Why Professional Photos are essential for Marketing

January 05, 2020

Why Professional Photos are essential for Marketing

In the new age of 2020, where Social Media Marketing is literally the go to marketing tool for all businesses, the Game of Photography can be a real challenge if you as a business owner can not decide as to what would work best for you, much worse if you do not consider the photos at all for your business. Specially for those from the Hospitality background, where visual appeal is considered as one of the prime factors for people to choose your property whether it comes to booking a room at your Hotel or merely to visit your restaurant for lunch with family.

WelcomHotel The Savoy, Mussoorie -Jan 2019

As a Professional Photographer, and as a founder of my company , Diffusion Marketing Solutions, over a period of 6 years now, i have photographed several different properties across sectors, majorly into Hospitality.Before commencing with any shoot for a property, it delights me to study the current photos of my clients.I would call it a small research that i like to do before taking any project.

The key aspects that I study are the following:

The angles from where the shots have been captured
The color tone of the photos, shouldn't be too blue or too yellow (not using my technical language here).
How natural do the images look
Are there any unwanted elements in the photos that leads to distraction
The quality of the images, for eg: grains in the image, distortion,lens correction etc.
Is the particular area showcased in day or night or evening.
Lastly, how wide the shots are

Now let me make things more interesting for you , let me show you a few after/before shots of the places.You may find some renovation as well,but again it doesn't matter much if the photo is produced right.

BEFORE

AFTER

• • • • •

BEFORE

AFTER

As you can notice the difference by yourself, the angle, color tone and quality of images differ drastically, the importance of such images is such that they can be the sole deciding factor for your potential customers to visit your place.For more images you can checkout our portfolio on Instagram or Facebook as well.

Also, i would like to add , nowadays people are more keen on producing photos right on their phones, the output of which is produced good enough to even make a professional photographer at shame, no wonder you may have also confused yourself while looking at an image captured on a ONE+ series phones or an i Phone, but one needs to consider that such images are good enough till the time you are using them for your personal collection.

The tech of a mobile phone is good enough for general conditions, the settings are all automatic and there are some free applications to enhance the images even further.Indeed your final output may look better on Instagram,with all the further adjustments that you will landup doing via Instagram filters.But remember the visibility of your photo on Instagram is just on a screen size of 5.8 inches(that too without a full display coverage).

Let me explain my point with a screenshot:

Image captured on i phone XR Image captured on One Plus 7 T

Although the result of i phone XR is no where close to One plus 7T, but still to an ameture eye, the images may still look really appealing. But remember we are talking about some serious work here, which can make you earn money.So why compromise.

From a professional standpoint there are still are major issues here, such as both the phones have bumped up the clarity of images to such a level that they look unreal.Majority of the people who click pictures on phone lands up editing the images on the small screens of their phones, i.e. a 5.8 or a 6 inch screen at max, which further leads to a compromised editing, considering the variety of screens such as OLED, LED or LCD you get on various phones may further give you problems in deciding the color tones of your picture.

The topic stays endless when it comes to highlighting the difference in image output you can get on a phone and a DSLR, nevertheless a phone can of course save you the cost of a photoshoot by a professional, but the very basic and the most important question i ask most of clients looking for a marketing plan is:

If you have invested lakhs or crores in setting up your business/property, a professional photoshoot will not even cost you 1% of that budget,then why hold back ?