommend a professional makeup artist to ensure that your makeup is flawless.

Remember, whether your headshots are for your social media presence or your professional resume, you want to present your very best image to your prospective clients or employers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below.

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The Importance of Event Lighting

As a longtime professional event photographer, I am regularly hired to cover corporate events of varying scale, in most every type of venue – and under every type of event lighting. A large stage with multiple spotlights and huge projection screens on each side makes an impressive presentation, but just as often I find myself in a dimly lit hotel ballroom or a small meeting room with only recessed lighting. Sometimes the speaker will request that no flash photography be permitted, as it can be distracting – particularly if the speaker is looking at a teleprompter. But it’s only fair to advise my client on the effect of their lighting choices, particularly since it’s been ordered in advance and already set when I arrive. I’d like to introduce a couple of considerations for those organizing events.

keynote speaker - Event photography by William Morton Visuals

Event photography by William Morton Visuals.

Let’s examine two scenarios, beginning with a stage presentation. With a larger stage presentation there are typically two ways to light the stage. One possibility (in some venues) is to use ceiling mounted lighting, sometimes permanently mounted. The advantage is that the venue may have fine-tuned their lights to wash the stage evenly. However, the risk is that the lighting may be at too acute of an angle to properly light the person on stage, particularly in rooms with very high ceilings. Lighting that is too high will give that midday sun look, with the speaker’s eyes being in shadow and looking like dark holes. See the example image at left. Adding flash can help mitigate that issue, but that will only work for closer shots from right in front of the stage. And not all speakers like having a flash go off repeatedly right in front of them.

The alternative is to bring in additional spotlights on trees or trusses. This provides the ability to get the lights down lower so that it can illuminate the eyes of anyone on stage, particularly if on a tree. See the example image at right – the folks at Isagenix and CG Creative Studios do this exceptionally well. (See photo at right.) Trusses will do this if they aren’t too close to the stage, and they allow you to spread the light evenly. The drawback to this option is the placement of the lighting in relation to seating for guests. If the layout of the event permits it, I highly recommend this option.

One other consideration is backlighting. Speakers are often in dark suits or dresses and standing in front of black curtains. Photographing them from the front makes them blend in to the background. Note the photo at right. Although the profile shot makes the speaker stand out, you can see that he has no backlighting to separate him from the background. In the image of the speaker at the podium at the top of this article you can clearly see great lighting on his face and rimlighting behind. This helps separate him from the background in photos — in my opinion, a great improvement. (The crew at the San Diego Convention Center know how to do it!)

A good question to ask your A/V team is whether or not they will be able to make the stage lighting comparable to the projection screen(s) that may be on either side of the stage. Similar illumination levels will be easier on the audience’s eyes, and allow your photographer to catch images that show the speaker and the screen to which they’re referring. See the example at left. If they are able to use daylight-balanced lights, or gel the lights to be closer to the color of the projection screen, it will help. And I love it when the lighting engineer can tell me the color temperature of their lighting!

The second scenario is a meeting room or ballroom, usually lit with only downward facing recessed (or “can”) lights. This lighting creates hot spots directly under a light and comparatively dark areas in between lights. Anyone standing under a light will have the same dark shadows in their eyes and usually a bright (overexposed) forehead and nose. Definitely not a flattering look! Since this is typical for events with many breakout sessions in individual hotel meeting rooms it usually isn’t cost efficient to bring in lighting in all those rooms. But your photographer should be able to provide a well-placed flash to tightly illuminate the speaker without irritating all the guests. See the examples alongside this paragraph.

One other thing to be wary of is the popular colored light wash on the stage background, particularly if you have a light colored stage background. These lights are too often too bright, and will cause blown-out highlights in your event photos. More often than not the frontal lighting on the stage isn’t bright enough to compete with these colors, so a photographer isn’t able to expose for both ends of the spectrum. Exposing for the backlit subject will blow out the background, and exposing to show the color in the background will yield a silhouetted subject. If you are planning on this please let your photographer know – he or she may want to bring in additional flash to help light a dark subject on stage.

Since I’m being hired to cover an event it’s safe to say that the images captured are important, and will likely be used to advertise (and attract potential attendees to) next year’s event. Should your hire Morton Visuals to handle your event photography I would be more than happy to help you coordinate your lighting with the A/V contractor at your venue. After all, it’s in my best interests to do everything I can to help us capture great images of your event. Please feel free to email us with any questions, or feel free to post any comments here. And of course the sharing of this article is greatly appreciated!

