Kris D'Amico Photography

August 24th, 2010 by Kris

Now, we all know how tricky it is to shoot black on black and I get a lot of questions about how I manage to shoot black on black and white on white. My answer is simple, hire a great retoucher. ONLY KIDDING, but seriously, a great retoucher will make your life easier. We all know though that I am a huge fan of shoot it right the first time and will make post easier, your retoucher will thank you. Even if your retoucher is you… but I digress, here’s the shot that I’m going to talk about.

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August 20th, 2010 by Kris

So, I saw this on my twitter feed this morning and I thought it was too good not to share. Thank you “Johnston on Photography!” Here’s a few of my favorites (link to the full article follows):

• Use either a very big camera, or a very small camera. People seldom feel threatened by a tiny camera the size of the Sigma DP-1 or Panasonic LX3, but they also don’t feel very threatened by a giant, clumsy view camera on a tripod (they are also seldom aware of “the moment it clicks” with a big view camera, since you’re not looking through the camera when you take the picture). I suspect that setting up a big camera makes you less of a threat because it immobilizes you; you can’t go sneaking about with one of those. You’re also given an opportunity to confidently pretend that you have every right to be doing what you’re doing. Of course, you’re subject to tripod restrictions in very public places such as crowded city sidewalks and tourist attractions, so do your homework ahead of time and be sure you have a permit if you need one.
• Carry a business card and give it away freely. If you’re stopped or threatened, a card goes a long way toward explaining who you are and implies that you have nothing to hide.
• Ask them for help. Asking someone for help changes your relationship to them. This works with potential thieves—you turn yourself from their prey into their beneficiary, and them from predators into good Samaritans—and it works with cops and guards too, whose job it often is to help people, after all. Have a question ready to go for when someone approaches you or hassles you.
• Work on your camera skills! Good shooters work fast. Cartier-Bresson could reportedly get his Leica to his eye and back almost literally faster than people could notice. If you want to avoid attracting attention, don’t stand there like a big dork futzing endlessly with your camera controls and staring through the viewfinder for minutes on end. Waist-level finders help with this too, because when you look through an eye-level finder, people feel like you’re looking at them, whereas when you look down at some device you’re apparently fiddling with, people assume you’re looking at the device and not at them.
• Adjust the camera while looking in a different direction. Then take the picture you want to take as though it were an afterthought, and do it quickly. A bored bouncer at a bar doesn’t have an excuse to stride across the street and hassle you if you’re pointing the camera down the street and not at his bar; and if you take one shot in his direction and then turn and leave, you remove his opportunity to challenge you.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Have a great Friday!!

August 16th, 2010 by Kris

Just a quick post, but I feel like I get a lot of email and phone calls about folks wanting to work with us, but they are either not sure how they can help or they are so hyper-niche focused that we could work together on one job twice a year. Trust me when I say, I know how you feel. For years I went around to agencies, big and small, saying “I just want to shoot.” Before that I’d call these photog’s with these huge studios and say “I just want to help!” So, can we take votes on how many of those jobs I was awarded? Yeah.

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July 5th, 2010 by Kris

How to Use Photos to Sell More Online.

Here’s a great article by a gent that crosses the design and photo boundaries. If you do interactive design or photography that goes into interactive work, you need to read this.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The best way to sell products is to let them sell themselves. Consider the Gorilla Pod shown below. The photo demonstrates brilliantly the benefits of the product. The copy is supplementary; the image does the heavy lifting. Let photography do the selling for you as much as possible.”

Read the rest here: How to Use Photos to Sell More Online.

-Kris

June 13th, 2010 by Kris

So, as many of you know, I’ve been pretty busy over the last 3 weeks. We’ve had several projects that crossed and blurred the lines between traditional ads, viral marketing and cutting edge public relations messaging. It’s gotten me thinking about that age old question that all artists deal with when working in the marketing and advertising world; “What do I do?” Read the rest of this entry »

June 8th, 2010 by Kris

So, here is the great irony of time management. I was supposed to put this post up last week and because of my poor time management, I missed my own deadline. Funny that!

So, without soaking up too much of your very valuable time I wanted to touch on some of the tools different people use to keep themselves on schedule.

Personally I use Google’s Calendar and Tada List by 37 Signals.

We’ve all seen Google Calendar and it’s pretty straightforward to use, I did download a little thing to keep iCal and Google sync’d up and then I read this help article. It seems to keep most things sync’d up between my phone and the online version.

For those of you who DON’T know about 37Signals and basecamp, you really should get to know them. They are an old web design shop that went the way of product design and wow, they do some amazing stuff. Tada List is pretty simple. It’s an online “to do” list that you can share with whoever. For me, I use it when I’m in over my head. I jot down from the most important to the least important things to do that week and share it with my key personnel (aka my wife and sometimes my sister). Anyway, it’s definitely worth checking out.

