Commercial and tourism photography in Collingwood

Collingwood spent a century as a manufacturing town. The shipyards launched their last vessel in 1986 after more than a hundred years of building ships, the grain terminal stopped taking grain in 1993, and what grew in their place was tourism, recreation and the businesses that serve both. That is who buys commercial photography here now.

The customer set is specific enough to name. Restaurants and independent retail along the heritage main street, where the storefront and the streetscape are part of what is being sold. The Creative Simcoe Street cluster of studios, galleries and kitchens inside the heritage district. Marinas and waterfront hospitality. Operators whose season turns on visitors arriving for the trails in summer and the hills in winter.

What the work looks like: the exterior and the street at the hour the light suits them, aerials that set a business against the harbour or the escarpment behind it, and campaign images made for the season being advertised rather than pulled from a folder three years old.

Commercial and tourism photography in Collingwood covers how each of those is quoted. The businesses and districts named above describe the market this page is written about.

Two seasons run through this town rather than one, and a business that only photographs itself in the busier of them has a marketing calendar with a hole in it. Trail and water traffic in the summer, the hills in the winter, and a good many operators here sell to both — which means one shoot produces imagery for half the year and the other half needs its own.

The heritage main street is a shooting constraint as much as a subject. The frontages are close together, the street is narrow, and parked cars sit in front of most of them for most of the day, so a clean exterior frame is often a question of hour rather than of lens. Early is usually the answer, and it is worth agreeing that before the day rather than discovering it on the day.

For the studios, galleries and kitchens in the Creative Simcoe Street cluster the useful photograph is frequently the work rather than the premises. A maker is selling what comes out of the room, and a set that covers only the sign over the door has documented the address instead of the business.

What a Collingwood business is selling usually includes the harbour, the hills behind the town, or the walk between the two, and none of those three fit into a photograph taken from the sidewalk outside. Drone and aerial photography in Collingwood covers what the air adds to a commercial set on the busiest stretch of this bay.