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Brian A. Kilgore
Toronto, Canada
416 - 879 - 5771
BrianKilgore@BrianKilgore.com
www.BrianKilgore.com

Go to the Business Photography section to learn more about my photography,

There's a long version directly under the short version.

10 TIPS - short version
A PR Professional’s Guide to Using Photographs and Photographers

Perhaps the biggest failure in the practice of public relations is the under use, and misuse, of photography.
Here are ten quick tips to get you thinking about photography. And coming soon, the same tips with all the details you could ask for. Here's the short version.

1/ Include photography in your overall communications plan. Budget for it, plan for it, include it in both strategic and tactical planning.
2/ Hire the right kind of photographer. Some are generalists, and can handle just about any assignment, but others are specialists. Don’t hire a wedding and studio portrait photographer to shoot an industrial plant.
3/ Overall, decide what you want a photograph to accomplish, and then home in on the benefits of photography at each implementation of a tactic; what actions do you want people to take after seeing the photograph?
4/ Effectively cut the cost of each photograph by using it several times, in several ways. Media handout, web shot, gift to a customer, and more.
5/ Decide on camera format and film type. 35mm cameras and film are fine for most PR purposes today. Color negative film is usually the best choice.
6/ Prepare the location. The pictures last a long time, so make sure you do your part to make them look good. At the very least, clean up.
7/ Assemble and prepare the props. You need more than people to make the shot work.
8/ Pick the models, (executives, production workers, customers, suppliers, whomever) and tell them well in advance. People want to look their best in any photo, so don’t just grab someone off an assembly line to pose with the president.
9/ Prepare the models so they are easy to work with, so they don’t waste their time with reshoots, so they enjoy the experience, and so the pictures accomplish your goals.
10/ Make it easy for the photographer to work, whether it’s "your" photographer on assignment for your public relations department, or television, newspaper and magazine photographers at an event you are supporting.

The long version (6,000 words) of:
A PR Professional’s Guide to
Using Photographers

Here are ten quick tips to get you thinking about photography, along with lots of details. If you've got more questions, send me an e-mail at BrianKilgore@BrianKilgore.com, and I'll try to answer it. Go to the Business Photography part of the site to read more about how I take pictures.

Depending on the project, the points may be rearranged into a different order.

1/ Include photography in your overall communications plan. Budget for it, and include it in both strategic and tactical planning. A good photographer costs about the same as a PR person, and allow some extra money for film and processing. $600 to $1500 a day is a reasonable rate except for the superstars.

Most photographers sell one-time rights to the pictures, so become familiar with copyright laws. You can usually do a "buy-out," which means you obtain the actual negatives and can use them for any purpose, by paying a slight premium. It varies with the ability the photographer might have to sell the photos to other users. Sometimes photographers hold back advertising rights, so if you want to use the shot in a paid ad, you pay extra.

Here are some places for photography in your communications plan

News releases; photos of the person being quoted or the product or service being described, or both

If you're announcing some numbers, whether financial or a survey, blow up some of the main numbers, and photograph an expert in front of the enlargement.

Speeches; formal portrait for promoting the conference in ads, brochures, etc., and a more informal shot to go out with the news release sent when the speech is presented/

New product introduction; product shot without people, for trade magazine new product pages, sales sheets (maybe Marketing Department will pay for this shot) and some shots of the product held by CEO, research chief, production manager, etc. for popular and general business media.

Contract announcement; contract signing pictures for trade magazines, your web site, client's web site, your and their internal and external magazines and newsletters, and more. One trick is to have the contract on a chest-high shelf, so the hand holding the pen is close to the happy faces of client and supplier. Maybe fit the product, or a model of it, on the same surface.

Executive and major sales appointments; regular, professional, formal portrait for the business newspapers, and an informal, dynamic portrait for inclusion with the news releases sent to trade magazines, etc. Use the informal shot in your own magazines and on your web site.

Support photo for each quarter's financial results; dominate the news coverage because you've got an illustration that has impact, so that your results get placed near the top of the story. Don't forget that television shows a lot of still photos.

Human Resources support; post lots of pictures of plants, offices, clients, employees on your web site, to use as a recruitment and retention tool. Make sure recruiters have lots of pictures (perhaps converted to computer projection images) to show at job fairs and high school / university career days. Have shots of the prizes in contests, the rewards for recognition programs, and use your own employees as models in the company logo-clothing sales and distribution programs.

