June 11, 2019 / in Blogging, Content Marketing, How To / by Jason Terry
I’ve talked in the past about thinking like a blogger… looking for situations in your daily life worth talking about. Your company wins an award. Your team volunteers for a not-for-profit together. Or a vendor delivers new office furniture. There are so many opportunities to keep your connections up to speed on what you’re doing personally and professionally.
Unfortunately, most companies and their employees miss great opportunities to truly capture these moments. If you take a picture, you might be able to use it later in a press release, blog, website or print ad. If you don’t, you won’t even have the option.
Recently, I was on vacation with family in Hawaii. Sure, I was taking lots of photos… but I still found myself capturing specific shots that could be used for blog posts. It was a sudden realization that I was intentionally framing shots of things that could be used in a story. When I realized this, I thought I would share a couple of examples. This serves two purposes: sharing some vacation photos with you and encouraging you to take more pictures!
This first picture is from a beach we visited to see Green Turtles. I have tons of pictures of turtles, my wife with the turtles, selfies with the turtles… but I saw some warning signs farther down the beach and wondered what they were there for. I walked a quarter of a mile to get to the signs and saw they were warnings about rip currents. “You could be swept out and drown. If in doubt, don’t go out.”
I thought to myself, wow. This could be a great picture for a story about starting a new business. Or borrowing too much money. Or the state of the stock market.
This next picture is a pineapple plantation. I had no idea that pineapples grew like this. I knew they didn’t grow on trees, but had no idea they grew out of the ground like a shrub or bush. (They tasted amazing cut right off the plant.)
The yellow harvesting machine was a good distance from our tour, so I took a walk to get closer. This might sound strange, but I thought the harvester looked lonely. It was in the middle of this huge field of pineapples and nobody around except our little tour.
This picture could be used to demonstrate harvesting at the right time, agricultural stories, staying on track, it’s a beautiful day, etc.
This last picture is an emergency stop button that I saw on a tour of a coffee bean plantation. (My wife loved this tour because we toured a coffee plantation and cacao plantation. Two of her favorite things in one tour: coffee and chocolate.)
Something about the shiny red button grabbed my attention. When I saw it had Emergency Stop printed on it, I thought it would be a great stock image. You could use this with any story about pumping the brakes. Anything from stopping a poor business practice, growing your business too quickly, or texting while driving.
So yes, this might be a shameless way to tell you I went on a great vacation to Hawaii with family. Lots of people aren’t able to take the time to get away for various reasons, and I’m so grateful we were able to go.
But I really hope you will see this as an encouragement to take pictures more often. Get in the habit of taking shots at different angles, with the sun behind you, in landscape mode. Practice makes perfect. And you never know when you will capture the perfect picture for a future story.
And if you made it this far, here is a bonus picture for you. My friend Parker Young at Straub Construction took one of the best vacation photos that could be used for a business blog post that I’ve ever seen.
He stumbled across a large bulldozer/excavation machine on the beach when he was in Turks & Caicos. Click here to read that blog post and see more pictures about construction in Turks & Caicos.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate it so much. Let me know if there is a topic I could cover for you in a future blog post!
Me? A blogger?
Honestly, I was skeptical. My first few posts were dry, hard to write and not very interesting, even to me. Then I had a breakthrough. I wrote about my passion for Bruce Springsteen. Very personal, very “non-banky.” The response was overwhelmingly positive.
Pam Berneking
Former President and CEO of Alterra Bank
