“Show Notes”
Andy has worked with cameras for many years. Initially, he was in the CCTV industry. This role was about sales and account management. He worked long hours, and got well paid, but eventually got disillusioned with it and decided to be a commercial photography. He started out within a Google Maps niche. At the time google was recruiting photographers to do 360 virtual tours of the inside of businesses.
This was very popular for several years. He also sold standard images to businesses while doing the virtual tour. He also used to upload images to stock photography. He doesn’t do this much any more, but still makes money from the images he has on there. He says the most mundane images are the ones that sell the best. Marcus mentions that we were chatting to Pete Coco about Spotify and how it’s effected the music industry, and we thought it was similar to how stock providers have effectaffecteded the photography industry.
Andy now mainly does self-hosted virtual tours, so he hosts them not Google. That means they can be much more sophisticated. Andy says this week is quite specialist and the shoot is quite rapid and quite technical. But then most of the work is done in editing. Andy has been doing this for ten years now. Long enough that he keeps being asked back to existing clients to re-shoot. He does a lot of work with independent and boarding schools.
Marcus asks how he markets himself. Before the pandemic, he did a lot of marketing, trade shows, emails, social etc. However, since then he has not needed to do much marketing. The amount of work he got shot up over the pandemic as schools needed to replace their school tours with something virtual. So during the pandemic, he had more work than he could manage. And due to that he has built up a relationship with many businesses that keep wanting him back. But he still does some marketing and outreach to ensure that he keeps getting some new business coming in.
Marcus asks how he stays creative. Andy says that doing the shoot for the virtual tour isn’t creative. But the creative work is in the post-production. He also says he prefers conventional stills photography as it is more creative.
Marcus asks Andy about Al and how he has been using it. Andy says Al is here and we may as well embrace it, it’s here to stay. He has played with the image creation side of Al. He has also been using things in photoshop like the generative Al fill. As an example, he sometimes has to remove items from a room for the tour and 9/10 Al does this well. But at the moment he says he thinks that the Al generative images is not something he can bring into his business.
Sam asks if his corporate life helped him when he had to run his own business. He says it really helped with the sales and marketing side of things as he was doing this in his corporate role. He says many photographers find this hard so it has helped him. He says one approach is to show them what their competitors have and they do not have.
Andy plans to carry on with the virtual tours for schools. He would prefer to do
more stills and drone photography. But even his current clients do not know he offers this.
“Show Transcription”
Marcus: Well, hello everybody, welcome to another episode and here I am with Sam.Hi Sam.
Sam: Hi Marcus, you okay?
Marcus: Yeah, I’m really good, thank you, how are you?
Sam: Very good, you sound very chilled, I’m imagining you’re kind of, you’re feeling like you’re sat there with some like incense burning in the background and sat cross-legged or something like this, the way you’re coming across.
Marcus: I did do my yoga this morning, my daily yoga.
Sam: There we go, very good.
Marcus: Yeah, so maybe that’s, I’m still in the vibe, that could be transcending.
Sam: And who’ve we got with us today, Marcus?
Marcus: Well, we’ve got a photographer who quite lives near me, we’ve got Andy Fletcher, who lives down in Bath and well, Andy, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Andy: Hi, hello Sam, hello Marcus, nice to meet you. Firstly, this is my very, very first podcast. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s first for me. Yeah, my name is Andy Fletcher. I, as Marcus said, I live in the Bath area and my company is called 360 Image Photography. In a nutshell, I’ve always worked with cameras for the last probably 40 years, which makes me sound very old, but I’ve worked with a different type of camera for the first probably 30 years of my working life. I was involved in the CCTV industry. So basically, analog, digital IP megapixel cameras. And that was where they made a Japanese manufacturer called Sanyo, who you may have heard of, who aren’t around anymore. But I was on the commercial side. No, they’ve gone, they were bought by Panasonic. But people think of Sanyo as microwaves in Asda or consumer goods. They had a huge commercial side, batteries for cars, CCTV, solar, they were lots of irons and fire, if you like. So I was on that side. And it was my job to basically get our CCTV equipment specified for integrators, installers, vertical markets, HSBC, Lloyds, banking, airports, retail.
