Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Headed West to Present - Rocky Mountain School of Photography

Often I give presentations that last just a few hours, and in August, I'll be headed West to the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, in Missoula, Montana, to present on, what else? The business of photography. If you're interested in learning more, click here to learn about their Summer Intensive. I'll come in at the tail-end of the program and talk, at length, on the subject that will sustain you in the field after school is out and the real world sets in.
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Monday, June 28, 2010

PR Photography Pricing and Subject Follow Up

In my other job as a full time photographer, I often get asked by clients "hey, who owns these photographs", and I always respond "I do." This is almost always followed up with "so, how can we see them if we were interested in getting a copy?" I always tell them I will send them an email with that information, which includes the following URL:

www.JohnHarrington.com/Portrait-Copy-Request

That PDF tells them all about the process, and also, that there will be a fee associated with it. Over the years, we have generated significant annual additional revenue from the subjects we photographed, which is just one of the many reasons why keeping your rights is of critical value to solid business practices. Over at A Photo Editor, Rob Haggart has a great article titled Real World Estimates – Publicity Pricing and the Value of Subject Follow-Up, which addresses a number of other points that often come up with clients and subjects.
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Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Top 11 Things Photographers Wish They Learned in Photo School

This one's just a quick link to a really great article over at PhotoShelter on the subject!

(No comments, just go read it and comment there!)

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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Photojournalist Victory - Yet 1st Amendment Initially Ignored

It's frustrating as a card-carrying member of the press corps, to see a fellow photojournalist harassed by law enforcement. Such was the case when, in December of 2009, "David Morse, a respected and veteran independent photojournalist was arrested while covering the student protests at the Chancellor's House on the UC Berkeley campus", according to their press release.

While you can read all about it here, on the First Amendment Project website (which represented him pro bono), it's frustrating to see that he had to jump through so many hoops and law enforcement (at least, to date) has not been punished for their violation of his constitutional rights.

Recently, FAP announced:
Oakland - On Friday, June 18, an Alameda County Superior Court judge quashed an illegal search warrant issued for the unpublished news photographs of veteran photojournalist David Morse. The court also ordered the return of all of Morse's photographs, including any copies made by the University. The court also ordered the University to declare under oath what agencies received copies of the photographs, if any.
While these victories are welcome, it's like applauding for something that was a given in the first place (or should have been.)

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Monday, June 21, 2010

Cloned - Don't Steal Artists Work

Yet another great visual to demonstrate how wrong it is to steal artists work.

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Surf Photographer - It's Harder than it looks

In anticipation of a trip to the beach this Summer, I purchased an Ewa Marine bag for my D3, and I took several dips into a local pool before headed to the shore. To be sure, I cringed when I first sunk my $5,000 camera underwater, and I quickly realized that I needed to also use the included desiccant to reduce condensation during my underwater forays.

At some point in the future, I intend to include "surf photographer" in my bag of tricks, and to that end, I am training my daughter to be my tow-in ski operator. (Pictured is one of my other daughters, Grace, age 17 months, on a short board). It's great because it's a real need for the future, and also is a nice father-daughter bonding opportunity. She's been operating jet skis since she was six, and soloing on them since she was 8 (all in controlled situations, of course.)

It was with great interest that I read Allen's post over at PhotoShelter about being a surf photographer - How to Fail as a Surf Photographer, and I recommend it to you for some insightful reading.
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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Photography and "The Buyout"

Photographers who know what they're talking about HATE the phrase "BUYOUT". It's like nails on a chalkboard. Why? Because, among other things, it's such an ambiguous word that means one thing to the photographer, another thing to the photographer's client, and yet another thing altogether to the photographer's client's client. The Picture Licensing Universal Coalition (PLUS) promotes against the use of the word because it can lead to misunderstandings. View "buyout" to learn more about it, which, they in part caution:
Buy Out is a slang term, often misinterpreted as a transfer of copyright ownership of a work from the copyright holder to the client or client's agent. In the absence of a specific copyright transfer agreement executed by the copyright holder there is no copyright transfer. If this term is used, an additional, precise list of rights granted or transferred should accompany any license.
Further, clients who ask (or demand) a buy out either are trying to pull a fast one on an unsuspecting photographer by getting the whole pie for the price of a slice, or, unfortunately, they have been screwed over by a photographer in the past and are now in defensive mode trying to protect themselves and their client from that happening again.

There's a good discourse on the subject over at A Photo Editor - Ask Anything – The Buyout - that's worth a read.
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MediaStorm - Final Cut Recommendations

With more and more photographers migrating into video, one of the oversights in Final Cut Pro is how to easily centralize all of the ingested video, scratch disks, and render files into one central location. It takes a few minutes to properly set up each project so that you can migrate the files from one computer to another easily.

