Working with Josh Meister was a breeze. Seriously. Josh is one of our member photographers from Atlanta who specializes in conceptual portraits, still life, and travel photography, and after receiving his promoted notes a few months back, he knew he wanted to make some updates to his brand. He wanted a new look for his printed book and website as well as to build a marketing plan to get face-to-face meetings. After reviewing his materials and learning that his wife is a graphic designer, we discovered that Josh knew exactly what he needed and his overall branding (logo, web template) was in good shape for us to get started. His overhaul included a Blueprint, Web Edit, Print Edit, and Marketing Partner.
We started with the Blueprint, where we outlined our direction and exactly what would take place. First up in the plan was a web edit with our Sr. Photo Editor, Stacy. After downloading close to 500 images Josh had sent over, Stacy spent time looking through all the content and selecting the most dynamic and commercially viable shots. From there, she started categorizing them in a way that would make sense for Josh’s brand. Since the majority of his portrait work was conceptual-based, she no longer saw a need for him to keep his conceptual portraits separate from the rest of his portraits as he had done in his previous edit, especially since his approach and style remained consistent across the board. Instead, she carefully organized all of the portrait work into a curated collection that showed off the best of who he was as a portrait photographer in one concise gallery. In the edit, she placed emphasis on his newest series, “Fashion and Food,” by putting it at the beginning of the gallery. She also made sure it was included in the image selects for new promo cards.
After finalizing the portraits gallery, titled “People,” Stacy went on to the “Things” gallery. Since Josh has equal amounts of still life and food work, yet not enough to keep them in separate, fully developed galleries on his site, Stacy again decided to do some combining and carefully put them into the same gallery.
The last part of Josh’s web edit was the integration of his travel work. Keeping in mind his upcoming plans to travel across the globe with this wife on a year-long journey, Stacy created galleries that would be easy for him to update with new content thoughout his travels. So, in his Places gallery, she made three sub-galleries to showcase his travel work by region: Europe, Africa & Asia, and The Americas were the starting points.
Moving onto the print edit, Stacy knew that the sharp division in Josh’s specialties meant completely different sets of clients for each body of work. So instead of trying to highlight and make sense of all of his different specialties in one book, she decided to make two. The first print edit focused on combining the portrait and still life work together. She aimed to mix them with consistent rhythm and flow, pairing image spreads thematically and in a way that would be interesting and engaging for clients to flip through (as opposed to grouping portraits in the first half and stills in the second half). The second print edit includes Josh’s travel work, which can be updated as he adds to the collection.
Here’s a look at Josh’s “People” portfolio:
Once all the photo editing was done and Josh was happy, the next step was to start our marketing partner plan, which included a calendar of what we would be working on for the next six months. The first half of the calendar was dedicated to his “People” and “Things” galleries. We first made a list of clients in Atlanta and the rest of the Southeast that would be interested in his conceptual commercial work. After reaching out to introduce these potential clients to his style and brand, we’ve already received two clients interested in meeting with Josh next month. As far as his travel work is concerned, the second half of the calendar is going to be dedicated to building a list of travel clients that will be interested in his work as he travels across the seas on his year-long trip!
We agreed that working with Josh was a smooth, seamless process, and we can’t wait to see the travel work that he adds to his portfolio this next year. Thanks to Stacy for all her input and explanation of the process from her end, and good luck to Josh as he travels the world! He left us with these awesome words before his trip:
I am getting to a point in my career in which I can no longer handle everything myself. I was looking through my work and knew it was time to edit my portfolios. When I called on Wonderful Machine to help with my portfolio, Stacy Swiderski was the answer. She did an amazing job at taking a look at my body of work and editing it down into two amazing portfolios plus a web edit. It’s really great having fresh eyes to edit my work. She did a great job at answering my questions and explaining why she made the choices she did.
Rachel Walburn has been such a pleasure to work with. She is quick to respond to my questions and always has great feedback. She has provided such professional service and is very detail oriented. I feel like a weight is being lifted off of my shoulders working with her and Wonderful Machine. I look forward to continuing my relationship with her to build my brand.
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