What The Duck: Work For Free

As usual, What The Duck recently had a great cartoon:

I have heard that one so many times, that if I had a dollar for each time I heard that sentence:

You'll want to pay me to…

Don't think that it doesn't happens. Many places make you pay so they can own your photos, including photography and photographers related companies. Many photo competitions make you pay $20 to $50 to participate. They keep your photos and for the privilege of paying them, they can use your photos for free for advertising or any other promotion they feel like having. $5 for a photo on iStockPhoto is too expensive for Rights Free photos. Why pay for photos when you can get paid by the photographer?

So, as photographers, how do you compete with free? You need to turn to industries that have been doing for decades. This has been a fact of life in the computer industry. Microsoft and Apple against open source software… I wrote about it in more details in Compete With Free.