by Tim Gander

See The Portfolio, Understand The Process

With the exception of David Bailey, every photographer has to keep their portfolio fresh and updated regularly. While for some that still means a printed volume, for most photographers it’s their website, which is what I’ve been working on lately.

The question photographers have to ask themselves as they work through this process is, “What makes a picture worth adding to my portfolio?” The question you might ask yourself is, “Why should I care?”

Well if a client understands the thinking behind what makes a good portfolio, they can also understand what a portfolio says about the photographer behind it.

There’s plenty to think about, but it’ll start with context (ie. what kind of photographer they are and what kind of work they want to attract), but setting that aside for now, the best way for me to illustrate the subject is by setting down my thoughts. Through this process, I hope you’ll gain some useful insights too.

1. Why Update My Portfolio?

This one’s simple – a regularly updated online portfolio keeps Google (and other search engines) happy. Each time a search engine indexes a website it’s looking for fresh content. Fresh content boosts the value of the site and elevates it in search rankings. I get a fair bit of work this way, so I need to keep my portfolio updated.

2. What to update it with?

Every few months I go through my Portfolio pages to see what’s especially old, or what might no longer be relevant to the types of work I’m doing or want to do.

Showing certain kinds of work will attract enquiries from certain kinds of clients, which is why my site is fairly heavily skewed towards showing corporate portraits – that’s both the work I do and the work I want.

Age isn’t everything – I’ll keep older pictures in if they’re strong and still serve a purpose, but on the whole, I’m looking at recent jobs to see what might be suitable to add to or replace existing work.

When I’m trawling through my recent archive I’ll be searching for images that fall into one of the three portfolio categories: Business Portraits, Corporate Communications, Editorial & PR.

3. What Makes A Portfolio Picture?

That’s where it gets trickier, and while I don’t think I nail this one every time, I see photographers who haven’t mastered the challenge at all. They include their favourite pictures, but this is the wrong place to start.

The challenge is to disassociate yourself from the making of the picture. A portfolio picture isn’t good just because you like it. It isn’t good because it was hard to make, or because you made a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

A portfolio picture has to be good in its own right. While Google won’t even care if a picture is interesting, in focus or correctly exposed, a potential client has to be convinced by the quality of what they see. What they won’t see is the effort or the circumstances surrounding the making of that image, so its entire strength will come from its quality and content.

Screen grab from Tim Gander's photography website showing a selection of business portraits.
Business Portrait examples.
Screen grab from Tim Gander's photography website showing a selection of Corporate Communications images.
Corporate Communications examples.
Screen grab from Tim Gander's photography website showing a selection of Editorial and PR images.
Editorial and PR examples.

4. What Is The Context?

I mentioned the context in my introduction, and there I was referring to the type or field of photography being promoted. A wedding photographer will have different considerations than an industrial, architectural or food photographer.

Similarly, I need to apply different considerations when choosing images for any of my three categories. Let’s briefly go through those:

Business Portraits

Here I want to show the quality and style of my portraiture, but I’m also looking for some variety. Beyond the basic headshot against white, I also want to show I can create different styles, moods and even orientations (upright or landscape). I also include a few images to suggest that a portrait can mean more than a simple headshot and can include some context, which stylistically starts to overlap with Corporate Communications.

Corporate Communications

This is broader than just headshots, so it’s an opportunity to show greater creativity. These images might include props or location elements; they might be staged or fly-on-the-wall action images. People presenting, interacting with others or with their environment are fairly typical examples of the Corporate Communications image.

I should add that the term Corporate Communications refers to everything I do for my clients, but I sub-categorise these images to differentiate them from pure Business Portraits or Editorial & PR images.

Editorial & PR

This gallery is unusual in that I’ll often include screen grabs of the images ‘out in the wild’ in news media sites, allowing clients to make the connection between my work and the possible exposure it will bring them.

The nature of the category means I might be showing work which has more of a story to tell, but the image should still be as self-explanatory as possible (though my captions will also help explain the context and reason for the image).

For this category, I’m looking for images of a news or feature style. They were shot for a newspaper, press release or corporate news web page and therefore have a different look to those shot for general Corporate Communications.

