When you send a press release to the media, do you send a good quality photo with it?
By good quality, I mean a portrait shot taken by a professional photographer who understands lighting or, at the least, a clear photo taken on a camera at a high resolution.
In my role as a business writer for a newspaper, I still receive poor quality photos, some taken on mobile phones with low resolution cameras. Sometimes even marketing and PR professionals send these, which astounds me. When this happens, I have to ask them to send a better quality photo.
A high resolution, well composed photo with interesting subject matter can be very powerful. It can persuade a journalist to include an article based on the press release simply because they want to include the image.
Another good practice is to send the photo as a separate JPEG file and not embed it in a Word document or PDF. Often this results in a call or email to send the original file.
As to the composition and lighting, I’ll leave that to the professional photographers, whose expertise and art I admire.
A good photo will make you look good and it’s easy to arrange with a bit of thought and planning.
Here’s one of the z2z brothers.
