The importance of doing nothing!

by Matt Gore/iconphotomedia

Hi All, 

Yes bit of an Intriguing title.. 
For us it's a mantra, I mean it, it refers to our mindset when a few of us get together to goof about. 
We do test sessions where we may want to try a certain technique or look, but often is equally productive to just play about, have fun and achieve nothing!

One idea we often use is to take a lens, camera, light whatever and see how many looks/uses we can make from it. It tests your creativity and often results in some interesting discoveries. 
The important thing is to try not to be quick to judge and or be too results focused. Go with it, do some goofy stuff be child like, contradict yourself. 

Now I could show you all sorts of pictures from these sessions but in reality they don't cut it...but then that's the point!

Here's some shot a week ago that did work though and resulted in a technique I used to illustrate a story idea a magazine had...







and then used live on the client job. The Magazine article was entitled 'Outside looking In' referring to the recruitment policy of this particular company hiring highly skilled experienced staff from outside the sector.



A simple discovery using the Elinchrom Quardra ECO ringflash hand held. Great on some business jobs where the location offers little in the way of interesting backgrounds or details and time is often of the essence...isn't it always these days!?

The additional kicks you see to our faces in the studio pictures are created using a large silver brolly camera right (with CTO gel) and behind and a strip box camera left and behind. 
The images shot on the job were ringflash and softbox camera right, then comp'ed as a triplet in Photoshop. 

And here are one or two more from the shoot with the good people at The Richmond Housing Partnership in London.






All good fun and looking forward to seeing what the designers do with the layout

mail shot promotion

by Matt Gore


Now we have this iconphotomedia blog we can get out there and inform clients of anything new. Hopefully along with the website www.iconphotomedia.com our blog will help new clients discover us, we have always been rubbish at getting out and looking for work. I can't remember the last time I showed a portfolio to a new client, instead our work has in the main come from either recommendation or repeat business. Two years ago I took a look at the sales figures for the last 6 months and although they were really good we realised we only had five clients in total! Two of those clients only commissioned a handful of jobs a year! The general rule of thumb is not to allow any client to contribute anymore than 30% of your turnover, this is sound advice, but no one is going to turn away work if a client keeps commissioning, we decided we needed a better balance and to create an infrastructure capable of attracting new work. We wanted our marketing to attract work from various areas, commercial, editorial PR etc That way we felt it protected ourselves should any of our clients or an entire industry such as advertising struggle in the recession. This sound approach is easier to implement with a company structure such as iconphotomedia as we have multiple photographers and a dedicated picture desk to manage our clients requirements. This allows us to handle multiple jobs to a very high level and deliver on time to meet the client needs. I think our record is over 100 individual jobs in one weeks trade....and yes all the clients were happy and the images went onto our ftp in time!! 




In the past we have tried communication with our clients via a digital quarterly magazine imaginatively titled 'untitled' (reference to art work gallery captions) although this was great it took a long time to put together and I'm not too sure many of the busier clients actually got past the first page. 


We also had 2500 promotional cards printed, the theory was that they would act as 'leave behinds' something to hand picture editors and designers as we left after a portfolio viewing. 

 All printed on 100% recycled card they look great (especially when piled up like this on the office floor) we have sent out around 200 but the return from mail-shot marketing is very poor (in other words not a sausage of a response)  I'm not sure it's the right approach for the photography business. In this campaign we were targeting local business in our two main regional offices Leeds and Reigate. We wanted the opportunity of working for local firms on a general level, be it product photography, management portraits or a company brochure. 


The most successful campaigns only record response of less than 5% I copied and pasted these figures from the Royal Mail (I agree they have an active interest in the mail shot return)

Medium	Size/format	Responses per 1000
Daily newspaper	10cm x 2 cols	0.1
Satellite TV	20 seconds	0.5
Weekend supplement	Full colour page	1.0
Weekend supplement	Page with tipped-on card	2.5
Daily newspaper	Loose insert	5
Cold mailing	Multi-piece format	25
Lapsed customer mailing	Multi-piece format	40
Active customer mailing	Multi-piece format	125
Active customer mailing + telemarketing follow-up	Multi-piece + outbound telemarketing	400

10 months ago I was about to change our Leatherhead office location as the lease had expired, but realising we had 2300 promo cards, around 2000 business cards, 1200 compliment slips and 500 headed letters plus three main websites and various email signatures all with the Leatherhead address on it was going to be way to much work and cost to change anything! 
We have always used either leased office or studio space here in London or paid for a mailbox address. I think it looks so much more impressive rather than a obviously residential address. Office space and mailbox address' can be expensive and business's such as pro photographers should always strive to keep 'fixed costs down' it's important to shop around and know that whatever monthly fee you're paying you're likely to be tied into that cost for sometime both under the lease terms suppliers such as www.workspacegroup.co.uk and www.regus.co.uk like to have you sign, and the costs associated with a change to letterheads, business cards and the like.




Video of putting away all those promotion cards for the image above : )