How To Use Catalogue Photography To Create The Perfect Sales Pitch

By: William Penworthy

Catalogue photography is a risk. Every single image holds the reputation and future of your business, and every single photograph is placed directly into the hands of every potential customer for them to inspect. Get your catalogue photography right, and you'll turn a potential customer into a paying customer; get it wrong and you could be the one who's paying.

Whether you're looking at developing a printed catalogue which is made available to potential customers, or whether you're planning a digital catalogue that will be browsed on screen, your catalogue photos perform a critical task - communicating your company's principles, aims and values, as well as trying to sell the product.

You're almost certainly an expert when it comes to deciding what products or services are likely to sell, and you almost certainly understand your market. Catalogue photo photographers are experts in helping to match the two - ensuring your expertise and business knowledge is used most effectively in engaging the target audience in a way which will boost not only the likelihood of converting a sale, but also of increasing or solidifying the reputation of your business.

Catalogue photography can be considered a little like sending a group of colleagues or business representatives to a trade fair. You can put all the training in you like, you can spend a fortune on a fantastic stand, banners, promotional products, a nifty promotional video and wonderfully printed fliers or brochures.

Yet even if every single representative is brilliant, if there's even just one colleague who lets the side down, behaving in a less than positive way, misleading clients, giving an impression of poor professionalism, weak dedication to the task or a lacklustre commitment to customer satisfaction, then the majority of potential customers will remain just that - potential.

Even more likely is that they will become actual paying customers, but not with you, instead moving to the next trade stand, the next shop, the next website and spending your potential profits with your rivals.

Studies have demonstrated that whether people view product advertising on a screen or as printed material, the portion of the document which receives most attention is the image. Not only that, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the part of the screen or page which attracted the initial attention was the picture.

In other words, since first impressions count for a very great deal, and it's the images and product photographs that are providing the majority of first impressions, it's critical to ensure that your catalogue photography is capable of giving the very best first impression of both your company and the products it sells.

It's worth remembering that catalogue photo photographers have a great deal more to offer than simply a flashy camera and a nice studio. Understanding how to photograph almost anything from a tap to a motorbike in ways which help to sell the product requires both specialist knowledge and years of experience.

As anyone who's taken photographs of their own will recognise, the old adage that the camera never lies is rarely true. Scenes and subjects which seemed very pleasant in real life seem somehow flattened when compressed into a photograph. Reflections, colour, saturation, lightness and accuracy all seem to have taken a back seat. Whilst we may accept an amateur level of photography when it comes to our holidays, this is simply not acceptable when it comes to catalogue photography.

Perhaps the most astonishing accomplishment is just how easy and simple catalogue photo photographers make the whole job of catalogue photography seem. It is anything but, and with state of the art studios, the world's most sophisticated camera equipment, a range of special lighting rigs, an infinity cove and a list of contacts as long as your arm for things such as sets, props, lighting, models and locations, catalogue photo photographers are able to bring out the very best in your products.

But even with all of these contacts and facilities, sometimes catalogue photography still requires an additional helping hand. That's where modern digital manipulation effects come into play, and this is a facility offered by many catalogue photo photographers. Using digital manipulation products can be photographed in ways that simply wouldn't be possible, or would be impractical or prohibitively expensive.

Imagine the shiny motorbike parked in the middle of the desert, the pyramid of crystal glasses perched on top of a snowy mountain peak or the highly reflective compact disc that seems to be surfing its way across the galaxy.

By using catalogue photo photographers who are able to offer such digital photo manipulation you can ensure that your catalogue photography creates a very striking and professional first impression. If a picture can paint a thousand words, first class catalogue photography can render a pretty decent sales pitch given the right injection of professional talent.