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Bad taste takes a while to show up, but as soon as it does it’s embarrassing. How to avoid it? Start by keeping it simple. If in doubt, leave it out.

The half life of crap

In her book The Mesh, Lisa Gansky talks about “the half life of crap” – about cheap manufactured products and how long they last. Or rather don’t last.

Her point is that the half life of crap products is way too short. They get boring or they break. They end up at the back of your garage or as land fill. Our poor planet can’t afford so much crap, and as it turns out, neither can we.

It’s such a vivid expression and it applies to more than physical goods – taste for example.

But there’s a twist. 

Take that tacky album with the fabulicious cover and all those cheesy layouts… What’s the half-life of that crap? Long enough to be embarrassing, that’s how long!

Bad products turn to crap quite quickly.

Bad taste may take a little longer to show up, but as soon as it does it’s embarrassing. And it’s half life is way too long.

So how do you avoid bad taste?

Start by keeping it simple.

If in doubt, leave it out.

What will the kids think?

Beware three-month taste.

I know it seems a long way off, but ask yourself, What will the kids think of this? That day comes up really fast and you want your work to be admired, not laughed at.

Back in the 1950s Frank Hofmann and Bill Doherty set up a studio called Christopher Bede, which offered home-based portraiture around New Zealand. I have a black and white Christopher Bede photo of my sisters and me, all pre-teens. We’re spruced up to the nines.

The print looks as good as it did sixty plus years ago, us kids less so perhaps. It’s in a very 1950s heavy glass frame with scalloped edges and a silver plate chain. We could never sell it today, but it looks classic quality, and so does the photograph.

And that’s what you’re after.

I can’t imagine anyone contemplating an image of the bride and groom in a brandy glass today (although I remember seeing a Photoshop how-to video about it)  and yet back in the 70s, for many wedding photographers around the world, that was “the” shot in the album.

Now it just raises a laugh, like the hairdos. To keep it real, check out those awkward family photo websites from time to time.

Simon has another rule of thumb. He doesn’t just ask what people will think of an album twenty years from now, but what would they have they thought of it twenty years ago.

If it would have looked silly then, it’s probably bad taste now. Probably easier to imagine too.

Wall art too

Heather is a great fan of Queer Eye. I get it. Too many people live too tough lives, and they spend too much time on others and too little on themselves. They deserve a makeover.

So do your clients.

But it needs to be real. It would be awful if the bride appeared on her Dad’s arm and nobody recognised her.

Again, what will the kids think?

Sure, if this is a boudoir session by all means go to town. That photo book is probably for an audience of one.

Your mileage may vary.

You’re only hip once…

Our album designers have a particular style — simple, classic, lots of white space to let the images breathe. Not everyone likes it, which is fine … and why many people design their own albums. Vive la difference.

After all, what ends up on your pages is entirely up to you. It’s your album, your art. The album is just the frame. Pick from our paintbox whatever supports your style, and leave the rest to someone else.

But a warning — I was hip once. OK, a hippie!

Like today’s hipsters I had a beard, although mine rivalled Noah’s.

I lost the beard, and you can do the same.

You can move on from cold brew coffee, no problem.

You can toss the cool T-shirt after a few months’ wear.

But those albums are supposed to last for decades, and trust me, everything that looks cool now won’t in the future. What it will be is one of three things:

• Boring (let’s not go there).

• Laughed at (“What were they thinking?”).

• Respected — because you created it with good taste and an eye to the future.

In a nut-shell, hip or classic, be yourself — everyone else is taken.

Just avoid fads, and spare a thought for what the grandkids will think. Dylan, Bowie, Grace Jones, Joni Mitchell, David Byrne — they’re all still cool. My grandkids say so.

Like the flu

Fads spread like the ‘flu.

Back in the day speakers would do the rounds, just as they do today, and tell us about the latest look or gimmick … and suddenly everyone would be cross-processing, or making double exposures of the happy couple in a brandy glass, or overlooking the ceremony.

