Perspectives on Commercial Photography

Perspectives on Commercial Photography
Jeremy Webb

What is your reaction to seeing the work of a great photographer? Are you inspired, fired-up with ideas, privileged at having seen such a masterpiece? Or do you whither and crumple, convinced that you'll never, ever be able to produce anything like that in your lifetime?

I ask the question because Commercial photography so often requires an optimistic and lateral-thinking approach which is worlds away from the please-yourself route of Fine Art, Independent, or Personal photography where you are chiefly (but not exclusively) your own commissioner, editor, practitioner and critic. It does not require you to sell your soul, or make a pact with the devil, but commercial studio/advertising work does require patience, discipline and (as I'll discuss later) people skills and perhaps most importantly, a sense of where your part lies within what can often be a lengthy production process.
The client has invested their trust, time and money in you. They are not really interested in the journey you take to reach your result. Only the destination is important. I've illustrated 3 commercial studio-based commissions here, where the journey taken throws up some less obvious issues and where (in true Buddhist style) the solution to your problem can be invisible because it is literally right in front of your eyes. Put another less esoteric way, why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

Background: A design agency approached me to produce some images of various new paper products and spiral-bound books which their client (one of the country's top book publishers) wanted to feature in an in-house colour newsletter/mini brochure for staff and distributors.

The Brief: Photograph them on plain backgrounds, no props or distractions. Emphasize their quality, light them beautifully, make the reader want to pick them up, handle them, impress in the mind of the audience their texture, weight, and workmanship. In short - make them sexy.

The Problems: Where to start?! Most of what came to my studio was flat, rectangular and decidedly unsexy. How could this be anything other than a copying job of flat artwork on flat backgrounds? Flare from lighting glossy, casually-opened pages would be difficult to overcome, and compositions were likely to be unimaginative since everything (and I mean everything) was rectangular.

The Solution: Priority No.1 - take the shots they want using overhead soft box on flash head to produce pleasing if slightly bland results. Then trust own instincts and take extras of details. I've always been a great believer in that old maxim that so often Less Means More, a fraction can say so much more than the whole, and in the words of one of my mentors Irving Penn, the secret is to "capture the essence". Then take a deep breath, gird loins, and prepare to sell the idea to the client as a fresher, more contemporary and visually appealing alternative to the original rather flat ideas.

The Result: Employing a little lateral thinking paid off handsomely. After experimenting with flash, tungsten, and daylight in order to light the spiral column of book, I dug out an old slide projector which I had tucked away to one corner of my studio. This produced a bright, narrow beam of light which lit the spiral beautifully and gave shadow details which emphasized its 3-dimensional qualities and picked out bright metallic highlights. The Composition also made use of diagonals that broke-up the square-within-a-square feel of a lot of the other shots. Finally, a wide aperture used with close-up provided a very narrow plane of focus forcing the viewing eye to seek out the sharpness within the image and dwell on that area.
Client happy, agency happy, photographer happy, further commissions gained.

Background: This seemed to be a straightforward commission to photograph a selection of hiking/outdoor wet weather garments that the client wanted to be done in the studio.

The Brief: A specially designed fabric keeps the walker dry. The garments are not simply highly effective and practical, but are colourful and attractive as well. Full-length modeling shots had already been taken. The task here was to focus on the detail of the garments without abstracting them or obstructing the message that crucially aims to emphasize their effectiveness in adverse weather conditions.

The Problems: Again, studio lighting just didn't look right. My first attempts were to take the flash head down low and light the fabric as though the sun was setting or rising over the hills and valleys of the fabric. This proved to be too abstract and was quickly discarded. As an idea, I felt it was a usefully creative metaphor, but crucially it didn't fulfill the brief's less sophisticated requirements.

The Solution: Back to basics. Why fiddle around with artificial lighting when you can have the real thing. Using the large V on the edge of the pocket gave the shot some scale despite being very close-up, and also gave good exposure to the fabric logo. The best shot of the session was taken in front of my kitchen window with water droplets sprayed on and picked-out easily by the back-lighting. As so many studio lighting set ups are used to mimic the effect of daylight lighting conditions anyway, this solution seemed almost absurdly simple.

The Result: A strong image that shows both form and function in a punchy shot which the client was pleased with.

Background: A local toy manufacturer was extending its product range and required photographs of their latest toy jewellery kits in the packaging that contains them. I was to liaise closely with a design agency who had known and worked with them for many years and knew the exacting standards which this work required.

The Brief: To produce a series of images which simply show the product in its best possible light ie clean, bright, colourful and on specified backgrounds (some colour, some black). The product packaging must induce near-hysteria and drooling on the part of any child, who seeing these colourful and appealing products, would want to grab them off the shelf. Any notions of "style" or "taste" go out of the window at this point. High Impact and boldness were to be the order of the day and the photography should integrate seamlessly with the packaging.

