A Mission Statement of sorts

I am seeking to build a solid business doing family and business portraits. As I continue to shoot family portraits, I hope to gradually become full time with advertising productions.

The above was written six months ago. I am leaving it for historical and context purposes. Photo By Murphy will never have the prettiest website. As we continue to build our business with advertising productions, we will hold our overhead down and offer full service to businesses. We mean full service.


Advertisers are controlling their cost by limiting the number of shots or how often we come to them to do a photo shoot.

We will be happy to come by and take four (insert your number here) pictures and we will quote you a very budget conscious fee for doing so.

Our full service flat fee will allow you to get everything that "might" have marketing value. Using images in your social networking is a strong, aggressive approach but most businesses will neglect that or take some shots themselves.

Go to our ugly website http://picbymurphy.com and click to the prices page.

Headshots of your staff, menu or product shots. Interior and exterior building photos.

Go with the guy that has decades of experience (prior to the camera) in developing strong, result oriented marketing messages.

Who Knows?

Photo By Murphy will always be a family portrait business. We are working very hard to develop more advertising projects to make use of my background in broadcasting. I am not going to identify our clients. There are a few I do talk about but most are not "published" in any way. You will only see a few identified on our website http://picbymurphy.com

So I will not identify the client that told me, "John, you always come up with great ideas !".

The point I want to promote with this blog entry is that we do more than snap a few "cool" shots.

This client was talking about tips I had given her for how to effectively use radio, what to do with her store front that would get more repeat business and the advice I had offered regarding a possible poster for the lobby.

While offering these little tidbits we always made sure the client was the final decision maker.

So, while I choose to keep client info mostly confidential, I did want to brag about Photo By Murphy being recognized for this type of client service.

The answer to the question in the title of this entry... the client is the one who really knows.

A Short Day Off - with camera of course

I think they call it a "busman's holiday". Due to a cancelled shoot, my wife and I decided to take in the Saratoga Battlefield. I am somewhat of a history buff and had read several books about the period. The feeling of the visit was powerful. I even commented to my wife that it was a very similar feeling to the one I had when we were in Dallas at Dealey Plaza and at Washington at Ford's Theater.

I couldn't help but take some shots and I have a thing for canons, I suppose. The small red cabin is my favorite shot of the day.

I encourage you to take the tour but budget about four hours. We took the driving tour but there is still a bit of walking to do.