Trade show support; include "editorial" photographs in all trade show booths, considering these are great recruitment tools. Lots of pictures in the media kits, and if your supplied photo is the best one, your speaker at the conference will have his or her picture on the conference brochure cover.

Industry relations; work with the PR professionals at your biggest suppliers and biggest customers, so that pictures of your joint ventures dominate at industry association functions.

You get the idea by now, I'm sure.

2/ Hire the right kind of photographer. Some are generalists, and can handle just about any assignment, but others are specialists. Don’t hire a wedding and studio portrait photographer to shoot an industrial plant.

Some photographers are comfortable shooting people and others, often advertising and architectural specialists, do not have the ability to work with people. It takes a special type to get the most out of a lot of CEOs, too. High ranking executives often are reluctant to get into the situations that result in front page pictures, so you need a photogapher used to working with people of all types. Sometimes the safest bet when you need a local photographer far away from you is to contact the local newspaper, and see if anyone is able to freelance. In Canada, Canadian Press has an organization that can provide genuine news photographers at reasonable rates anywhere in the country.

But often they can't shoot the more formalized shots you'll need, and are not experienced in setting up shots that show off products or plants in the best light.

My photography clients appreciate the fact that I can work alone, without a PR department rep, since I'm a public relations practitioner in addition to being a photographer.

The kind of photographer you pick is linked to the equipment you need, too. If you need well lit portraits of groups of three or more people, the photographer will need what are called studio strobes. These are high-powered lights mounted on stands, often used with umbrellas or large fabric boxes to soften the light, necessary to provide even lighting over a medium sized to large area. They're also the best way to shoot location portraits most of the time.

The camera size (see #5) is related to the photographer you pick, too. Although we can all rent larger cameras, it really does make a difference if we're used to working with them.

Wedding / studio portrait photographers are good for formal portraits, and the wedding shooters do a good job at receptions, dinners and similar events. Make sure they can get prints to you in time, though. Some studio photographers are comfortable on location, and can shoot your executive portraits in a boardroom or CEO's office. Others develop mental and artistic blocks when they leave the studio.

 I wish this was my shot of Jimmy Buffett, but it isn't. Jean Pagliuso took this photograph of Jimmy Buffett, and as I understand the story, the picture is the result of serious planning by the two of them, including looking at computerized maps and using GPS and other high technology systems to determine what lagoon to fly to in Jimmy Buffett's airplane, and when to arrive so that the sun would be shining from the right angle for the shot. 

Commercial and advertising photographers can usually overcome any kind of technical problem, but some are not comfortable working with people, some charge very high fees, some can't work quickly, some need stylists and prop managers and assistants that make the shoot overly complicated, and some can't work with the real world. They need to bring in a desk from an interiors store, cuz the real one isn't good enough. Here Ms. Pagliuso proves how great a shot can be when the photographer works with the model, the pilot, and the client, even if they are all the same person.

But, pick the right commercial shooter, and you've got someone who can handle the mixed light6ing sources in a plant, organize seven people in a group shot, and know exactly where to place the lights for the most flattering shots of the senior executives.

Photojournalists can be good and bad. There's a surprising number of lazy ones who rely on the client to set up the shot, and then just point the camera. And there are lots of good ones, who create the shot in their mind, move the people, track down better locations, and then wade into the middle of the raging river to get the best angle.

They may, however, forget to move the pile of cardboard cartons out of the background.

I call myself a "Business Photographer" and explain that this fits in between photojournalist and commercial / advertising photographer.

I've got the eye of a photojournalist, and can "find" the shot just by walking through a plant or chatting with the CEO for ten minutes while setting up lights. As a former newspaper and magazine photographer and television cameraman, I know what works in attracting the attention of photo editors. And as a serious photographer I have the equipment and know how to use Dyna-Lite studio strobes, Nikon and Leica 35mm cameras, and Fuji 670, Mamiya C330 and Mamiya RB67 medium format cameras. I can even run the swings and tilts of 4x5 view cameras (put the cloth over your head) although I've not needed to for thirty years.

3/ Overall, decide what you want a photograph to accomplish, and then home in on the benefits of photography at each implementation of a tactic; what actions do you want people to take after getting visual information about a topic, subject, person or place? If the picture won’t cause an action to your benefit, don’t bother.

