Colours May Vary - Sharon

Self Promotion in Photography

As an artist it is important to get your work known in order to promote yourself and your work. There are multiple different reasons why self promotion as an artist is important as you have to promote yourself as a person as well as your own work.

Photographers often have their own website that works as a media portfolio as it’s easier access from a larger area as it’s internet accessible. This allows for more potential clients or simply promoting your work to other artists.

Other artists also pay an important role in promoting your work so art shows are a great time to show off your work, meet and converse with other artists who may be interested in your work or perhaps wish to work with you to promote their own and your work.

Social media is a great way to promote your own work  such as the use of twitter, Facebook and Tumblr the largest social media websites in current times. Doing a photo shoot and tagging the client in the image will also promote your work among their ‘friends’ and potentially bring new clients in that way.  This can also give people updated activities you are doing in your work such as price changes and other work you have worked on.

Known Photographers Websites/Blogs

http://www.davidlachapelle.com/

This is the famous photographer David Lachapelle's photography website. It instantly opens up to a full page picture of his work that is busy and full of life. Any other page of his all have the very similar and well known black and white layout. This website is good to promote his work as it lists exhibitions and dates his work is on display. His website persuades people to come see and potentially buy his work or ask for photography jobs. The website also shows his earlier works to give you an idea of the type of photography he does. Publications he has done in the past are shown to promote books he has released. He also has all of his contact details down so it easy to email or get in contact with him.

http://www.billbrandt.com/

Another example of a famous photographer’s website here instantly gives you the opportunity to buy his publication and has a link to twitter and Facebook. The layout is black and white which is incredibly popular for a photography blog or website as it is similar to a photo album with matte edges. The simplicity allows for the main focus to be on the artist’s work.

http://alexprager.com/

The front page of his blog gives a list to contact him, look at his past work and links to social networking (left). I like how he shows his different artwork in a more gallery format (right). As the background is white, this disallows the images from contrasting from the rest of the page.

Colours May Vary

For my colours may vary project, I had to photograph a small new and upcoming business, a small shop in central Leeds called “colours may vary”. Upon entering the shop I felt a sense of a clean, open space with a simplistic layout. The music is very relaxing and the lack of colour on the walls made me focus more on the products in front of me. This gave me inspiration for my portfolio work as I could make use of the clean walls and enhanced colours in my photographs with minimal photo manipulation. I worked with the camera RAW files as these do not lower in quality with the use of photo manipulation like JPG format is prone to.

Colour Correction

This is an example of some images I made use of in my final portfolio. The initial images, despite the content being suitable, seemed too dull to fit the shop’s atmosphere. I opened the camera RAW file and simply adjusted colour balance, focusing on trying to make the whites as pure and bright as possible. The adjustment of contrast allowed me to keep the product colours bright, without them being blown out by the highlights being made brighter.

(before)

(after)

Porfolio

When I was creating the portfolio for the client I had to ensure the images I put together were complimenting.. I made use of the bleed and matte space around the images to make the portfolio more appealing. These are some examples of potential layout choices I think would work nicely:

 After taking the photographs I then tried out a few of these formats to see what my results were and if it works well and will suit my client’s needs. Luckily, the image layout and style of photographs worked well together as planned. These are my results following the familiar layout above:

If I have the chance I would like to print out these images on appealing photographic paper. Because of the image I have chosen I believe matt and glossy would both work fine. The problem with this however is money so I may have to find a cheaper alternative.

Postcard

In order to promote my work to my client I will leave a personal postcard with my contact information to encourage the client to promote my work forward to other people. This card should be fairly simplistic and it usually is in the black and white colour scale depending on the photographer and the work they do. The card can feature images of your own work to give the viewer some visual feedback.

I just used something simple with my name and contact information on that is easily readable and quite rememberable.

Evalutate

As I never showed my results to the client I have no knowledge of how they would have received the work i had done for them. The deadline was not met and finding time to enable the client to see my work in a physical form despite having it pre-ready on the computer. I do however think that my images would be well received as I feel they fit the criteria and aesthetic they wished for.