Sam: Not so much of the creative side in there in terms of the images.
Andy: It was sales, it was sales, it was account management, it was a sort of BDM role. And I was doing that for many, many, many, many years, working very long hours, earning very good money, all the perks, company car, as you would expect with a Japanese company.
But I got a bit disillusioned with it. I had a little bit of a midlife crisis. But I thought, let’s do something else. Let’s just change direction. So I thought, I know, I’ll become a commercial photographer. I’ve always been a hobbyist since my teens. So I thought, let’s just start a business as a commercial photographer. My way in was actually a little bit unusual. I actually started with Google and Google Street View, Google Maps. No, you have the guys in the cars, they just drive the cars. But basically, Google, when Google Maps started or shortly after, they were recruiting or looking for photographers to do the inside business views. So if you come on Google Maps for a business, you might see that they have 360 images inside the business, the shop, the pub, the hotel, whatever it may be. So you can do a virtual tour using Google Street View inside the business. You can walk around, spin around, click the arrows and just walk around as if you were on the pavement.
Sam: I didn’t know Google would do that. I know lots of businesses in that themselves. Originally, Google were literally doing that and paying for it, were they?
Andy: Um, no, they basically recruited lots of photographers. Now, I didn’t work for Google.
We were all independent. We weren’t paid by Google. We weren’t part of Google.We were independent photographers. So basically, it was us charging for this service.
Sam: Oh, charging the business. So you could say you could be part of Google Maps. You could kind of integrate with it. We can do this for you.
Andy: Exactly. Go into a shopper business. This is what we can do. And it was incredibly popular. And I was doing that for a while. I’m still doing it now, but not so much. I rarely, rarely do Google business virtual tours these days. When I started, basically, it was very few. You had to have an exam, do some neutral shoots. It was very, very, very stringent. And the quality control was quite free. Fortunately, these days, Google would be regulated and anybody can do it. So there’s a lot of rubbish being published. It’s an awful, awful, awful stuff out there. So I, if I’m asked to do it, I’ll do it, but I don’t really promote it. So that’s how I kind of got in to selling to businesses, selling imagery, because as well as the Google Street View tours, I did stills of the business, internal, external food shops, hotel rooms, all sorts of stuff like that. I also did an awful lot of stock photography and people like Getty Images, Shutterstock and iStock. Again, I don’t really do that much these days. Occasionally, I might upload some kit and I still get some income from that, but not not a huge amount.
Marcus: Were you doing any, what kind of, what kind of things were you photographing the stock? Were you specializing in anything, Andy?
Andy: Well, on the, on the sort of stock side, it’s, it’s the most mundane things that sell the best. Strangely enough, I’ve got a sign, I’ve got a sign that I took, it must be 10 years ago. It’s an antique metal, we are open sign in a shop. You see everywhere. Yeah. Took the picture up in Photoshop. I must have sold that literally hundreds, if not thousands of times. And I get an email from Getty or from Shutterstock or from whoever it may be, iStock, you have a sale. I’ve sold that umpteen times. So it’s the, it’s the weird things like that. Back in the day, people made a really good living from like, um, doing stock photography. These days, that shit’s out really. No, it’s gone. It’s gone. It’s, it’s a, it’s a numbers game. I don’t really do it anymore. But anyway, I still get income from it.
Marcus: We had a guest on recently, just to interrupt you, Andy, a little bit of a plug here for the show, actually. We had a guest on recently, Peter Coco, and we were talking about music and the way Spotify was to change the landscape of music business. And then we also talked about stock photography that was similar, we thought, to the way that Spotify had been in photography industry. So check that episode out. Anybody who’s listening, if they want to have an interesting story.
Andy: My lad, this was about eight years ago. My lad got a skateboard. He was going down the street on a skateboard. He fell off and he grazed his arm quite badly. Quite a bad graze. It was gushing with blood.
Sam: I thought great opportunity for stock photography.
Andy: My first reaction was I got a huge big white card. I dragged him in, put his arm in front of the white card, took some pictures.
