Industrial photography & product branding

Turning assets into branding and photo shoot into success

	I resurrected the printer images section of the Tally site.

When I took over the web manager position at Tally Computer Printers, I discovered a Macintosh full of images … photos, illustrations, line drawings … you name it, it was on that hard drive. And it was a mess; as superb as my predecessor was as a graphic designer, apparently she wasn't much for organization.

But organization was needed. The value-added resellers wanted pictures of the printer products. The advertising agency needed pictures. The PR agency had requests coming in from industry journals for images. Every request meant hours searching the Mac's hard drive—I catalogued everything I found and handed off, but it didn't seem I could catch up. The Mac's drive light just churned and churned.

Finally, in desperation, I pulled my boss over and showed her the problem. She was dumbfounded. It suddenly made sense why I seemed to struggle with the requests, and why I wasn't getting anything else done.

I suggested that we archive all the years of clutter off the Mac and start over with new images. Bless her heart, she agreed. Together, we went through the product list and identified what we should photograph and what variety of shots we needed for each product. The list totaled 160 photos.

Figuring a ballpark estimate of $250 per shot for professional photography, that came to approximately $40,000. She gulped … and said "yes."

Into the studio

I called a couple acquaintances and asked if they knew a photographer named Michael Craft, who had been recommended to me by a product manager at Tally and by a man who'd done some service on the Mac. I called Craft and chatted with him.

And when Craft gave us his estimate, it was right in our ballpark range. Turns out, Michael had worked with my predecessor, so he knew what I needed. I liked his level-headedness. So we booked a week in his studio in January 2001.

With the date locked firmly, I moved into logistical mode. I approached the woman at Tally who ordered printers and dispatched them to the resellers. Would she allow me to pull one each of every printer out of inventory? Would she allow me to uncrate them, if I re-crated them when I was done? Would she help me ship them from Kent to Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, about 35 miles?

Her answer was "yes." Either I was pretty persuasive … or she understood the problem. And she made arrangements for a truck and driver to make the pickup and delivery.

Both images were built from individual printer photos layered against a common background (with some color shifting). Drop shadows were added to give a sense of depth and reality. Having perfect lighting on every printer made composites like these simple to assemble. See image library. Years earlier, a similar photo of the entire product line was made by the same photographer—but took several days to set up.

Taking control

Michael Craft requested that our advertising/design agency provide someone to handle art direction for the photo shoot. Our account manager said he would be there, which was a relief because I had some commitments the first half-day of shooting.

But when I arrived at Craft's studio, I discovered the art director had no idea what he needed, even though he was at that time redesigning the printed sell sheets and should have known how he wanted to depict the printers.

Craft and I hunkered down and hashed out a game plan. I had too many shots on my list to waste time, and many of them involved different printers in virtually identical positions—facing left, facing right, with paper, without pager, with covers open, closed, and even rear panels. Craft remembered a previous shot for Tally that filled his studio with multiple printers, on the floor, on pedestals, and on tables.

We agreed that what I needed was one by one shots of each individual printer. If I needed a composite with more than one printer, I could use Photoshop to build group and family shots. That decision made a big difference in how smoothly the rest of the week went, as I became my own art director.

Slams, pinches, and misses

The work actually took nine days. I'd arranged with the trucking firm to deliver specific printers to Craft's studio each day. After the first day's shot, I went down to the trucking warehouse and reorganized the deliveries, wrapping what seemed miles of cling wrap around pallets of printers.

We had one casualty—as Andy, Craft's assistant, helped me position a line printer, the door of the cabinet swung shut on his hand. I felt really bad about it then and I still walk up occasional nights with the shivers from how much Andy must have hurt. Beyond his initial outcry, though, he never said a word.

I almost missed a dinner my wife and I had planned for some church couples at our house. That Saturday's shoot had bogged down and we weren't able to quit as soon as I'd planned. But the whole thing made a great dinner conversation, as the other couples wanted to know more about my week.

