Commercial Photography with TJ Vissing

Jacob:

 TJ, thanks for being on today. We go a-ways back because I used to work for you. So, just want to be that transparent for everybody. And TJ, thank you so much for being our first friend-of-the pod to be on the pod and get under the hot seat of questions. 

TJ Vissing:

Let me make one correction, though: you didn’t work for me, you worked with me.

Jacob:

Thank you.

TJ Vissing:

I always saw that, right? Because you were… you knew more than we did about everything you did, so clearly, you worked with us,

Jacob:

Well, thank you. And you guys know way more about what you do than pretty much anyone can probably ever understand. And so you’re a commercial photographer, and I thought we should get you on here because we’re trying to talk to small business owners or people in digital marketing that are just getting out… And Jeff is always my favorite digital marketing newbie who’s on all these podcasts asking all the questions that I don’t think to ask anymore. So I’ll let Jeff hit you with the first question, but I think it’s great that you’re here.

Jeffrey:

Yeah. So, TJ, just, you know, break down commercial photography, who uses it, and why they use it.

TJ Vissing:

Well, it’s surprisingly everywhere. You know, the best place to see a lot of it is the grocery store, right? So, you go inside the middle of the grocery store, you stay away from the outside where all the fresh stuff is, you go in the middle, and every package has a picture on it. And it’s a game that’s played at a high level with the grocery store.

So now, granted, I would say a lot of those brands are owned by a lot of the same people. But they have certain protocols for designing their packages. They, you know, their package has to compete with the one next to it while someone’s staring at it, they’ve got milliseconds sometimes to sort of draw the eye.

And so all the design firms– the graphic design firms and packaging firms– spend a lot of time and effort breaking down the best way to sell a product to someone when it’s on the shelf. Well, that involves photography: most of the time photography stands out. It works. It gets… it catches your eye.

And take a walk down any aisle, cereal aisle, or tomato sauce aisle, or whatever it is, and there’s pictures everywhere. And the game is played at a very high level there, so the design firms work with the brands to design packaging that stands out, and they have to execute on that with good printing and good photography and good graphics, right? So they are professionals at blending all that together. 

So, someone from a design firm will reach out to us and say, “Hey, we’re going to shoot a line of crackers. We’re going to have 10 different skews. We want them to all feel like they’re part of the same family. We’re going to treat them this way, style them this way,” and we have the capacity to understand what their objectives are, and execute on those desires. So, that’s one place where that lives. 

But also, for instance, if you go into a restaurant, certain restaurants– and Wendy’s is an example for us– you go in there and the menu boards, or the signs that are on the windows that try to draw you into the building to order food, the stuff when you’re going through the drive through all the pictures out there, that’s all done at a very high level. They are trying to basically describe to you, via your eyes, what these flavor profiles are of any sandwich or combo that you’re going to get.

So in a sandwich, you know, there’s layers of flavors. Well, how do they… how do they let you know that’s all there without having to make you read a bunch of words about what’s on the sandwich? Well, you style a sandwich with all the flavors forward, so that it’s crystal clear that there’s a tomato, there’s mayonnaise, there’s lettuce, there’s cheese. Yeah, you want to be able to glance at that and get it: it’s chicken, it’s not beef, or whatever it might be.

Jacob:

Right. And there’s a legal aspect to that too, if I remember right.

TJ Vissing:

Yeah, yeah. So, keeping it real is definitely the world we live in these days. It wasn’t always that way. You know, we don’t put things on there that aren’t real, that you can’t eat. You do accentuate, sort of, the visual profile of the sandwich so that you can see what everything is, right? So the tomato can’t just be buried under the middle of the bun. It’s got to come forward so you can tell there’s one there.

Jeffrey:

But you use real tomatoes, and real lettuce, and all that stuff. Interesting. 

TJ Vissing:

And we use all their product, right? So, when we shoot for Wendy’s, you know, we’re given all their stuff, and if we shoot it here in our studio, or if we go up to their corporate office and shoot, those arrangements are made before we even start to get everything we need at the studio before the shoot, so that it’s all ready to go.

