Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
Hi, I'm Andrew Scheer, Bonnie, and welcome back to Creativelive, where going to talk to you today about social media, for food photography and how that's important to us and how it's an essential part of our business plan and our creative plan, and it is a integral part of our business lives as photographers. So what I want to talk about is a number of things from social media participation. Why that's important to us getting engaged. I want to talk about audience engagement, the things that we can do to improve our audience engagement and also understanding the business. Do's and dont's off participating in social media, the creative do's and dont's of participating in social media and then also understanding and unpacking analytics and understanding, like how we're reading analytics and understand the true nature of numbers when Tom's to how we participate in social media. One of things that occurred to me when I contemplated talking to you about this particular issue with social med...
ia in our business was that in my career, which is spanning close to 20 years, at this point, I've lived through three very distinct divisions of what food photography has sort of meant in in the photo world. I kind of broke it down into these segments, which is pre digital, which is film the digital era, which is obviously when we started to use the Internet as the main place that our photos were being displayed. And now we're in another very distinctive change and I'm calling that obviously the the social realm standing in the middle of that where I came into my own, particularly as a digital photographer, I did do some assignments in film, but that was at the very tail end of when that was becoming important in editorial photography, and I establish myself in digital photography and like many of you, I'm looking at social media. I sort of sometimes a necessary evil and something that we have to incorporate into our professional lives on. I'm also I want to talk to you about the changes that have occurred in social media and how that's impacted our business. So one of the things that's really important understand is that the social media realm is where we do a lot of our commerce today, which is also where we promote ourselves regularly, and it's kind of the place where our personal and professional lives have a tendency to intermix. So all of those things are really important and how we proceed in presenting ourselves to the world as photographers. It forces us to understand that maybe that kind of access is something we need to be careful about, how we use how we present ourselves as professionals in the social realm. One of the things that I try toe incorporate into my personal use of social media and how I found that it's helped me is to compartmentalize the platforms that I'm using now. Obviously, as as a social media creature, we as food photographers are going to use Instagram most predominantly so that if I look at Instagram as the, uh, the social media platform, I want to talk about most. I try to think of it in terms of my digital portfolio, my first contact with clients the way I interface with my, uh, the other photographers in in the space community. Ah, it also gives me opportunities to, uh, meet new artists and be inspired. So there are so many benefits to it, but how we present ourselves and the kinds of images that we want to portray how we display things in our in our feed versus how we interact with story features or the I G TV features or some of the other things that allow us to play around with video. All of these things are important components of what we're going to do in food photography, but I want to focus on firstly on how we use the feet, because the feed is the thing that, actually, for me personally drops onto the home page off my website. So I'm constantly able to update my portfolio in real time. My instagram is my portfolio. I constantly edit it. I am trying to look at the analytics and basically understand my audience and the kinds of things that they are going to either like or ignore, and then also using it to be a way to display the things maybe I'm not able to publish because the trends are different or because my clients are requiring me to shoot a certain way. But I'm still able to express myself there. That's portfolio worthy, but also a little bit more like me than what I'm selling to my clients. All the time. The other thing I try to remember about my Instagram feed is that my personal life is my life now. That's not always the case for all of you. Some of you might want to show that your personal brand includes yourself personally. That's not my brand, because I'm a table top photographer, for the most part, and I try to keep my personal life out off my work. That's that is my choice. But it's also not on brand for me, because that's not exactly the kind of work that I'm selling to my clients. So I try to keep those things separate. But I'm gonna give you some examples later on of people who are successfully building themselves into their brands as well, even in food photography. So we have a lot of things to cover today, but I think that initially we have this sense that social media is pretty important for us and that we're gonna figure out some tools of how to make it even better.
Ratings and Reviews
Katia
Really enjoyed the class. It is not about how to grow your following or how to book clients through social media, it is more about creative intention, knowing the benefits of the platforms and how you can use them to showcase your work as a free marketing tool. I am a big fan of Andrew’s teaching method - he always makes you ponder and think a bit further about what he says. I found this class inspiring and positive
Trina Thomson
This was fantastic. It was insightful and concise with some real pearls of wisdom. Andrew is really articulate and warm and you get a sense of real professionalism from him. I loved this course. It wasn't long but the time was used succinctly. Recommend.
wendy wlilja
I was expecting more solid information regarding social media platforms, their pros and cons etc. This was more about the instructors opinions about generalized issues like only put your best work out in public, on social media. I
Student Work
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