January is the perfect time to spring clean and refresh your company promotional campaign material. That would usually include bolstering your website with new content, adding news posts and getting ship shape for the coming year. Just as January was in full swing, A9K were asked to provide a selection of lifestyle shots for Peterborough based Made to Measure. Lisa Mammatt’s soft furnishing business needed that new year photography lift to hit the ground running for 2020 and beyond. After a quick chat on the phone it was obvious that the job would fit neatly into a half-day booking that was timed to coincide with the delivery of the brand new, sign written, company vehicle. The January weather was…well, January weather but that’s not such a big deal on a mixed interior/exterior job like this one. The forecast was cold but no wind or rain. To a UK based photographer in January, that’s a result.
Lisa asked for a modest selection of set pieces. Firstly, a casual set of fabric and flooring swatches for website equivalent of B-roll. The business has a huge selection of samples to choose from and all of them were supremely stylish, contemporary and to my eye, very similar colour temperature. Although a mixture of cold and warm tones could be made to fit visually with a touch of Photoshop, it’s a big timesaver when editing is kept to a minimum. Then we moved onto “the customer shots”. These were the “people sell to people” type shots sadly lacking from a lot of small business promotional material. There is nothing like showing actual customer engagement with actual product, something very difficult to mimic with stock photography for any industry. Stock is nearly always too hygienic and impersonal in this regard. It just doesn’t feel genuine in a small business context, especially when the business in question is the kind that provides a personal touch. Finally, we moved outside to capture the immaculate new van for a couple of owner/fleet images.
With an efficient project turnaround of just under a week, the final shots were edited a little wider than usual to allow Lisa’s web developer some freedom on the crop. After all, most of these will have to be the right fit for a webpage where landscape still rules over portrait. Lisa now has dozens of hi-res images for the new look website, with a few square ratio thrown in for good measure to drip feed Instagram for weeks to come.
