What Is Advertising Photography?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lara Blair and I own Lara Blair Images Portrait Studio in Camas, Washington and today I'm going to talk to you about advertising photography. Advertising photography can go lots of different ways. One way can go is a business, a local business, this is what I've done a lot of will approach you about taking images for their business for marketing purposed. On a grander scale, a large company can acquire your services for their catalogs or for their brochures and then you can also go to the stock photography route where you sell your images to a stock agency and then corporations buy those stock images from the agencies. Another form of advertising photography is product photography where you would bring something in like a food item or even a piece of clothing or jewelry, something that you're going to need to light usually with studio lights so the studio light setup it's going to be something you need to be comfortable with, particularly something like jewelery where you've got lots of sparkly things that you want to bring out having a light on it will really help with that. Again this is something that a company can hire you for, you're going to want to have a contract for it and understand that they're going to want the rights to the images to use them in all their brochures and materials. If you're doing this in your community, a really great way to start is to go in and show your style that might match a certain business, let's say a children's boutique needs some brochures or some maybe even a television commercial that's local, you can talk to them about the different styles that you have that match their business and get a flat fee where they pay you a certain amount and then they get a certain number of images that you're going to take. Make sure that you have a contract from the very beginning about what you're going to provide for them and what they're going to pay you is that you don't do a ton of work and get paid something that you weren't expecting. Big corporations, a lot of photographers who go that route have really big names and have been to school for photography like Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara for example, but you don't have to go to those schools to become a star, there are a lot of photographers in the country who do fantastic work and they started out at a completely different area before they became a photographer. So if you find that's something you really want to do and you have your mind on it, go for it."