From USA

Christopher McEniry is a Freelance Commercial/Editorial photographer. He lives in Charleston, USA and he is 34 years old. He has visited Argentina during January for Rally Dakar 2009 as ESPM Photographer. Some of his clients are Conde Nast, Heineken, USTA, Wieden Kennedy, Arnold WW, Golf Digest, Outside, ESPM, and others. In the Interview, we talked about his job, and how does Internet influence his work.

-Where do you work?

I own and operate two businesses that are both incorporated in the United States:
Overflow Productions, Inc. and Christopher McEniry Photography,LLC

I am Chief Creative Officer (CCO) and Technical Advisor to Overflow Productions, Inc. and CEO of Christopher McEniry Photography, LLC.ç



The production company runs a studio facility, provides crew and equipment for print advertising and still photo commercial and editorial photo shoots, handles travel and lodging arrangements for out of town clients, coordinates locations and permitting, builds sets,handles catering, and takes care of any other requests our clients typically have.

The other business is my photography business which has a stock division and assignment division. This end of the business typically hires the production company to do its production work, hence I make all the money rather than hire others to do it, while renting my studio, equipment, and crew as well in order to maximize profit.

-how long have you been working there?

I incorporated the production company in 2002, making it 7 years running the business. The photography business was incorporated officially in 2005, that makes four years.


- We can said that the Internet provides opportunities galore, and can be used for a variety of things. In the other hand, there are certain cons and dangers relating to the use of Internet. What are advantages and disadvantages of Internet?

We use the internet for nearly all aspects of our business.

We use a service called Adbase (www.adbase.com) to generate lists of businesses that regularly buy photography and hire production companies. We send over 4,000 promotional emails a month from both the production company and the photo business to both prospective and current or past clients. We employ an office manager who has a graphic design degree to oversee this process. We also use Photoserve and several other websites to get our work and name out in front of prospective clients, who are primarily magazine photo editors and creative directors and art buyers at ad agencies. All of this is used to ultimately drive clients to our websites to view our work and services.

We also use the internet to send FTP or image files and documents to our clients and maintain a server for this purpose.

These are all pros and make our jobs and possibilities global.
We use Skype to speak and video conference with clients in other parts of the world. We also use Google Analytics to see how many people are viewing our site in response to the emails we send out. Using this we can see/gauge how much interest or potential clients our current promos are attracting.

The cons are simple. We have had our servers hacked several times and used for their bandwidth and to send out spam.
We rely on the internet completely, if it were to fail our business model would be in serious trouble. Lastly, it is impersonal and cold. It lacks the personal touch of talking on the phone or meeting in person and it keeps people locked in front of the computer for too many hours instead of being outside. Identity theft is also a problem.

- what do you think about the fall of newspapers whit the emergence of internet?

Magazines and newspapers are folding and going
bankrupt at an alarming rate in the US and around the world. This has not been kind to our industry, my expertise and business are print media.
I personally prefer a tangible book/magazine/newspaper in my hand as I love the design and feel of them. However they are infinitely more expensive to produce compared to a web page.
The simple economics of it are the problem, one thing is free (which appeals to everyone) the other costs money. Also a new generation is growing up learning to find all of their news and media online rather than from newspapers and magazines, why would they want to pay for something that is not good for the environment, costs them money, and has to be recycled or thrown out daily.

-Do you think there is a solution?

The only solution is to embrace that the internet is where it is all headed. They must make an immediate shift to create as much quality content and as great looking and appealing a product as the original magazine/newspaper was and make it an easily interactive site. If you do this as a newspaper, you will draw more people to it, the more people the more advertisers will pay to have space on your site. The problem is that quality of the content does not remain as high as it was in print materials and that is why many are failing. Newspapers and magazines need to spend the same budgets if not more than previous on their websites, especially if they are moving away from print which should free up most of their budgets. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening.

-Ten years ago, the Internet was practically unheard of by most people. Today, the Internet is one of the most powerful tools throughout the world. Give us a piece of advice for using internet.

My advice for using the internet is that you need to embrace the opportunities it provides and learn to utilize it to its fullest.
No other single device can connect you to so many people and possiblities.

I recommend if you are an entrepreneur that you establish a website for your company/brand as soon as possible and spare no expense to make sure it looks good. I do not mean a Facebook page, MYSPACE, or any blog, although there is nothing wrong with having any of these. The fastest way to gain clients and grow your business is to have a site that looks much better than what your organization may actually be. Not being deceptive, just looking like you know what you are doing.
So many people have terrible looking sites that a friend did for them or so on and do not understand that subtlety and ease of use are much more important than overstimulating colors and other distractions.

Keep it simple and classic, do not overcomplicate. Spend a few dollars and hire an established designer, this is how the world will see you.

My websites are the main portal of our business.
www.overflowpro.com - www.chrismceniry.com