The Problems: Spherical highly reflective objects always scatter and bounce light around. Finding an arrangement that suited the beads was difficult for each set and, in order to maximise the colour, soft and diffuse lighting was out of the question.

The Solution: To use sunlight as a bright, single-source light with the product arranged on slightly textured glass with black cloth underneath. A variety of tin foil reflectors arranged around the necklace just out of view would throw back bright light into the shadow areas and make the beads 'sing out'. What would have been nasty black shadows were simply passed through the glass and onto the black cloth where they were absorbed and under control. Had sunlight not been available, I would probably have used a single bright tungsten light.

The Result: Brief fulfilled with a series of different toy jewellery sets that were incorporated into the box design.

These three examples of real commissions that I have fulfilled provide a flavour of the working practices of a commercial photographer - the challenges that they face and the creativity required to meet those challenges. However, the biggest challenges that commercial photographers face are not usually technical or creative ones - the biggest challenges are invariably dealing with people. In the world of commercial studio-based photography there are times when the biggest problems you wrestle with are not the perennial technical ones of film choice, perspective distortion and so on, but the issues of people, personalities, and professional relationships.

Commercial photographers have to deal with all types of business, from the small regional clients - local manufacturing businesses with a small staff, struggling to compete in an over-crowded market, to huge global multi-nationals with mega-bucks budgets. Most of my professional nightmares have been inspired by the thinner end of this huge wedge - the struggling industrial unit whose turnover allows precious little for any advertising budget and yet they require a miracle brochure in 2 weeks time. They can approach you directly via your yellow pages ad, or through the recommendation of a colleague or client. In which case you listen carefully to the client, find out exactly what they require, then battle hard to persuade them that you don't work for free, or that the commercial exposure would be sufficient remuneration.

Then they drop a bombshell - this may vary, but it is often an issue that will affect the way in which you work and the quality of the final images that you can produce. On one occasion, for example the MD of the company commissioning some work was determined to feature his teenage son as a model or 'typical customer' in their new brochure despite the acned skin and unattractive features. In such situations these decisions are based on either vanity or budget (more usually both). Often, extracting yourself from such commissions at this late stage becomes difficult, if not impossible even when you marshal all of your arguments and prepare to dig your heels in.

In such situations you are faced with that commercial vs professional dilemma - should you give the client what he or she wants even if you feel that it compromises your professional quality standards. After all, they are the client, you are the photographer. At one level they pay you to produce what they want, not what you want, even if you know that disaster looms. However, my view is that any photographer in this situation has a duty to at least try to have some further input into this type of problem. It is quite simply a question of professional integrity and personal reputation your photography deserves to be seen within a context of 'quality', not between the pages of a home-grown brochure that looks as if it was thrown together in three minutes.

It may sound contemporary, but this kind of 'challenge' echoes an old dilemma faced by early photographers as the medium spread at the turn of the century - are photographers tradesmen or craftsmen? Obliged to do nothing more than what is asked of them by the rich sitters who seek flattery and self-aggrandizement through their portrait sitting, or are they artists, seekers of the truth, allowed licence to apply creativity, vision and craft to their art?

In today's commercial world, can photographers be trusted to offer some creative input, or are they the production machine of somebody else's tightly scripted images? I suspect that only a tiny fraction of today's commissions trust a photographer with an open brief to produce the goods. And I can see why. A lot of money is at stake and people's jobs are on the line, its all very well being arty, but not where clarity, directness, simplicity and explicitness are sacrificed in the process. This is why cliches are used and despised in equal measure by the advertising industry. On the one hand they are safe and reliable, instantly comforting and recognisable. On the other, they are corny, tedious and irritating beyond belief.

Mercifully the type of Client - Photographer conflict outlined above is becoming rare as the gap is filled by the professionalism and expertise offered by Design and Advertising agencies. This gives rise to the Client - Agency - Photographer triangle where the agency is not simply a bridge between the two parties, but a very necessary facilitator and font of knowledge, able to represent the needs of the client, advise on budgets and media spend, take care of creative decisions, and ensure that the photographer is fully briefed and paid for the job on completion (at least thats the theory!)

These days, marketing is all. If you don't know how to find, serve, and retain your customer base, you simply won't survive. Integrated Marketing Agencies are a multi-functioning hot pot of design, brand development, marketing, communications, print production and so on - all inter-related and all ready to take the creative responsibility burden (but not necessarily all of the creative decision-making) off the shoulders of their hard-working clients.

Commercial studio-based photography does not always involve convoluted lighting set ups, expensive gadgetry and technical wizardry. Sometimes an eye for simplicity, an open mind, and your negotiating skills will be worth far more than your Hasselblad and all your kit ever could.