Media Bytes – Issue 2

Sac City Tech Media Bytes
April 3, 2019

Exclusive Hints, Tips, Special Offers and More!

Importance of Quality Photography

Like most business owners, you most likely would like to look professional and appealing to your prospects and clients. Smartphones are great for quick social media posts, but really don’t provide a professional look. Even if you have a nice camera, there’s some things you should know about producing nice, appealing images to use when promoting your business. Here’s a few general tips if you decide to tackle the photography yourself.

1. Know your subject – What are you taking a photo of and why? Have a clear idea of what you want your photo to say in order to set it up achieve your goal.
2. Make sure that the scene is free of distractions. You don’t want a bunch unrelated items in the photo foreground or background that will pull the viewer’s eyes away from what you do want them to see.
3. Simplify – Don’t be afraid to crop in close so that the desired subject is front and center! However, not too close as you want to have room to crop for various print sizes as proportions are different and you don’t want to be cropping off parts of the image in an undesirable way.
4. Use a tripod – It doesn’t matter how steady your hands or the person taking the picture are. Camera shake can cause blur. You may not see it in smaller versions of the image but it can wreck a photo needs to be printed big.
5. Lighting – Good lighting will help your image look it’s best. If taking people photos, keep the lights or flash up and away from the camera position to prevent the dreaded “Red Eye”. Proper lighting can also avoid glare, shadows and make the subject look their best.
6. If it all possible, get it right in the camera. The only thing you should be doing in a photo editor is cropping to the right size. The more adjusting you do to an image, the more likely you are to reduce it’s quality.
7. Save original images for later use in a format other than JPEG if there is any chance you will need to go back and adjust them again. Although larger, PSD, TIFF and other formats will preserve the quality of the image. Each time you save a JPEG image, it gets compressed using what’s called “Lossy Compression”. This discards important information in the image file. This may be OK for a few saves, but over time each time the image is opened and resaved, it degrades. You’ve probably seen images on-line that look bad for just this reason.

While it’s not possible to cover everything, these tips should help you improve your photography which ultimately will help you produce appealing images for your business materials. Don’t be afraid to hire a professional if you don’t want to deal with all of this. The investment will be worth it!