The Acquisition of Photography for Your Business

In our previous post we discussed the value of photography. Today we will talk about about how you can acquire quality photography for your business.

If you need images for your business’ use, you can follow one of three avenues:

Take your own snapshot – Do It Yourself
Use a stock photo
Hire a professional photographer to create custom images (which only you will have)

The type of imagery needed and your budget can help determine which is the best course of action, of course, but there are a few considerations to keep in mind as you make decisions for your business.

Snapshots vs Professional Photography

Hopefully everyone can see a clear difference between the images above. The first image looks more like a dreaded driver’s license photo, or the “Employee of the Month” you sometimes see posted in a grocery store. The second image is clearly a studio portrait showing a person “in their environment,” and illustrates what they do.

The examples below show the view an audience member may get at an event versus what a professional event photographer can capture.

Stock Photography

Many businesses consider stock photography to be an affordable option, as stock photography prices have dropped significantly over the last few years. If you want a generic image of a telephone or a computer, or a random customer service operator, then stock photography may work. However you won’t likely find images of your employees, and it’s even less likely you’ll find images of your management team. Likewise with any public relations events – stock images won’t be of your event, or your people.

Stock photography is also pretty recognizable. It usually features ridiculously good looking models in perfectly pressed clothing, always in solid (and usually bright) colors. For this reason it’s less believable. And recent studies have shown that customers are 1/3 more likely to purchase based on an ad showing a real person rather than a stock model.

Stock photography is, by definition, stock – meaning anyone and everyone has access to use the same images. This can cause confusion, and embarrassment, when the same model shows up in ads for your competition. Don’t think it can happen? Check out this article on Stock Photography from the American Society of Media Photographers. It’s not just the small businesses – even giants like Dell and Gateway can use the same model in the same outfit and the same setting for Back To School ads during the same month. Oops!!

The girl pictured above is one of the most popular stock models in the world. See just a few examples of how often her image is used in advertising and you can start to see some of the confusion that could arise if your competitor is showing that she “switched to X brand” after your ad had run.

Hire a Professional Photographer

A professional photographer can ensure that you have high quality images customized to your exact needs, and images that only you will have. We have previously shared 10 Reasons to Hire a Professional Photographer, which is a great start. Key points are that a pro will have the experience and the means to ensure that your photo shoot is successful and meets your needs, on time and on budget. The pro knows how to make you look your very best, both photographically and with professional retouching.

The photography portfolios on this site show a variety of photography now available in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, including commercial photography, corporate portraits, and event photography . Another valuable resource that we recommend for photographic talent nationwide as the American Society of Media Photographers’ Find-A-Photographer database. The ASMP site allows you to search by geographic location as well as photographic specialty – and features many of the best professional photographers in the country.

Have any questions? Please feel free to give Morton Visuals a call (toll-free) at 888-239-6213, or email us. We’re happy to help! Have any comments or suggestions? Please feel free to comment here. And of course please feel free to share this article on your social media!

The Value of Photography to Your Business

I recently had an opportunity to do a presentation on business photography for my Farmers Branch Chamber of Commerce, and I decided to focus on the value of photography for the business owner. In the first of two parts below we’ll talk about the value of, the need for, and the types of photography relevant to most businesses.

How Prevalent are Photos?

Some basic numbers, which will be quickly outdated (if they aren’t already):

Facebook has 1.5 billion users, 2/3 of whom use it daily
56.5% of the US population are on Facebook
Facebook has over 400 billion photos, with 400 million being added every day
Every day 1.8 billion images are posted online
Instagram has amassed 400 million users, 40 billion photos, and adds 80 million photos every day
Instagram has grown so quickly that Facebook just bought it for $1 billion.
YouTube has more visits each day than Facebook, and it’s the #2 search engine in the world (behind Google)

[Update 2/10/2017: Some new, updated stats are available. Internet Trends 2017. Stats & Facts in the U.S. and Worldwide]

Why Are Photos So Popular?

Life moves at a much faster pace today than in decades past. Our shorter attention spans are likely born of our information overload. The advent and pervasiveness of smartphones and mobile devices have changed the way we not only receive information but also how we communicate. We want immediate gratification. We don’t want to leave voice messages, so we text – allowing responses even if someone is in class or in a business meeting where they can’t talk. Business is now about information availability and speed (and ease) of transactions. And of course “a picture is worth 1,000 words.” I believe that this last point is the key. We don’t have – or take – the time to read anymore, but rather take in our information in imagery. Thus the rise of the Facebook meme.