Brian Storm, over at his MediaStorm blog, has put together several short cuts for Final Cut Pro that will make your life easier, so go check them out here.

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Getty and Flickr's New Relationship

From time to time something good comes along from Getty Images. Such is the case with the latest announcement that people trolling Flickr for free photographs can license the photographs via Getty. I see this as a bit of a mixed bag, but with a net positive effect. The BBC reports here on the subject, as does Rob Haggart on his "A Photo Editor" column here, and even Paul Melcher sees something positive in it here.

It seems that Getty wants Flickr to be the middle man in the transaction, with Getty taking a piece of the pie as well. It's not clear yet how much a license will be, or even how much of a percentage everyone is going to take, but you can be sure that with an estimated 40,000,000 registered Flickr users, and multiple millions of images from them combined, even in an "opt in" approach, you can bet that a flood of new content will be licensable, and generate revenue for many parties.
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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Non-Commercial Use of Photographs

All over the place, all manner of "free" content is made available, provided - and this is the big caveat - that it's used for "non-commercial" use. However, at what point does a personal use become a non-commercial use, become a commercial use?

Over at "A Photo Attorney", attorney Carolyn Wright has a great explaination of the subject, in her article, entitled "Defining Non-Commercial Use" (5/22/10).

As with all advice from lawyers, be sure to check with your own for matters specific to your circumstances

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Future of Publishing

This is a remarkable way to reverse the way people look at publishing.


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Monday, June 14, 2010

Wedding Photographer - A Painful Incident

Below is a painful video for ANY photographer to watch. I've known a few photographers whom have suffered this indignity.

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One thing that strikes me immediately is that, while the photographer clearly had two camera bodies, he unfortunately placed both of them at risk in this situation. Surely, we commend him for his focus on getting the shot, but not at the expense of his gear. And, does he now not have any gear to finish the wedding? He still has posed photos and the reception to cover.

In the end, this incident likely cost him when he has to replace both bodies and lenses. It appears that some tuxedo-clad attendant smartly grabs at the camera ASAP to minimize the effect, and it looks like the "write" light is still illuminated, so, well, who knows?

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Sunday, June 6, 2010

Creative Business Wire - Do Not Pass Go

Today, Creative Business Wire, launches, billing itself here as "Creative Business Wire is a digital imagery news service that specializes in business photography, and only business: the economy, Washington D.C., leaders, trends and other business related images are produced on a daily basis by our stable of acclaimed professional photographers." On the eve of their launch, with just about 8,000 images pre-populated on their site, we talked for some time with their President and co-owner, Sandy Huffaker.

In a wide-ranging interview, Huffaker seemed to come off as hoping for the best, while not really prepared for anything else. When asked about his photographers, he said "I've wanted to get a certain number of photographers on board, which as actually been kind of a challenge...it's been hard, because it's kind of a spec agency", which is understandable. Not that he's trying to do that, but that he's having a hard time because spec agencies/models are bad. We dovetailed that question into a question about how he intends to differentiate CBW from, say, a Bloomberg. "I'm trying to sign on really talented, high quality type photographers", I want to hire these documentary photographers... and have them go out and follow around a cobbler or a fisherman...really try to mix it up..." When we asked "so, it's kind of like assignment work on spec", he answered "exactly, exactly. And I'll plan to send out a needs list every night. It'll be a little bit of redundant work. There seems to be three to five business stories a day. I want the photographers to self-generate their own assignments."

This didn't sound like a promising idea, at all.
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Huffaker then offerred up David McNew, one of his primary contributors. "I have this guy, David McNew, who's a former Getty staffer, he got laid off, he's in LA, editors love him." So we asked, "So, if editors love him, why would David go out and churn images to be a part of a $100 a month online all you can use service? How is that economicaly viable for him?"

"I think he believes in it", Huffaker said. "He believes in the model where, say, you get 100 subscriptions at $300 a month, that's $30,000 a month, split between 10 photographers, I think that's real income." Then, it seemed, to a degree, he realized the challenge of his argument, then offered, "I'm not crazy about having such a low subscription rate for downloads, but in my research, seeing how Getty is offering $30 editorial images, it's kind of, it's the only way I can see to do it right now."

Since photographers now have a choice of shooting their own stock, and putting them onto a platform like PhotoShelter and marketing to a group of clients, picture stories, as produced, we asked him about this, "how do you see this as different than doing this themselves with PhotoShelter, and doing their own marketing?" He answered, "I think what's going to differentiate us is it's a very hand-picked select group of people. I'm really banking on some of our name recognition. A lot of our contributors work for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal...when I go to the New York Times tomorrow, 3 or 4 of us already work for them..."

When we brought to his attention that the New York Times has their own syndication deals for images, and there are a number of images on the CBW site that have as the byline "...for the New York Times", and that this could be a contractual problem there, and further, that the NYT's contract (at least the last one we saw some time ago) precluded photographers from using the New York Times' name to promote themselves, he responded "they've never expressed that to me...I better go back and look at that, because I haven't looked at that contract in awhile."

