Why Providing Visual Examples to Your Photographer is Extremely Useful!

Whether you book a personal branding photo shoot or a product photo shoot, providing visual examples to your photographer is extremely useful for a successful outcome.

Why?

It brings you and your photographer on the same page.

If you have booked with a professional photographer before, you know that communication is key for final deliverables. If your photographer understands your vision, they can therefore capture it, and you will ultimately be a very happy customer. That is why the best way for your photographer to understand your vision is to provide him or her with visual examples.

In general, photographers are visual people. If we can visually see what you are looking for, then we can most likely deliver this.

Sometimes word descriptions can lose a lot of their meaning and get lost in translation. Say you are talking with your photographer over the phone trying to describe what you want:

“I’m looking for the photos of my candles to be colorful and include some props that are listed in the scents.”

To you, this may seem obvious. But there are so many ways to interpret this. Do you want solid colorful backgrounds or colorful backgrounds with fun patterns? How do you want the prop scents to be laid out next to your candles? Are you wanting contrasting shadows with the light? Providing your photographer with a visual example will help answer all these questions.

One important thing to note: when you provide your photographer with a visual example, please keep in mind that they will not be able to copy the image exactly. Not only is this considered to be copying, but it also wouldn’t allow your brand to stand out in its own way. The purpose of the inspiration photos are to provide your photographer with visual examples so that they understand what you are looking for and can create something similar (but not exactly the same). Does this make sense?

Now, how can you provide visual examples? There are many ways. Here are just several:

1) Make a Pinterest board and share it with your photographer! Pinterest is an amazing tool for finding great visual examples. Sometimes when our clients don’t really know what they want, we go to Pinterest and search for ideas. You can use it like the Google search engine - just type in what you are looking for and BAM! You’ll have plenty of examples to choose from.

2) Gather posts on Instagram using the “Save” feature! Instagram makes it really easy to save posts that you want to come back to. All you have to do is go to the post and click the button that looks like a flag in the bottom right hand corner. To access them, go to your profile page, click the three parallel lines in the upper right hand corner, and then click “Saved.” You will be able to send these to your photographer using the “Share” button (the paper airplane symbol on the bottom of the post). Or if you don’t feel like saving them, you can just click the airplane button and share them with your photographer right off the bat.

3) Go the old-fashioned way and clip from magazines! If you don’t like technology (or you just need a break) and would rather get creative with magazines, then go for it! Gathering inspo from magazines is a great way to organize your thoughts while also finding new inspiration! Once you have gathered all of your clippings together, you can put them into a collage and snap a photo to send to your photographer.

Interested in learning more about the photoshoot process and booking? Click below to schedule a free consultation call with us!