A media relations note: If your photos capture the imagination of editors and they run the pictures, you'll dominate the pages, and attract the attention of your real audience. Once their attention is attracted, the pictures plus the stories give you multiple chances to influence behaviour.

If one of your communications department goals is the recruitment and retention of high-demand employees, the strategy could be "impress upon them that you value the skills and contributions of employees by getting these employees involved in high-level projects." The tactics to meet this strategy include putting employees at many levels into situations where they are in the spotlight, are meeting with executives at client organizations, represent your firm at conferences and seminars, and meet with and discuss business matters with your CEO and other executive-level managers.

Use photographs to record these events, and distribute the pictures broadly, including souvenir prints for the employees. Revamp, if necessary, your company paper, so that these shots run. Develop your community relations and academic relations programs so that your multi-level people are front and center, and then record the fact on film. Loaning one of your electrical engineers to a solar-car derby, freeing another from her desk so that she can assist an executive vice-president in a presentation to a chamber of commerce, etc. are all photographable events (send the pictures to community papers, daily papers, trade magazines and more) that reinforce the reasons for retention, and make your company more attractive to prospective employees.

4/ Effectively cut the cost of each photograph by using it several times, in several ways. The handout photo for a news conference becomes a web photograph, and gets published in the quarterly financial report. It also is framed and hangs on the wall of your biggest customer and most valued supplier. And another print is in the company newsletter, and as another step, it’s in a trade magazine ad.

The biggest expense in photography is running a photographable event. If you don't take pictures, this money is wasted. Once you've paid the photographer, extra prints only cost a few dollars, yet public relations people often scrimp here.

Attaching a note to the bottom of a news release saying "Photo available upon request" is almost always a complete waste of time. If your news release is really news, the editor wants the shot now. And, you've never seen an empty white space in the paper, where a photo was supposed to go, have you? No, because someone else, with a photo not as good as your, enclosed it with their news release.

An almost OK way of avoiding sending the print is to type "Photos available at our web site," and then give the specific web page address. Get high quality scans done at several resolutions, and let editors download the image and run the picture.

5/ Decide on camera format and film type. You may want to discuss this with your photographer, or with the art director or editor most likely to use the picture in the largest size. That may be a trade show booth designer, incidentally.

For the vast majority of uses, including photographic prints up to about 8x10 or 8x12 inches, for full page reproduction in the editorial pages of magazines, for any size editorial reproduction in newspapers, for any web use, for souvenir prints and wall prints that are not oversize, 35mm cameras and film are fine today.

The quality of professional cameras, professional lenses, and professional film means a 35mm negative or slide today is as good as many medium format (120 film designation, 2 ¼ by ?? negative size) picture of a dozen years ago.

Use these medium format cameras if you want to use the shot up to perhaps five feet square at a trade show booth, want to wrap it around the front and the back cover of the annual report (about 17 x 11 inches), are looking for 11x14 or 16 x 20 prints of the CEO and the chairman to hang in the boardroom, or will use covering almost an entire newspaper page in an ad.

As a general rule, readers comfortably accept slightly lower quality in editorial style pictures than they do in paid advertising.

Film type

The speed with which you need final pictures, and the use you’ll make of the shots, affects your choice of film type; slide film, color negative film for prints, or black and white film for prints.

For slide shows and for the highest quality reproduction on glossy magazine paper with a line screen of at least 110, and more likely 133 or 150 lines per inch, slides are still best, but only if they are shot with great care and exact exposure, and perfect color balance.

In major cities, slide film and be processed, including being mounted in slide frames, in about two hours.

A semantic note: some people think "slides" means only 35mm film, and anything larger is a "transparency," and all slides are transparencies, but not all transparencies are small enough to be slides. And both slides and transparencies are also called "chromes," which ismost often at the end of the film name, like Ektachrome or Fujichrome or Agfachrome. And slide processing is also called E-6 processing.

Other than these uses, I'd almost always recommend negative film instead of slide film for pictures managed by public relations professionals.

If you want to use your pictures for many purposes, and you probably should, color negative film is usually your best bet. Color negatives can be easily printed in black & white, but it takes a custom lab to do this well, and it means extra time. More on color in a few paragraphs.