Marcus: Oh you did?
Andy: Shoulder down, down, down to wrist of his, his, his elbow bleeding profusely. I still, I still get sales on that. I don’t know who buys it, where it goes or where it’s being used. I’ve no idea. It’s just so interesting, you know. Um, and I can remember. Oh, actually make.
Marcus: Make, you know, Sammy’s ruthless. This guy.
Andy: I mean, my first image that I actually sold, I sold for 75 pounds on, I think it was Fotolia who were now part of, I think it’s Shutterstock. And I was so chuffed. I’d sold a picture and it was just, wow. You know, anyway, um, so yeah, I started, I started doing virtual tours for Google, um, but I’ve now moved away from that and I now predominantly do virtual tours, self-hosted virtual tours, which are completely away from Google, nothing to do with Google. I host them on my servers. Um, I use specialist software. It’s completely different. They’re more whizzy. They’re more sophisticated. They’re matched. They, they’re built to match the branding of the business. They can have pop-ups with, uh, copy with media, with audio, with video, anything. So they’re quite sophisticated.
Marcus: So it’s just over the drone, Andy, or just with a regular?
Andy: I use, I use drones. It’s basically, um, I use a crop sensor camera, um, uh, just a bog standard DSLR crop sensor camera. I don’t use full frame for the, um, sort of panoramas. It’s a little bit specialist. Um, it’s a little bit out of the ordinary because every image that you take for a 360 panorama is actually 12 images. It’s all taken using bracketing and HDR. You have to merge the images, stitch them together. So the actual shoot itself is very, very, very rapid. People are surprised. I come in, it could be a school, university, hotel. I’m there for maybe a couple of hours and they think, wow, is that it? I said, yeah, it’s done. It’s like the iceberg sort of scenario. It’s, it’s 10% doing the shoot and 90% plus in post. Sat in front of my three screens here, editing.
Sam: So if somebody’s thinking, oh, this sounds interesting as an addition to my photography business, this isn’t something that’s very easy to go. Oh, I could just do this as a little bit of an expert, something that’s quite involved and you need to know quite a lot about.
Andy: You need specialist software.You’ve got to learn the software. You’ve got to learn specialist stitching software, the specialist software to actually build the tours. It’s, when I started doing it, they were very few of us around. Now it’s very popular. There’s a lot of people out there doing it, but not doing it very well. And they tend to use one shot cameras, like the sort of fetters, the little hobby aesthetic sort of one shot cameras, which I’ll be honest, they’re not very good. I’m the old school. I use a DSLR. It’s more work, but the end result is just way, way, way, way better. The quality is just pin sharp. So I work at the moment, I’ve been going 10 years, so I’m doing something right. I must have at least, I kind of tried to work out the other day, 700 plus clients. And I’m very humbled. I’m very fortunate that I’m actually invited back many, many times to existing clients to reshoot and go back again and again and again. And I work a lot with schools, predominantly independent schools, boarding schools, not so much states, state schools, but independent schools. So I’ve worked a lot with a lot of the big independent schools, people like Sherbourne School, Monkton Coombe School, Bath Spa University, just in the sort of southwest. But I’ve been to Dublin. I’ve been up north and Midlands, London, all over the country. I’ve had inquiries from Switzerland, from Italy, from France, from Nice, all over the place. So yeah, I guess my, sorry.
Marcus: Yeah, do you know what? I was just going to say this, because that’s a massive field you’ve got there. Maybe this is more for Sam really, but maybe you could talk about how you market that.
Andy: It’s yeah, because I’m a sole trader. So I do the marketing, I do the creative side, the photography, all the work in post, everything, basically. I’d probably say before the pandemic, I did a lot of marketing, a lot of calls, a lot of emails. I did trade shows. I did networking groups, all sorts. Since COVID, I haven’t done any marketing whatsoever. Zero. I think when COVID started, what was that, three, four years ago? I can’t think now. I thought that was it. I mean, who’s going to want a photographer? I’m going to be sat at home doing nothing. I think my workload doubled or trebled, purely because of COVID.
