Worth More Than A Thousand Words – Custom Photography
Nicholas Longtin | July 2019
If the old adage “a photo is worth a thousand words” is true than custom photography is worth millions. Creating a rich and engaging online experience for your visitors isn’t possible without compelling imagery. With the advent of high quality affordable stock photography most websites are littered with photos from common royalty-free services like Getty Images. While these images have their place, nothing is more effective than purposely produce custom photography.
Authentic and Unique
The biggest problem with stock photography is the best images are overused. Browsing any stock photo site will provide you with the most popular images at the top of search results. This inevitably results in overuse of top searched images. If you browse the web enough the same images keep popping up making it painfully obvious the designers used stock photography.
Creating your own images alleviates this issue and also creates the opportunity to bring authenticity to your photos. While your photos may lack the slick presentation of stock imagery the authentic nature of custom photos can be worth the small downgrade in technical quality.
Train Or Work With A Pro
Whenever possible work with a professional for your photography needs. However, if it’s not feasible to hire out all your custom photo work at least get training and the right equipment. Many times my clients that require a high volume of photos hire us to collaborate on the first set of photos and train them on the process. Then when additional shots are needed they can handle the work internally.
This is a common situation with e-commerce sites and other situations where a continual need for custom photos exists. Very high quality results can be achieved when we train our clients and consult with them on the purchase and setup of equipment.
Spot The Stock
Here is a fun little quiz to see if you can determine which shots are stock photography and which ones are custom. All the custom photos here we took for clients to achieve specific marketing objectives.
Which one is a stock photo, A or B? (answers key below)
ANSWERS: B, B, A
