Understanding Your Market

Photographing apartment interiors on Moscow housing estates in minus -16°C in February may not sound like a good gig but as it happens this work has been one of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on.

The reason is simple. A client who applied this technology to their needs, valued and shared the interactive experience to the right people in their organisation.

Panoramas have in many ways been considered left field. Photographic curators don’t like digital, commissioning editors don’t like stitched images, Google street view, in most cases has seriously bad production values.

Whatever your opinion of the genre, you can certainly say they that this style of imaging has a function when it’s deployed online. You can see everywhere. As an artist I love the format. I love the discipline of the creation process.

But back to my client.

The reason they chose panoramas was to illustrate a typical apartment of a given socio-economic group. Not for any aesthetic reason but to share with their CGI industrial designers stuck in a beautiful studio in the middle of a Nordic forest.

With space at an absolute premium in Moscow these images provided their designers with evidence of how the limited space available is utilised, what space was possibly available and objects that may be missing or could be re-imagined. It could be something as simple as a soap holder or a bread bin. Understanding your market and your client is vital in terms of keeping your costs down. Knowledge of your customer needs is something this client aims to know very well.

With this in mind, how can this type of imaging help your business be more responsive and profitable? Is it simply to illustrate a property or place? Is it, as in the this case, to show others who can not physically make the journey?

If you have questions do send them to me via the ‘contact’ page above or reply to this post below and I’ll do my best to respond as promptly as I can.