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Trade Insights Victor Aberdeen - part 1 of 1 2

Published 01/04/2014

Victor Aberdeen's position at Eizo seems to have been created especially for him. It fuses his experience in sales and marketing with a proven track record in the photography industry. Some might say that Victor's career appears to have been a little schizophrenic, however, he is now in a position where both paths have crossed and understanding what photographers and other imaging specialists truly need is an integral part of his job.

'I started out working in a darkroom in a photo agency before moving into broadcast television as a stills photographer,' Victor tells me. This was to be his career for around 10 years in the UK before using his dual citizenship to relocate to Canada where he took a position working for a newspaper in Vancouver.

Seven years later Victor moved back to the UK and worked for a variety of different IT companies in sales and marketing before finally landing his job at Eizo. 'I was given the job because I have the three things that matter; I've got the understanding that this is a business, I've got the technical background to understand the challenges that a photographer might face, but most of all I'm a photographer myself so I understand that their perspective is about delivering great images.'

As many of us know, sometimes it feels like the largest obstacle to taking a great photo is that the technical process can get in the way of being creative. 'The biggest challenge for me is education,' Victor tells me. 'It's about getting photographers to understand what the various elements of the equipment that they use will do for them. When I started, most of it was already defined for you as a photographer. The film had its colour space and its tonal curve and we never thought about that. If you were brave you might print your own colour, but for the most part the whole element of colour management, colour spaces, white points and so forth was left with a group of specialists inside the labs doing your printing for you.'

Of course moving the world of photography onto digital technology was never going to be simple because there are so many more variables available to the average photographer, however, this is exactly what makes Victor able to connect to his clients so easily. 'I sell a lot of monitors to the film industry, broadcast television and photographers.

Since I've had experience in delivering photographs to these industries, I know what the people I'm talking to need.' One of the consistent problems within the imaging industry seems to be that hardly anybody is teaching this new digital workflow to people such as photographers, designers and artists. Instead of making things easier, digital technology has actually made things more complicated in that respect.

There comes a point where anyone working with images wants to get their photographs off the screen and onto paper and this is where the real problems begin to creep in. 'Hoping that a file will print well just isn't good enough,' says Victor. 'Colour is especially relevant to wedding photographers because couples will build their whole wedding around a colour scheme. The dress, the flowers, all those things have been chosen deliberately. Wedding photographers have one of the biggest colour challenges out there.' Fortunately those problems are not insurmountable and can be overcome with the right training and equipment.

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1st Published 01/04/2014
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:44

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