Types of Photography

More to the point of the presentation, there are many types of photography of benefit to businesses.

Portraits represent people
Advertising represents a product or brand
Marketing and P.R. represent events

A few of the types of photography offered by William Morton Visuals.

What Can a High Quality Image Do For You?

Put a face to the name
Change you from an impersonal corporation to a friendly neighbor
Show your style (see our prior blog post on Does Your Image Represent Your Company Culture)
Personalize your business
Illustrate what you do and how you do it

Other benefits include:

Highlighting key moments of events for marketing next year’s event
Public relations: awards presentations, community support events
Social media content – build your brand
Entertainment, particularly at events
Take-home advertising for ongoing marketing

Do images affect sales?

According to MDG Advertising, 67% of online shoppers rated high quality images as being “very important” to their purchase decision, which was slightly more than “product specific information,” “long descriptions,” and “reviews & ratings.”

Recently Sports Illustrated magazine released their annual swimsuit edition with three different covers – and they weren’t the first to do this. The magazine industry well knows how important the cover image is to that month’s sales on the newsstands. National Geographic photography is famous for the power of their images, a driving force in their success.

Images are king in social media. Aside from the fact that more and more social media channels are primarily image-based (Instagram, Snapchat, 500px, Flickr, etc.), statistics show that even text-based social media channels show a significantly higher ROI with the inclusion of photography. Adweek reports that SHIFT measured 5 times the engagement on Twitter postings with pictures vs text-only tweets.

In our follow-up blog post we’ll discuss the acquisition of photography and how important that process is to businesses. Until then, please feel free to share this article via social media, and add any comments here!

White Seamless Doesn’t Have to Be Plain or Boring

Of all the photography commercial photographers shoot, the white seamless background is the most common. It’s definitely a fashion photography mainstay. A white cove, or “cyc” (short for cyclorama) in a larger studio, is booked at our north Dallas rental photo studio 20 times more often than any other studio, and provided seamless papers in varying colors are only used about 10% of the time. Why is this so popular? Quite simply because it’s easier to drop out the background in your images if you are dropping the subject into a print layout. Catalogs and the like will often feature text wrapped around a subject, and current design trends favor a subject blending in with the page rather than being constrained by a box. Likewise a baseboard on a background wall would be distracting when the focus of an image is on a model or clothing.

Since fashion and catalogs often show an expressionless model “just standing there,” as some describe it, some feel that a white seamless background looks plain. There’s no color, no texture, and essentially nothingness. If the photographer doesn’t light the white background it can look like a shade of gray (as pictured here). This example shows the model “in a box,” which a designer may not want in the layout as compared to the example above. But either way you still have a subject. And a subject doesn’t have to “just stand there.” You can always concentrate on bringing out the model’s personality and featuring it.

Below are a few examples of images we’ve captured on a plain, boring white seamless background. The background of these samples have been adjusted so as to not “float in midair,” so that you can see the image frames. Adjusting for the effect of the top image (of the two young models) in this post is easily achieved in processing. As you can see, once the photographer has built rapport with the subject or subjects, they can collaborate to create some fun, interesting images.

What can you think of doing with a “plain white background?” Anything that ties in with your job, activities, or interests – or anything that is “you” – can help make your images much more dynamic. And dynamic images sell!

Have some ideas? Leave a comment! Want to talk about how Morton Visuals can help you look dynamic? Give us a call! We’d love to show you what we can do.

Are The Profoto B1s Really That Good?

Having worked with the new Profoto B1 strobes for a short while, I’ve finally challenged myself to ask this question. The B1 brings a lot to the table – self-contained monolights, remote control, 500 watt-seconds of power, and TTL control. Not to mention the expansive Profoto lighting modification capabilities. But how well do they work in the real world?

Being somewhat “old school,” I still prefer to meter my lighting to place my light sources in desired ratios. I’ve been doing this with the B1 lights as well, but recently decided to test the TTL accuracy of the equipment in which I’ve invested. The below portrait of a patient and accommodating Nancy Grab is an example.

Executive portrait of Nancy Grab for Five Star Professionals' feature — Nancy Grab, Union Bank mortgage banker

After placing my main light in a 45” white umbrella I added my hair light with a 20-degree grid. I set the Profoto Air Remote to TTL and fired my first test shot. To my amazement this is the result I saw. I was able to start working with my subject and concentrate on expressions and angles that would flatter her rather than fussing with lighting and interfering with her workday.

