by Tim Gander

Has Video Grown Up?

This is the first in a short series of articles discussing the various pros, cons and considerations for businesses and organisations to get the most out of video. I’m going to start with a bit of background.

In the Beginning

In the beginning there were words, and words were good. Actually, images pre-date words by some considerable margin, but since Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictures which represent language, maybe it’s a moot point. I digress.

The point is, still images remain the most portable and often most potent and powerful method of disseminating information. There’s no denying though that video has exploded in popularity over the past decade.

Where Are We Now?

I don’t want to state the obvious, but let’s just recap that the power and popularity of video has its foundations in the convergence of Web 2.0 with digital cameras, followed by the rise of social media and easier access to the creative tools to bring us to where we are.

What has changed in more recent years is the refining of of the equipment and the editing software, bringing the craft within reach of anyone who understands images (namely photographers).

How Did We Get Here?

In 2008 the first full-frame digital SLR capable of video capture launched. It was “a game changer” but only in the right (experienced) hands. I wasn’t ready to offer video at that stage.

The tipping point has come with the emergence of mirrorless cameras, where the combination of stills and video capability in a single camera might be said to have come of age. It still requires more than just flipping a switch from Stills to Video, but that’s the nature of the medium, not the technology.

Where Do We Go Now?

All of the above leads to a situation where high quality video is now more accessible to a wider range of businesses than ever before. That isn’t to pretend it’s cheap or easy, but where it would previously have been impractical and excessively expensive to commission video for an SME’s communications, it can now be achieved with a far more attainable investment.

I mention it’s not cheap, but if you consider I can deliver a sequence up to 60 seconds long for a little over £1,000.00, that’s pretty astonishing. Of course overall cost depends on various factors which I’ll cover in a future article, but a few years ago that kind of budget would have left you with something you wouldn’t want associated with your brand. To have a video shot professionally and with any level of polish would have set you back £10,000.00 + and then you’d have the expense of getting it out there, most likely through paid-for advertising channels (more £££££££!).

Angled close-up photo of a mirrorless camera mounted on a video tripod with a follow-focus device attached.
Crossover stills/video cameras are highly capable machines now

Where Do Photographers Fit In This New Paradigm?

There are still differences between the service someone like me offers, and that of a full production company. However, like many photographers, my service is in addition to, not instead of, the Hollywood treatment. It’s a service which is positioned to give SME’s a step up into the world of video. The finer differences between this and the full production house service are an aspect I’ll discuss in another article later in this series.

I’m concentrating on in-house interviews, client testimonials and B roll (think flavour-of-the-event, office/business overview and retail events). Clips for YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram reels etc are an increasingly large part of my practice, often alongside stills work (not always practical or possible, but always worth asking about).

You can see some of my video work here.

That’s A Wrap!

If you’re not sure whether video has matured enough for your needs, I hope this article puts things in context. In simple terms, video is here, it’s more available than ever and it can be incredibly powerful.

Whether it’s right for your business is a question I tackle next time. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it!

in Industry Comment 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Buckle Up! It’s going to get rough (again)

The previous 15 years has been a tough time for many, myself included, so what will this coming recession mean and what can I do to help your business?

The short answer to either of those questions could be ‘not a lot’, but I think there are ways we can coordinate our approach and help each other. Here’s a broad outline of my plans as we head into choppy waters.

In the wake of the pandemic, I set up a Startups Exclusive package. Aimed at those starting up new businesses, perhaps as a result of being made redundant or deciding on a career change after being furloughed, this is my most competitive package and is a gesture to help individuals or teams of up to three to get their branding images in the bag. It is limited to genuine startups though, so please don’t try to book this if you’re an established business 🙂

Since the fallout of the pandemic is still with us, compounded by Putin’s nasty little war, it seems fair to keep this package going for the foreseeable future.

The other way I can help your business communicate with your audience is through video work.