Site-Wide Refresh

While the focus of this article has been on the portfolios, I also regularly update my homepage image as this is the first impression potential clients get. It also makes the site more attractive to search engines as they favour new content over old.

As if all that wasn’t enough, this time around I’ve also updated some of the featured pictures for the top-level Portfolio menu, again keeping the site a bit fresh for returning visitors and search engines alike.

Screen grab of the Portfolio menu page of Tim Gander's photography website showing three thumbnail images to illustrate each of the Portfolio categories; Business Headshots, Corporate Communications and Editorial and PR.
The thumbnail images help to guide clients to the relevant gallery.

Summing Up

In essence, if you’re a client casting around for a photographer for your next project, it’s worth having a bit of insight into what you’re being presented and why.

If a portfolio doesn’t even present examples of the genre you need, move on to the next site. For example, photographers who showcase family portraits are probably not going to grasp the particular challenges and requirements of corporate or business portraiture.

It’s important to match genre as well as style and quality to your requirements to avoid costly mistakes, and I hope this article goes some way towards avoiding that scenario.

Now you’ve read this, why not take a look back at my website? I’d love to hear if it’s changed your perception of what you see.

in Advice / Case Studies / Industry Comment / Personal Opinion 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

The Pop-Up Job

One of the toughest tasks for a photographer can be to shoot a photo which works well in an extreme shape. Ultra-wide and extreme deep crops from a standard image ratio can create challenges. Shooting a full-bleed image for a pop-up stand is a perfect example of this.

A good illustration of what I’m talking about is the recent shoot I undertook for University of Bath’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. They needed a new image for their Sports Performance course pop-up banner which was needed for the university open day on September 10th. It wasn’t a massively tight deadline, but things had to move apace to get the image to the designer in good time.

The concept was to have a student in sports kit with a library scene behind. I’d shot something similar back in 2013, but where on that occasion I photographed the student against a plain backdrop so they could be cut out and placed against a library shot (literally a library shot of the library), on this occasion we decided to get the whole image done in-camera.

Twin netball players Jasmine and Jemma Nightingale very kindly volunteered to model and we set the shoot up on the 4th floor of the university library. It had the benefit of being relatively quiet, so I wouldn’t disturb too many students, and it just happened to have the right aisle configuration to work. It’s amazing how many aisles just weren’t right. Too narrow, a pillar, a window on the back wall, not “library-ish” enough; I eventually found one aisle I could work with.

I set up portable studio lighting to get full-length, even light on the sitter (I shot mostly individuals of Jemma and Jasmine). Even this was quite awkward because there wasn’t much floor space for lighting stands, and I also had to set up lights behind the sitter to lift the background so it didn’t look gloomy.

There were overhead strip LED lights in the ceiling which also needed to be on, but they were motion-sensor controlled. Every now and then I’d have to jog down the aisle to make the lights come back on. I certainly got my steps in that day!

Of course I forgot to do the BTS shot (I’ll remember one day!), so I can only show you the end result.

Pop-up stand final artwork
The final artwork which went to print
Sports Performance pop-up banner at University of Bath Open Day
The pop-up banner in use
single portrait of netball player Jemma Nightingale in a university library
Jemma Nightingale also posed, but the shot of Jasmine with a slightly different pose just worked better
twin female netball players photographed standing in a library aisle
Jemma (left) and Jasmine Nightingale in a double portrait
Portrait of a smiling female netball player looking to camera
Portrait of Jasmine Nightingale, a useful shot for other materials
two young female netball players walking away from a modern building
A useful stock image with plenty of design space around the subjects

But the location worked well. I made pictures with each student individually and a few of them together. The latter didn’t work so well for the tight upright format, but did make good alternative shots the university can use in other ways.

Once I was happy we had what we needed, I packed down the kit and we headed outside for a few alternative shots, again mainly for other uses.

Among my favourite shots from that session is the one of Jasmine and Jemma walking through the scene – their confident smiles and purposeful strides set against a modern University of Bath building (it happens to be the School of Management) make this a multi-purpose image that will sit well in either a web or print design.

