Commercial and tourism photography in Simcoe County

The county does not have one economy in it. The Georgian Bay shore sells visits. Midland and Penetanguishene trade partly on heritage tourism at the top of the bay. The middle of the county is farmland and small industrial towns. The southern end, around Alliston and Bradford, is manufacturing and commuter growth — Honda has assembled vehicles at Alliston since 1986 and is among the largest single employers in the county.

Commercial and tourism photography means something different to each of them. A beach operator is selling a season and has to have the images made in the season before the one they advertise. A manufacturer or a distributor is selling capability, and the aerial that matters is the one showing the site, the yard and the road access. A rural business is usually selling the place itself.

What this page is for is the brief that spans more than one of them: a business with sites at both ends of the boundary, or an organisation whose members are scattered across it. That is a real category and it is badly served by quoting each address as though it were a separate town.

A multi-site county brief is a route before it is a shoot, and treating it that way is most of the saving. Sites clustered by geography rather than by importance, one long day rather than four short ones, and the light budgeted deliberately — the addresses that need the last hour of sun cannot all be at the end of the route, so which of them earns golden hour is a decision made at the planning stage rather than discovered at five o'clock.

Consistency is the other thing a county-wide set has to deliver and the thing most likely to go wrong. Images from six locations that will sit beside each other on one website need to look like one set: the same height, the same time of day where the weather allows it, the same treatment. Shot piecemeal across a year, they read as six unrelated jobs stapled together, and a viewer notices that even when they could not say why.

Scope is worth settling before any of it is scheduled, because a county-wide set is usually being cut up. A single announcement wants one or two frames per site. A website and a season of posts wants coverage built to be divided — wide establishing frames, closer detail, and enough variation per location that the same photograph is not reappearing in four different crops. Those are different days and they should be quoted as different days.

Most of what makes a site or a shoreline legible in those sets is taken from a few hundred feet up, and in this county that is a licensing and charting question as much as a photographic one: drone and aerial photography in Simcoe County covers what gets checked, and where the driving stops being incidental.