TIP: With the Air Remote and the B1 lights, you can take your first shot in TTL mode. Then when you switch the remote to Manual mode, the Profoto system remembers the power setting of the lights it just fired. So you can easily adjust individual groups up or down to tweak the balance to your liking from your initial TTL exposure. In the above example I didn’t make any further adjustments, and merely switched to MAN and left it there for the remainder of the shoot.

How important is this? In my world, I photograph executives and groups of business people and time is of the essence. I don’t want to keep a CEO or a $400/hour attorney waiting for me to get my lights right. So this system has helped me greatly reduce my setup time, and being able to adjust the lighting from the camera (while I’m shooting) helps me get the busy executive in and out so that they can get back to doing what they do best. Not having to look for electrical outlets (and then tape down extension cords and power cords) is another huge time saver.

On that note, and in the spirit of the season, this final image was a portrait of a man who is quite busy right now. I had the opportunity to photograph him with the employees of the Omni San Diego and a hundred very excited children. He definitely appreciates efficiency!

Two Profoto B1s set up to light Santa — Lighting setup for Santa — no wires!

Santa is ready to greet children at the Omni San Diego — Santa is ready

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and best wishes for a joyous holiday season!

Does Your Image Represent Your Company Culture?

I’ve recently had an opportunity to work with a client photographing a number of different companies for a magazine awards feature. As I met and interacted with the executives and their staff I noticed significant differences in their personalities. Of course the executives and the staff had different personas, but the collective “vibe” is what struck me in particular. Since the companies were all financial planners and wealth managers they all had a sense of seriousness and professionalism. But a few stood out, which led me to the question: does your image represent your company culture?

Below are two different companies and their group portraits. Aside from the differences in offices and demographics, each group definitely had its own style.

office group portrait of Labrum Wealth Management — Jason Labrum and staff

executive group portrait of Epstein and White Retirement Income Solutions — The office of Epstein and White

On the left is Jason Labrum of Labrum Wealth Management, a Carlsbad-based firm. His team exemplifies modern, hip, casual and comfortable. Their single-story open office space reinforces this progressive style, and they project a team environment. On the right is David Epstein and Bradley White’s La Jolla-based office of Epstein and White Retirement Income Solutions. Their individual offices are located in a high-rise opposite University Town Center, and they exude an independent, professional and traditional environment. Their more formal style is apparent in their boardroom portrait.

As you think about your own company’s culture, does your office image match the personalities of your staff? Do you have individual portraits that showcase each valuable member of your team? What’s your style? If you aren’t projecting the image that you want for your company, find out how Morton Visuals can help you! Comments are welcome.

The Most Important Thing to Show at Your Conference

As a professional event photographer, I have opportunities to see (and photograph) a wide range of conventions, conferences, awards banquets, and other corporate events. Over the years I’ve noticed distinct differences in each event – what’s featured and emphasized, what’s offered in terms of entertainment and activities, and what attendees do during the event. When a convention or conference includes a trade show you see your normal assortment of booths featuring products and services, and attendees all browse. Conferences see speakers presenting informational or motivational speeches. With awards banquets you have presentations and congratulations abound. One thing they all have in common is a desire to engage – for speakers to connect to the audience, vendors to “put a face to the name” and build personal relationships with customers, and companies to acknowledge awards-winners.

Former First Lady Rosalyn Carter greets VIPs at the American Psychological Association (APA) conference in San Diego, CA. — Former First Lady Rosalyn Carter greets APA guests

A vendor at the Johnstone Supply tradeshow greets a potential customer — A vendor greets a customer

A HR representative from Shell Oil greets job-seekers at the NACE convention — HR rep meets career-seeker

I look for moments. From my perspective that is best illustrated when people meet. Before they start highlighting their goods or talking business there is an initial smile and greeting, usually with a handshake. To me this encapsulates the interaction of networking, and the engagement that sponsors, vendors, and organizations seek. Connecting people – whether for sales or camaraderie – makes events great, and in my humble opinion, successful. I capture this by watching for those smiles and handshakes.

What aspect of a corporate event do you feel is the most important goal? Tell us in the comments below!

Corporate Headshots

Corporate Meeting and Event Photos

Corporate Offices

Corporate Parties, Outings, and Retreats

Commercial photography

Food Photography

Product Photography

Interior Photography

Industrial Photography

Brochures and Catalogue Photography

Benefits of Commercial Photography

Conclusion

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Why Use Stock Photography?

How To Use Stock Photography

Royalty-Free Images

Rights-Managed Images

The Safest Solution: Custom Photography

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