It’s about the personal brand.
There is a certain language that we are developing around business and our expectations as owners and customers. They include terms like relevancy, authenticity, and accountability. The days of hiding behind a logo or a companies policies are waning as more information, and the speed and accuracy of that information, becomes accessible not only to your customers but the whole world. It is more important than ever to look to the local community to build trust and develop relationships based on openness. Why? Because it can save your ass when you mess up, and you will mess up. These relationships will be that attachment to the human part of you that will allow for your customer to forgive you as a person. Really, lets face it, it is easy to hate a compnay (or a person) that claims no fault and easy to forgive your friends.
It’s about you.
As a photographer, it is the purpose of any portrait to capture that moment when you are most human, most yourself and exactly like you imagine yourself at your best. A good portrait will develop trust and convey meaning beyond what you can tell people about you or your brand, in this way a photo is a 1000 words. The avatar is this concept times a million, especially if you are involved in the communities on twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. With people actively tweeting on average 10-20 times a day, that is a lot of seeing your poorly chopped and shopped photo for your followers and it makes a difference.
The deal.
I am the best portrait photographer in Phoenix and I want to photograph your avatar. I think it is vitally important to your business or personal brand especially if you are using any of the tools mentioned above. The normal price for personal portraits is $300.00+tax (see pricing page on tysoncrosbie.com for full details) and you get one image for use across all media from the session. I am offering an avatar session and one avatar image for use across all digital media for $150.00+tax. This isn’t entirely a discount, just a product I don’t normally offer. I am offering this product through the summer, it will end 08/31/08. This is a chance to get a photo session from me at 50% the normal starting cost. Obviously if you want more of the images from the session they will always be available in whatever format you would like.
Ready? Call me at 602.254.2880 for an appointment.
Not ready yet? Check out the soft edits page if you want to see what the Phoenix community thinks about avatars.
If you are a past avatar session client please leave a comment on this post incase others need help deciding. 
Thanks.
Building a community through education and transparency.
A soft edit is usually the first step a photographer will take after a photo session. I like to wait a couple hours and return to the whole session and look over the images one by one. Being very particular about what is in and what is out. For me I usually eliminate about half the images on the first pass, so typical session with 60 to 100 images is now around 30. Since I prefer to converse with my subjects as I am photographing a lot of this is just what I call “closed eyes and open mouths.” If you have been following my experiment on flickr you may have noticed I like to include one of these bloopers in the set, partly for fun and partly to help the audience to understand the process of photographing a single subject.
Exceeding expectations:
I didn’t expect the response to soft edits that I’ve received, seriously my mom doesn’t even read my blog. So to have a community build up around such a simple idea really excites me. I notice both parties starting to learn and grow together and yet it remains accessible to experts and beginners. Since I started to treat my business with authenticity and transparency I’ve only seen positive results, now I don’t think I could ever go back.
Upcoming Special:
I’ve been toying around with the idea of having an avatar session special and I am very close to having all the details worked out. Stay tuned for more information.
Final thoughts:
I am always looking for ways to improve the experience. Any questions or suggestions for improvement are welcome in the comments below.
Three more ways to show the love:
First up the badge that says “I look at the soft edits on flickr, comment on my favorites, and love it.”
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com/blog/projects/soft-edits-opening-the-process-to-the-community/"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/participation.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Second badge says “I love your City 20 art work, I may have even bought a book.” *No purchase necessary*
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/fanatic.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Last but certainly not least, in fact maybe the most important badge of all. Says “I am a proud client of tyson crosbie photography.”
<a href="http://tysoncrosbie.com"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/client.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" /></a>
Collect all three!!
Seriously, thank you to all who read my blog, look at my work and support me in this community. I am constantly blown away by the talent and dedication to being good and supporting good that I’ve found here in Phoenix. You all make my dreams come true by allowing me to do what I love.
As a reward to those who comment and participate in the soft edits I built this badge that you can proudly display on your site.
Thanks to @denthewise and @stevebelt For encouraging me to build this badge.
The new badge:
Just copy and paste this code into your widgets/blogs or anywhere else you would like to:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tysoncrosbieedit"><img src="http://www.tysoncrosbie.com/badge/commentbadge.gif" border="0" alt="Phoenix Photographer, Tyson Crosbie" width="200" /></a>
Thank you to all who view, comment and participate in the soft edit process. I am certainly grateful for your help and all those who have participated in crowd sourcing their own avatars have all loved the feedback. You have made a difference, and isn’t that the point of participating?
On Saturday, (yes I’ve been so busy since that I couldn’t post before now) Phoenix attended the event of the year: Tyson Crosbie’s (that’s me) book signing for his new book “Phoenix 20″.
I just want to thank everyone that attended. Phoenix continues to surprise me, in a good way. We had 25-30 people show up and watch me talk about my work and my connection to this city. I had good conversations with nearly everyone that was there and it is my hope that some new relationships were formed between the guests. It isn’t just a marketing phrase or gimmick for me, I really think the events main focus was about community. If I get to sell some books and prints along the way that is just a bonus. It just happens that I sold out of all available books and left some people wanting one. Which is a testiment to the kind of community that exists here already.
Erica Lucci and Chris Altman purchased their first art piece together as a married couple, and were gracious enough to let me unveil it at the event and show off a little bit.
This was the draft for my speech:
I started working abstractly in college in the beginning it was just about learning compositional rules and practicing observing the world around me. About the time I traveled to Mexico, about a year later, the work had begun to evolve into something a lot closer to abstract expressionism, in that I wasn’t able to disconnect the experiences I was having personally from the work that I was producing. I continued practicing and developing the work over the next several years. I never really gave too much credit to the work and still considered it just an exercise even though the images were becoming increasingly complex, and I was starting to get noticed at shows, I still didn’t feel like it was completely ready. When I moved to Phoenix in July I didn’t want to be here and went into a quite severe depression as I looked for work and essentially felt trapped in my house during the summer months. The few times I went out to photograph I couldn’t find the same complexity and depth that I had been previously working on in Austin. It was like hell for a color abstractionist with all the stucco and sandstone bricks. I almost gave up on it completely, and started looking for a temporary job.
It eventually cooled off and I started to attend first fridays I was absolutely blown away by the event. Here was an entire emerging art culture right on my front step, all I had to do was get to work. I started to go out photographing again and it took a long time to find what I was looking for in the sea of brown. But there it was a little spot of color and then another and another. One of the major hurdles I had to get used to was driving a lot further and taking little field trips into the city that may or may not result in usable material.
It was a strange coincidence that as I started photographing the streets of Phoenix and the work became more accessible I started to connect with the community of people in the city as well. I started my own business and decided the work was ready to be something. That thing was a series of 20 images that related as much to my experiences moving here as it was a reflection of what Phoenix is as a city. I worked toward publishing this book and it took a couple months but here it is and I am so happy that you all are here to share it with me.
This is a question for anyone who attended: What was the signing like for you?
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