Creating Impeccable Visual Content to Boost Your Social Identity

It’s of great importance for a company, to have good online identity and its visual content bears a main role in the process. Having a more personal touch by using own photography and video materials, instead of stock materials, creates an even greater impact. Achieving this could be an overwhelming task for readers with limited to no experience in visual arts, but what I’m about to write doesn’t need all that proficiency, so sit tight!

In this post, I will do my best to provide a number of easy tips and tricks on how to achieve it on your own just by using your phone. As a bachelor in photography with enough field experience, I’ve gained knowledge on how to edit visual materials in a variety of ways, but here I will only focus on a few straightforward and accessible methods. To simplify things even further, I will provide examples and share how you can do everything on your smartphone.

Don’t get me wrong. If you are skilled in photography or video and you already have a computer with appropriate editing software, you can apply all of the below, just as easy.

Tools

• Smartphone — any smartphone after 2015 should have a good enough camera)
• Editing software — Snapseed is a great start for editing photos (available for iOs and Android)
• A pinch of imagination and trust in the digital power

While we are still at the beginning, it’s best if you decide what your content would be. At Evermore, we like to connect with other remote based companies and so, the content we produce is largely oriented in this direction. For instance, when me or my colleagues travel somewhere, we tend to take photos of the places we’ve worked from.

On the above photo, you can see Polly on her trip in Greece this summer. Seems like she’s kicking some quick errants while obviously having a side story with the wind and her curly hair :)

The same applies for when we want to produce a video to show our activities. We organise team buildings twice per year in different countries and our side activities are usually quite fun. During one of the many things we did on this year’s summer team building, we organised a fun beach football game, which was in line with the then ongoing World Cup 2018. This clips was filmed with a GoPro 5, but it was fully edited on its complementary smartphone app (GoPro Quick). I actually downloaded and edited everything on my phone, while we were still on the team building.

Capture it right!

• Don’t use the flash If the surrounding light conditions are not good enough, aim at taking the photo in a different time of the day or in a well lit location. As a general rule, natural light is the best light source. Videos in general require good light conditions, so I would straight consider only well lit locations. As good as the smartphones are getting, they still have a fearsome fight with low light conditions.
• Keep your phone steady When making the photo, take a pose that doesn’t put your body under pressure. You will eventually and probably quite soon, start shaking your hands, which in low light conditions would result in blurry imagery. You can always use a flat surface to place down the phone and lean it on something for support. When filming a moving object or you are moving together with the camera, just try to keep it steady ;)
• Don’t use the digital zoom If you are too far from your object, move closer. Unlike the lens zoom in photo cameras, the digital zoom is one of the worst features of the smartphone’s camera. Digital zoom actually means cropping the image, which significantly lowers the quality.
• Use HDR mode This will bring up more information in the image, when taking photos in contrast light conditions and would generally, make the image more appealing. In cases when taking photos of moving objects or when the camera moves, this feature would not work properly, as the effect of HDR photography results by mixing several images into a single one. This feature is only available for taking photos.

Editing for the win.

• Colour filters Choose several filters which suit your needs best and try to stick with them. This would bring consistency in your visual content. Don’t get too wild though, if you are not sure what you are doing.
• Save your edited materials separately Keep your originals separately from the edited materials and don’t make the mistake to delete or overwrite them. A good rule is to generally, backup all your materials, as you might want to return to them in the future, for further changes or new edits.
• Get your colleagues’ opinion Opinions would vary, but there would surely be points that match among all of them. Do this for a while, to get a feeling of what you are doing right and what wrong. You need to ask people for criticism in particular, as everyone is prone to saying good things to avoid confrontation.
• Keep it straight to the point Videos should not be too long, as people nowadays lose attention pretty quickly. Put all of the footage that you like together, find a nice song that suits your needs and watch it. Cut out everything that you are sure you can do without and have another look. There’s no general rule of the duration, as everything depends on your content and what’s the aim of the final product. For us, something between 30sec to 1:30min usually does the job.

Another idea for creative content is to involve your actual work, in an interesting and informative way. A good example is one of the videos we did for the redesign of our streaming platform Livecasts.

This video was done on a computer, so I decided to share it at the end.

Conclusion

Keep it simple! You might need a bit more time (or not) to get around it, but with practice and well thinking you will surely get there. For questions regarding this article or any of our previous write ups, just DM me.