Despite billing CBW as "specializes in business photography, and only business: the economy, Washington D.C., leaders,", and co-founder Robert Benson over on the Lightstalkers forum (here) writing "We are looking for photographers in NYC and Washington DC" for "a very specific type of imagery: business photos (economy, transportation, green, economy, jobs, energy, washington, etc)" Huffaker said of DC and political imagery "I'm not going to focus as much on the politics, you know, Washington, you know, AP, Getty, they all have full time staffers doing that. Another thing, I know if it was me, I wouldn't want to shoot that stuff on Spec...". yet CBW is asking just that of DC photographers, and marketing that as the objective on Lightstalkers.

As to overhead, Huffaker said "I don't have CEOs, no office, basically, you can do this from a computer. It was incredibly cheap to start this thing. I went through Photocore, which, they did US Presswire. It was basically $1,000, and about $150 a month to rent the storage.So, it's very cheap to start up."

When we asked "have you run any projections as far as numbers", he responded, "I think our yearly goal for the first year is 40 subscriptions, I think 100 would be great. We need to be able to produce 3-5 of these daily stories, I think, to survive."

We presented a scenario to him, off the cuff. Since it's not our role to be his accountant, we didn't have a definitive set of numbers, so we tossed out a few examples. He had said he would have two of his 10 photographers in New York City. So, we asked, keeping in mind his goal of 3-5 stories a day, and that at least one of those each day would come from NYC. So, with his two NYC photographers, that equates to 2.5 stories a week, or 10 a month. We then suggested that if they were to go the route of shooting those assignments for the AP, they'd get $2,000 a month from the AP. How much would CBW have to produce for them to get the same amount from CBW? We even walked him through the numbers:
You would have had to have sold about $5,000 of their images for them to get $3,500. That means CBW would have to generate $50,000 a month for each of the 10 photographers to see a gross revenue of $5,000, which they would then get their $3,500 from. Thus, since their model ranges from $100 to $300, a mid-point of $200 per subscriber would be reasonable for the purposes of this scenario. So, in order to get $50,000, CBW needs 250 subscribers, so each photographer can get their $3,500. When we then suggested that 250 subscribers is more than double the 100 he considered "great", that presents a problem. If 250 subscribers earns each of the 10 photographers a net of $3,500 for the month, then 100 would earn $1,40 a month ($140 an assignment), and, with an annual goal for the first year of 40 subscribers, that's $560 a month, to do 10 assignments, or $56 an assignment. It's important to note - the photographer contributing in NYC would have to do all 10 assignments, and hope that they had enough subscribers.
When we presented this scenario, and asked him if he had run the numbers in some similar type of scenario, he said: " I haven't done kind of the math as you just did...I am so in the dark right now. I think we could get anywhere between 40 and 250. I'm feeling it's almost a shoe-in we can get, we have a list of over 4,000 publications, and we have a full-time salesman who's going to be on this." He then went on, "You know I don't know if it's proven or not, we worked hours on just trying to find some kind of formula ...I have to be honest, this model isn't proven...I'm not super experienced when it comes to the numbers stuff." Well, that's certainly a vote of self-confidence, in the eve of the companys' launch.

When we asked Huffaker who would be doing sales, he responded "A photographer who's worked for Zuma, he's been in their system awhile, so I can be out shooting. His name is Jerod Harris. He's kinda new, he's done some entertainment, so I am monitoring his shooting, he's very driven. " When we asked about him being full time sales, or part times sales part time shooting, since he has images on the site himself, he said "he's going to be fulltime sales....I'll let him go out and shoot the brands, you know, we have this brands link..." So, he's going to be doing both, it seems. Certainly, from the images on the site, he's got a lot there.

He then went on about the number of photographers, "right at this minute we have five really commited people." He then pointed out "I've officially stopped accepting new photographers". Whew, I'll take that as a sign that no one else out there is going to be subjected to this bad deal. He said he cautioned everyone he's signed already, "this is something on the side of your daily assignments...don't quit your day job...I have no idea if it's going to fly or not."

I do. It's not.

Near the end of our conversation, he offerred, "Come back in a month and we'll see if this thing is going to fly or not." Ok, I'll start with your website in a month, to see if anyone other than you, McNew, and Robert Benson, are still contributing images. When Huffaker said "Im a little inexperienced, to be honest, with this", and coupled that with a comment early on in our conversation he made - "my biggest fear is dicking over photographers", I say, stop now. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 from even a single client. Use the platform to license stock on an image-by-image basis, as the subscription model only profits the agency, not the photographer. Oh, but you just opened an agency, and are also one of the photographers too. Now I see.

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