Jacob:

Right. And so, you’re talking at a real high level, because you’ve been working at a high level. But you weren’t always working at a high level of, like, super organized photography shoots. But what you did outline there is all the different parts that you’ll need to plan for. So I wanted just to poke you a little bit in that.

So you’re talking about: you have a brand, so it’s like a company; you have someone with a creative vision, often a brand designer, right? And then you have you, the photographer executing that vision. And then, there’s a slew of other people that never really get a lot of credit that are also on that set sometimes with these commercial shoots, right? 

TJ Vissing:

Oh, absolutely. And a big part of that in the food world is the food stylist and basically you are a sculptor. So you’re given all the components, and a lot of times there’s sort of a roadmap for it. It’s not you know, just out of the blue: they have operations set up so that they build their sandwiches a certain way, or whatever it might be. So the food stylist is given basically a roadmap to how to build things. It takes finesse. It takes touch. It takes even, like, an appreciation for the photographic outcome.

So, you know, a good food stylist who’s been doing it a while knows that things have to land where they land so the camera can see them. So, a camera is looking at something through basically one eye, right? Whereas we use two eyes when we’re out in the world and we’re looking at things, but cameras don’t have binocular vision.

So, it’s a different way of looking at things. So, a food stylist, knowing that, will place the drip of ketchup coming off the part of the burger in a spot where it’s appropriate, right? But that’s a learned thing: You got to be in the business to kind of get the lay of the land and what people expect to see. 

And then as soon as you know everything, modifications show up and people want to do things different: the style of photography might change; I might want something to be lit more dramatic, or more high key, whatever it might be. So, there’s always things changing. But for the most part, surrounding yourself with professionals from the styling all the way to the retouching.

So, we have in our studio, we have a team of really high level, very experienced retouchers that also understand the nuance.

Jacob:

Pause there. Retoucher is definitely a word that is, like, one of those industry jargon words. And I remember when I first started getting into photography, working with you… Jeff, do you know what a digital retoucher is? Like, what a photo retoucher does?

Jeff:

I think so?

Jacob:

Okay. Just want to make sure. TJ, can you break it down? Because I bet somebody in the audience is like, “what does he mean by retouch?” It sounds very physical, but it’s not physical.

TJ Vissing:

Yeah. I mean, the easy word for it that maybe lands for everyone is Photoshop, right? So AI is getting, it’s coming into our world a little bit, and that’s being blended into the Photoshop tools. The possibilities are endless for what you can do. But, in our world, most of the time we’re charged with keeping it real.

So again, someone who’s doing a retouching might be taking a blemish off a bun, or a crack off a bun that we just couldn’t get rid of, we couldn’t fix it, didn’t have the perfect bun. But, we don’t want you to get distracted by that in this photograph. So we factor that out with Photoshop.

Jeffrey:

Gotcha.

TJ Vissing:

But that goes, when it comes to something like shooting for Hershey, you know, a candy bar: go open a candy bar from the store and there’s dings on it and, you know, it’s been handled, it’s been packaged, it’s been put on shelves. You carried it out of there, you threw it on the countertop, whatever.

Finding the perfect candy bar is not possible. Finding good ones is. But, you know, some of those nicks and scratches and things that are on there, you’re not really changing the reality of what the bar is, you’re just taking off some of the scars that it took getting shoved into a package or shoved up on a shelf, whatever, and making sure that that word Hershey right on that little pit of that bar is readable. And occasionally lighting gets… is difficult for something like a candy bar. So, you just clean the edges up a little bit so that everyone can read the word.

Jacob:

Well, sometimes you should also point out– and this is something I thought was really neat– is just the camera quality that you sometimes work with. You use, I think it’s called a Phase One, right? You still shoot with that? And that camera’s like a hundred megapixel camera, right? Or is it more than that now?

TJ Vissing:

Well, we have an 80 megapixel and a 100 megapixel.

Jacob:

So essentially, with shooting with a camera, it’s almost like having a microscope. Like, you are up on it. So, if something that might look like a small blemish on a countertop, to you looks like a boulder when you blow it up to the nth degree on these giant cameras. 