One other technical aspect I brought into play was Lightroom’s new Enhance feature. Using AI, Lightroom can double the resolution of the camera’s native image. In the case of the pop-up stand image, that meant I could supply a file which was now 12,000 pixels on the longest side rather than 6,000, giving the designer a greater quality print out on the finished display.

Thanks to Sophia who sent me the photo of the stand in-situ on the open day, and I have to say I’m really pleased with how well the image works in the design, how it really ‘pops’ and catches the eye.

This kind of project is a creative and technical challenge, but with pre-shoot planning, adaptability on the day and careful treatment of the image files afterwards, it all comes together for a really satisfying result.

If you’re looking to have images taken for potential use in exhibition materials, bear in mind that they may need to be taken specifically for the format you’re working in. Stock images probably won’t be high-enough resolution (and will be too generic anyway), so feel free to drop me a line to discuss your needs and ideas to ensure you’re getting the best for your project.

in Case Studies / Uncategorized 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

My Personal Plain

Casual visitors to my website might be a bit confused if they read my blog. I’m supposed to be all Mr Corporate Headshot, Mr Corporate Comms and so on, yet my blog is often about my personal work.

Certainly SEO “experts” would have a thing or two to say about the fact that I’m not plugging the corporate work week-in, week-out, but I’m not sure they understand photography (or people), which in my view is a bit of a shortcoming.

Those experts will presumably have some understanding of search engine algorithms, but I’m more interested in posting material which allows potential clients a more three-dimensional view of my practice.

Which is why this week I am posting pictures from Salisbury Plain*, my current personal project.

After months of barely leaving the house, I was so pleased to be able to get back on the project and I’m happy to share a few of the latest results with you. Some, if not all of these, will be made available as fine art prints via my takeagander website where you can see more images from this project which I made before lockdown.

Scene from Salisbury Plain, June 2020.
Scene from Salisbury Plain, June 2020.
Scene from Salisbury Plain, June 2020.
Scene from Salisbury Plain, June 2020.

But given that this blog often veers away from the pure business of corporate communications work, how does a project like this help potential clients choose me over the next photographer? Why do I post personal work here? Let’s turn that around and ask, “What kind of photographer would I be if I didn’t do personal projects?”

Go to a dozen photographer websites and the majority will tell you at some point just how passionate they are about photography. All too often this doesn’t show through their work. I believe they are passionate about being a photographer, but mostly because they like having, or being seen with, cameras. There’s a chasm of distinction between being genuinely passionate about photography, and liking taking pictures (or liking owning nice camera gear).

My personal work is mostly shot on film using a variety of relatively low-tech, often un-glamorous cameras, because photography is the important part to me, not owning the gear or being seen to have the latest equipment. Working this way is also part of my “keep fit” regime in that it keeps my photographic eye honed even during quieter periods (lockdown being an extreme example).

In a world where “everyone’s a photographer” my passion isn’t just about being a photographer, it extends to the purpose of photography, its purpose and value to society. Getting heavy now, huh? Sorry, that’s really a whole other blog post there.

Perhaps next time you’re looking to book a photographer other than myself for a job (yes, I do know this happens!), take a look to see what personal projects they’re working on. If there are none, ask yourself if they’re genuinely as passionate as they say they are.

*I haven’t yet settled on a permanent title. I’m passionate about finding a good one.

in Industry Comment / My News / Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

PR Photography in Lockdown

In my recent article Measured Success I described how a couple of simple items, a tape measure and chalk, allowed me to work a public relations photoshoot and still keep everyone safe.

This week I thought I’d share a bit more about that job with you.

The client was Seko Logistics, who had undertaken to deliver free personal protective equipment (PPE), supplied by Alexandra Workwear, to all 69 care homes in The Order of St John Care Trust group, starting with their home in Thornbury, Bristol.

Now this was never going to make the tight group shot I would normally aim to produce, but given the circumstances I felt the distancing between the people in the photo would not only keep everyone safe, but would also help make the picture visually interesting.

The light was difficult (when isn’t it?), so I had to put up a couple of high powered studio flash units. Without them the people’s faces would have been silhouetted and I also wanted to pick out some detail of the building too. The only giveaway is the shadow of the care nurse which runs contra to the shadows cast by the sun behind the people and building.

