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.

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.

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. 

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.

 Formal portraits are long gone

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 shoot portrays an interesting professional group that already seems successful.  They got a good audience in our Recital Series and were re-booked for the following season and pulled an even better audience. 

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.

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 Chamber Series season. 

Groups
s       

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.  

Now the group clearly connects with each other and appears to have been playing together for a long time.
Rule 7 - Groups need to be shown as groups. 

Rule 8 - flash pictures rarely make good publicity pictures.

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
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. 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. 

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 Photoshoping to get rid of the fence.

Rule 9 - no background or one that is relevant. 

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

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

Rule 10 - no pictures in bright sunlight.

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.

How to make 'Alliance Regional Newspapers unhappy
Lyn Pry, Editor, Alliance Regional Newspapers

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.

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!