Getting good photos for your website or your brochure or your magazine ad or whatever else can be tricky. We used to partner with Harper’s Point Photography here in Fort Collins. Then they moved out to the Los Angeles area, which made things tough. So we decided to fly out to California and get a crash course in portrait photography and product photography from the best.
Val and I packed our cameras and headed out for a two-day photography boot camp. We picked up a lot of new skills (and trade secrets) that will make shooting for our clients a lot faster and deliver a lot better results. Better pictures mean better ads.
Portrait Photography
We had the opportunity to observe a real estate shoot and watch how Harper’s Point worked with subjects to make them comfortable, get them posed naturally and get shots that, essentially, don’t look like they were whipped up in the Sears portrait studio. Seeing the experts in action was a great way to watch how to work with subjects, as well as how they streamlined the process.
The following day, we returned to the studio and tried out some of the portrait photography techniques they used earlier that day. I’ll skip the technical details, but we learned some great shortcuts with tethering our camera to a computer to fine-tune white balance. We also learned new ways to manipulate depth of field and lighting conditions to strike perfect mood and best capture you and your staff’s personality!
Product Photography
Product photography can be even trickier to get right, so we put a lot of time into learning ways to shoot your products to make them enticing to customers. Again, there are a bunch of technical details to get bogged down in, but the short story is that Val and I learned how to light and frame products so they’re easily cut out and transferred to other art without looking strange. This included capturing shadows and reflections in the glass.
We came away with a lot of new tips that we’re aching to use on your next project. We also brought home a huge list of hardware to expand our in-house photography capacity. OTM has expanded to fill the entire upper floor at our 400 Remington building, and we’re devoting some of that space to photography set up.
Get ready. Your customers are going to be blown away by the photos on your next creative project with us.