It’s about the personal brand.
There is a certain language that we are developing around business and our expectations as owners and customers. They include terms like relevancy, authenticity, and accountability. The days of hiding behind a logo or a companies policies are waning as more information, and the speed and accuracy of that information, becomes accessible not only to your customers but the whole world. It is more important than ever to look to the local community to build trust and develop relationships based on openness. Why? Because it can save your ass when you mess up, and you will mess up. These relationships will be that attachment to the human part of you that will allow for your customer to forgive you as a person. Really, lets face it, it is easy to hate a compnay (or a person) that claims no fault and easy to forgive your friends.
It’s about you.
As a photographer, it is the purpose of any portrait to capture that moment when you are most human, most yourself and exactly like you imagine yourself at your best. A good portrait will develop trust and convey meaning beyond what you can tell people about you or your brand, in this way a photo is a 1000 words. The avatar is this concept times a million, especially if you are involved in the communities on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. With people actively tweeting on average 10-20 times a day, that is a lot of seeing your poorly chopped and shopped photo for your followers and it makes a difference.
The deal.
I am the best portrait photographer in Phoenix and I want to photograph your avatar. I think it is vitally important to your business or personal brand especially if you are using any of the tools mentioned above. The normal price for personal portraits is $300.00+tax (see pricing page on tysoncrosbie.com for full details) and you get one image for use across all media from the session. I am offering an avatar session and one avatar image for use across all digital media for $150.00+tax. This isn’t entirely a discount, just a product I don’t normally offer. I am offering this product through the summer, it will end 08/31/08. This is a chance to get a photo session from me at 50% the normal starting cost. Obviously if you want more of the images from the session they will always be available in whatever format you would like.
Ready? Call me at 602.254.2880 for an appointment.
Not ready yet? Check out the soft edits page if you want to see what the Phoenix community thinks about avatars.
If you are a past avatar session client please leave a comment on this post incase others need help deciding. 
Thanks.
Tomorrow is the online release of my Phoenix 20 series. I am excited and nervous. I am excited to have a new audience that will view the work, I am nervous that I don’t have a strong enough connection to my new audience to get any feedback about the work. I am also curious about how my new online network will aggregate, judge and ultimately ignore or promote the work. I would love to know why or why not.
In the art world if you recommend something to another person and that person doesn’t like it your taste is questioned. This is very bad because “good taste” is the ultimate art collectors, curators and academics commodity. Good luck trying to break into that very tight herd unless you can distract (controversy) or convince (politic) the leaders of the community to support you.
I have a feeling social media may have a more democratic answer to this problem, though I don’t believe it to be an intrinsically better system. I think it has the potential to do great things and level the playing field, which is one of the reasons I am in this space and trying new things. However it is important to remember that democracy in it’s purest form has the potential to be even less forgiving and may be a far more difficult herd to tame.
I am trying to say as varied as possible with my lighting and composition. The repetition of the series is really dominating the work and I am finding it difficult to create new ideas with the same faces. I am seeing the end of dog a day just ahead and frankly I am a little sad. I enjoyed this project.
A fellow photographer told me that the transition from pets to fashion couldn’t be bridged. I always like a challenge like that. I hope that you all have enjoyed the series as much as I have. Thank you for your participation and allowing me the opportunity to share these documents, experiments and photographs with you over the last month.
I know it isn’t over yet but I felt like thanking you.
Awww. Sleeping brothers. The other four can be seen by clicking on the image above. Enjoy.
This is the new image for dog a day, it is also my wife’s “favorite image so far.” and I agree.
My education on the history of photography is one of my most cherished possessions. And so the reference to early photo history and the pictorialist movement in this image really excite me. It was a movement that tried to establish photography as a fine art often by distorting the lens in an attempt to mimic the effects of the impressionist painters that were popular at the time.
With no intention of doing so (I realized as I was writing this entry) contemporary photo history also has a reference as well by one of the artists to cause controversy for National Endowment of the Arts, Andres Serrano. Of course this image is far less controversial and has no intentional religious or political foundation. It was just a creative way to photograph my dog Huxley.
For me being able to reference work to the past elevates the experience of creating. Do you think understanding history is an important element when creating? Or is it enough to be talented with color, composition, lighting, following trends, etc?
Recent Comments