Jason from Studio Commercial gave us a talk about their business. Studio Commercial do editorial, advertising and fashion photography but mostly commercial portrait work. About 40% of their work is commercial portraits (both just heads and/or creative). 60% of their work is on location & the remaining 40% in the Studio. Customers like Ernst and Young are their bread & butter.
In Liverpool Street they have a large factory-type room on the 4th floor. This has been sectioned into an office/postproduction area, one cyclorama & several smaller studio sectioned off with black curtains. This costs $7000/month. Apparently there is a similar area upstairs for which they are not charged rent. The business was originally started by Ron Freer.
Their marketing is mostly word-of-mouth. An email newsletter is sent to customers 2-3 / year with some of their current work on it – for advertising. Occasionally they put on an exhibition of their private photographic work & ask their clients to the show. This is a type of advertising.
Each of the 6(?) photographers does his/her own postproduction work. They cut down the number of photographs from a shoot & send the proofs in a pdf file (20/page) by email. Then the customer gets back to them picks some out & proper postproduction work is done. Ie only retouch the images that are good so not as time consuming.
Each of the photographers does the photographic work that he/she likes best - depending on the jobs that come in. When the recession was on they had periods when they worked 4day weeks. At least they all kept their jobs. Now it is back to normal weeks’ working. They work in a relaxed atmosphere.
They do plenty of back ups – at least 4. Two stay in the office & a BlueRay & a hard disk are taken home. The backup software they use is retrospect.
When they do a job for a corporate client, they let them use the images for 1 year for things like websites and newsletters. If it is for advertising work, then they charge an extra 20@ & this covers copyright issues. If they want to buy the image outright, then they negotiate with client.
A good talk.
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