Commercial photography: The B2B

B2B, or Business to business, is a models where suppliers meet. They dont work directly with end customer, they work to produce products that sell to end customer. And B2B requires different approach than B2C business.

Calme studio also runs B2B commercial photography. We understand deeply what business partner need from a photography service, and we supply accordingly.

At Calme studio, B2B works can be divided into creative work and bulk work.

Commercial photography in Creative world

Creative work is where we work closely with creative director, to produce hero images for a campaign, a website revamp or any special type of PR. Creative works usually take months of market research, brainstorming, discussion and meeting.

You may ask why is take so long. Because launching a product can not take lightly.

New products, whenever they enter a market, need to find their customers. Owners have to do research to see if there is any market for their product, and find out who gonna buy their products. When you are to eager to release a product without market research, sale number may look ugly, and worse, all your money turn into dead stock on the shelves.

To avoid that bad ending, you have to do market research carefully. And if you do it well, it could save you tons of money, and even better, open a whole new lucrative market just for you. A little money for market research could take you further than you think.

We, photography business, also benefit from your research. We know who you are aiming at, and we study this demography, to design suitable imageries for product launching campaign. Each demography section has different visual taste, and we need to study them, and create images that can talk to them. It’s a crucial part of commercial photography.

People think photography happens on set, but it actually happened long before that, since the moment our client decided to work with us. In creative world, we call the time before actual photoshoot pre-production. Every ideas, every discussions, every decisions happen at this stage. We decide which idea will be realized, how we gonna do it, the challenges and solutions. Actual photoshoot, or the production day, is just a big step to transform the idea from words to images.

Even after the shooting day, it’s not end yet. We have to do post production, which is, photo editing, and even compositing. The photos we shoot, usually in high resolution, reveals a lot of product imperfections, something you may never see by eyes. We need to take care of that. Then to creative editing and compositing, a crucial part to finalize the image. This stage requires enormous creative and technical skill, and it could make or brake the final images right here, at this stage. But the pressure is rewarding.

The Bulk Work

Not everytime we do creative works. Our clients also have different need than creative, more boring, but not less important. It’s the bulk work of simpler photography, like product catalogue or E-commerce photography.

These type of work requires precise and repeatable work. It sounds easy on paper, but not so easy in real life. Produced photos need to be coherent, from batch to batch. It means we have to be able to replicate photos we produce from months, or years ago.

So we developed our own process for this type of work. This process require good amount of technical documentary and lighting diagrams from each set. Everything has to be documented for future project, otherwise, client’s photo bank will be flooded with photo mess. Coherent photo bank is a sign of professional, and our client doesnt want us to mess up their assets.

Bulk work sounds easy, but it’s not. Our clients have vastly different products, each of them may be made from different material, and painted with distinct painting. To make it look good, we have to adapt our lighting setup from product to product, but keep the overall tone unchanged. We can say it’s a technical-heavy type of work.

Verdict

Commercial photography may seems boring, but it’s a crucial part in every well-managed marketing plan. And by this article, we hope this could help you understand our process and help you design your plan better. Happy shooting!