That’s ok though. I’d rather ensure the people were sufficiently lit than have to spend ages trying to wrestle with the exposure levels in post production, which would never have looked as good or had the crisp, colourful impact this image has.

The result is a photo which the client has been able to use not only in their own social media feeds, but which has gone around their various industry publications too. I’m always pleased to see my pictures working hard for a client and I know the client is also pleased with how everything went and the result at the end.

So while organisations will be struggling to balance many conflicting requirements right now, it’s wise to keep an eye out for any stories which your business could put out as a press release. With professional care and execution, it’s still possible to get good PR coverage and raise your business profile with something positive.

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 by Tim Gander

Emergency Blog

Do you know what? I have written and re-written this article about half a dozen times, trying to say so many things about how I hope everyone is ok and about what my coping strategy is.

The problem is, since we’re all in the same boat, anything I write looks like opportunist marketing, so I’ll just say this:

  • Stay safe, obviously.
  • If I can help with anything, let me know. Even if it’s just to pick my brains.
  • I am determined to be here for my clients all through this and well beyond.

In the meantime, if you’re stuck at home and need a diversion, check out takagander and consider buying a print (if there is anything you like). This will help keep me sane while everything else is in shutdown.

And if you do buy a print, use TAKEA20 at checkout to get £20.00 off any canvas print, or £20 off any fine art print (or multiple prints) when you spend £150.00 or more. Hurry though, the offer expires on March 20th. There, I just marketed again! Ugh.

Black and white photo of a grass crop bending in the wind against a sunny sky with some clouds.
From the Salisbury Plain landscape series, available at takeagander.co.uk

A final few words for now:

It’s going to be tough to plan new photography for your business when we don’t have a timescale for this situation, but do speak to me now because we can all hit the ground running whenever the brakes come off. I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Take care,

Tim

in Industry Comment / Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Say CHEESE!

Close-up of a truckle of Westcombe cheddar cheese showing the label.
By far my favourite cheddar.

Finding a photographer is as easy as finding cheddar cheese in Cheddar, and in case you were unaware; Cheddar is an actual place and it’s where cheddar cheese originally came from before everyone from the Irish to the Azerbaijanis decided to make “cheddar cheese” themselves and flood the market with their filth. Even so, there is an awful lot of cheddar in Cheddar and it’s easy to find, trust me.

Sorry, I digress. It’s just that living in Somerset, about 30 minutes from Cheddar, I’m a little fussy about where my cheddar comes from. Although, at the risk of prolonging this needless digression further, there’s an excellent Somerset brie which I highly recommend. Apologies to Brieland.

Right, back to my point… which was? Oh yes, photographers are easy to find (yes, I said that already, get on with it Tim!) But actually, like cheddar, not all photographers are the same. Just like Canadian cheddar, there’s a lot of rubbish out there (sorry Canadaland, but your cheddar is pants*). And even amongst the really excellent cheddars, not every cheddar will suit your pallet, just as not every excellent photographer will suit your requirements.

Some cheddars are creamy, smooth and mild. Others are crumbly, borderline gritty with a bite that gives you that weird stinging sensation at the back of your jaw. I actually love a strong cheddar, but it’s not to everyone’s taste and it doesn’t suit all occasions.

So what I’m saying is, yes it’s easy to find a photographer, but make sure they shoot what you need in the style you need it. There is rarely any merit in hiring a wedding photographer to shoot your corporate website (I accept a few exceptions to this rule, but only very few). Likewise, I really don’t ‘do’ food. For that you need a food photographer, who will have all the tools, both mentally and in terms of equipment, to make your dishes look mouthwatering. Hire me to photograph your food and I’ll probably just eat it. It’s also well known I don’t do weddings. Why would I when there are some superb wedding specialists out there?

When hunting out the best photographer for your job, you’ll probably start with a search using the terms for the kind of photographer you’re after, eg: business, portrait, photographer, Bristol, or whatever. This will return MANY sites to consider and you’ll probably want to start by quickly dismissing the part-time photographers, the wedding photographers and the “I have a camera and will literally point it at anything you want me to” photographers.