Now I’m not going to pretend video is cheap. Cheap video is cheap, but that doesn’t work for most professional businesses. Even the YouTube and Instagram influencer crowd has had to up their game, but good quality video, the kind you’d want representing your brand, has become far more accessible than it used to be.

With sensible pre-production planning, a day’s video shoot can often be edited a number of ways to suit different platforms and target specific audiences. It requires close collaboration and good communication to get the most out of a video session, but the results achievable with relatively modest outlay can be far better polished than anything a solo photographer could offer just a few years ago.

Check out the Video link on my website for examples of my work

To help clients save valuable marketing budget, I’m very open with clients about what I can do for them in terms of video. Before there’s any commitment between us, I’m happy to discuss an outline brief with you. If your project requires a crew or production company, I’ll tell you I’m not the solution you need. You’ll either have to increase your budget and find the right supplier, or trim your expectations to match your available budget.

If what you want is office B roll (a flavour of your team, culture and working environment, for example), that I can do. I can undertake interview projects, short promo videos – it basically comes down to what you require and what resources will be needed to achieve that.

Ultimately, where this helps businesses is they can now access a quality of video they simply couldn’t raise budget for previously, and video has definitely become more important in corporate communications than ever it was previously.

Underpinning the services I offer, I’ve always believed that communication, coordination and flexibility are the best routes to success. I’ve been freelance for almost 25 years now, and in that time I’ve seen clients flourish and I’ve seen clients fail.

Thankfully far more have flourished than have failed, but I can honestly say that the failures were always the ones least open to communication with me, least willing to take advice on how best to make a project work and a realistic view of the resources required. I was simply a tool for the task, rather than a collaborator in their project.

It will have been a wider, embedded corporate culture which lead to this failure for sure, but if you’re open to communicating, being realistic about what it costs to achieve your goals and can be flexible to adapt to changing needs, we can help each other.

The one thing to keep in mind is that I want you and your business to succeed, even through the toughest times. If we can achieve that, just think what we can achieve in calmer waters!

If any of this chimes with you, why not drop me a line? It’d be great to hear from you.

in Advice / Industry Comment 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Why Media Studies Are More Important Than Ever

Where are we now?

Media Studies is a subject which is often viewed with disdain, sometimes suspicion. Certainly at GCSE level it’s often seen as a less academic subject, a bit of an easy one. And to my discredit I’m pretty sure I’ve held that view too. To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought for many years, but either way I’ve certainly changed my mind now.

I would go even further and say that the subject very much needs to be brought to the fore, studied at all ages and all levels. No longer a Cinderella subject, it must be taught at a high-quality and given the same standing as any ‘mainstream’ subject.

Why this shift in opinion? And why am I bringing this up now? I can give the same answer to both questions – because we’re all now so immersed in media, we barely even recognise it, and when we do, we often misunderstand it.

So What’s the Problem?

Traditionally we think of ‘the media’ as being newspapers, magazines, television, radio, with the internet now a part of how those traditional media operate. But of course social media is also a large part of the media we consume (possibly the largest part).

The information we gain from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and similar are an un-edited deluge of personal opinion (often fed by exposure to other, un-edited social media opinion). It’s trite to say information can be disseminated at break-neck speed via these channels, what is less trivial is the effect it can have.

In particular when the information is untrue, contradicts the truth or even distracts us from core issues, the harm this un-edited information can cause has a real affect on our understanding of events and issues concerning us.

How Can Media Studies Help?

One of my pet peeves is the derogatory use of the term ‘mainstream media’. The term itself is useful to describe the main channels. However those who use it with disdain usually neither understand what they mean by it, or have any real understanding of the media organisations they’re trying to deride. It could even be argued that social media is now mainstream.

I’m not suggesting media studies should be used to simply to fill this knowledge gap. I happen to believe everyone would benefit from it. We can all have a better understanding of all the media we interact with if we start with a broad knowledge of how it works.