Sam: Is that, then people wanted to show their business, but people couldn’t go there. So they wanted to kind of.
Andy: Exactly. I mean, I’ve always worked with schools, independent schools, years before the pandemic. But when it kicked off, independent schools were cancelling their open days. The schools were empty. How can we promote, showcase the school when you can’t come in?
Sam: So you need like a virtual.
Andy: A virtual tour. It’s the best way of being there, without physically being there. You can walk around, you can see everything. So because of COVID, the phone didn’t stop ringing.
Emails are popping in all over the place. And I was just buried in work. I was almost struggling. I didn’t mind that, but yeah. So that was good for me. And since then, I’ve built up many, many relationships with school, not just schools, but other businesses also.
It could be hotels, it could be retail, it could be… But predominantly schools. And they always want me back, because they’ve built a new STEM building or a new sixth form building, or they’ve redecorated the boarding rooms, or they’ve added on something to the school. So to keep it fresh, up-to-date, relevant, I go back and I reshoot an area and update the tour. I go back again and again. I was back at the school literally on Tuesday down near Yeovil. I must have been there at least six times over the last probably five years, where they’ve updated a section of the school, the prep school, what have you. So I’m always doing an awful lot of that, sort of revisits. And it’s not… What I love about that is because you build relationships with clients, because they know you, you pop back. How’s the kids, Andy? Because you’ve met them before they’ve met you. It’s great. Absolutely love it. And I’ve met some fantastic people, and I’m humbled, really, that they invite me back so often and like what I do.
Sam: That’s amazing. So then are you doing outreach in terms of just your existing clients, or is it literally you now have… You’re a sole trader, so you have a limited capacity. You now have enough clients that they just kind of rotate round enough that it gives you enough business.
Andy: Pretty much, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can’t rest on your laurels, and it’s always good to go out there and try and get some new business if you can, because you can rely on what you’ve got to a certain degree. So yeah, I’m always looking for new stuff. And I do do a little bit of marketing. I might pin a few emails out, make a few phone calls. I get recommendations from existing clients to prospective new clients. They might give them my details. That’s happened quite a lot. Oh, you want this? Speak to Andy, and they’ll give me a call. And we’ll talk, and we’ll do it.
Marcus: And for the name of your business as well, you’re really laying it out there exactly. You know, 360 degree imaging. You’re saying what you do. You’ve been working the game a long time. You know, it’s very niche indeed. Just talk about this creative side. How do you keep creative doing something like that? How do you keep reinventing yourself?
Andy: Well, just purely on virtual tools. Doing the actual shoot itself isn’t creative. It’s very regimented. When I’m doing a shoot, it’s very quick. You’re plunking the tripod in a room. You’re taking 12 images. It’s a minute to do one panorama. You walk into another room, another panorama. So the whole creative process to build a virtual tour is in post. It’s building the GUI or the actual display. How they want it to look, the colors, the branding, the layout.
Sam: That’s where all the work is. On that side, it’s almost the technician side.
Andy: It’s very mundane. It’s just very regimented and quick and rapid and mundane. And I must say a bit boring, actually, to be honest with you. It’s 90% of the work is in post. It’s sat in this chair in front of three screens, building it in post. That’s where all the work is. And it is very, very, very labor intensive. It’s hard to do to make it look good. And that’s why I actually prefer doing conventional still photography. It’s not really what I’m known for. So I’m a bit of a victim to being able to say it. As you know, it is more creative.
Marcus: Been dabbling in AI and you’ve had some positive feedback from that as well, have you not?
Andy: Well, yeah. I mean, it’s I mean, AI is the sort of buzzword, isn’t it these days? I mean, everyone’s talking about AI. It’s everywhere. And I thought, well, this is it’s going to happen. You can’t you can’t un-invent it. You can’t close Pandora’s box. AI is here. You’ve got to basically embrace it. A lot of photographers whinge about it and they whinge about this, like they whinged about digital back in the day, you know, and they said, oh, no, we can’t have digital. So you’ve got your 35mm film, blah, blah. But AI is here. I mean, there’s a lot of guys. I mean, if I mean, Sam, you must come across this. Well, you want an image for a website.