This is no easy task, but usually a few moments spent looking through their online portfolios will tell you whether or not they do what you need AND are competent at it. Also if a portfolio is a scattergun of different genres, subjects and styles, you might want to move on as this can suggest either that the photographer is not consistent in their field, or that they’ve been stealing other peoples’ photos to build their own portfolio. Perhaps shocking in the age of the internet, but yes this does happen.

It’s taken me years to find the right cheddar for my tastes. I like Wyke Farm Extra Mature for everyday eating and for recipes, while I’ve yet to find a cheddar which quite matches the joy of Westcombe Dairy’s prize-winning offering. So having found my favourites, I stick with them. The same can go for your photographer if it’s a case of shooting the same subject or genre of photography and the photographer shoots to the style and quality which matches your standards.

Just as you can constantly chop, change and shop around for your cheddar cheese, you can constantly chop and change your choice of photographer. However, if your corporate communications end up looking like a ragtag of styles and qualities, well that’s just hard cheese.

*I’m using the UK definition of ‘pants’ as in ‘underwear’. Yes, Canada, I’m sorry, but your cheddar tastes like grey y-fronts. I love Canadians though, and they make the best maple syrup.

in Advice / Industry Comment 2 comments
 by Tim Gander

How Soon Is Now?

Well that’s got The Smiths fans reading. Hello, both of you.*

What that slightly odd headline is nodding towards, in a painfully contorted way like Morrissey performing William, It Was Really Nothing, is that while a photo might be taken for quick social media use, bear in mind you may wish to use it later for other things.

So, what difference does it make if you approach the task with only Twitter or Facebook in mind? You might want to ask yourself if it matters there’s only half a person in the frame, or the resolution is poor.

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

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but your photos and your brand should work hand in glove across many media. The quality shouldn’t oscillate wildly from one media to another otherwise your message is going nowhere fast.

The point of photography is to communicate your message; get it wrong and the world won’t listen.

I hope this post has per suedehead you that such a little thing makes such a big difference.

*The more astute amongst you will have spotted a few familiar references and one rather painful pun.

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 by Tim Gander

SO LONG, SEO-UCKERS!

In April 2010 I wrote a blog article about the frustration caused by photographers who don’t do what I do getting their websites SEOd as if they did. Not only frustrating for me, but also for clients genuinely looking for a corporate, commercial or press photographer in the Bath, Bristol and Somerset areas (see what I did there?).

The majority of perps in the search-engine fraud were wedding photographers fishing for the extra calls, but if a client clicked to their site looking for examples of that type of work, they were often disappointed; galleries entitled Corporate Photography or Press Photography often containing nothing but… wedding images. Something of a waste of time, and I was frustrated by a lack of intelligence on Google’s part to seek out and demote these sites, making search results more relevant.

I’m happy to report that Google do appear to have been reading my blog, and now a search using the terms you would expect a potential client to use to find me sees my website listed top or at least on the first page. Especially pleasing when I’m competing against a glut of photographers in places like Bristol and ranking highly for Somerset.

Dr Vince Cable speaking at Innovator of the Year awards, London

A press picture for a corporate client, and definitely not a wedding photo

How have I achieved this? Well I stick to using simple, standard terms, and ensuring the images I upload for my clients are properly tagged, captioned, keyworded etc and plugging away at things like this blog.

In other words, my SEO efforts are honest. I don’t WANT to be found under wedding searches, or family portrait searches or plumbing and electrical searches. I want to be found for what I do, and it’s nice to be able to report that I’m getting new clients as a result. I’m not saying I do a perfect job, but I do my best and try to avoid keyword loading.

Hopefully those wedding photographers didn’t spend too much time or pay too much money to SEO ‘experts’ only to have their sites demoted by Google, and I do indeed hope they’re getting top listings for what they actually do.

in Industry Comment 1 comments
 by Tim Gander

Case Study: Business Portrait Consistency

contact sheet of business portraits

Reasonable consistency across different sites is possible with the right set up and approach.