If you just want black & white, you have your choice of lots of traditional black and white films which yield excellent B&W prints, but ask your photographer about processing times. Very few pro photographers process their own film today, and B&W can take a day, using a professional lab, to get the film developed and a contact proof sheet made, and another day to get prints made. In some cities, you can't even find a conventional black and white lab. Check black and white processing prices, too. They may frighten you, or they may fit your budget just fine.

Kodak’s recently introduced black and white film that gets processed in color chemicals, and this means you can get film developed and printed in 4x6 machine print size within an hour at minilabs all over the world. Ilford pioneered this kind of film, but Kodak’s launch has promoted the concept so that more labs are willing and able to do the work. Let your photographer decide between the Ilford XP2 film and the Kodak CN (for color negative processing) versions. You can get nicely toned sepia prints, too. Here’s one. Prints of this shot, in the sepia version and a regular black and white version, have been sent throughout the US, Canada and parts of Europe, all made by a one-hour photo machine in a little camera store on Bloor Street West, in Toronto.

Minilab operators do need to know what they are doing; do not rely on the lab at the local grocery store, unless you know the technicians are well trained. One comforting thought, though. While a poor operator can give you lousy prints, chances are the automated machine produced good quality negatives from your raw film, so you can get them reprinted there, or take them to a better lab.

Both the Kodak and Ilford films are great, can be used with flash or available light, and this is the system I now use for most of my black and white shooting.

For color prints, make sure the photographer has an idea of what he’s going to shoot, and what you want to use the prints for. (The same applies to color slides) There are dozens of different film types, and the photographer will pick the right film for the job. I once figured out that I use 16 different films, depending on the subject and the use.

Some film has brilliant colors, which is great for product shots but shows every blemish on a middle-aged executive. It makes for great exterior photos on cloudy days, but the shadows are too dark on sunny days, and a slightly red nose can turn out looking like Rudolph.

Kodak and Fuji both make special films for wedding and portrait photographers, and these are the films to make sure your photographer is using for formal or semi-formal executive portraits. They are also the best films for a lot of outdoor pictures of people and products taken on sunny days, because they have better details in the shadows, and more control over the highlights. For a building photograph, for instance, they'll keep the white sign from glaring at you, while still showing detail in the shadows of an inset entranceway.

6/ Prepare the location. The pictures last a long time, so make sure you do your part to make them look good. In industrial plants and scientific labs, this can include painting the machinery, retiling the floors, replacing broken glass in doors and windows, buying new uniforms and lab coats, and replacing fluorescent tubes, so all the lights look the same.

Check all the safety equipment. Are the fire extinguishers in place, safety belts on certain machinery, lights working on the stairways, and so on?

At the very least, clean up. And give the maintenance crew enough warning that they can get people in to do the job before you arrive.

Outdoors, arrange for the new trucks to be parked at the front and the rusty, dented ones at the back. Wetting down the parking lot just before a picture makes the photograph look a lot better. Fill in the shipping and receiving or logistics manager, so that you have traffic flow under control.

In offices, get the cardboard cartons off the CEO’s floor, replace the dead coffee maker in the meeting room, get chairs that match to place around the table, and so on. If you are going to photograph an open office area or several cubicles, allow cleanup time.

It’s often well worth the money to bring the photographer in a day or two early to supervise the clean up and revamping, because he’ll be able to tell you what will be in the background of each shot. Depending on the lenses used, you may find just a narrow swath of space needs revamping, or you may find a big job on your hands.

Check out the way the sun shines, if you are shooting outdoors. If you're building an outdoor stage for some special ceremony, you don't want bright sun on half of your platform, with the other half in shadow. Work with the event organizers to determine stage placement, too. The stage at Nathan Phillips Square in front of Toronto's city hall is set up so that no sunlight falls on the performers, but it does fall in the eyes of the audience, for any afternoon performance. Backlit performers and squinting VIPs in the audience make for poor pictures. South facing buildings can be shot any time of day, but east facing and west facing need to be shot in the morning and afternoon, respectively.

And if you are having the photographer shoot outside, you may need to spread carpets for the audience to stand on, so that the speakers are in the sunlight and the building, with its logo, is in the background.

   For a Festival Caravan news conference, we left the details in the hands of the CN Tower public relations staff, who set up speakers for the audience that also served the needs of Toronto's all news radio station. There was no need for things to get complicated. 
The television crews were able to shoot interviews simply by moving close to the windows, where this shot of Leon Kosser from Caravan is lit by daylight. 

