Guest Blog – What Makes a Business Photo-Friendly?

Guest Blog – What Makes a Business Photo-Friendly?

Hi! This is Raeley, Doug’s personal photographer.
He’s taking a short vacation so he asked me to write his blog post this week. I’m a photographer that specializes in photography for social media – so basically I take photos for Facebook and Instagram. We’ve noticed some things that make some businesses more attractive to the camera, so here they are!

What makes a business photo- friendly?

Cleanliness

Yeah yeah, this should be obvious. However, simple things like trash cans, tissue paper, papers, sticky notes, and wires that don’t bother us in person pop out in photographs. I normally don’t notice trash cans till I’ve taken a photo with one in the background. At this point, I move the trash can to out of site.

So if you ever notice that your trash can has hidden, it’s probably my fault (sorry).

Color Scheme

If you’ve been reading Doug’s blog, you’ll notice that the location is not clear in every image. Many of them are detail shots or have a blurry background, but you still visually recognize it as the location. Why? Because I’ve established the location with a shot in the beginning, and all the ones after that look similar – mainly because they all fit into the same color scheme. Having a solid color scheme helps the images to have a visual sameness because they adopt your color scheme which is strong and store-wide.

Lighting

Lighting is EXTREMELY important to photography, but I don’t have this at the top of the list because the lighting is mainly the photographers responsibly. I tend to carry around a flash just in case I need more light. The best light comes from windows, but if you can’t have a ton of windows, have a ton of lights that are all the same tint.

Also… avoid having only overhead fluorescent lights, especially if you have dark walls because everyone ends up with dark areas around their eyes which makes them look like zombies. We don’t want to look like zombies.

Friendly Faces

A set of photographs with only Doug would be pretty boring. Photos of Doug interacting with people spice things up! Friendly, willing, and smiley people are really what bring his adventures to life. One small thing that can help this is if the people are wearing clothes that blend in/go with the environment rather than distract from it. However, the best people (photographically speaking) are those who get creative or crazy and decide to have fun with Doug by coming up with great poses!

Arrangements

It could be flowers, it could be products, it could be educative material, but having things that visually represent the business is that Doug visits is a huge help! When we visit places, we want to show them off so having visual displays is a very easy and effective way of doing that.

Tangible products

Thank you, Captain Obvious…. but seriously, it can be very difficult to show something that Doug can’t interact with. So if you have a product or service that isn’t tangible – think of ways to make it. Sometimes effects or results are easier to depict that the actual service or product. For example, if you just saw a photo of me taking a photo, you wouldn’t understand my service as much as you would if you saw the photograph that I took and how it was used.

Thanks for reading! If you are a business local to Huntsville and would like photographs to enhance your social media presence, let me know.

Here are links to my website, Facebook, and Instagram so that you can stalk my work