It’s easy to see this in the past, where we’re not emotionally invested. Not so easy to recognise today.

Influencers

They’re selling fads — OK, I’ll mind my manners, fashion. They have their moment in the sun. And what they’re pitching now will be gone soon, and so will the Instagram posts people are responding to.

But your frames won’t be. They’ll still be on the wall. At least until they strike someone as “cringe”.

Furniture?

Maybe it helps to think of your art as more like furniture.

Patricia Urquiola said, ”Designers should be wary of subscribing to the idea that furniture is fashion. A design is meant to accompany a person for a lifetime. It cannot be fashionable!”

Classic out lasts cringe.

Too many pictures

Would you say the worst thing about your photography is that you take so many pictures, or that you expect your clients to look at them all?

Rod started out in the UK in the 1960s as an apprentice.  He’d be given five rolls of film to shoot a wedding. Sixty images!

Later, as 35mm SLRs became the norm, photographers would typically shoot (and pay for) maybe ten rolls of 36-exposure film.

That film cost real money to develop and print, so sensible photographers would expect their lab to do a top quality job printing the “first runs”, and use those for the album.

Then they’d drive the lab nuts, trying to get the larger hero prints, which they ordered later, to exactly colour-match the originals. Rod was very particular about that. I’m not a photographer, and I’m not a lab technician, but I do know this is hard to do.

Now none of that matters any more, and wedding photographers shoot thousands of images.

What are you going to do with them all?

I have an idea. Throw most of them out.

Some photographers can’t be bothered. They throw them all onto a flash drive or no-limits web hosting service, blinks, soft focus, duplicates and all. Or they pay someone in a low-wage economy to “cull” them.

If the photographer can’t be bothered looking at the images, how should the client feel? If the photographer can’t be bothered selecting the images they’re proudest of, the images that tell the story, the images that show mother and child at their best, the look of pride, the special moments?

I promise you, show me that many images, especially online, and I may stop looking before I find anything I want to buy.

I can’t tell you not to spray and pray. The technology encourages you to, and it’s all us amateurs can do … but don’t show them all to your customers.

Once again, I know this is controversial.

The last, best and only

Did I say throw most of your images out?

I’d better qualify that.

By all means get rid of the duds and duplicates, but just because a shot didn’t make the cut for the wall, box, album or slideshow, think twice before throwing it out.

As I said earlier, at an event like a wedding, who knows what you’re photographing? You might have the last ever photo of Aunty Em with her boys, or the best ever photo of the bride’s school friends, or the only ever photo with her sister who came all the from South Africa.

They may not even be very good — but you don’t know their significance, and they didn’t really cost you anything (unless you spent ages on them in post-production). So be generous with them.

But to repeat myself, don’t make everyone look through them all. In Workspace you might publish a collection with a few images as a teaser, another with all the big hitters, and a third for for those who really do want to see everything.

The very best argument for the digital files

Incidentally, that right there — the "last, best and only" — is the very best argument for supplying the digital files as part of a wedding coverage. Because you'll take a lot of pictures that you can't possibly know the significance of. At least I hope you will, rather than do an extended fashion shoot.

Get it right in the camera

When Rod shot a wedding in the 1960s he really had to make his sixty shots count. It was excellent training in frugal photography.

He was proud of framing the shot in the viewfinder and not having to crop it later, of “getting it right in the camera”, of attention to detail in composition, lighting, expression, posing, exposure. Drawing the eye in to the subject. Removing distractions.

You know what’s great about that attitude even now, when pictures are pretty much free? You don’t have to “fix it in Photoshop”.

Johannes is passionate about image editing and album design, but he sees the value of getting it right in camera too. Knowing your light, knowing your composition, knowing what you’re after, starting with well exposed images.

Certainly, “we get some true gems,” he says, “but we often create more work than is necessary … It costs us in time and quality to deal with these things in post production.”

Tell a story

Imagine you’re shooting a high school graduation ball. You set up your camera, the kids stand in front of it and you shoot away.

