So many pictures, so few heroes.

 A camera captures images, just like the human eye. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two. Our eye is connected to our brain; a camera, of course, is not. A camera can see everything, but often recognizes nothing. Recognition and, notably, emotional recognition is what engages an audience.  We rarely forget a strong image.

So how does one create emotional images?

Most people take pictures; however, very few make pictures.  What do I mean by the word “make”? Great photographers always add emotional context to a neutral image to facilitate the cognition process. 

Take an ordinary pebble we find on the shore.  As insignificant it may be to us,  to a geologist it could be fossilized evidence proving a thesis, which he/she is passionately defending.

Lets’ assume that we are taking a picture that pebble for an audience of geologists. A pebble will be carefully scouted, selected and placed on a studio table, propped up to be seemingly floating. A modeling light will form a mysterious shadow; a second light will cast a pseudo-geological striation onto the background. A blue filter will flood the entire background scene and create a seemingly endless cosmos.  A sizeable amount of Photoshop wizardry applied will defuse the left edge of the pebble, then add contrast, fine tune the saturation levels, opacity, clarity, blackness and on and on. The result? The audience will see much more than a pebble, perhaps part of an asteroid carrying cellular life toward our planet. 

I call this hero photography, and I strongly believe in its power to convey a message and make marketing material – whether it’s an annual report, or brochure, or web page – highly memorable. Click here to view examples of how we've included hero photography in annual reports.

-Lumír Hladík, Chief Creative Strategist, TMX Equicom