Regular readers of the blog may have been expecting a photograph of my niece to appear yesterday (because I promised as much at the end of the last post) but for a few reasons I didn’t get to post an image yesterday, and now that I am, I’ve pushed that one back another day in favour of two photos to belatedly mark the inaugural National Fish & Chip Day which took place in Ireland yesterday. That photo of Abbie will definitely be here tomorrow, but for now it’s time to get a little off-topic.
Apologies in advance for this prolonged aside – this is a photography blog afterall – but I think it’s worth acknowledging that National Fish & Chip day seemed to be very successful, and the organizers – ITICA – deserve a lot of credit for the idea and for the success of the idea. In case you didn’t hear about it, ITICA is a relatively new association of Italian Chippers (officially called the Irish Traditional Italian Chippers Association), and one of their first acts was to declare May 26th to be National Fish & Chip day, with all members of the association offering half-price fish & chips on that day – which was yesterday.
The media quickly picked up the story and in the run up to yesterday ITICA were getting a lot of coverage both online and in traditional media, with the result that every participating chipper in the country, almost without exception I suspect, had a queue out the door last night. The hope is that some people got a long lost taste for fish & chips yesterday and will return to their local chipper again in the near future.
What has this got to do with photography? Well nothing directly, but indirectly for the photography business, which talks amongst itself a lot about the recession hitting hard and endlessly lists the things that are wrong within the industry I think there’s a lesson here. ITICA didn’t just complain about the recession – they were proactive in doing something about it, and I bet you anything that takings at the participating chippers not only hit record levels yesterday, but will stay up. It was a simple, effective idea. As an idea perhaps it’s not easily transferrable to photography or to other industries, but the concept of proactively doing something to regenerate business in your field rather than talking endlessly about all the problems you are having to cope with surely is transferable to any industry.
An example that comes to mind, outside of photography, would be for Dublin Bus to have a free-travel day on a weekday so as to encourage people to try taking the bus to work. Or all the hotels in Ireland to get together and offer guests a free night’s stay on one particular weekend in the off-season.
The point being this: ITICA came up with a simple idea that was easily communicated, and on first glance appears to have been very successful. Other industries, including the photography industry, could easily follow suit with a little bit of initiative.
To finish back on the topic of photography, here’s a second image taken last night inside the chipper shown in the image up top. What I like about it? Mainly the way I was able to use the shiny counter to reflect the signs overhead and still include one of the hard-working (they earned their wages yesterday for sure) staff members as she prepared orders.
And in case it’s not obvious, both images were captured and processed using my iPhone 3GS.
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