So, some of the other suggestions I’ve received are TeuxDeux, from Freyanator. It’s another web-based “to do” list that’s laid out in a day-by-day system. Very cool stuff. The ladies over at Dandy Lion Events also turned me on to Time Management Ninja. It’s a blog with sections dedicated to how to be more efficient with your email, your blog, your technology, etc. Definitely worth adding to the regular reads in your RSS feeder. That’s all for now! Have a great week and we’ll talk to you very soon!

KD

May 10th, 2010 by Kris

From an email blast I receive from Ivan Levison, a great copywiter.

“If someone wants to optimize their Web site for the search engines, what’s the first five things you’d tell them to do.”

Here’s [Mary O'Brien's] advice in her own words . . .

#1. Develop a Relevant Keyword List

Developing an effective keyword strategy for B2B SEO can be very challenging. Start with a brainstorming session and pull together as large a list as you can. Try to include every term possible that a potential prospect might search on. Focus more on broad keywords and don’t get caught up in industry or company brand lingo. Think of all the types of products and services you sell.

#2.  Decide which phrases to target

Once you’ve created your list of potential keywords, you need to discover how popular those terms are. Use a tool like Wordstream or Google’s Traffic Estimator to find out the historical popularity of those keywords or take the data from your AdWords campaign and extrapolate, based on searches and ROI. This will give you a better idea of the most relevant terms to target for your SEO.

#3. Create content to match the keywords

Develop pages that specifically focus on each term you have selected with good site architecture around each one. Try to speak to prospects’ needs in your copy, but also consider the search engines and what they are looking for when they crawl your site. Watch your word order, singulars and plurals and the length of your copy. Longer copy is typically better for B2B prospects as it allows you to provide education on your product or service. Search Engines also appreciate longer copy and you have an opportunity to position your keyword more frequently within it.

#4. Focus on your external links

Establish a good linking strategy by thinking of all the ways you can reach your audience through your content. Post on article sites, tweet, blog, have company members appear as guest bloggers, distribute white papers, create webinars and case studies around your articles and products, etc. Anything that can position your company as a thought leader is a good thing especially if it provides a link back to your site.

#5. Focus on your internal links

Work all of these extra content pages into your navigation. Some of these pages will be accessible through your site-wide navigation while others may be in the sub-navigation of a particular section or only be available through text links in the body copy of a page. Keep the content pages for your most targeted and highly searched terms closest to the home page with the least amount of clicks to get to them. Content pages related to less relevant, more obscure, or niche terms can be accessed from deeper in your site.

Ivan’s Information:
Phone: (415) 461-0672
E-mail: ivan@levison.com

February 22nd, 2010 by Kris

So, I was going to write this incredible, potentially life changing blog post on how to think about e-commerce. Then I found something online that was much more involved than I was ever going to get, so I’ll keep my post short (no doubt, a little life changing) and let you sift thru the wealth of information over there. Ready, here we go:

Web a user is surfing the internet research shows that people take between 5 and 7 seconds to decide weather to stay on a website or not. Print catalogues usually are given to a somewhat interested audience. That means that your leading web image, needs to be a ROCK STAR. Not to say that you can slack with your print catalogue, just that you are speaking to two different audiences. Alright, that’s all from me right now.

Here’s a teaser and a link to Philosphie’s e-commerce series, it’s more about design standards and the thought behind selling on the web than photography, but without the correct positioning and web functionality then it really doesn’t matter what the pictures look like, right?

-Kris

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February 4th, 2010 by Kris

This article was reposted from: http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com. Despite the fact that I do disagree with a few of their “pop-predictions” about 2010, it seems that many of these trends have already come to pass, and like most major trends in the market, trends just take time for most folks to grab a hold of them.

1. Facebook replaces personal email
2. Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud
3. Mobile Commerce – the promise that has never delivered, yet.
4. Fewer registrations – one sign-in fits all
5. Disruption vs. Continuity – Alternatives to the “Big Idea”
6. Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven, Open Source DIY Culture
7. Info-Art
8. Crowd Sourcing
9. More Flash, Not Less

Here’s the article:

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February 2nd, 2010 by Kris

So the formatting of this article was so bad that I decided to repost it here on my blog:

By Scott Tillitt
Publication: Photo District News
Date: Wednesday, December 1 2004

“We asked some of the leading creatives in the county to talk about current and future trends in advertising photography, and what they would like to see both more of and less of in 2005. We certainly got some interesting answers: covering everything from photographs of parking lots at noon to Juergen Teller; from a discussion of plagiarism to a rejection (by one creative) of any more photographs of people over the age of 80. Warning: This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in advertising photography.

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