Now, I will say, what you’re doing for me, and I think for our listeners, is pointing out the fact that when you have a photo, there are so many other factors that get you to that picture. And I think that’s something that is really good for people to understand. And, it was nice that you just dived in and talked about– you got your brand, your designer, you got your food stylist, we got my retouchers, we got the photographer– and that’s all to get one photo. 

So when a lot of times people reach out initially, or want to get into commercial photography, they’re a little overwhelmed, because they had no idea that they’re not hiring a photographer usually, they’re hiring a whole team of people… Oh, not to mention producers depending on the complexity of it. And you’re just talking about food, but you can probably apply pretty much the same amount to some types of product, sometimes of lifestyle shoots with people…

TJ Vissing:

Yeah, you know, our producer at the studio here, Nancy, she does so much work beforehand just to line up a photo shoot: from scheduling it, getting on the calendar, finding, making sure we have the space to do it– and we have three studios in our studio here. We can do three different shoots on any given day. But, where’s the shoot going to land? And do you have a lot of clients coming? So, do you need the bigger space or the smaller space? Do you have models you need to find? Do you have props you need to find? 

You know, we’re shooting a shoot tomorrow where we needed to find a bunch of pink and white roses. Well, off the top of your head, like, you just go buy some pink and white roses. Well, they have to be the right color pink, and we were given a document by our client that basically outlined exactly where they would like that color to land, and how open the roses should be. So, we had to think about when did we need to get the roses? Did we store them in the refrigerator? We store them on the countertop? You know, can we force them to open if they’re not ready yet? Do we have to keep them from opening by keeping them cold? So, the thing you have to do just to figure out what you have to do before you can take the shot, it can get really detailed. 

And sometimes travel’s involved. You know, you’re going on location to shoot in a factory somewhere, or a corporation somewhere, and you got to get there, and you got to make arrangements to get in the building, and you got… you know, there’s a lot to it. 

And so, basically what one thing that people don’t quite understand is, “why can’t just anyone do this,” right? Everyone’s got an iPhone. Anyone can take a picture, and most people are actually quite good at it, right? So, what the iPhone can do for a photograph that you take of kids jumping in a pool, it takes great shots. Like, “oh, I can shoot photography for packaging”. It’s like, well, you need to be equipped with the right kind of equipment, and you also need to be available, right? So, a brand manager could theoretically shoot their own photography, but they are busy managing a brand. And the graphic designers are busy designers. 

And we have a studio where we basically make ourselves available to produce– with all the pre-production necessary– execute, and deliver a high quality image, basically, for brands that can afford it. They’re playing in a game that’s at a pretty high level because, you know, many of the brands are billion dollar brands. They’re competing in grocery stores. There’s a lot on the line. They sell a lot of products. , So you can play that game with those kinds of clients. 

Jacob:

Yeah, absolutely. And so, I feel like that can be one of these, these points that is a tipping point for a lot of businesses, as they’re growing, is to know when they can swing it and go from shooting stuff on my iPhone, to shooting stuff in a studio. And that gap feels pretty big for some people when they’re just getting started out, because you go from doing it yourself to, “there’s five people in a room,” and any business owner, any digital marketing… any person that’s in charge of a budget knows if there’s five people in the room, my budget’s gone.  And you have five super-talented people or three super-talented people on this stuff.

So, Jeff, I know you have another question that leads directly into this one. Do you want to hit him?

Jeffrey:

No, you can do it.

Jacob:

Hit him over the head with a club. Do it.

So the question that we had was: it can be a substantial investment for smaller businesses, or even medium sized businesses, and we bet some clients can be a little shocked at the price point that comes out of it, because they’re used to just driving through that drive-thru at Wendy’s and being like, “that picture looks really good. I will take that $10 cheeseburger,” which is I think $10 now, which is crazy.

Jeffrey:

Yeah, it’s gotten expensive. 

Jacob:

So like, how do you… how can we justify that value to people, or where does that value system work?

Jeffrey:

Those companies that are on that sort of threshold that Jacob was talking about, you know: they’re growing, they have the money… How do you justify them taking that leap into the real professional photography space? 

