DeMato Productions, Astoria, NY (2026)

09/08/2026

Look at the person holding up their phone.

They’re taking a picture of what’s happening onstage. Something up there was worth capturing.

I don’t know exactly what motivated them to pick up the phone, but I know they were engaged enough to do it. And that makes this photograph useful visual evidence of more than “John Smith spoke at a conference.”

It starts showing what was happening on the other side of the stage.

That’s something I’m always hunting for when I photograph events. Of course I want to capture a variety of shots of the speaker delivering the keynote. I want the wide room. I want the stage, the screens, and all the production surrounding them.

I also want the people experiencing it. A participant taking a picture of the slide, recording a moment, filling an entire page with notes, a hand going up during Q&A, 2 people turning toward each other because something they just heard started a conversation.

Those reactions help fill in the context of the experience around the expertise. And, depending on what you’re asset you create later, a photo like this gives you options. It could:

- Support content about an idea from the keynote, especially if we can see what the participant is photographing.
- Help you talk about audience engagement or the way people interact with your material.
- Sit inside speaker marketing where you want something beyond another photograph of you standing onstage.
- Enhance a story about teaching, facilitation, or creating ideas people want to take with them.
- Give a designer a different perspective of the room when the asset they’re building needs the audience to become part of the story.

The visual asset doesn’t come with one predetermined use attached to its creation. Its value is that it gives you another piece of evidence to work with when the right context presents itself.

So next time you look through photos from an event, don’t only look for the best pictures of yourself. Look for the people who thought what you were doing was worth pulling out their phone to remember.

09/07/2026

A compliment on a photo usually sounds something like:

“You look great!”

Feeds the ego, but is empty on useful feedback.

The reason is because the decision maker who might hire you isn’t evaluating whether you photograph well.

They’re trying to figure out who you are, whether you still do relevant work, what it might be like to have you in the room, and whether you’re worth a conversation.

That means a good photograph can still leave a lot of unanswered questions.

And when you’ve been looking at your own photos and website for years, those questions can become almost impossible to see.

I wrote about the danger hiding inside one seemingly harmless assessment:

“It looks just fine.”

https://bit.ly/4xd1Hxp

09/04/2026

You get the email on Tuesday:

“Can you send us a photo for the conference website by Friday?”

Seems easy enough. Then you open your image folder.

You're met with 2,416 images from the last few years. A bunch are headshots. Plenty of stage photos. And suddenly, a request that sounded like a 45-second task has you staring at photos wondering what the hell to send.

This is one of those moments where the visual problem becomes very real, very quickly.

The conference isn’t asking for your favorite photograph. They’re putting you on a page beside other speakers, inside their brand, for an audience that may have never heard of you before.

What does that visual asset need to communicate?

Do you need direct eye contact? Energy? Warmth? A cleaner background? More room around you for their layout? Does your current appearance match the photo? Does it complement the room you’re about to walk into?

Those are different questions than, “Which one do I like?”

And the funny part is, the right option may already be sitting in your library. You may just be too deep inside the folder to see it.

Or the task may reveal something else: the image you need simply isn’t there, which is useful information before the next shoot instead of discovering the gap 5 minutes before another deadline.

This is the kind of visual decision that pushed me deeper into Strategy work in the first place. Sometimes you already have plenty of photos. What you need is another set of eyes on what you’re making, what you already have, and what the situation actually calls for.

If “send us a photo by Friday” routinely turns into a desperate scavenger hunt, take a look at the Strategy work and see if it’s a fit for you:

https://bit.ly/4y3pq3l

09/03/2026

For years, I’ve been hired to take photos.

But somewhere along the way, the conversations started stretching beyond what happened while the camera was in my hands.

Clients would ask which images made sense for their website. What they needed to capture at the next event. Why something on a landing page felt off. What they could do with the thousands of photos they already had.

Sometimes I’d look at what they were creating and notice something they hadn’t even thought to ask about yet.

And every time that happened, I was using the same brain I use behind the camera, just focused on a different part of the problem.

Over time, I realized there was actual work living in that crease. That work became what I call Visual Authority Strategy.

It gives me room to look beyond the act of taking the picture and into the way those images support the business around it.

The website. Speaker materials. Content. A book launch. The next branding shoot. A photo library somebody has outgrown. A new offer that has no current visual evidence behind it.

Because the photos are already threaded through all of that stuff.

And once you start paying attention to the visual layer with the same level of intention you bring to the words, the offer, the content, and the rest of the marketing, you start seeing opportunities and gaps that were easy to miss before.

That’s the work I’m spending a lot more time talking about now because it deserves its own place in the business conversation.

If you’re curious what that looks like or wondering where your own visual presence might be leaving something on the table, take a look at how I work with people on it:

https://bit.ly/4hSsieC

09/02/2026

Most people think event photos start when the speaker walks onstage. If that’s when the camera comes out of the bag, the opportunity to share the full story is gone for good.

Of course you need the packed room, big screens, applause, and speaker doing their thing. But the story starts before somebody says, “Please welcome…”

Think about the time before the keynote. Reviewing notes in the hotel room or backstage. Walking the room. Talking with the organizer. Getting mic’d up. Prepping with the AV team. Standing backstage while the room fills.

Those moments give a decision maker something the stage shots can’t: a feel for how you prepare, how you interact with the people around you, and what it’s like to have you contribute to the success of their event.

And the story doesn’t stop when the applause begins.

What happens after you step offstage? The participant who tells you what landed. The questions in the hallway. The hugs. The selfies. The book signing. The conversation with the organizer after the room clears.

Those moments show the reaction to the work you just did.

