Let's say you sell beauty products, you'll need a simple but elegant website, printed flyers, probably a catalog, a blogs, e-mail campaigns, sales presentations, brochures, ads. Which means you'll need beautiful pictures so hat your brand is perceived correctly.
Hiring a photographer costs $80-150 an hour and many small business owners have taken this matter into their own hands by figuring out how to use their digital cameras as we reported some time ago. See our post on how to set up the lighting for a home product shoot.
Now, there is a new trend that we have observed among our customers: small business owners purchase stock photography at $1/shot and then send them to PhotoHand for alterations and merging with other images - mostly home made photos - to produce editorial-level ads for products or services.
I this example a professionally-shot image purchased from a stock photography website was altered several times to present different variations of a beauty product. These images were further combined with amateur shots of the branded containers. The total cost with the volume discount - $5.95 per ad.
In another example, a stock photo was converted into an illustration to the company's business model by changing the background, adding some graphic elements and incorporating the company's product pictures. The total cost of the ad production - $16.95.
To create such ads the agency way would have cost at least $300: You would have to pay a photographer, a model, a stylist and still use a photo retoucher. Be smart! A penny saved is a penny earned.