We need to become more analytical and critical of the messages we see, regardless of their source. The strained relationship with the truth that we’ve witnessed from Vladimir Putin and, sadly, from our own government is easier to analyse if we have the tools to dissect the message.

Former Question Time presenter David Dimbleby points to take a question from an audience member during a recording of the programme at University of Bath
YOU NEED MEDIA STUDIES

Who Should Be Studying Media?

Now I’ve said that media studies needs to be taught at all levels, and by this I mean at least from same age as sex education. We need to start from a young age. With children exposed to 100s, even 1000s of media messages a day it’s vital they have the knowledge to understand what they’re consuming. Their lives are a world away from the 3 channels of TV I grew up with.

Conclusion

Our understanding of the world around us, from local to national, climate change to conflict, is shaped not only by the information we receive, but also by our understanding of the channels by which it comes to us. If we don’t understand the mechanics behind the message, we cannot analyse the message itself. And if we can’t analyse it, we often take it at face value.

In that instance, information becomes weaponised and dangerous. Having the knowledge to counter this would be truly liberating.

in Industry Comment / Personal Opinion 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Hacked Off

Ukrainian flag
are hackers Putin's virtual invaders?

Is Putin’s War the Cause?

It’s possible I’m turning into a conspiracy theorist, but having had my website hacked twice in two weeks, each time within hours of tweeting something derogatory about Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, I have had to wonder if there wasn’t a connection.

Even if it’s un-related, it’s been a complete pain in the !@*^# to sort out. It has disrupted my schedule and soaked up my time; I’ve had to postpone blogging for two weeks, I’ve postponed much-needed updates to my website, I’ve been trying to compose the text for my book What Happened Here as well as handle client enquiries and prepare for up-coming work. All this has been disrupted while I tackled the situation.

All that might sound trivial, and of course compared with the horrors being inflicted on Ukrainians by Putin’s invasion, it is indeed piffling. But if these hacks do have tentacles reaching back to The Kremlin, that would make them part of Putin’s war effort. Ok, perhaps that’s going too far. If it’s a theory with any legs at all, it could simply be part of a mass, un-targeted attack on any IT vulnerabilities the hackers can find, regardless of their importance.

Impact on the Sole Trader

The impact of these hacks is also greatest on those of us who operate as sole traders and freelancers because we don’t have large resources to fight back. Even with outside help, we’re having to be there liaising and dealing with the situation. We can’t just hand the problem off and go and do other tasks. If you’re a sole trader handling sensitive customer information through your website, it could be crippling.

Thankfully I did manage to get some help from my wonderful web design colleague Ben who finally got everything back to normal. I have now beefed up the security to a level which should keep the hackers out. Only time will tell.

And Just… WHY?!

Dismissing my earlier, possibly paranoid theories, it still begs the question of why my site. I haven’t the foggiest idea what the hackers wanted to achieve. There were malicious files found (now deleted), but there is no client database to compromise, no e-commerce aspect to the site. Presumably it was “just because we can” hackers.

Hacking is big now. It affects everyone. From personal Facebook accounts to huge corporate databases, everyone now has to spend more time battling hackers. We could be approaching a time when we’re spending more time using technology to sort out problems caused by technology (or more accurately, the misuse of technology) than we are using technology to assist our lives and livelihoods. Technology could be on the way to becoming a zero sum game.

Chain Reaction

Now I know this next conspiracy theory is straying into tin foil hat territory, but last weekend I was on a bike ride with my best friend. He commented that his blue and yellow bike was in the colours of Ukraine. Twenty minutes later, his rear gear mechanism packed up and his pedals would only free-spin. He couldn’t pedal anywhere and had to call his wife to come and pick him up. Coincidence? Or conspiracy? You decide!

in Industry Comment / My News 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Is shooting film pointless in a digital age?

I have been told by people who clearly know more than I do about these things that shooting film, then digitising it, is a pointless exercise because you end up with a digital photo; why not shoot digital in the first place? Well sometimes I do shoot digital for personal projects, but it’s my choice.

