 by Skip Cohen I was proud to be a writer for Shutter Magazine when it first started. I wrote for them for at least six years. For each article, the authors were required to submit a short video related to the story. I knew that I had to make each video memorable. Well, it's Throwback Thursday, and I'm pulling the video below out of the archives. (I know I shared it a few years ago, but it's too much fun to not share again!) My topic that month was the importance of diversity. I was playing off an old Kodak study that I don't believe has changed since it was conducted over 30 years ago. The hierarchy of why people hire a professional photographer in the portrait/social categories goes brides, babies, and pets.  But there's a secondary message here: if you're going to be diverse in your specialties and promote them on one website, you need continuity. In the portrait/social specialties, brides have babies, babies grow up and become seniors, get married and start their own families, and families have pets. If you photographed the wedding, why not be diverse enough to follow the family as they change and grow. It's really that simple. However, if you're going to branch off into more commercial applications, for example, then build a separate website or have a landing page that gives viewers the opportunity to choose which way to go. The reason is that different viewers have different priorities. For example, a staff member from an ad agency looking for a product photographer will not spend time looking through the work of a wedding photographer. In the same vein, a bride and her mother won't visit a commercial photographer's website to see wedding images. Obviously there are exceptions...Elizabeth Taylor had Herb Ritts photograph her wedding in 1991. She sold the images to People Magazine for a million dollars and the money went to her non-profit AIDS foundation. Personally I thought the coverage was terrible, but it was shot by Herb Ritts, and added value to the sale, so who cared? LOL KNOW THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE! Sheila helped with every video, even when I used a cheap camera. My recording quality improved over the years. She also joined my Goodwill search for a gown—still inexplicably in my closet. Add the tiara from Party City, the doll from Goodwill toys, Molly the Wonder Dog, and it's the recipe for a perfect trip down Memory Lane. Happy Throwback Thursday!
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Your walk is just a click away
Our Partners
"Why?"Check out "Why?" one of the most popular features on the SCU Blog. It's a very simple concept - one image, one artist and one short sound bite. Each artist shares what makes the image one of their most favorite. We're over 130 artists featured since the project started. Click on the link above and you can scroll through all of the episodes to date.
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
© 2019 Skip Cohen University