TJ Vissing:

Yeah. You know, I think the barrier there is basically defined by your competition, right? So, again, thanks to Jacob for helping us craft a lot of our web presence, and we get contacts from people that are saying things like, “Oh, I’m starting my own Amazon store, or I’m starting my own little eBay thing, or I make purses, or cowboy hats,” or whatever it might be. And they just don’t have the capital to spend $5,000 or $20,000 or whatever it might be on a photo shoot.

But, when business gets good enough, and your competitors are basically outperforming you, because of the quality of their… the look of their store, or just their packaging, if packaging is involved… that’s when I think, you know, you kind of have to get in the real game.

Again, not everyone… you know, you’re starting a little candle company and you want to sell them online: if you’re independently wealthy and you want to just jump straight in, go for it.

Jacob:

I’m thinking of Jan from The Office when she started her little candle business on the side… If no one remembers that but me on this call, whatever. But, she starts her own little candle business and Michael Scott has to fund it all because he’s in a very uncomfortable situation… Anyways, when you’re past the Jan-phase owning a small little candle company out of your house, basically… 

Sorry, I didn’t mean to interject there and interrupt the call.

TJ Vissing:

But no, that’s really relevant…

Jacob:

 And no one knows what The Office is on this call apparently, so…

Jeffrey:

It’s been so long since I’ve watched it.

Jacob:

I don’t do dated references. I’m very modern. Please…

Jeffrey:

Yeah, I dont know, The Office is so topical, Jacob. Thank you.

TJ Vissing:

Yeah. So, you know, again, if you’re starting something up, you probably don’t have a lot of product, you’re limited in what you can sell, and you have to ramp up, and a business isn’t ready to be giant overnight. You know, growth is dangerous in any business. So if you’re making a hundred candles a week, and then you need to go to 10,000, and then you need to go to a 100,000… Well, how do you do that? With a lot of capital investment. And the only reason why you would want to spend good money on photography at that point is that your competition is, again, outperforming you, and you want to be seen as a really high-quality player in that environment. And you’re being seen by enough people, and you can supply enough product to all the people you’re going to find: Then you’re ready to do that. But, it just isn’t necessary early on. It’s cost prohibitive. 

And I think again, if you’re the maker of a unique product, then it’s kind of your baby and you should probably explore that yourself a little bit photographically. And when you’re creating your own little store, a version of a store, whatever it might be– and you know what that product’s all about, you know why it’s good and why it’s not good– over time, you learn from your customers what they care about and what they don’t, and they might not even notice that you’re doing what you think is special, but they noticed something that you didn’t know was special. 

And now you need to have a conversation about stuff like that, because that’s what people are noticing. So, you know, it’s a very dynamic situation. So, small business getting started, you don’t go to the grocery store and sell Kroger five million candles, you know, you’ve only got 400 that you’ve already made. So, there’s a process.

Jacob:

That makes a lot of sense. So when your competition is… and I can understand that too, with a marketplace too, depending on like, you know: if you’re at crafts fair, and you’re selling your candles, no one else there has excellent, amazing photography either, right? And it is really when you’re pushing that up… 

Because I remember one thing when I was working with you on this stuff, is I did some little scientific research on what happens with photography, and I remember: it’s a really short amount of time when a human makes a judgment call on a photo, on an image, or an artwork, or anything. And it’s usually within a blink of an eye, like within a half-a-second or less, your brain has made a ton of emotional decisions on what it just saw. And so that’s another value to this too that I remember bringing up with clients being like, “how valuable is that little window of time for you to have that amazing photo?”

So, this leads us into the next question of this pod, which is: when they get to that phase– and they’re getting to that tipping point for the first time, most people don’t know the whole team of people that you need– what should a small business do? How should they approach getting into this place for the first time, and getting nice photography: going from taking iPhone photos to getting a person with a professional camera and like, a real food stylist, or set stylist, and all that stuff? How should they approach this?

TJ Vissing:

You know, again, it’s going to be so unique for every situation, And I guess one of the things I would say, too, is before you are even  thinking about photography, you might need to be thinking about graphic design, web design, right? 