So here’s my response:

1. If I shoot digital, I can only ever have a digital print from that file. Conversely, if I shoot film I have the option of a traditional (wet) print if I want it, with all the nuance and quality that gives me – far above and beyond anything achievable from a digital file.

2. Done correctly (and I’ve spent a lot of time working on this), a digital reproduction of a film negative (or positive, for that matter), should preserve much of the tonality and look of the original. It still doesn’t look like a digital image.

3. So why not add a film look to a digital original and be done with it? Because it always looks fake. And I still can’t get a traditional print from that (see 1 above).

4. When I shoot film I’ve already made certain creative choices about how I want the end result to look; I’ve baked my commitment in from the moment I loaded the film. When I shoot digital, the choices can overwhelm the creative process and the question arises, what was my original intention? What constitutes ‘the original image’?

5. Detail isn’t everything. Digital cameras now record scenes in such fine detail, it can leave the result looking sterile and forensic. Emotion and nuance are difficult to preserve in a forensic medium.

6. Why get so bent out of shape about the fact I shoot film? Some people get quite heated about this and I just don’t understand this reaction. Do they rant at watercolour artists? Do they criticise sculptors who must surely be throwing their chisels away in favour of 3D printing?

Apart from all that

I shoot film for all of the above reasons and for more besides (archival stability, provenance, approach and so on). Let me do my thing. And if my results are rubbish, by all means have a go at me for that. Criticise my results, not my method of obtaining them.

Right, I’m glad that’s settled once and for all…

PS. To see more of my personal project work, head over to https://www.takeagander.co.uk

If you sign up to my quarterly newsletter at https://www.takeagander.co.uk/contact before March 1st 2022 you’ll receive a 10% discount code for any order worth £75.00 or above AND be in with the chance to win an A4 fine art print of your choice! The winner will be announced on Friday 4th March 2022.

A roll of 35mm film lies curled on gritty ground having been pulled from its canister and dumped.
From my series What Happened Here
in Industry Comment / Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Do You Love Photography?

Loving Photography

The recent acquisition of Unsplash by Getty has prompted me to think about what the love of photography actually means.

I won’t go into the ins and outs of the sale here, you know how to use Google. But I do want to examine what people mean when they say they love photography. Many of these people are contributors to sites such as Unsplash, yet I have to question the nature of their love of photography.

Of course I can’t tell people what to do with their photos, but equally we should be aware that something is happening (has already happened) to photography which leaves us all much more vulnerable than we might think. It has harmed society incrementally such that we’ve barely registered the change. More on that later.

When I talk about my love of photography, I use the phrase in a global sense; I love coming up with ideas, shooting them and presenting them. Some make money, some don’t, but they’re never available for exploitation without suitable remuneration.

And loving photography doesn’t just mean loving the act of taking pictures. In that global sense, loving photography also means nurturing the industry of which you claim to be a part. In short, it means acting like a professional. At the very least, it means not causing harm.

For others it seems to mean a love of having people and brands exploit their work. Some see this as beating professionals at their own game, which is just downright weird. That is not a healthy love.

Filthy Lucre

I can’t criticise the work people upload, much of which is of a very high standard (albeit it’s often very sterile), but they should be paid fairly for its use.

Some will argue that you can’t truly love photography if you want to make money from it. Hogwash. Utter c**p. In fact I would say the opposite; anyone hooked on views and downloads is more in love with their own ego than anything.

And what if, instead, brands had to pay for what they took from Unsplash? Would they download and use it then? What does it say to a photographer if no one is willing to pay actual money to use their work?

So why does this even matter? It’s just some pictures, right? Wrong.

A Diminished Industry Hurts Us All

The devaluation of the photographic industry over the past 20 years has left us with fewer sources of high quality photo-journalism. Our once thriving press has become less diverse, even where it tries to be polarised in opinion. Think the PR machine at No 10 dishing out the same sanitised pictures to all outlets. Those outlets, having no budget (or claiming not to at least) will use free over paid every time. So the visual voice becomes homogenised across titles and channels. Diversity suffers as a result.