Maybe in the old days, you had to buy something off the stock, maybe, or like getty images, a sort of generic image of something, you know. But these days it can be created using sort of Midjourney is the sort of most famous platform, although there’s many more out there. So I’ve kind of dabbled in it. I haven’t marketed it. I haven’t sold it. I’ve just played with it.
And what I’ve seen is absolutely, well, it’s stunning. It’s incredible. It’s just mind-blowing where it goes. I mean, even using things in like sort of Photoshop, using the new generative AI feel, which I’m sure you’ve used, Marcus. Yeah, it’s just well, what I’m doing when I’m doing virtual tours, say I’m in a classroom and there’s an item that needs to be removed, which they haven’t removed. It’s in the image. In the old days, I would use content aware, which is fine, but it’s a bit of work. Using the AI in Photoshop, you click a button and nine times out of 10, it’s done it. And you think, how did it know what was behind that object? And you just sit there scratching your head and thinking, this is black magic, you know? Yeah, it’s incredible. And it’s going to get even more incredible. And it’s just going to be developed. And I think it is the future to a certain degree anyway. It’s not going to replace everything because you can’t replace a specific image. But if you need a generic image, just something that’s a little bit kind of mundane, it’s just been absolutely awesome.
Sam: Which in some ways comes back to that stock thing in terms of stock photography as a photographer probably isn’t the way forward, because that probably is going to be one of the first things to go, isn’t it? Like you said, if we want a picture of me and Marcus doing a podcast, we need a photographer and we need somebody there. But yeah, if you need a picture of a lamppost or something, yeah, it’s good. That’s eventually going to be easy to generate.
Andy: And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I’ve dabbled with it, but it’s not really for me. I can’t really see how I can make a living or make money out of it, really. I’ve just had a little play with it.
Sam: But I think it is one of those things that are interesting in all areas of your business. It is worth looking at because there are some areas where we do that kind of repetitive task. We take a lot of time. And if we look, maybe one of these AI things can just, you know, help us along the way, save us a lot of time in the many different areas it’s coming in.
Andy: Well, I had a client from a school send me some stills of within their virtual school, they had a slideshow and the slideshow were people sat at a desk and they were shot in portrait mode. Now, ideally, I’d like them in landscape, just because it fits into the actual slideshow much better. So I had to generate each side of the image. So in Photoshop, I just made a little box each side of the image, push the button and Photoshop worked out what it thinks should be each side of the image to make it a landscape image. And I can think, how did it know?
Sam: It was pretty impressive.
Andy: Yeah, wow. So yes, I have used it to that extent, but it can be useful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: Amazing. That’s really interesting. And then I was wondering, you had a lot of time in corporate, doing all sorts of things. Did what you learned there help you, do you think, in your business when you’re running your business? Did you learn lots of skills there? Lots of stuff that really has helped you run a business?
Andy: Yeah, I mean, I would say on the sort of sales and marketing side, because I mean, I spent at least 20 years in the sort of corporate world doing sales and marketing. And I think a lot of people in any kind of trade, any profession, whether it be photography or what have you, can find it a little bit intimidating trying to promote themselves. You’ve got to pick the phone up. You’ve got to speak to people. You’ve got email. You have to start a conversation with somebody. And I think that experience in sales and marketing, yeah, did teach me an awful lot of lessons on sort of how to do that, you know, and do it correctly. You know, don’t pressure people too much. Don’t hang with them. I think you have to just create a conversation and kind of explain to them how what you do can benefit their business, you know, and I often use a method where I may say to say it’s a hotel. I may say what your competition down the road, they have this to help promote and help showcase a business. They have these fantastic images and this virtual tour on the website, which they can share on social media, what have you. You have this, but what you have isn’t quite as good as what they have. And sometimes the penny drops. Sometimes it doesn’t. But that can be a bit of a way in sometimes.
Marcus: Yeah, I could definitely, I definitely think having that background from you definitely helped you define your career early on. You know, you’re focused on a business as opposed to something, you know, maybe like I did. He’s my example, as I was just thinking all about creativity and business never came into it whatsoever. What are you looking for for the future, Andy? What’s the next step for you?