You put the pictures online, the kids look at them and hopefully they buy a couple. A few dollars each from hundreds of customers is good business.

You could make a proof book out of the pictures, but you couldn’t make an album because there’s no story. It would be like looking for a plot in the phone book. This is the souvenir business. Nothing wrong with that.

Now look at your wedding shoot.

Here you have two customers, not hundreds, and you want (need) a lot of money from them. The difference is, in this case you can sell them as a story.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and yes, one picture can tell a story, but not in this case. Just as a writer uses words to tell stories, you use images. Part of your art is story-telling, which is why often you need to make a book out of them.

Day in the life

Stories are not just for weddings.

Who got to decide that a portrait shoot is a few beautiful images shot in your studio, so your clients can pick one or two and frame them for their wall?

What about a day in their lives? Spend the day with them, just as you would for a wedding.

Shoot them at work and play. Design a book or album. Tell the story of their lives.

Intimate

Albums aren’t always about stories.

Every year Sonya created a photo book for each of her daughters. Even we thought she was a little OTT crazy until Alexandria turned 21.

A lovely boudoir album also makes a wonderfully intimate gift, and an empowering self-affirmation.

A 2kg business card

Albums have two jobs:

To tell your clients’ stories.

To sell your next shoot.

In two minutes, without you needing to say a word, an album says “She’s good. She’s different. She knows how to make a wedding memorable. She understands emotion, style, design, colour, artisanship.”

Your display albums should also reflect what you want to sell — size, number of images etc.

They should define what people can expect from you.

They’re social proof, silent salesmen, 2kg business cards.

In a display album let them admire one beautiful wedding. It helps them imagine their own album, and you as their photographer.

Display albums need to be both desirable and believable. If the people are so beautiful, the dresses so gorgeous, the venue so grand, the book so big, that prospective clients can’t imagine themselves in it, it’s not right.

Of course that varies from person to person, which is why — besides Good Better Best — one sample is not generally enough. Perfection can be intimidating.

And of course the same goes for the other products you sell.

You choose

Sonya sat in on an album planning session with one of our clients, where almost literally every photo had to be mulled over. Was it in or out? If there were three files to choose from, which one did the client prefer? 

“What do you think?”

“No, it’s your choice…”

“No, what do you think?”

Sonya soon felt like screaming to the photographer, “You choose! They want you to choose.”

Even if they don’t like what you chose for them, at least you’ll have given them a better idea what to replace it with.

It belongs to them

Here’s a tip to keep you on track.

Remember it’s the client’s product, not yours.

An album isn’t a showcase for you and your photography, it’s a story for them.

It’s your job is to gather the collateral and write that story.

You can and should apply your own style to it (that’s why they chose you) but you’re a hired gun. They own the relationships and the story.

And despite what I’ve said, you’re the story teller. It’s your sensitivity to them and their needs, and what you could make of those things, that determines how precious the story can become.

It’s just that, like a writer taking out choice words and paragraphs because they don’t advance the story, you will doubtless have to sacrifice some hero shots and layouts in the interests of the Big Picture.

Editing and design are completely different skills to photography, and just as important to the final product.

Beautiful

I’m looking at a truly beautiful print of an equally beautiful orchid.

Where does the beauty come from?

It starts with the flower. I don’t know who bred it or nurtured it, but I wish I did.

It’s a beautiful composition. I do know that the stylist was Katie Lockhart, the photographer Sjoerd.

It’s a beautiful file, worked to perfection at Alt Group as part of our re-branding project a few years ago.

And it’s beautifully printed.

Here’s the thing. The beauty in the print is totally dependent on everything that went before. Break the chain and you’re left with ordinary.

If expectations are high, and the final outcome less than perfect, it can be difficult to allocate responsibility, and it’s probably only possible on the basis of mutual trust and respect among everybody involved. Learning rather than blaming.

We see things differently

They’re both photographers, but she and her husband, both professional and opinionated, see things differently.

