Grey County · South Georgian Bay, Ontario
Commercial and tourism photography in Grey County
An apple crop, a ski season, a working harbour and a factory town are four businesses, and this county contains all four.
Agriculture is the constant here and the Beaver Valley is its most recognisable face: the valley produces a significant share of the Canadian apple crop, and the growers, cideries and farm gates along it sell a place as much as a product. Behind and above them sits the escarpment tourism economy — the Bruce Trail, the waterfalls, the ski clubs on the slope — where the customer is a visitor deciding where to spend a weekend.
Commercial and tourism photography means something else again at the other end of the county. Owen Sound is the county's only city and keeps a harbour at the mouth of two rivers. Hanover and Durham are the manufacturing and service towns of the southwest, and Southgate and Chatsworth are farm country with the businesses that go with it. Those operators are selling capability and premises, not scenery, and the frame that sells them is the yard, the plant and the road in.
The brief this page exists for is the one that will not sit inside a single town: an operator with a farm gate at one end of the county and a unit at the other, or an association whose members are spread across all nine municipalities. Quoting that address by address is how it ends up costing more and looking less coherent than it should.
The seasonal calendar here is unusually unforgiving because two of the county's industries peak at opposite ends of the year and neither will wait. Blossom and harvest in the valley are a fortnight each. The ski season photographs as itself for a few short weeks of reliable cover. Anyone selling either has to be shooting roughly two seasons ahead of the campaign, because the alternative is a website that shows bare branches to somebody planning a summer visit, or brown slope to somebody booking a February weekend.
A county-wide set has to look like one set, and here the terrain fights that harder than the schedule does. Images made on the escarpment and images made out on the flat southwest carry different light, different horizons and a different sense of scale, so a run of them assembled piecemeal reads as several unrelated jobs. Deciding the height, the treatment and the time of day once, at the planning stage, is what keeps six locations looking like one business.
Scope is worth settling before a route is drawn, because a county job is almost always being cut up afterwards. One announcement wants a frame or two per site. A website plus a season of posts wants coverage built to be divided — establishing wides, closer detail, enough variation per location that the same picture is not reappearing in four crops — and that is a different day's work, quoted as a different day.
Most of what makes an orchard, a harbour or a plant yard legible in a set like that is read from a few hundred feet up, and in a county built on a cliff line that is a terrain question as much as a licensing one. Drone and aerial photography in Grey County covers what the escarpment does to a flight plan, and what gets checked before a date is agreed.
The commercial and tourism photography page covers the same work across the whole of South Georgian Bay, Ontario, without the Grey County specifics above. Everything Pete shoots in Grey County lists the other one, along with his accreditations and the certificate he flies on.
Questions
Asked about this work in Grey County.
- How far ahead does a seasonal business here need to book?
- Further than most people expect, because the two seasons this county sells are short and opposite. Blossom and harvest in the valley are about a fortnight each. The ski weeks that photograph as themselves are not many more. Anyone advertising either is showing pictures to somebody planning months in advance, so the images have to be made a season or more before the campaign that uses them.
- Do a farm gate in the valley and a plant at Hanover get shot the same way?
- Not at all, and treating them alike is the usual mistake. The farm gate is selling a place, so the surroundings, the approach and the season are half the picture. The plant is selling capability, so what matters is the yard, the scale of the building and how a truck gets to it. Same photographer and often the same aircraft, but a different brief, a different time of day and a different set of frames.
- Can sites at both ends of the county share one booking?
- That is usually the better arrangement, and it is a route before it is a shoot. Addresses grouped by geography rather than by importance, one longer day instead of several short ones, and a decision made in advance about which location gets the last hour of light — only one of them can have it. Booked separately, the same drive across the county is paid for twice and the resulting images rarely look like one set.
Grey County
The other work in this county.
Each is quoted on its own, and near the Thornbury end of the county fitting both into one day is ordinary rather than ambitious.
Commercial and tourism photography in Grey County?
Tell Pete what the images are for and which season they need to sell. Scope and a quote come back together.