What commercial photography is actually for

A commercial photograph is not decoration. It is a working part of your business, and it gets judged on whether it does its job.

An image that looks good and an image that works are not always the same thing. A photograph of your premises has to survive being cropped square for social media and stretched wide for a website banner. A team portrait has to sit next to eleven colleagues and not look like it was taken in a different decade. A product shot has to read on a phone screen at the size of a stamp.

So I ask where an image is going before I take it, not afterwards. I spent years in digital marketing and SEO before photography became the job, and it changed how I shoot. The photograph has a job. It should be built to do it.

What I photograph for businesses

I work with businesses, organisations, charities and public sector clients across Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex.

• Your premises. Offices, retail, hospitality, workshops and industrial spaces, photographed so they look like themselves rather than like a stock library.
• Your people. Team portraits, staff at work, environmental portraits, and professional headshots that still match each other six months later.
• Your products. Packshots, flat lays and lifestyle images, including glass and reflective packaging, which is the hardest thing in the discipline.
• Your events. Conferences, awards nights, openings and corporate events, edited and delivered while the event is still news.
• Your announcements. PR photography that a picture desk will actually run.
• Your campaigns. Promotional and advertising photography for adverts, marketing and social media, planned around how each image will be used.
• Your printed material. Brochures and prospectuses, shot at the resolution print needs.

A recent example: Adnams

I have photographed for Adnams in Southwold across a number of commissions: board portraits of the eight directors at The Swan, The Plough at Wangford, and their products out in the town for their social media.

Three jobs, three different problems. A board meeting with no time and a room throwing a colour cast. A pub that had to look warm and lived in rather than lit like a studio. A bottle on a coast road where the sun decides the morning before you have taken a frame. The full case study is worth reading if you want to know how I actually work rather than how I describe it.

How it is priced

Commercial work is priced on time and scope, not per image. The cost reflects what the job needs, whether that is a few hours on location or a full day across several sites. There are no packages to choose between, because no two commercial briefs are the same.

You tell me what the photography is for and where it is going, and I come back with a quote. Travel and any other expenses are agreed before the shoot, so nothing turns up unannounced on the invoice.

Full detail on the commercial photography rates page. Headshots and portraits are priced separately and follow a different process.

If there are people in the pictures

This is the part most businesses have never been told, and it can cost them.

Owning the building does not give you the right to photograph the people inside it and use the pictures. An identifiable person in a photograph is their personal data. Using it to promote your business needs a lawful basis, which in practice means consent and a signed release. And the legal responsibility sits with you, not with your photographer.

I raise it before a shoot rather than after. There is a full explanation here: photographing people in your business.

Studio or on location

My studio is at Base Business Park, Rendlesham, near Woodbridge, on the former RAF Bentwaters airbase. Full lighting control, a changing room, and free parking on site.

I also carry a portable studio: a set of lights I can put up anywhere and get the same result I would get at Rendlesham. That matters more than it sounds. A meeting room I have never been in before, with a colour cast I did not choose, is not a place to start improvising with whatever light is coming through the windows. With my own lighting in the room, the building stops having an opinion.

I work with businesses across Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex, including Ipswich, Woodbridge, Southwold, Felixstowe, Bury St Edmunds and Colchester.

Getting a quote

Tell me what the photography is for, where the images will be used, and roughly when you need them. I will come back with an approach and a price based on the time and scope of the work.

Phone or WhatsApp: 07884 366 342. Or use the contact form.