Publicity shots

How good photos create your audience. 

10 Rules

Ian Cleghorn, Marketing,

Lewisville Lake Symphony

Plus

How to make Alliance Regional Newspapers unhappy

Denton Record-Chronicle recommends

 thinking about sex and taboo food

Stay home or go out?

The size of your initial audience does not depend on your professor.  It depends on your photographer. 

The Lewisville Lake Symphony has the pictures and the corresponding audience numbers to demonstrate what works and what does not.

People have busy lives and competing demands for their time and money. The easiest choice for an evening's entertainment is to stay home and watch TV. 

As concert promoters, we have to persuade people to get off the couch, into their cars and eager to spend time and money on an event we say is going to be great but cannot prove it up front.  

iTunes has 34 downloadable versions of Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons.'  We have to make the case that your live performance with the Lewisville Lake Symphony is a better experience than hearing a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic. 

Communicating with potential customers

The Lewisville Lake Symphony promotes events, in part, with advertising and press releases. 

Ads cost money.  Published press releases are free.  We like free.  Also, a well written a press release has the newspaper saying you are brilliant.  That has more credibility than us saying you are brilliant.  Readers assume the promoter is unlikely to say otherwise.

Editors choose press releases that, they think, will interest their readers.  A lot of editors don't have any personal interest in classical music so the story needs to be a good one in order to get past the editor's personal indifference.

Make life easy for editors

Editors are much more likely to pick ones with an attached photo.  The Dallas Morning News says it improves the chances by about 75%. 

Rule 1 - provide a picture.

Newspapers print the front page of each section in color.  Black-and-white pages are often used for a number of pages inside the paper.  If you want to be on the front page, send in a color picture.  If you want to be on page 10, send in a black-and-white.  

Rule 2 - provide a color picture.

A lot of local newspapers run a 'coming events' column on the front page featuring a color picture and a very brief description of the event.  No color picture, no publicity.

How the customer makes a decision

Readers don't read everything in a paper or magazine.  There is too much stuff there.  They scan the material until their eye catches something that seems interesting.  What catches their eye is a picture and/or a headline. 

Provide a picture that works for an editor

Because your picture will be small and reproduced with 'newspaper quality' printing, it has to be bold and simple.  Chances are that the picture will be about 3 inches high or less. The reader is weighing up your face so a head and shoulders shot has more impact than a full length shot. 

Rule 3 - head and shoulders is much better than full length.  

The editor has to make the picture fit the space available.  He or she may need to crop the picture as a vertical or a horizontal. 

Rule 4 - don't crop the picture too tightly.  Let the editor do the cropping.

The picture must say what you do without an explanatory caption.  Since you are a musician, that's easy.  The picture should include your instrument to visually tell the story about who you are and what you do.

Pianos are a problem. Just show a bit of the piano....

 Rule 5 - include your instrument

Make the picture informal

Editors do not like stiff, formal studio shots.  They want pictures that are informal, showing you in action or in an unexpected location. 

Time Magazine doesn't show a formal Bill Gates behind a big chief-executive desk. 

 Formal portraits are long gone

Incidentally, note that when Gates was only famous, Time showed him with a tool of his trade.  Once he moved up to icon status the image did not have to explain what he did for a living.  Finally, he has become so hyper-famous that Time could show him in a secondary position. 'Wow, isn't that Bill Gates behind the guy with the orange shades?"

'Informal' does not mean a quick snapshot.  It may take a long shoot to produce the right carefully planned and posed 'informal' picture.  Time Magazine takes a lot of time generating its cover pictures.  Its reaching for an audience that will buy the magazine on the  bet that the content will be as interesting as the cover.

That's what we are trying to do.

Look at CD covers. Look at portraits in Entertainment Weekly.  You will never see a artist shot that looks like a photographic version of the stiffly posed oil paintings of long ago.  

Rule 6 - supply an 'informal' picture.

lf the picture follows these rules, the reader will probably, decide you are an interesting person, read the caption and move on to read the story about you.  In combination, the reader might decide that its worth taking a chance and mentally commit to come to your event.

What to wear

Wear the 'uniform' you are going to use on performance night.  

An editor (see below) says you should dress in such a way that you wouldn't be embarrassed to meet the President of the United States.