And the costumes of the Caravan Princesses made for naturally photogenic subjects. Jim Wilkes from the Toronto Star, right, moved outside the building for this shot, which, from his angle lying on his back, showed the Princesses and the CN Tower in the background, and got big play in Canada's largest daily paper.

7/ Assemble and prepare the props. You’ll need these for your photographer, and, if outside media are invited, their photographers will need props, too, so sometimes gets several copies of the same thing. I’ve shot dozens of minivans that had special wording painted on the sides, allowing me to place people inside an open door, looking through a window, so the shot had the grill of the van with its distinctive logo, plus the door with the company name clearly visible, parked in front of a dealership so its name was visible, too, along with identification of the event.

Get the trucks washed. Or the tanks, or the building signs, or, or, or…

At one news conference I attended as an observer, a drug company was announcing a new medicine, but there were no bottles for the television crews and newspaper photographers to photograph. Somehow the PR people thought the media would be happy with pictures of men in suits. I wasn't the only puzzled person, however. A sales rep at the conference, standing beside me at the back of the room, asked about props. "Shouldn't they be showing the medicine," she whispered to me. "Apparently it does not exist," I whispered back. "Yes it does," she said, leaving the room. She was back in five minutes with several bottles she'd taken from the sample case in her car, we showed these to the photographers and cameramen, they all reshot their pictures, and the company dominated that night's news, and was featured in the next morning's papers.

There's a story about this group picture in my Business Photography section here. The blow-ups were specially created because the actual book was too small to see in a publicity photo showing all the editors, and its real colors, black and red, do not show up well in black and white, as you can see below.
  This shows how the color original is unreadable in black and white.

Among the best clients providing great props for my shots were Canadian National railway people north of Toronto, who washed a locomotive and a crane for me, and restacked a dozen containers the size of transport trailers, so the ones in my pictures were clean. And one of their contract drivers had his truck decorated with some beautiful custom striping weeks before schedule, just so it would look wonderful in the shot.

I've had fire departments arrange their trucks in a pattern on the ground, so I could shoot from the end of the aerial ladder. One of the good photographers who works often for CN had trains park outside of a window so the locomotive could be in the background of a portrait.

If the picture is of new machinery, remember to never trust a promised delivery date. Make sure the machine is actually working before you schedule a photograph.

Howard Johnson's Hotels in Canada used to be run by the Crothers family, which also owned a Caterpiller construction equipment dealership. They once delivered a giant CAT earth mover to downtown Toronto for the express purpose of being the most-photographed float in a parade. We decorated it with balloons, filled the bucket with freezers of Howard Johnson's ice cream that we scooped out for the kids lining the parade route, and came up with a subject all the newspaper photographers and their photo editors thought was the best.

8/ Pick the people who are going to be in the photographs, and tell them well in advance. Again, it may be worthwhile having the photographer come in to help in the selection.

In a world of casual dress, the men and women in your shots, whether executives or production workers, need some time to get clothes cleaned and pressed, and get hair cuts (at least three days before the shoot for men; maybe that same day for women, depending on hair style and the mood of the picture). Guide the subjects in clothing choices, to make the photos "work" visually and to convey the mood and feeling you want. For instance, no finely patterned, multi colored shirts or blouses for people who are going to hold small objects in front of themselves. Decide if colored shirts with white collars makes an executive look serious and stylish, or just pretentious. It varies with the man, and works well with Paul Tellier, Canadian National’s CEO. In the U.S. presidential election, Al Gore was almost always seen in a white shirt with a tie, but no suit jacket. That wasn't an accident; it was a strategic decision related to photography.

People want to look their best, so don’t just grab someone off an assembly line to pose with the president.

There are politics involved in selecting company people to be in a photo, so be careful. I've seen shots discarded because one of the people in the shot was a union rep involved in a union election, and management did not want to appear to be playing favorites. (There was some doubt whether being in a picture with the CEO was a benefit or liability in relation to the election.) Some organizations pick photo subjects to be politically correct; government agencies are the most careful to represent skin color and mobility limitations. Others select employees to be models based on length of service, or pick the people who have received recent awards. And in some companies, it's a lucky draw, or it is the person normally closest to the place where the photograph is being taken.

