Five reasons you should hire a photojournalist

I have never met Andrea James but I couldn’t agree more with her article entitled “Five reasons you should hire a photojournalist”
Here’s a link to the article on her website.

Here are the highlights:

Five reasons you should hire a photojournalist
You are: In charge of marketing for a corporation. Organizing an event. Planning a wedding. Starting a blog.

You want: Beautiful, memorable photos. Images that will grab the viewer’s attention, and hold it. A new head shot. A creative Christmas card.

You need: A photojournalist with daily newspaper experience.

Here’s why:

1. Photojournalists don’t make excuses — Things do go wrong, but a photojournalist who has worked for a daily newspaper is trained to do superior work, and quickly. She cannot come back to the office with no photo. The paper is coming out tomorrow, a photo is needed. She is used to operating under pressure.

2. Versatility — What I love about newspaper photographers is that they can do anything. My P-I colleagues often found themselves shooting a natural disaster one day (they all own rubber boots), a concert for the arts section the next day, and then a cake for the food section the next.

3. Consider your moment captured — How much would you pay to make sure that THE moment of your event is captured forever? This is what photojournalists are trained to do every day. At my own wedding, I knew that I didn’t have to worry about making sure our photographer (and friend) was capturing crucial moments. He was everywhere. When I saw the photos, I was delighted and saw new aspects of my own wedding that I had missed.

4. Photo journalists are problem solvers – Tell me, how do you make a photo of a technology company interesting? As a business reporter for nearly five years, I got to profile some really cool companies — but a lot of times, these companies performed a service that just wasn’t visually interesting. But I rarely worried about this — I knew we’d have a publishable photo for the newspaper because the photographer would think of something I never could have.

5. They’re the best of the best — Newspaper journalism is cutthroat. Thousands of people want to shoot photos for newspapers, particularly in a big city like Seattle. However, just a dozen actually get to do it. In short, they’ve been vetted.

Click here to see John’s website.