So, if you put a nice picture in a horrible place, no one’s going to see it, right? If it’s not framed well, the story’s not being told. So photography, at our level, photography is a part of a system: rarely does it stand on its own to tell the whole story. And you have to have something like a  brand identity, people have to realize when they’re looking at your stuff that that’s who you are, and you’re not someone else. So you have to separate yourself from the competition. 

So, frankly, I think the evolution of that, of finding… if you can find someone you know, that does photography, that can take a decent photograph for you, that shoots in their garage: great! I mean, do that;  find out who you want to become, talk to a graphic designer and a web designer at some point, and decide how to badge yourself, who you want to be, and be that consistently. And as the game gets elevated,  the quality of the work can get elevated with it. So we’re probably, like,  fifth tier on that pecking order of that upward spiral to making your business amazing.

Jacob:

I mean, that’s a good point. I mean… to kind of distill what you’re saying, the way I hear it is: if you don’t give it a place to live and breathe and be a part of something, you’re going to be just spending money with very little return on that, because it’s not going to be a part of a greater story. And that does make a lot of sense too. I think, if I remember right, when you get a shoot, when someone comes to you with a shoot, and OMS, they usually start with having a shot list, right?

TJ Vissing:

A lot of times, yeah. Let me give you an example though of someone that kind of did it a little different: So, we had a brand, a tequila brand, come contact us through our website. And basically, they’re a new brand that didn’t have a lot of money to spend. They wanted to do some social media photography, so they didn’t really even have… You know, what branding they had, was very… it was a very young brand, we’ll put it that way.  

So they wanted us to help them sort of visually see who they are, and we were in the mood to do it, okay? You know, it was a tequila brand: we’re like, “yeah, we’ll play with that!” Because we were just excited about the opportunity to kind of do what we want, which is really different than how we normally operate: normally, a client comes to us and says, “We need exactly this kind of stuff. We need this treatment. It’s going to go here.” This brand came to us and said, “Help us to find out who we are: play with it.”

Jacob:

So instead of… so let me go back and pause real quick: we have the brand, the company; we have the brand designer; we have the photographers and all the people behind them. So this company didn’t have the brand designer person, they wanted you to wear that hat: They wanted the photography company to wear that hat for them, for a little bit, when it came to setting the mood, the tone, and look of the brand, right?

TJ Vissing:

Right, yeah. Again, it’s a pretty unusual request that came our way. And, again, we were in the mood to do it. And what we ended up doing was we just, sort of, you know… a few different photographers in the studio, we just kind of passed it around. And we said, “give it a look that you like, and just play with it.”

And I worked on it, and a number of other people worked on it. And  basically they reacted to what we did and said, “Hey, let’s keep going down this road. Like we want to be a brand that’s a little more masculine, a little more drinking the tequila neat– not throwing it in margaritas, and things– and rich, warm tones, wood grains…” things like that. And they just sort of, they saw it and wanted to dive deeper into that. And we ended up shooting for that brand for, well, for years. Every month we would just do a handful of images, and over time it meandered a little bit: they wanted to do more mixed drinks; they wanted to have a different personality; they wanted something to maybe represent a celebration, or have, you know, some hands and some people in it. And so we just meandered through that with them  until they sold the brand and…

Jacob:

Oh really?

TJ Vissing

So, you know… Yeah, we considered it a great success for a few reasons: One is that we really enjoyed doing it again we…

Jeffrey:

Yeah, it sounds like that was a fun thing for photographers to probably get to not be dictated to by Wendy’s and stuff.

TJ Vissing:

To get creative, right. And so we had an opportunity to play, is kind of how we think about it. And it was a really great body of work that now populates a lot of the work on our website. And we can now use that experience to tell a story about how we can do that for other people, right? 

Again, so when we do the things for the Hershey’s or the Wendy’s or whatever, you know, we’re also are very comfortable in that world where we know our role, and we do that stuff. And that work also becomes our portfolio to get more work like that from other clients, but they’re really two different kinds of things. And both of them are great. 

