Say ‘cheese’!

Having let the EML team have a few weeks off to enjoy the ‘summer’ we’re now picking up the series of “who’s who” blogs, and to get us back into the swing of things, Account Manager Siobhan Gaffan has agreed to share her passion for photography with us:

“I have always been into art and at school I always liked drawing, but the problem with drawing is that it’s so time consuming! The thing I like about photography – apart from the fact that it’s instant – is that it can be controlled. I’m quite a visual person, and I like expressing myself by creating images. I love the whole process of generating an idea, starting with an objective, and working out how to illustrate it; researching it, looking at other people’s work to see how they approached it to see if I can take some inspiration from that. Watching an image grow is very rewarding.

When it came to choosing a career when I left Uni, I decided that I wanted to do something that could involve working with images, but I didn’t want to be a photographer – I don’t want to have to rely on something that is my passion to pay the bills and end up hating it. I wanted to keep it as more of a personal interest, but still be able to put my skills to use from time to time. PR offered the perfect balance.

When it comes to photography for PR I think there are four main rules:
1) Be creative, but don’t get too ambitious – Conceptual images can be great, but the image still has to have a clear message.
2) Make it realistic – People can make technology shots much more tangible and make images suitable for use in corporate presentations.
3) Be relevant – Someone smiling at a phone is ridiculous. Use, it, don’t smile at it!
4) Keep it simple – Don’t over complicate the image as it will just distort or hide the message.

Technology is a hard subject to capture – especially at semiconductor levels. There are so many applications for each product, it can be hard to include them all without breaking the rules, and it can be really hard to make a chip look exciting. One tip I’d give is not to feel compelled to put in additional products to ‘jazz up’ an image – don’t try to dress up the chip. Speak to the photo editors and browse through your key magazines to see what kind of style they usually include. More often than not, the photo editors will just use a plain and simple image.”