True story; I was once photographing a group of people at a contract signing, including senior and junior managers from my client company, and several people from their client's organization. Walking into the building, the senior manager leaned over and whispered, "Can you get some shots without Ralph. We're going to fire him tomorrow." I mixed and mingled the people and, son of a gun, there were some shots where Ralph was on the outer edge of the group.

Clothing tips; solids are better than patterns, joke ties (Mickey Mouse, a golfer, etc.) don't work; women almost always look better with their upper arms covered; union reps will spot non-safety shoes where they are required, so be careful; finely patterned jackets "herringbone" when on television; dark suits for men are always OK but light colored suits make the pictures look out of date once Labour Day is past; no man has ever looked professional while wearing brown; presidents and executive management should never be seen in white short sleeve shirts, but long sleeves can be rolled up; drape tables that are on platforms so that photographers down low are not shooting crotches; some up to the minute fahsions look outdated too quickly if you want these shots to last two years; no man in a business suit ever looked good in a company baseball cap, and besides, they cast shadows on faces; on the other hand, company jackets can look very sharp; scooped neck tops for women limit the way they can be posed and the angles from which the photographer can shoot with dignity; black clothes and white clothes can be harder to photograph, but may be appropriate for arty or scientific people; safety helmets and safety glasses can often be held by the models, rather than worn, without stirring up too many safety concerns; light blue shirts look better than dark blue shirts when worn with ties; try to avoid "seasonal" clothes.

If you are having a photographer shoot executive portraits for the files and for assorted future uses, have the people photographed with a dark suit or business dress, then without the jacket, and then with a different tie and another jacket (or a different suit or dress for women) and perhaps you should have them change again, and wear a more casual outfit, perhaps a golf shirt with the company logo.

If you give the photographer enough warning, he can have two shooting locations set up with lights at the same time, so you can move the CEO, for instance, from his office where you took the first three or four set-ups into a meeting room for some more, and then to a development lab, or to the lobby where the company's products are on display.

The two major Canadian business dailies ran pictures of IBM Canada president John Wetmore recently. He followed some of these rules (someone else told him; we've never nmet) and was shown in a blue dress shirt with a nice tie, but no jacket. Useless, non-identifying, backgrounds, though.

What about payment and releases for employees in pictures. Most union contracts make no reference, and most employees are happy to be in the pictures. I've been organizing and/or shooting pictures of employees for thirty years, and never had a problem, but I still often create a simple, plain English release form, and ask the employee to sing it, saying we have permission to use the photo for company uses public relations uses. On one major project for the government of Ontario, where I shot about a hundred people in the United States, I had the release printed on official Ontario Government premium stationery with the embossed gold logo, and I paiud each person one Canadian dollar coin. And I've never worried about shots where there are large numbers of people in an audience photo.

I do try to make sure that people photographed do receive a souvenir print.

9/ Pick, and decorate, the location to advance your cause. If you have a news conference in a factory, don’t hold it in a meeting room that looks like every other meeting room in the world. Hold it on the shop floor, and put two hundred employees into the picture while you’re at it. If you have to hold it in a downtown hotel, take the three most important people out to the factory floor or a lodading dock or a customer's office the day before, shoot them with the new product, new machine, new whatever, and then have handout pictures to give to the media at the hotel-based announcement. Or bring the new product to the news conference. This may mean booking a different room at the Hilton, so that an entire car can be unveiled, but it will get your picture printed in the paper.

Get your logo up on the wall behind the speaker, big enough to read in a photo. Even better, get a great picture behind your speaker. I’ve been to the CN web site looking for the wonderful shot of Paul Tellier in front of a huge photo of a CN locomotive. Editors love this shot, but I couldn't find it to show you.

Put up a huge blow-up of your new product, especially if it is small, behind the speakers.

And spray it will dulling spray so it does not glare in our shots (and on TV that light)

There is no reason in the world to have people see a lectern with a hotel name on it. Go to the hotel early, and examine the lectern that will be used by your CEO at the announcement. Measure it. Get a designer to create a new sign with your logo, and some event-related graphic. A big, bright, dynamic "200 Years" and your logo is a lot better than "Ramada Inn"

When David Foot and Danny Stoffman revamped "Boom Bust & Echo," the best selling business book in Canada for two years, the publisher, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, bought a bus shelter ad in the heart of Canada's business district. The morning the poster went up, David and Danny and I were down there, with the poster posting person, for some shots. This postcard I took went to book store managers, and a very similar shot of mine ran, very large, in the Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Hamilton Spectator, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, and Montreal Gazette, plus many smaller papers.

