Kris D'Amico Photography

March 9th, 2010 by Kris

Not my thoughts, I got this from Seth Goddin’s blog last year and I think it’s worth repeating!!

“As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

• Before engaging with the innovator, foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
• If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the innovator to figure it out?
• Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
• After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
• Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
• Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
• Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
• Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
• Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
• Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
• Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
• When you find a faux innovator, run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
• Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.”

Thanks Seth.

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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January 12th, 2010 by Kris

For those of us who do not have an MBA, these can be nagging questions. What does all this stuff mean? Why does it matter? Well, recently I’ve been working with a few startup companies that have been struggling with these questions, so I decided to turn it in on my studio. So, here’s a few exercises that you can use to flesh out, refresh, or like many of us small biz owners, establish a written mission statement and define values and goals.

So, here we go step one: Core Values.

You can google core values and get a list 3 miles long of what that means and the corporate definition, blah, blah, blah. Here it is boiled down to a sentience:

Core values are 3 to 5 words that define your approach to business on a daily basis.

For example the values that I came up with for Kris D’Amico Photography:

• Inspire
• Serve/ Contribute
• Invent/ Set Standards
• Experiment
• Embody Excellence

So, what do these mean, well you can break them down as much or as little as you like, but for me these can be put into one line. I want this studio, my studio, to inspire, while serving the community and helping to invent new methods thru experimentation, all while giving our clients a level of excellence that makes them raise up over their competition. Get all that? Alright, I know there’s a lot here, but the best advice that I read was from some Ph.D. at Harvard. He said, if your industry changed, your core values would not, if your management changed, your core values would not, you get the idea.

So, step two: The Mission Statement

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December 23rd, 2009 by Kris

So, I’m adding social networking icons to my home page and soon the blog. Has anyone had a good response to a call to action when using these icons? Email me if you’ve got any success stories and I may post them up here! Thanks and have a great holiday.

Oh, new eblast here. You need to sign up if you’re not already getting my emails. The new series that’ll be starting in January will have 2 parts, one for you art director, writers, and photogs and the other for you business owners and general creative folk who could care less about f-stops and more about a cool picture.

Thanks!!

KD

December 18th, 2009 by Kris

We shot our rears off yesterday for Say i Won’t. It’s a clothing company that’s been around for a while and recently found some new finical support. Here’s a sneak peak from the shoot…

December 3rd, 2009 by Kris

For what it’s worth, we did a proof of concept video for Boswell’s Harley here in Nashville. And guess what, they loved it. Yesterday they sent it out to 6000+ people on their mailing list! We’ll see how it flies, right? Well, here’s the link, take a look and don’t judge too harshly, it is after all it’s only a proof, right?

November 9th, 2009 by Kris

We did a little model test for Ms. Katja Russell a few weeks ago and shame on me for not sharing earlier!! It’s just take a little bit to get to the photoshop work, after all we’re a busy shoppe! So with out further ado, here are a few of my personal favorites. (You can also find a few more of these on my flickr page too!)

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November 4th, 2009 by Kris

Just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about what we’ve had going on over here at the studio over the last few weeks.

Well, for starters we picked up a client that is redoing their entire online brand. That’s been keeping us busy, busy, busy. 120 sku’s, 70 individual products, it’s been a lot of work. We shot both the new e-commerce and lifestyle images. They’ve never used a professional to shoot this stuff before so there has also been a large educational component. The nice thing about this project has been the opportunity to work thru some of the business of business with them. Meaning that they didn’t show up and say shoot this, we had the chance to really work hand in hand with them and shape some images that are really dynamic. We are shooting many of their products to have some serious flexibility in the future. How? We are shooting them blank and doing the imprints in photoshop. This keeps their “overhead” down and it allow us to just to do some great product shots.

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