This degradation has affected the national voice in other ways beyond photography. While there’s a clamour for greater diversity in our media, we see fewer articles written by people from less privileged backgrounds because only those with independent means can afford to work on the poor (or non-existent) rates on offer.

I certainly can’t afford to work for the fees our national newspapers pay – I’m a grown up, not a school child. But I’m a white guy so boohoo me. What about women? Or people from poorer backgrounds? Or those whose ethnicity makes it more likely they won’t have independent means? The talent is undoubtedly there, but the access isn’t because it’s flooded by people who can afford to “donate” their work. This is what’s happened in photography too.

You might not see the connections between newsroom budgets and free stock image sites, but all areas of the photographic economy affect all other areas. That’s why all photographers need to look after their own areas of interest in an holistic way and take responsibility for their actions.

Pups For Sale

And so back to the happy punters who give their work for free to Unsplash. They’ve been sold a pup; a dream that their altruism is the engine of a creative industry of which they are a part. That perhaps one day they’ll be spotted amongst the millions of lemmings and picked out for plum commissions.

Except it’s not, they’re not, and they wont. It’s just shutting down creativity for the truly creative. It’s shutting out those voices which haven’t the spare income to be heard. It favours the motivations of individual egos over the cause of the wider industry, and it’ll now be feeding that cuddly little independent, Getty Images.

Anyone who says they love photography should ask themselves what they’ve done for it lately. If they’ve become hooked on giving their work away, they need to question their devotion to it.

Perhaps if they’re amongst those who’ve fed Unsplash with free material, Getty’s acquisition of all their images might help peel the scales from their eyes. It might be time to redefine their relationship with photography and understand what a true love of photography looks like.

in Industry Comment / Personal Opinion 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Blog Off?

A female hand is pointing towards the twitter app icon on an iPad.
An ever-expanding universe of social media platforms.

Do people still blog? I’ve been writing this one since October 2009, but does it still serve a purpose?

Over the years I’ve tried my best to inform and entertain my readers (still plural, I think), admittedly with mixed success, but of course it’s also been a way to keep Google happy.

On that score I have to admit it’s been useful for my Search Engine Optimisation. I’m just less convinced it still has the impact it once did. People are using different routes to finding photographers, but it has become a much more fragmented landscape, so which options might work?

LinkedIn

Facebook for businesses (aka LinkedIn) has been a good way for me to keep in touch with existing clients. I can keep up with what they’re doing and I can update them on my latest news. I sometimes use it to message clients directly, though I still prefer email for keeping all correspondence in one place.

That said, LinkedIn is practically useless for finding new clients. People looking for a specific photographer for their needs will find LinkedIn a poor source of reliable information. More often than not a prospective client will canvass their network for recommendations, at which point there ensues a scrambled deluge of suggestions, most of which ignore geography or skill set – a photographer’s a photographer, right? End result, a mis-match and a lost opportunity.

Facebook

Facebook is useful for keeping in touch with a wider friendship network and group interests and I use it to promote my personal project work, but corporate work doesn’t really work on Facebook. I’m careful where I use client work, and Facebook just isn’t the right place to post my commissioned images.

Twitter

Just… no. Like Facebook, Twitter isn’t the best option for business use. It needs personality, which tends to exclude much in the way of a corporate focus. Again, it’s more useful to my personal project work and I like to promote other photographers there, at least those practicing fine art or documentary work.

Other Options

Should I start a podcast? *collective cry of NOOOOO! echoes back at me* Or a YouTube channel? *ditto, see previous*

Except YouTube is perhaps the more interesting option; less for my corporate work, but perhaps more useful to my personal project photography. I have no desire to be a “YouTuber”, but I can see how video might help create wider interest in that work. Which still leaves me wondering what’s best for the corporate work.