She likes punchy images, and he likes seeing detail and tone.

In spite of their differences they both want the best.

She knows they can’t have both — it’s a trade-off.

He sympathises with the lab “trying to keep people like us happy”.

We appreciate their understanding.

Image editing and colour correction is part science, part preference.

Natural or photoshopped

There is a very striking difference between much of what we see and admire in our Bindery, and the heavily worked images that seem to dominate most professional photography competitions.

I used to think there was an irony in watching a self professed “photojournalist” teaching newbies how to “pose” couples for the perfect shot. But it’s been a few years since naturalism and photojournalism were the buzzwords du jour.

Maybe it’s time for the pendulum to swing again – and save you a ton of time by letting your images speak for themselves.

Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be. That’s been good advice since the dawn of desktop computers, and Apple turned 40 in 2016.

Master Chef

We have a good friend who’s a master chef. He wants us to live our lives around food. He can’t understand why we live so far from Auckland’s best food stores and restaurants, and if we travel, he always knows what to eat and where.

Neil Young wanted us to stop buying low quality MP3s.

Your barista wants you to go somewhere better than Starbucks.

They’re all obsessive, and doubtless you are too, thankfully. We get better photography,  and better food, coffee, wine, music, books, cars and art, as a result.

 But your customers aren’t obsessive, or not about the same things.

They care what you do, hopefully, but not so much how you do it.

As a result they probably don’t understand how good you are, or why. They may not really believe they need a photographer at all – any more than they need someone to write their letters and emails.

I love Neil Young’s music, but as long as I can get it in iTunes that’s good enough for me.

Of course you can take better photographs, but that’s not the challenge. Figuring out what your clients value is very profitable. It’s probably not the same thing that you value.

The best ingredients

Our friend the chef has a simple culinary philosophy: buy the best ingredients and don’t feck them up. Ways to feck them up include over or undercooking, over or under seasoning, and over or under cleverness. Also garnishes you’re not supposed to eat.

But again, start with the best ingredients.

It should be the same with your photography.

You’re in the business of shooting people, and you can’t add heart or liveliness in post-production. You need to get that happening before you press the shutter … or grab it from the sidelines if you’re more a stealth photographer than a showman.

Then (back to the cooking metaphor) having gathered the best ingredients you can bake them with subtlety and finesse into a classic dish. Beautifully presented, but without faux creativity covering it like a thick sauce.

By the way, I’m expressing an aesthetic opinion here. There are plenty who make a thing of bringing fashion photography to portraits and weddings, working the images heavily in postproduction like a magazine shoot.

But for myself, if I go to a wedding it’s for the people, not the dress.

Anyway, you decide.

And again, figuring out what your clients value (and why they came to you) is very profitable.

Left brain right brain

When people talk about designers, what springs to mind? Heather thinks of Dieter Rams, Stephen thinks of Jony Ive, but as often as not I think of Jerry Breekveldt. 

It’s a long story, but I used to work with Jerry, who was a marine architect. We did small commercial craft like tugs and fishing boats.

Jerry was a true gentleman, a very talented man, and a designer.

Watching him in the early stages of a design I was always in awe. He had to build this functional sea-going machine, strong enough to do its job, light enough to float, sleek enough to drive economically, comfortable enough to live on, practical to build, and stable enough not to tip over under any circumstances.

There were so many moving parts to consider, down to seemingly trivial domestic details like, how much room do you need for this toilet, or that set of bunks… and actually, will they fit inside the lines of the hull?

And then it had to make the owner proud. You can’t sell a Prius to someone who wants a muscle car. A boat has to look right. Jerry’s designs were bluff, handsome and manly.

Here’s the thing. Was Jerry right-brain or left brain? Creative or analytical?

Clearly he was a bit of both. 

If you’re going to run a business you need to be a bit of both too.

Like boat design, or software development, your studio is a creative endeavour that needs to be thought about analytically.

Until things “add up”, boats sink, computers crash and businesses fail.

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