In these days of affordable and high-quality digital cameras, suddenly everyone has become a photographer. This is particularly relevant in the arena of commercial photography where more and more businesses are deciding to purchase a 'pro-sumer' DSLR for a few hundred pounds and set about taking their own images for use in their brochures and on their websites.
Now this is all very good - I can see the logic - why pay about the same cost of the camera to a professional photographer for just one job? After all, once purchased, the camera can be used again and again whereas, not unreasonably, the photographer would expect to be paid every time.
The trouble is, it's not just a camera that you need to take top quality photographs. In addition to (at least one) camera, you need a selection of lenses for different images (and these ideally need to be pro=grade lenses which are inevitably expensive) lighting equipment - and this doesn't include the camera's built-in flash - backgrounds / light tents, computers, hard-drives, memory cards, software etc - all of which suddenly starts bumping the cost up appreciably.
But more than equipment, you need skill, experience and artistic ability
All the gear in the world isn't going to give the best quality images when it's in the wrong hands. As with anything else, it's not the tools that makes the craftsman. (Or should that be craftsperson?!)
So in addition to photographic skill and the ability to position, light and shoot your products to display them at their best, other considerations for using a professional photographer include insurance, backup (more on this later) and TIME. Photography is what we do - that's how we spend our days. It's our job. Your job is to make things, or sell things or to provide a service to others, and if you're busy doing your job, you shouldn't have the time available to spend taking photos!
Other considerations are what will happen with the images after they have been taken and processed (even digital images need an amount of processing) and this particularly applies as to what format(s) the final images are required to be supplied in. For example a magazine advert would probably want a 300ppi CMYK TIFF file, whereas your website people would be expecting a 72ppi sRGB JPEG with web compression. Would you know how to do this? Why should you? It's not your job!!
I mentioned backup earlier and this is an important consideration. A professional photographer backs up every job in at least two different and physically separate locations, so when a year after completion of a job a client realises that they've lost the CD of original images, they can simply ring up the photographer and request another one, as happened to me recently. If the client had taken their own photos, would they have made duplicate copies, or made additional backups? Probably not.
Ultimately, photographs of your products or services are often a prospective customer's first impression of your company, and therefore should be portrayed, literally, in the best possible light. There seems to be a growing acceptance of things being sub-standard or low-quality (generally, but that's another story) with the thought that, with DIY photography for example, it doesn't really matter what the image looks like, because once the customer sees 'the real thing' they're bound to be impressed. But will the customer get as far as seeing the 'real thing'? Would you buy bread from a baker who displayed a stale or mouldy loaf in the window and kept the best loaves inside? Certainly not.
I'm constantly amazed at some of the frankly awful pictures that appear not just on company websites, but in magazine adverts too. This particularly applies to staff photos in the popular 'Meet the Team' page on a website. Rather than having a group of consistent portraits, nicely lit against a crisp white background, or properly posed in a specific location, we get a selection of Crimewatch mugshots of people stood against a wall and blasted with the on camera flash, or gurning up from behind their computer. Not the most flattering of pictures either way.
The bottom line is, that adopting a DIY approach is not necessarily the best way to go. By the time you've factored in the cost of buying the camera (ideally two for when one inevitably develops a fault) additional lenses, the lighting and ancillary equipment that you'll need and then added in the cost of the hard-drives to back everything up, plus the value of the time spent setting up and taking the photos, you'll have spent a lot more than employing a professional in the first place.
Remember, in business, image is everything!
The final word on this should go to John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) who observed:
"It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little.
When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all.
When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better"
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