In (sort of) conclusion

It seems that while change has been a constant in the exciting world of SEO, that change is accelerating. Couple this with the fact that new platforms are constantly springing up, the risk is that social media is becoming too fragmented.

My gut reaction to all this is that continuing the blog posts is wise. Keeping my website fresh and compliant continues to be the best use of limited time. I also need to investigate new ideas; maybe even some old ones. Books and zines interest me, so they’ll be something I’m focusing on for the personal projects, but what of the corporate side? Perhaps print has a role worth exploring too. Many years ago I made Blurb books of my portfolio and they went down quite well.

So after 557 words, I ‘think’ I’ve concluded that I’ll carry on with the blog. Ideally I’ll use it to showcase my corporate work, but lockdown and on-going restrictions will make that a challenge. Things will pick up though, and when they do I want to be visible to new clients as well as existing ones.

One last thing…

On a bit of a side-note relating more to my personal projects, if you sign up to my takeagander newsletter here before the end of January 2021, you’ll be in with a chance to win a beautiful A4 print from any of my collections!

So cheer yourself up for free, sign up and have a browse to see if there’s a print you’d like on your wall.

in Industry Comment / Personal Opinion / Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

The Local Proposition

Are you buying anything from Amazon this Christmas? The campaign to shop local seems to have gained ground, even if the orange behemoth with the A to Z smile is still gaining sales.

The pandemic will have put many in a quandary; desperate to get their Christmas shopping done, but still unable to leave home, it can seem as if there is only one choice, when even online there are many great independent traders now.

However, the shop local/support independents movement is definitely finding new followers. Buying on the high street is beneficial to local economies and communities, while buying online from local, independent businesses is certainly helpful too.

Buy Local for Your Business

So this week I’d like to extend this notion: If buying local for personal reasons is beneficial to the local economy and jobs, please also consider buying ethically-sourced professional services for your business too.

Not just photography, but other creative industries have struggled against the big players for many years now, yet none of the disruptive sites offering creative services has benefitted the wider economy. They might seem to be the cool, new and exciting way to do business, but they dis-benefit independent creatives disproportionately.

Of course as a business owner you probably want to find the best value for money for all the goods and services you need, but have you ever thought about how this might impact the economy in which you’re trying to function?

It might help you in the short term if you can populate your website with images and graphics bought in at below cost of production, but when this process replicates across an entire business economy, who is left with any money to buy your services?

Value vs Cost

Likewise, if you’re unwilling to pay fair rates for the goods and services supplied by others, why should anyone pay your rates for the goods and services you supply? And let’s set aside the impact of using suppliers who pay little (if any) tax back into the society in which you operate.

So undertake a pledge, make it company policy if you like, that from January 2021 you will start the process of making your business more sustainable by helping to sustain others. It might make you very slightly less profitable in the short term, but it will make your business more sustainable in the longer term.

You’ll almost certainly have a more robust business come the next economic upset.

Until 2021…

I’m taking a break from writing blog posts here until January 2021, so I’ll just take this opportunity to thank you for all your kind support through this monumentally challenging year.

If in the meantime you would like to keep up with all my goings on, you can follow me on Instagram (@takeagander) or sign up to my newsletter for very occasional updates on my personal projects and new fine art print offerings.

Thank you, have a happy Christmas and a new, improved 2021.

Tim

in Industry Comment / Personal Opinion 1 comments
 by Tim Gander

Are We On The Same Page?

I’m sure there is a thesis being written by somebody somewhere examining the changes in the use of (and attitudes to) photography since the launch of Web 2.0. Setting aside technological changes for a moment, the proliferation of photography and the way it is presented, received and perceived has changed beyond all recognition. But should that be so?

PICTURES ON A PAGE

What’s brought me to write this is reading Harold Evans’ bible of news photography “Pictures on a Page”, first published in 1978. For whatever reason, I had never read it before. I wish I had as it’s the undisputed last word on how editorial images are shot, presented, the ethics and so on.

