The Media, cannot always do a custom photo shoot for each news item they cover. And sometimes, Web journalist are happy to give a small article about it, if their posting can be supported with some hot visuals. This is where your photo collection becomes of great value. It is a good idea to have some great shots available, on demand, as long as they meet editors’ and journals’ and web standards, so they can be used to feature your story.
Here some basic tips and why:
Have your photos ready in high resolution. (A picture that will cover a magazine page needs to be at least 300 dpi at 8″X10″. A smaller picture will not give you a cover, so you may as well have a large picture ready.)
A) Look at you collection, analyze which are the most often asked-for pictures. This will give you great insight into what the media wants. Do not hesitate to get these shots professionally re-photographed from time to time to maintain a fresh and contemporary look to your product or destination. Be ready to provide new angles, new views or different times of the day versions. (The journalist gets tired of the same old shots.) It is not the product or the destination which is a deterrent, it is too often how it is portrayed.
B) Do not underestimate the keen EYE of a professional photographer. Whether the purpose is fashion, documentary, action, or scenic, a pro does give a shot that visual twist that makes it something like: great, attractive, actual, fresh, powerful and charged with emotion. (Discuss with your photographer the essence of what the pictures should be and launch them on a shooting “spree”. To get a great shot even with pros, it often takes hundreds of clicks.)
C) You cannot hire a top photographer, o.k., and sometimes some good snaps are all you can manage at the time or moment. There is nothing wrong with that. But do not forget to polish you photo skills a bit. Our experience has been that most snaps become unusable because 3 simple precautions have not been taken:
- WHITE-BALANCE
Insure you get the white-balance right to compensate for the light conditions (indoor, outdoor, flash, etc. No camera does this by itself, you have to make a selection in the menu of each photo-camera.
- RESOLUTION
Insure you take your picture in the best resolution possible (saving your file as jpegs is fine but delivering RAW files is questionable).
- EXPOSURE
If you are not sure about your light exposure, use the auto-bracketing, so you end up with 3 shots (from light to dark, you can always choose the best one afterward).
Oh, I almost forgot my secret tip: use a tripod or lean against a solid object, if you can, as you take the shot. For some pictures, a blurred effect, makes the shot but in most cases there is nothing sharper than sharp.
- Polishing compound
If this is all seems too complicated, you may brush up you skills by making a few tests. Where to start? What is white-balance, right exposure, etc.? We found great straightforward polishing info on this site among others:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm
Posted by nelsonvigneault 
- Refrain from………
A blog is a dynamic website that you can get up and running without basic internet skills. No webmaster or IT professional is needed to begin. There is no need to worry about fancy servers that you need to update and maintain. When people ask how they should begin to get their feet wet with social media and say things like “should I make a brand new website?” I tell them, “No, start a new blog instead”.
Typically with these clients, we have noted a business organizational shift from compartmental divisions between PR/marketing/communications toward a business model, where communication is more integrated and concerted. These shifts do not come from IT but, rather, through executive decisions addressing directly the purpose of marketing. Simply said, marketing in Social Media is not about computer networks, it is about people networks. In these models, for example, a photo collection is no longer the domain of a gate keeper, but is instead viewed as a live asset that can be pooled and tailored instantly to meet the demands of communicator teams, whether PR , marketing or media relationists. We note that the BEST RESULTS, in posting news, come from quite brief (single focused) and targeted stories/headlines. One journalist user said it best when she said, “we want the seeds not the tree” — meaning: not several pages or even a page-long newsletter, but a news brief consisting of a few lines of text with pertinent and press-ready photos.
Nicole Smith, Mandi Engram, and Kelly Barbrey, of Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports & Tourism graduated from CleanPix online coaching with the greatest honors. That means getting famously HOT media attention for the Midlands Authority, following the posting of only a few consecutive briefs on pressuite.com
- Adding some zest and pizzaz to your caption (20-40 words).
For the next several weeks, the CEO of CleanPix, Nelson Vigneault, will be sharing his thoughts on “Marketing with connectivity”. 
SOCIAL MEDIA: A NEW PLAYGROUND OF CONNECTIVITY
Getting It Right: Photo White Balance
February 13, 2009I got a phone call yesterday from Nelson Vigneault CEO of CleanPix. “Your white balance (WB) on your camera is all messed up SIR”! Not something you want to hear. This was in reference to a set of photographs I took to assist the Florida Rep theater. I had done a studio shoot with strobes for their kids performance PR images. Nelson said that it took demanding Photoshop skills to get the pink/red color cast out of the photographs.
I shoot with a 2 year old Nikon D70S. I went and googled the problem and found this site by Ken Rockwell. The solution was toward the bottom of the page and this is what it said: “Try the Daylight setting to match carefully daylight balanced studio strobes”. Aha! I just excepted that the camera new best and had been setting it on the flash setting. Nelson commented: “In doubt, shoot a grey scale, that will tell you.”). I raced to my storage room and dug around in an old trunk of photo stuff from college days 28 years ago and found my grey scale. Then I did what I should have done in the beginning and ran a simple test with the camera. WOW! Sure enough the Flash WB setting gave a terrible cross curved pink photo. The Auto WB setting was a little better but still poor and the Daylight WB setting was pretty much spot on. Needless to say my computer screen is not calibrated. I sent the grey scale test pictures to CleanPix to be checked.
I stand corrected and somewhat ashamed but I now know how to better calibrate my camera for the white balance, or at least check if my settings are off. I would certainly recommend the purchase of a grey scale at your local photo store for some simple tests.