10/ Make it easy for the photographer to work, whether it’s "your" photographer on assignment, or television, newspaper and magazine photographers at an event you are supporting.

If it’s a controlled shoot with the shooter using a lot of photographic equipment, far away from the photographer’s home base, meet him at the airport with a secure, lockable truck to help get his lights and stands and tripods and himself to your location. Assign a plant maintenance expert to help. Photographers love lift trucks and cherry pickers and ladders. We need lots of electricity for many complicated shots. We need windows blocked and lights turned on and off to balance the lighting we provide.

If it’s a speech-maker shot, give us a spotlight shining on the speaker if you need to darken the room to see the slides. Put the slide screen in a dark spot, close to the speaker, and we may be able to get both in the picture, but make sure the screen isn’t lit by pot lights washing out the image. If you've got spotlights on the speaker, put the lights on a high stand, so that he doesn't get blinded.

Give us a shooting platform, and put floodlights shining on the podium. The television camera operators can use these, and so can the still photographers, if the lights are bright enough. Otherwise the TV guys will turn their camera-mounted Sun-Gun style lights on and off, messing up the exposures of the still photographers, blinding the speakers, and annoying the audience.

The platform helps keep us in one spot (we’ll get down and wander, but not as much as if there is no platform) and gives us a good shooting angle at the speaker, so we are not crouched down in front, shooting up his nose. The end result is your client or boss will appear in the paper and on television looking good.

If you’re in Toronto, you can watch broadcasts of Canadian Club and Empire Club speeches on Rogers Cable, where the camera platform is too high, and, if the speaker isn’t very good you watch the top of a (often bald) head during the whole broadcast.

By the way, train your speakers to look at us, and hold the look for a few seconds, a few times, preferably near the start of the speech. We need the subject stopped, so we don’t get blurry pictures, and if we can shoot early in the speech, we get out of the way of the audience that much sooner.

If you want to make a news photographer happy, set up some shooting opportunities before the speeches. Get the top people assembled in front of a dynamic background, with the products or contracts or other props, and let the shooting begin. Once some pictures are "in the can" the news photographers can take off. They'll leave, too, if they get tired of waiting, so make sure the events start on time.

And they all have pagers and cell phones, and will leave your PR event so some live news happening, so it's always advisable to give them something good to shoot, early.

Here's a tip to impress television camera operators covering speeches. They are not going to shoot the whole speech, so get a copy of the speaking notes, and mark the two or three "sound bites" you most want on TV. Give the script to the camera operator, and you'll be amazed how often that's the part of the speech that's recorded, and that's the part that gets on-air.

If your PR people are good and the event warrants it, you can get live broadcasts on local television, but you need to agree with the broadcasters about timing. Last June I arranged about 60 live broadcasts of a nine-day multicultural festival in Toronto. The key to the success was the way the segment field producers worked with the on-stage performers to start their singing, dancing, craftmaking or whatever just before the cameras went live.

You can even organize the photo session hours before the actual event, if your function is scheduled for dinnertime. Let the photographer shoot at 2 p.m., (let the reporters do interviews then, too) and there’s time for the pictures to be processed and the stories to be written in time for tomorrow’s papers and the videotape to be edited for the late night news.

Or have your own photographer shooting at 2, taking lots of shots, and send a 4x6 proof print and the actual negative over to the local papers by four or five, in time for consideration for the next morning’s paper. (You need a photographer who can shoot a "news" picture for this to work. Not some silly "grip and grin" shot.) In the old days, you needed a real print, and that was hard to get in two hours. Now, the one-hour minilab proof and a negative is all you need.

Make it easy for the photographer to feature the most important person. Don't line six un-named, unimportant, people up behind the main speaker. It messes up the shot, confuses the caption writer at the paper, and hides the company logo.

It should go without saying, but, just in case, make sure the photographers get a complete media kits, especially if they're shooting with no reporter alongside them. Photographers do not listen to the speeches, and they don't pay attention to the presentations. They're looking for angles and checking shadows, so let them take the written information away from them, to be edited by a deskbound reporter back at the paper or station. Include the complete names of anyone likely to be in a picture, especially if there's a potential confusing name, even as simple as Dan or Don Smith or Smyth. And is it Reed or Read or Reid?