So, basically, though, in this day and age of social media, you know, photography where we see this– this is kind of a harsh word– but cheapening of photography, so to speak, in the eyes of the users of social media, because they feel like it’s so… it’s just there and gone. right? But you go to an Instagram account of a certain brand, a tequila brand, or, you know, you name it, and a lot of their stuff isn’t great photography, but it doesn’t need to be because they’re just trying to say hello to their followers, right? But when you do see good photography…

Jacob: 

I was gonna say I’m gonna put a little point in here, I was actually researching this recently: what are the latest statistics on how many people see what you post on social media in any given time? Usually only like 10 to 15 percent of your follower base will see a post when it is posted, or within that period of time when it can be seen, and unless it gets picked up and likes and commented on and gets a buzz, the rest, 80, 85 percent of your followers will never see that thing ever. 

And so, I’ve seen a lot of brands starting to figure out how to recycle posts more, because… Well, I got basically 80 percent of my resources just going down the drain with this. So anyways, just a point to prove like the cheapening that is happening, or the loss of value I should say, in social media photography.

TJ Vissing:

Well, and when you look at the quality of the photography, as a photographer, you know, we see it, we might see that tequila brand pepper in a few shots that someone took on a fishing trip or whatever, and it’ll be like, “really? You really put that next to the shot we just did that just smokes that thing? What are you doing?” 

But, it’s okay, it’s the world… it’s just how that game is played. But, we notice good photography. Does everyone? I bet they notice it. Do they quantify it? Nah, probably not so much.

Jacob:

Right. And this is like that thing I was saying earlier, and you’ve mentioned it at the beginning, that just little bit of…  that little bit of time right at the start of when you see a picture, and all those things are there, and everything looks perfect, if it’s very idealistic looking, it will probably have a better quick emotional response versus an iPhone.

However, you’re right. People don’t verbalize that feeling, or know how to…

Jeffrey:

I don’t think I could.

Jacob:

Yeah. You could say, “wow, that picture looks great,” but that might be the extent of your commentary.

TJ Vissing:

That’s one of those things too, where you, again: what a design firm knows you’re going to see when you look at something, you know, they understand how to go it to you, so you see what they want you to see. So you don’t even have to think about it, right? Your brain’s just going to catch it because of the color palette, the weight of the graphics, and the image on there, and knowing where it exists in the story… I mean, all that stuff is thought about. So, in a sense, we’re being played, right? By people smarter than us. But that’s how the world works, right?

Jacob:

Yeah, I mean, that is like how food scientists are like that, you know, to a certain degree. So where they’re trying to optimize the amount of salt, or sugar, or flavors that you can have in it. And so, to a certain degree, I don’t think certain branding specialists, or designers, get enough credit for kind of being like design scientists to like elicit an emotional response to a thing that will happen in a half a second or less. They’re doing so much work on the front end so that when you go in that store, you’re in that drive through, you hit a billboard, you’re scrolling the internet… That moment is maximized for that emotional effect.

But, people don’t think about it like that. Most people think about it as like– especially in advertising when it’s on the advertising side, not necessarily the packaging, or the practical side where you’re trying to just show people what the product is– people are very annoyed by the advertising side of things anymore, because they get so inundated with it, on every scale.

TJ Vissing:

Oh, absolutely.

Jacob:

Well, TJ, this was great, very informative podcast episode for me, even though I knew a lot of this stuff going in, because we used to work together, it was…

Jeffrey:

I didn’t know any of it. So very, very informative for me. It’s been really interesting.

Jacob:

Yeah, and I think it was… It was good for everybody. So, thank you for coming on, I hope you feel like you had a good time…

TJ Vissing:

Yeah, absolutely. And I do enjoy listening to your podcast. You got… Your banter is fantastic, so keep it up.

Jeffrey:

It comes with being friends for 20 years. So…

Jacob:

Yes.

TJ Vissing:

Yeah. 

Jacob:

All right. All right. Well, this is great. Well, thank you so much for coming on and, well, hopefully, maybe we’ll have you on another episode, because I feel like someone might ask me a question about some things that you talked about today, and we might have you back on.

TJ Vissing:

Cool.

Jeffrey:

Very good.

Jacob:

Thank you.