Andy: Well, pretty much kind of, I think, just carry on as is. I love working with the schools. I’d like to do more stills photography, but like I say, I’m a little bit of a victim of my own success. I’m kind of known as a virtual tour guy. Even I must admit, even present clients, they don’t always look at your website and they don’t realize that actually you do still photography. I do drone aerial drone photography. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t do video.
I don’t want to get into video at all. I actually, I actually work with other guys and if I need a video shot correctly and done professionally, I’ll call on them to do it for me. I don’t want to get involved with that.
Sam: I know that’s another thing I was going to ask you if you’re kind of stacked out and full and some of the work that you’re saying is quite just technician work, turn up, bang, bang, bang, bang, do the shots. I mean, have you ever thought about, you know, building the business and employing people and things?
Andy: I have. There’s also, I mean, I could also, if you like, farm this out to, there are companies who will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You can send them all these raw images. They’ll stitch, they’ll process, they’ll edit, et cetera, et cetera. I wouldn’t say I’m a control freak, but I like to do it myself. I like to do it. I do, do photographers have OCD? I don’t know, but I don’t think I’m diagnosed. I don’t think I have, but I like, it has to be right. And it has to be done how I want it to be done.
Marcus: Fulfilling your creative side for you as well, isn’t it, Andy? You were saying the shooting, if you just ended up just shooting all the time, your creativity comes from putting it all together, the branding, you mentioned the color, toning, et cetera.
Andy: Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of my work is basically 12 and is taking these 12 images off. So I’ve got to then, you know, color correct them. I’ve got to sharpen them. I’ve got to run them through Lightroom. I’ve got to stitch them. I’ve got to put them in Photoshop.
I have to remove the nadir, which is the base of the image. So if you imagine I have a tripod, well, the base of the image is a big black square. I’ve got to fill that as if it’s a complete sphere. There’s a lot of work in post and I do quite enjoy sitting in the office in front of the PC with thousands of images running through Lightroom with a large cup of coffee, just editing and processing the images. That is probably more interesting than the actual shoot itself, because like I said, doing the actual 360 shoot is a bit mundane. But yeah, I mean, just touching on some of the clients I’ve had in the last 10 years, I mean, I’ve shot Shepard’s Hut, I’ve done helicopters, I’ve done cars, I’ve done Robbie Williams’ car, I’ve done Harry Kane’s car, the Inland Skipper. I’ve done work for English Heritage, the NHS, Forestry Commission, major hotel brands, local authorities. I’ve just finished a job for the United Nations actually for a museum out in Sierra Leone, which was interesting. This was a virtual tour. And rather than going out there, they used a local photographer to take the images, sent me the images to process and basically just edit, build and construct the tour. So yeah, that was interesting, a bit different. So yeah, I’ve just worked with so… But what I like doing is, it’s the scope of clients that I have. It’s just across any business, literally from hairdressers to field directors to hotels, in ambulances, in vehicles. I did a shoot for a World War II amphibious landing craft for the Royal Logistics Corps. It’s just like next day, it’s something different.
Sam: Yeah, there’s lots of variety and stuff. That is amazing. Absolutely. Yep, it has been really interesting speaking to you, Andy, but we are starting to run out of time, unfortunately. So there is a huge amount, I think lots of photographers can take away there. Lots of things to learn. And yeah, thank you so much. Listeners…
Andy: Thanks for your time.
Sam: That’s right, it’s great to be with you. Listeners, if you want the Shoot To The Top podcast in your inbox every week, and of course you do because you don’t want to miss it, then what you need to do is head to the website, shoottothetop.com, sign up and you will then get the podcast emailed to you every week, as well as lots of extra goodies, which is things like hints and tips from me and Marcus about creativity and marketing, chance to be guests on the show like Andy and all sorts of things like that. So go to the website, shoottothetop.com and sign up. And Marcus, I will see you next week.
Marcus: See you next week, Sam. And thank you, Andy, again.
Andy: Thank you very much. Bye.