A recent commission, spread over a number of days, consisted of corporate portraits of around 50 partners and staff in accountancy firm Moore Stephens.

Simple enough, apart from three considerations: Firstly the portraits all needed the same look, secondly the staff are spread across five office sites (Salisbury, Chichester, Newport, Southampton and Guildford) and finally the style needed to match that which I’d established with the client on a shoot which happened over a year ago.

The first task then was to pull the previous headshots from my archive and double check the look and lighting of them. That’s easy enough, and I remembered what setup I’d used so simply had to replicate that for the new shots.

The simplicity of that setup also made it easier to replicate it across the sites. This was handy because different offices have different amounts of space for me to work in, so compact is good.

Different offices will also have different kinds of lighting in them, and different amounts of daylight. Really I needed to kill the daylight and ceiling lights, and set up using my portable studio lighting so that again the look would remain as consistent as possible.

I’d previously chosen quite a flat, “airy” kind of lighting because as nice as it is to use dramatic side-lighting, it can be a lot less flattering. And while everyone at Moore Stephens is attractive in person, I have to consider how they’ll look in a photo.

With corporate portraits I often emphasise to the client that these photos aren’t meant to flatter them or look good on the mantlepiece, their purpose is to make them look friendly and professional to their existing and potential clients. Even so, when shooting dozens of headshots while trying to keep people tied up for as little time as possible, the set-up I used ensured that the pictures are consistent, as flattering as they need to be and simple to execute.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so far I’ve had some very complimentary comments about how it all turned out.

If you have a lot of people in your business that need to be photographed, it’s worth thinking about how the look you want will translate into images which can be replicated for other staff at other sites, and how well that look will suit the people being photographed. And if it all gets too complicated, this will affect how easy it is to get everyone photographed in a sensible amount of time.

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 by Tim Gander

Goldilocks and the photo.

Can brilliant corporate photography save a failing business? No. BUT it will be part of what makes success easier to achieve. Conversely if a business is using snaps or stock imagery, this can be, as an American business guru might put it, a drag coefficient on your success rocket. *blech!*

I don’t pretend that the photos I take will turn you into an overnight sensation and put you in contention for The Sunday Times Rich List, but it’s fair to say that when marketing departments go to the trouble of getting a lively, engaging web design together with compelling text and a user-friendly interface, what often lets the whole project down is the lazy or cheap approach to the accompanying imagery.

call centre staff on telephone

Quality photos say “quality business”.

Head shots of key staff needn’t be cheesy, and they certainly mustn’t be low quality just because they’re going to be used small. You never know when you might need to reproduce one to a larger scale and in print, and that’s when poor lighting and composition as well as poor resolution really start to show up. The purple gargoyle look doesn’t suit anyone. Neither is it helpful if an over-compressed file leaves you looking like you have some kind of skin disease.

Photographs of products and processes, people, places (and all the stuff not starting with p) all require a level of quality. After all, shot once you can use these images over and over again and they’ll pay for themselves in time, whereas low-grade, badly taken images will simply remind potential clients how little you care for quality every time one of these photos shows up.

Equally, if you get great imagery but either don’t use it at all or don’t use it properly, you’ll be wasting your money and you’ll think it wasn’t good value. This comes back to using a quality photographer who can give good after care, and a marketing specialist who knows how to use pictures for maximum impact.

Where’s all this going? Well I believe it’s possible to overstate the importance of photography in business, but what’s happened since the mass-accessibility of digital is that things have swung too much in the other direction. General opinion is often that photography has no, or very little importance. Often I’ve seen web designers refer to the photos in their designs as “eye-candy”. If the photos are just eye-candy, why bother with any imagery at all? And why do I have so many clients if what I do has no impact on their business?

If your business uses photography it should be as a way of communicating something to existing and potential clients. Not just showing that which is in front of the camera, but the quality, composition and presentation of the photo will all be shorthand for the kind of business you are.

Now, that’s not going to save a business which is already circling the drain, but dismissing photography on your website and in your literature as “so much fluff” won’t help you to the top of your market either. As Goldilocks might have said, you need to get the balance just right.

in Advice / Case Studies 8 comments