Thankfully I learned most of its lessons through training, observing and doing, but this book cements what I know while adding some delicious new ideas I’d not considered so closely before. But though it’s a book from a very different era, does that make it irrelevant? I think not. In fact I believe its main tenets are more important than ever, and not only in the realm of editorial.

Cover of Harold Evans' book Pictures on a Page.
Pictures on a page by Harold Evans.

While Evans’ book talks about story, cropping, emphasis and so on, I would say that the vast majority of images taken today are not composed with such factors in mind. Even if we take pictures for a story, few photographers have any clue who will end up using their photos or the design into which they will be placed. Largely gone are the days when a photographer knew which publication they were shooting for, let alone which page or position.

Is it the web’s fault?

Back when I shot regularly for newspapers, I often knew how the pictures were to be used and could ensure I gave the images the emphasis needed to work on a left or right-hand page. I also knew when to give an image a direct, or neutral emphasis, but today’s photographer is effectively shooting blind when it comes to design; they have to make their images work in all contexts, which can be the enemy of good image design.

This isn’t true in absolutely every case, but it must account for the majority of work shot today and it’s leading to a morass of images lacking any emphasis at all. The effect is compounded by the need to shoot predominantly in landscape orientation to suit the restrictions of web page designs, leading to another level of homogenisation.

Even in the work I do now for my corporate clients, I occasionally wish there was a little more scope for using emphasis and picture design as a creative tool. Websites shackled to a template leave little room for intelligent design, especially given that responsiveness rules over all other considerations. Again, you can only shoot for that by keeping any daring design ideas to a minimum, which can render them lifeless.

Pictures are more than just content and colour.

Pictures on a Page includes wonderful insights into how we “read” images, but even that perception has changed with the proliferation of photographic images which pour over us like a monumental waterfall on a daily basis.

If the book is taken solely as a series of essays on how news pictures are taken, edited and presented in newspapers, and their effect on our perception of the world, perhaps it could be seen as old-fashioned now, but I think that would be missing the point.

The best pictures, regardless of where they are published, will still have an impact beyond just colour and content. They will take us on a visual journey within their own frame and guide us to a point either within, or more interestingly perhaps, outside the image area itself. We risk losing that in a flat web world, so perhaps books such as Pictures on a Page will become more important than ever. Perhaps that theoretical thesis will reach the same conclusion.

in Industry Comment 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

The Beat Goes On

While the news seems unrelentingly gloomy at the moment, I’m pleased to say I’ve had some positives to focus on.

I’ve had bits of work in the last couple of weeks and enquiries have also increased. People are looking to promote their businesses once again!

This doesn’t mean a flood of work is about to engulf me, but it’s encouraging to know I still have clients. I also have some great supporters helping me via my ko-fi account*. They’re keeping me funded for the non-client projects I’m engaged in. *HINT: You can do the same from as little as £3.00 one-off payment!

Concrete vehicle washing station, Salisbury Plain.
From my Salisbury Plain project.

What is especially encouraging is that in an atmosphere of debate about what counts as a viable job, my job – the job I love, which has been put under this particular spotlight for many years now, continues to be considered viable; invaluable, even.

There are many out there who believe professional photography is dead and that every photo ever needed has been taken already. And if it doesn’t already exist, well there’s always that professional photographer in your pocket. They are, of course, quite wrong.

We know automation and technology cannot replace certain needs. Technology still can’t make a decent loaf of bread, so we can’t expect it to make pictures with the right tone and impact. This only comes about through human interaction.

Try to imagine a world without human interaction, how much fun would that be? How creative? We’re experiencing a taste of it now, so we know the answer already.

So while there will be some very difficult times ahead, I’m going to stay focussed and positive. No one is telling me I’m not viable.

in Industry Comment / My News / Personal Opinion / Personal Work / Uncategorized 0 comments