Quality Images and Photography

There is no doubt that we are, at heart, visual animals. Most of our sensory energy is tied up in our vision, unlike other mammals such as dogs and cats. For them, smell is one of the strongest senses and it shows in their talents and behaviors. But humans are primates and primates get by on two major advantages. One we have are incredibly mobile and can live in a wide range of environments. And two, we have pretty good eyesight. Not as good as some other animals, mind you. Eagles, for example, have some of the best eye sight in the animal kingdom. They can spot prey from up to two or three miles away and then swoop down and do what has to be done. Though we can’t do that, we’re still pretty good in the vision department and it has allowed us to flourish in all sorts of different ways. This idea might seem a little abstract or scientific but it plays out in all sorts of ways you might not expect. For instance, we as people are heavily influenced by color and shape. There is much evidence to prove that red makes us more excited and passionate. Hungrier, even, in some circumstances. If you’ve ever noticed that many food signs have red in them, there’s absolutely a reason for that. Red is known to have a power psychological effect on the human mind and that all comes from the vision system that we have. Green and blue are calming, purple makes us comfortable. The list goes on and on. Clearly, we are visual creatures and this type of visionary prowess plays a big hand in both our personal and professional lives. So what does all of this have to do with commerce? Well, to answer that, we need to look at the way that our modern visual landscape has evolved in the past few decades. It might be strange to think that our visual landscape, such as it is, is changing but it really has. Today we live in a large complicated world of signs, pictures and symbols but that wasn’t necessarily the case even a few simple decades ago. Before all of this complicated sign business got started, our world was much more visually empty than it is today. Even as far as back as the thirties and forties, large scale visual advertising was just not as much of a thing due to budgetary costs. Today, we have a thriving online ecosystem of advertising that we enter into it every day when we go online. But where did this come from and where did it begin?
The Catalog Management System, Product Attributes and the Visual Landscape
Today’s ecommerce images are incredibly important for advertising, obviously. People usually want to see what they are buying physically before they buy it, online especially. Ecommerce content and the catalog management system are extremely important right now but it might help to have a slightly better understanding of where that trend came from so we can understand where it’s going. Now, before the catalog management system and structured data and things like the grocery images database, before the advent of the internet even, there were only a few places to go for the advertising game. Let’s rewind the clock a bit back before the internet to the seventies, a decade where there was no such thing as the internet yet still modern enough to be relevant to today. Back then, your only choice for advertising was analog and your analog choices were fairly limited. You could rent a billboard, a visually striking choice and one that a lot of people would see but it was expensive and could only be maintained for a limited amount of time. You could also take out ads in newspapers, not quite a catalog management system or the digital equivalent but it was wide ranging and many people in many different places would see it. Whatever you picked, you would want the images to convey a certain feeling and idea. You were only half selling the product. You were also selling the idea in a visual way. It is this idea that has carried over into the digital landscape of today.