Depending on what you’re creating later, these photos can give you options for social posts, speaker materials, event recaps, articles, and pages that need something other than another arms-out-wide stage photo.

This is why I think about the beginning, middle and end whenever a camera is pointed at an expert. The performance matters, but it’s only one part of the world you need to show decision makers.

You can’t predict every asset you’ll create 6 months from now. You can capture enough of the people, preparation, environment, reactions and little details surrounding the work that you have choices when that need shows up.

Capturing the keynote from all angles matters. So does everything that shows how you got there and what happened because you did.

08/31/2026

I've been a guest on a bunch of podcasts.

More than once, I've seen the episode graphic go live with a photo of me I did not choose, did not love, and in one case did not even remember taking.

Nobody emailed me to ask for one. Of course they didn't. They Googled my name, clicked Images, grabbed the first decent-looking shot, dropped it in the template, and moved on. Forty seconds, tops.

And I get it. I'm not mad at them. They were busy, on a deadline, and they needed a face. The internet handed them one.

The people putting your face on their stuff aren't curating. They're grabbing. They pull whatever surfaces first, which means the photo you forgot existed is out there doing PR for you in rooms you'll never see, picked by someone who gave it a quick thought.

There's a stupidly simple fix for this, and almost nobody does it.

I wrote up what the problem actually costs you and how to take the decision back. But first, go Google yourself and click Images. You'll see exactly what I mean.

https://bit.ly/4wmajRJ

08/28/2026

Scroll her feed and you'll find the book cover. The product render. A quote card. The book cover again, different angle.

Go back about four months before you find her face.

She has good photos from a session two years ago. They're sitting in a folder and she reaches for the 2-dimensional graphic every single time.

Substitution feels safer, and it costs more than the thing she's avoiding.

Here's what's happening on the other end.

Somebody's been reading your stuff for six weeks and is starting to think about hiring you, referring you, or handing you their stage.

So they go looking for the person, and they find inventory, instead.

A book cover proves a book exists, sure, but meeting planners and the people signing your contracts are looking for something else entirely.

They want to see the human they'd be putting in front of their audience, and digital graphics - along with all the other non-you photos - can't cover that job.

How often you appear matters more than any single post.

If your last twenty pieces of content have you in two of them, the math is telling people something you weren’t setting out to say. It quietly tells the decision maker you're hiding, whether true or not. And, it’s that initial read that will get you silently deprioritized.

Try this on your next five posts. Two share a photo of you in a room speaking from the stage. One showcases one of your favorite branding photos. The other two can be whatever you want.

Give your audience of potential buyers the opportunity to connect with you before you open your mouth.

Not sure what your feed and your site are signaling right now? Run the 10-second scan and see it the way a stranger does: https://bit.ly/45msrzv

08/27/2026

Nineteen years in her space of expertise. She'll debate anybody and walk away with it.

Put a camera in front of her face and she's hiding under the lectern.

I used to think those two things were connected. Fix the confidence, fix the camera. That's wrong, and most advice about this gets it wrong the same way.

Being sure of your expertise and being comfortable getting looked at with a camera are two separate things.

One is about what you know and your passion to help others.

The other is about being the subject, which most experts have spent an entire career not being.

You're the person who points out the thing, and now, somebody's asking you to be the thing.

So directing you to relax and be confident falls on defiant and deaf ears.

You are confident. That's not the friction point.

What makes the difference is changing what the photo is for in your mind.

The second the camera stops asking you to be looked at and starts documenting what you’re doing, your whole body changes. Hands move. Eyes go where they're supposed to go. You forget the lens is in the room, because you’re in the act of doing your thing.

“Come with me on my journey,” instead of “look at me, I’m amazing, right”?

Practically, that means fewer sessions where you stand and pose, and more coverage of you working.

Somebody in the room at your next workshop. Your next client session. Your next talk, shot from the audience.

The camera transforms from a torture device into an evidence-gathering machine. You just do the thing you've done for umpteen amount of years.

Solid on your expertise and still dreading the lens? The fix is in what gets shot. Let's talk it through:
https://bit.ly/45BsYNS

08/25/2026

She keeps a Word doc listing every single social post she’s posted.

Description, date, platform, which post. Typed by hand.

My brain explodes thinking about that level of detail. It explodes for another reason, too:

She never kept track of the photos she’s using. That means she still can't tell if she's repeating the same shots over and over again.

While you hear plenty about getting photos taken, you hear nothing about the importance of displaying variety in your photos across your entire visual presence.

What do I mean by that?

Repetition of the same small handful of images makes the decision maker feel a certain way - and not in a good way. Those same three images showing up everywhere reads as stagnation to the person evaluating you, even when your work has moved miles since.

The fix is smaller than a Word doc.

When an image ships, either move it to a USED PHOTO folder or use color highlights that signify they’ve been placed somewhere.

Then give your core images a shelf life. Six months on a primary touchpoint, then it rotates down into content and something else takes the spot.

You stop tracking and start rotating.

No idea whether you've been recycling the same handful of shots? Bring your library to a call and let's find out: https://bit.ly/3RLM4gT

08/24/2026

Most experts pour their energy into the visuals everyone can see.

The LinkedIn headshot. The website photos. The images for your social media content.
Many experts, however, don’t think about the impression that happens in private.

There's a moment in every sale where one person sits alone with your document, on their screen, deciding whether you're worth their time.

That's the highest-intent moment in your whole business. The point where real money is actually on the line.

And it tends to get the least attention of anything you put out.

Funny how the impression with the most riding on it is so often the one we throw together in a rush.

Wrote about where this blind spot comes from, and what it quietly costs over a full year.

https://bit.ly/3QNA0eM

DeMato Productions

09/08/2026

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