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At the last community event I volunteered at (at least, with the company), our store marketing director was there. I had my camera in tow (an old, but awesome Sony DSC-F717 - I paid $900 for it new), like I always do, and was snapping plenty of photos.
She was impressed with how they turned out.
During the last "walk" - which is when we make the store look extra pretty and the regional types come in and look around - I did shots of all of the displays. I just did it on my own, nobody asked me to, but both my current and old departments always look amazing for these things.
When management saw me walking around snapping photos, they asked if I would mind emailing copies to the marketing director. Our HR person was also snapping photos, but using a pretty low end camera.. and using the flash (ugh how I hate flash).
Here's a couple of them.
My favorite - except for the reflection (I didn't have my polarizing filter with me)
All of those are straight off the camera except for resizing - normally I play with my photos a bit in photoshop.
So finally, the good news.
The store manager and marketing director approached me the other day and asked if I would mind doing photos of every dept's team members, and a wide angle shot of all of the employees gathered together (all 275 of them!) at the next store meeting. They tried doing an experiment with the meat dept with this - and printed the photo on a large banner and hung it in the department with "Meet our meat department!" or something to that effect next to it (we have our own graphic artist in the store, along with plotters, large printers, etc - all of our signs and banners are made in-house). Customers have liked it, so they're doing it for all departments.
In short, I'm basically the official store photographer now. I'm actually supposed to do some photos for our cheese department tomorrow - we have a guy who makes mozzarella right there in the store, and he has a bunch of photos of his product and himself. The photos he has now suck pretty bad - good ideas with them, but bad execution (and they left the date/time stamp on when they did the photos).
Marketing and management have given me free reign to basically bring my camera anytime I want as long as they get copies, and I promise to submit some of them to the corporate newsletter - the employee handbook is very strict about photography in the store by either customers or employees, but says approval can be given by store management.
She was impressed with how they turned out.
During the last "walk" - which is when we make the store look extra pretty and the regional types come in and look around - I did shots of all of the displays. I just did it on my own, nobody asked me to, but both my current and old departments always look amazing for these things.
When management saw me walking around snapping photos, they asked if I would mind emailing copies to the marketing director. Our HR person was also snapping photos, but using a pretty low end camera.. and using the flash (ugh how I hate flash).
Here's a couple of them.
My favorite - except for the reflection (I didn't have my polarizing filter with me)
All of those are straight off the camera except for resizing - normally I play with my photos a bit in photoshop.
So finally, the good news.
The store manager and marketing director approached me the other day and asked if I would mind doing photos of every dept's team members, and a wide angle shot of all of the employees gathered together (all 275 of them!) at the next store meeting. They tried doing an experiment with the meat dept with this - and printed the photo on a large banner and hung it in the department with "Meet our meat department!" or something to that effect next to it (we have our own graphic artist in the store, along with plotters, large printers, etc - all of our signs and banners are made in-house). Customers have liked it, so they're doing it for all departments.
In short, I'm basically the official store photographer now. I'm actually supposed to do some photos for our cheese department tomorrow - we have a guy who makes mozzarella right there in the store, and he has a bunch of photos of his product and himself. The photos he has now suck pretty bad - good ideas with them, but bad execution (and they left the date/time stamp on when they did the photos).
Marketing and management have given me free reign to basically bring my camera anytime I want as long as they get copies, and I promise to submit some of them to the corporate newsletter - the employee handbook is very strict about photography in the store by either customers or employees, but says approval can be given by store management.
Maybe if this becomes a very regular thing I would take her up on that, but I couldn't do that in good faith when the camera is mostly used for personal stuff.
Ironically enough, the wine dept manager told me that her dept can't do them tomorrow.
(that way my bonus isn't affected by the OT!)
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