As we finished up each printer, I'd arranged for two people from Tally's field service depot to help box the printers up for shipment home. But the photography was progressing fast enough that I started forgetting how the crating had come off. Again, I called our dispatcher. She suggested that we send 'em home as is—and she arranged for all the field service staff to come in one afternoon the following week for a "class" in re-crating printers.

Paths and more paths

As Michael worked, Andy kept track of the 4"x5" sheet film. Each night, Michael sent one sheet from each printer to the lab on a rush for processing. The next morning, we reviewed the transparencies. If we liked what we saw, Michael had the lab process the other three sheets of film for each printer. He kept one set, I kept one set at home until the merger with Genicom (and I wish I still had them), and we catalogued the other two of each into three ring binders.

Once the film was processed, I turned it over to another friend who ran a high-end scanning business. His staff scanned the pictures to disk. When we were done, there were mode than 30 CD-ROMs, at nearly 650 megabytes each.

Using this digital output, I laid Photoshop "paths" around each printer, so I could isolate just the product and get rid of the backgrounds. Craft shot everything on white seamless paper using a couple big "softboxes" on his strobes but there were still shadows. And as careful as Andy and I were, the printer cabinet wheels left faint marks on the white paper.

The other decision I made, with Michael's advice, was to light each printer so that one side was highlighted and the other visible sides had diminishing levels of light, but all were clearly distinguished against the seamless background. I wanted to be able to differentiate the printers from the backgrounds when using the pen tool in Photoshop.

That made the lighting a bit more complex. But in the end, it made a significant contribution to being able to composite multiple printers into the same image. The evenness of the lighting, and the way each face of the printer cabinets dropped off, was a critical part of making the composites match.

Putting them on the web

After clean away the backgrounds and standardizing on a fixed size (400x525-pixels) for all the printer images, I start building pages for tally's website that would give away the printer images. Yes, that's right—give them away, even though the final bill was almost dead-on to our $40,000 budget, including the scanning and Photoshop work.

Because so many diverse entities and people wanted photos of our products, I knew all along that the simplest way to handle requests was to have a page—one for each model, as it turned out—that provided web-quality AND print-quality versions people could download.

I selected a JavaScript driven process that I'd used once before to display one image at full size surrounded by thumbnails of the other shots. Clicking any thumbnail replace the fill-size shot with another full-size one of the selected thumbnail. Under each thumbnail was a link to the corresponding high-quality (meaning huge file size) version for advertising and product literature.

I had an idea the pages would be popular but the actual response was overwhelming. On any given day, at least 20 people visited one or more of the photo pages, and the novelty of clicking the thumbnails must have been compelling, because sometimes they were clicked five or six times per visit.

Adding corporate branding

The product photos proved to be so effective that I went back later and added a page with all the corporate logos and branding elements in multiple versions, for web, print, even for use in Microsoft Office.

And later, I compiled a page with some company history, after giving the HR department help assembling a DVD that was presented to each employee at the company's 50th anniversary celebration.

When the line matrix printer cabinets changed color from beige to milk white, it was simple to call up the high-quality images, modify the color balance to match, and save versions for web and thumbnail. The product manager was worried it might take a long time but I proved the value of having the library by doing the whole job in one day (a moderately longer day than normal, admittedly, but done between dawn and midnight).

The project was a success. The owner of one of the channel reseller companies called and thanked me for making all the photos and images available. He said he'd been after Tally for years to give him a such a library on disk. And when Genicom bought Tally, they added the image gallery to their website, too.

Creating a useful tool not only helped Tally's partners, but it showed everyone that we were committed to our products. By making the photos and logos available on the website, we showed that our corporate image and our products were important enough that we wanted others to share the resource as well.

Note: The print-quality images use approximately 220 megabytes of disk. Since the images are copyrighted by Michael Craft and since Tally (as such) is no longer in business, the high-quality links have been disabled and the images removed.

Product photos © 2001, 2003 Michael Craft. All rights reserved. Used by permission.