Avoid wearing white shirts or dresses unless its tux.  Its very easy for the photographer to overexpose the white and lose the detail. Even if the exposure is correct, newspaper printing degrades the image quality will probably leave you wearing a white blob. 

Conversely, losing detail in a black suite, shirt or dress is often a photographic plus in a portrait.  Tony Blair knows a thing or two about image.  He is wearing a blue shirt because that works better on TV and in photos.

Ladies, always wear a dress with straps. A strapless shot where your clothing is hidden by a music stand, or whatever, leaves too much to the reader's imagination.

Portraits that work and some that fail

Stuffy

This is the equivalent of Bill Gates wearing a tie and photographed behind a desk.  Boring.  Its a picture of three musicians, very well known in Dallas music circles.  Its a very formal, old fashioned, oil-painting shot that says classical music is stuffy. The group seems to want to be at a distance from the photographer and thus distant from the reader. 

The photographer appears to have said, 'smile and look at the camera.'  A good photographer makes the subject forget the camera exists.

Not many editors used the picture.  Their concert, in our Symphony Series, pulled  the lowest audience of the season.  That was a shame because their music was superb.

Great on a second try

This trio's first shot looks like a garage band without a gig.  Why is the guy in the center sitting down?

The second try, a week later, looks like an interesting professional group that's already successful.  They got a good audience in our Recital Series and were re-booked for the following season and pulled an even better audience. 

The second try, a week later, looks like an interesting professional group that's already successful.  They got a good audience in our Recital Series and were re-booked for the following season and pulled an even better audience. 

Editors could crop the picture in a lot of ways

Right first time

Editors loved this picture (same photographer as the trio pictures) and used it more times than we deserved. The picture is flexible enough for them to crop it a lot of ways.  The pianist pulled the best audience of that season in the Recital Series

It is an 'informal' picture that has been carefully thought out.  The soft lighting of a rehearsal studio flatters the subject.  The head has been tilted to the right angle.  The photographer made the subject feel very comfortable.

Editors liked the shot of this quartet.  It can be cropped a number of ways.   There is no distracting background.  The reader immediately knows the story is about musicians.  (The artist on the right could have been a bit more relaxed.)  The photographer used a smart camera angle by placing the camera about eight feet above the floor.

Avoid the brick walls and sound reflectors in the UNT College of Music performance spaces.  They make distracting backgrounds.

Studio shot

This is a formal professional studio shot.  The photographer knew his business and used a camera that produces a picture with mega-millions of pixels so it can be tightly cropped and still stay sharp.

The full picture is a bit of an oil-painting and makes the subject rather too cute and perky.  Once cropped, it comes to life.

This artist pulled the best a in that The artist played in our International Chamber Series and then generated our all-time record audience in our Symphony Series the following year. (It helped that she toured with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra between the events, and audiences since Mozart's childhood have been fascinated with kids who can beat adults at their own game.)

No information

All the reader knows from this picture is that the subject is male and plays the piano.  He pulled the smallest audience of that Recital season. 

Groups

Groups need to be in a group photo.  Readers and potential audience members will wonder if these three people will actually meet before the performance.  

Rule 7 - Groups need to be shown as groups.  Rule 8 - flash pictures rarely make good publicity pictures.

Now the group clearly connects with each other and appears to have been playing together for a long time.

Here is another great group shot that seems informal but has been carefully thought through.  This amazing group pulled one of our largest audiences for the Chamber Series.

Last resorts

As a last resort, some heavy duty PhotoShop work can turn a snapshot made with a low quality camera into something more interesting.  This worked for a Symphony fundraiser featuring a UNT Dixieland Sextet.

Easy shots set up by the subject

The easiest shots, from the photographer's view, are those where the subject knows exactly how they want to be revealed. 

This pianist picture was taken at the end of an interview in a newspaper office.  The subject controlled the picture by falling into this pose even as the reporter swung the camera towards him. The photo session took about 30 seconds.

He understands that musicians need the some of the same skills as politicians.  Being an actor is part of both jobs. That's not unkind. Acting is communicating. 

