Pleasant Surprises

Unlike wedding or family photographers one of the problems with shooting commercial is that you basically have NO control over the creative final output or media buy or the timing of your work being seen.

It may take months or even years for your work to make it into print, sometimes you actually never get to see your work in print because its released in another market or is used for pitches or internal purposes.

You could work 10 shoots in a month and never be able to share your work because of proprietary processes and branding and marketing considerations.



That said its always a pleasant surprise when you open a magazine months later and see your work in an AD the way you envisioned it. Other times you look at the AD and say "Hey isn't that my picture??" or "wow I didn't think the agency would use the work that way!"

This is kind of cool in a way because you as a photographer envision an AD one way, then a designer gets a hold of your images and does his (or her) thing.

I thought I would share a couple with you

The first is a Union Hall ad that appeared in Profile magazine. The shot was originally a huge band series because Union Hall rocks. When Ignition Media asked for this group photo I was kind of like ummm.. it's not that great. But when the designer cropped it that's when it all came together.

As a photographer I had no idea the designer was going to do this.

Next is an ad for Graham construction which has appeared in a lot of trade publications and places live Venture etc...

I shot this series at a plant under construction and we did two images of the Buggy and the Truck. Graham uses both. I really liked the picture of the Buggy.

It's cool, has presence and is composed well.

But the client obviously wanted to see their company logo, which is not seen on the Buggy, so I understand why they went with the truck photograph.


C