Impact! Photograph Or Photographer?

Nov. 12, 2012 - PRLog -- We live in an age when anyone can pick up a camera and call themselves a professional photographer, regardless of their skill level. This has resulted in a saturated marketplace, with many photographers competing on price alone. Sadly, talented professionals are losing their business every day because they fail to set themselves apart from this rising tide of newcomers.

"Too many photographers are using their photography as a crutch for their marketing, and relying on their photographs to do their selling for them," says photography business coach Nigel Merrick, http://twitter.com/ZenologueBlog. "While it's true that photographs can have impact, it's really the photographer, not the photograph, that has the most impact on potential clients."

But how can professional photographers create more impact in their business if not solely through their photographs? Before we can answer that question we must first define what "impact" means in this context.

"Impact," says Chris Brogan, CEO of Human Business Works, http://www.chrisbrogan.com/, "means getting a larger audience to see and act upon your ideas, and learning to build a community around that experience to take it all to a higher level."

To help professional photographers understand how to create more impact in their business, and to attract more clients, Merrick interviewed Brogan for the Zenologue photography business and marketing website in a special edition of his regular "Head Shot Monday" series, which focuses on the psychology of the photography business and the mindset of professional photographers.

While not the complete picture, the foundation of a big impact does begin with the work the photographer creates, but that work has to be sufficiently different from the local competition to stand out in the eye of the consumer.

Brogan says, "Professional photographers often times, let's say portrait photographers, can go way beyond what a regular person is capable of doing, by setting up interesting shots, by doing really interesting and exciting avant-garde type work that you can bring back to the portrait world, and then get some of the business that you're not getting."

Having created photographs that communicate a unique and personal style, it's then up to the photographer to add real impact to the equation by introducing the human element of themselves, their subjects, and the prospective clients they want to interact with.

When people look at a photographer's work, they should feel a deeper connection to it than simple admiration. As Brogan explained, they need to think to themselves, "I see myself in this work, or I'm the kind of person who would like this work." This is the principle of "echo", as detailed in The Impact Equation, Brogan's latest book, co-authored with Julien Smith.

At the end of the day it's the photographer, rather than just the photographs they create, that generates the most powerful form of impact - an intangible force that connects in a very human way with the potential client to let them know that the photographer is the right choice for them and their photography project.

If you want to explore this idea further, Merrick and Brogan talked at length about the finer details of creating impact for the professional photographer in their fascinating interview, which can be found at http://www.zenologue.com/chris-brogan/ together with a full transcript.

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About Nigel Merrick & Zenologue Photography Business and Marketing

Nigel Merrick is a professional photographer, business coach, and author of the popular Zenologue Photography Business & Marketing blog. Zenologue's mission is to help professional photographers succeed in their business through the use of proven marketing and SEO strategies, which is accomplished through an extensive library of articles, interviews, webinars and training programs.