There are times when the artist and the photographer just don't connect.  Some photographers are good at capturing how an artist sees themselves in the mirror or understanding the performance persona that the artist wants to project.  Other photographers are more interested in getting through the artist's defenses and trying to reveal what makes them tick.  Some, say those who shoot Vanity Fair covers, tend to see the artist merely as a pliable means to a great photograph. 

Here is another picture controlled by the subjects. The Narrator of 'Peter and the Wolf' is a TV reporter in his day job and thus very aware of cameras and pretending they aren't there.  The Maestro is also an old hand at being photographed.  The two moved seamlessly from talking about nothing to holding still while earnestly examining the score and back to talking about nothing as soon as the photographer was finished.  Shooting time was about a minute.

Not all subject-controlled pictures work out well.  Out of kindness, we are not showing a picture of a UNT opera singer who sent in a picture of himself in the character of an glaring operatic villain.  The readers decided it was safer to stay home, lock the doors and watch TV.  It was our all-time worst audience.

Background

The best background is usually no background.   Only include background if it adds to your story or makes you more intriguing.  Being photographed playing a trumpet with the Eiffel Tower in the background adds the information that you are an international artist and thus probably on the way up.

This violin guest artist supplied a garden snapshot with a lattice fence behind him - and no violin in the picture.  It took a lot of PhotoShop work to get rid of the fence.

That tree behind the cellist has to go.  So does the building.

Rule 9 - no background or one that is relevant. 

Actually the whole picture had to go.  Bright sunlight made the cellist squint at the camera.

Rule 10 - no pictures in bright sunlight.

How to make 'Alliance Regional Newspapers unhappy

Lyn Pry, Editor, Alliance Regional Newspapers

Number of pixels

You might want to make sure to tell people that the photo should NOT be sent as a thumbnail, or reduced size smaller than 1MB (1,000kb) or under 250 dpi. It should be in jpeg format.

Faces should be listed left to right at the top of the press release / picture email. 

Sometimes an editor will choose to use a photo as a cover shot & that means it needs to be able to fill 9.5x7.5" and photos too small just can't be used. 

Stiff, posed pictures

You are absolutely correct that stiff, posed photos with "bouncy" flash will most likely be used less.  You are also correct using the photo samples you did & your assessment of why they are good or bad was also right on. 

An "action" picture is great & including the instrument for a music event is critical (you should've used the two Russian husband/wife pianists as another good example). 

(Here is the original and one way an editor might turn it into a vertical to fit available space. This team always pulls a big audience for both the Symphony and Recital Series, partly because they have a fan base in our area.  [I.C.])

Hate PDFs, love JPEGs

The most critical thing about a photo, however, is its format, size & sharpness.  When I open an e-mail & get a picture imbedded in a pdf (Adobe Acrobat format,) I actually groan-- no way to pull it out to use it (plus all the copy has to be re-typed-- as if!). 

If you ask most publication editors (newspapers, magazine, whatever), they will all tell you that they HATE pdf's. 

We love word.doc & JPEG's (no tifs or gifs either).  Those we can edit & move & save to our servers for photo and layout people.  When I get a JPEG photo that is sharp & comes to me at 25% in a 750kb to 2MB size, I am thrilled-- it makes using the story effortless.

Deadlines!

Last thing-- if the photo & word.doc are not sent before a submission deadline, it doesn't matter how great they are. 

The earlier, the better!

Denton Record-Chronicle recommends thinking about sex and taboo food

Lucinda Breeding, Features Editor, The Denton Record-Chronicle

Thank you for doing more than most to educate performers. I have no argument with anything you have said. I usually provide a capsule of this to newbies who ask. You have covered all the bases -- readers (editors) like faces, instruments and muted backgrounds. And if you send us a PDF, we curse as we open them and believe, not-so-secretly, that agencies love to make promoting them harder than it needs to be.

Our central photo message is:

1) Dress in such a way that you wouldn't be embarrassed to meet the president of the U.S. (Or the paparazzi.)

2) Stand/sit in front of a neutral background and think of something that makes you happy (we get "sex" and "taboo foods for dieters" more than anything when subjects reveal that to us).

3) Send us a color JPEG at 300 dpi. If you are in a group, provide identification left-to-right or clockwise in your e-mail. Please provide a photographer name or studio affiliation.

Please share my remarks with the board, the performers and anyone who wants useful free ink.