ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHY The making of photographs for advertisements is at once the most fascinating and can be made the most remunerative branch of com mercial photography. It is fascinating in that you are helping to create a demand for a product—you are coming into contact with the pulse of the world—commerce.
Many fortunes have been made almost over night by means of advertising in the past. Today, many standard products owe their success almost entirely to advertising. .Photography is playing its part in the making of ads.
It is remunerative, because, if you create an idea, make the pictures to get that idea across, you are entitled to all you have the nerve to ask for, and there is no fixed price on brains.
The commercial photographer is especially fitted for this line of work, as he already has an acquaintance with business men who advertise. He is in on the ground floor with the manufacturer with his new models of different goods and appliances. He has, in other words, an inside track to what is coming. He has a knowledge of photography and the tricks and stunts neces sary for this work. He should get it. But, I am sorry to say, few of them do, as the photographs that seem to grab the big money are photographs made, oftentimes, by amateurs. However, there is a new school of photographers coming up who are going after this business, and they are going to get it.
Conditions are really coming to such a point that the advertising pages of the leading magazines are more interesting, or equally as interesting, as the reading pages, due, to a great extent, to the quality of the advertisements inserted, and, while it is true that many drawings and paintings are still used, there is nothing that will tell your story like a photograph, and advertisers are beginning to realize this fully.
Even the cover pages of a number of the magazines of late have been made from photographs, and it is, indeed, a tribute to the progress of photog raphy, but why should this not be the case for, in the hands of the skilled photographer, the camera can be made to do almost anything.
Advertising managers and advertising agencies want photographs. They
would take all of them they conld get, but they want quality ; they want some thing with a story, something that will round out their argument for the goods, something with a punch and up to the minute, and they want it when they want it, which does not mean next week, but today, for an idea is an old story in a week or a month.
About the simplest rule I know of, in making photographs for advertise ments, is to get the picture so that it tells a story so that "he who runs may read." In other words, it must tell the story at a glance and tell it strongly so as to make an impression.
In this line of work you will come in contact with the advertising agencies, or the advertising manager of the concern itself. There are two methods open for procedure. One is to work up their ideas, and the other, and by far the best way, that is, where the money is, is to furnish the idea yourself, work it up yourself, and turn it over to them with a catch hrase or an idea for the printed copy.
Advertising agencies generally have one or two artists on their staff who spend all or practically all of their time working up advertisements, which are nearly always started from a photograph, or photography plays some part in the "make-up" one way or another. In other words, photography is an essential in the advertising world.
For histance, Figures 84, 85 and 86 are copies of page ads taken from an issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
The one of the Cotta Transmission is partly photograph and partly draw ing, the phantom effect is obtained by working over a photograph and is the type generally handled by a commercial artist. The chain conveyor is a straight photograph, the Goodrich tire ad is nothing more than a close-up photograph, made with a good strong side light, with the camera practically on the ground. The nut page is a wonderful exatnple of photography, and, as one would say in advertising circles, "it should knock them dead," but this just goes to show that this photographic work is nothing beyond any photog rapher. One needs nothing elaborate in the line of equipment—nothing but what the ordinary photographer has.