$100 Wedding

It's Friday 5:45pm, I just got a phone call from Joe¹. He wanted me to shoot his wedding, in 2 weeks. A good friend of his brother in-law is offering to shoot his wedding for free. But he wants a "real professional" to shoot his wedding and his budget is $100.

I was both angry and wanted to "understand" Joe, so I started asking some questions, he was spending:

$9 per hour

This is an extract from the Pro Digital Talk Forum

0% financing in today's world? Yep, you can.

I need to buy expensive lenses, a computer and some new software to make it all legit. We are talking close to ten thousand dollars. I am still in the pricing stage so I don't have the exact amount yet.

25% Off

As I have written before in Discounts and in Discounts Discounts that I don't like to give discounts. I am very firm on that policy. I give "freebies" and extras but not discounts. So why did I give in April a 25% discounts to a customer?

Last year, one of my biggest customer went "belly up", closed, bankrupt, sort of. They did file for bankruptcy after they paid the "small guys", including me. They owed me $400, which they paid.

6 month later, I get a phone call from Travis, the ex-owner. He's trying to get back in business and there are a couple of photos that he'd like to use, but he can't afford to pay me anything.

On 6-Jul-2008, Lewis Hamilton won the Formula 1, UK Grand Prix in is Mercedes/McLaren. Will you earn more money if you buy a Mercedes or a McLaren? Will it make you a better driver?

Kyle Busch is leading the Nascar 2008² in his Toyota sponsored by the M&M candies. Nobody believes that, since they are driving a Toyota Camry and that Kyle Busch won last weekend, it will make them a better driver.

A few years ago, I met Michael. Michael was Rivka's boyfriend. Michael was a real "wacko".

I rarely talk about advertising and mostly write about marketing. What's the difference when it comes to your photography business?

• Advertising: the purchase of time or space in a media. You can buy time on the radio, on the TV or... You are buying the time to show your information. You can buy space in a magazine, in the newspapers or on the Internet such as banners or Google to show your information. All in all you are paying for the exposure. The more "eye balls" the more you will be paying. To advertise you will have to pay.

Aggressive Pricing

Price is rarely THE number 1 factor when hiring a photographer. Price plays an important role in determining where and when you are on the buyer's list. If a buyer is looking for the highest quality, she will not start by looking for the lowest prices. The higher the prices you charge, the higher the perception of quality of your work.

Some people are more sensitive to prices than others.

All other things being equal, people will buy the cheapest one. Luckily for us³, we are not all equals.

• 2 photographers with the same equipment at the same event will take different photos⁴.
• 2 photographers with the same computer and the software will process their photos differently.

Alligators

The number one rule to avoid alligator attacks:

Amateur photographer vs. professional photographer

I was at a reception taking pictures when this guy (it's always a guy) came. He began gloating about his new Canon EOS1d MarkIII while I only had a small Canon G9.

Canon EOS1d MarkIII

An Army March On Its Stomach

Another one from the Dumb Department

I regularly see people doing stupid things, being punished for being stupid and then complaining about it. The latest case is Shane Baker. He was at REI, a very large outdoor store in Seattle. Shane took photos of the private security guards refilling the ATM machine. First should he have taken photos of the security guards that were refilling the ATM? I don't think so, but when the security guards asked him to stop, he kept and taking photos and he started arguing with them.

So lets review the situation:

I just got this phone call:

Archival vs. 200 years

• Are you saying: "We use archival quality photo paper."?

Or

• Are you saying: "Your photos will last 200 years."?

Are You A "Yes Man" Or A "No Man"

When somebody ask you for something do you say:

• Are you trustworthy?
• Are you embellishing a little or even a lot?
• How do people feel about you?
• How do people feel about your photography?

This week I had coffee with Georges, it's a French Georges with an s. It's the same Georges from: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. He just lost $3500 Canadian, or just under $3000 US, because he forgot.

Two years ago, he made some photos for a company that used his photos for a national ad. Georges realized that they stopped using his photos in their ad. So Georges took his courage in his hands and phoned to see what happened. Why did they drop his photos from their ad.

Are You Selling A Service or Are You Selling Photos?

What are you selling? Are you selling a service or are you selling photos?

If you are selling photos, you sold the photo and now the transaction is closed. There may be another transaction with the same photo but that's stock. With today's prices, selling stock will get you from $1 to $10 per photo, if you are lucky, many photographers are getting less than $1 per photo.

Yesterday: Tuesday 6-May-2008, was the US democratic primary in North Carolina and Indiana. Big news:

• Obama won North Carolina by a wide margin
• Clinton won Indiana by a narrow margin.

Audit

5 years ago, I was audited by CRA⁵, the tax people. It was my fault. I checked the wrong box on the tax return. The tax people complained about it and offered me the opportunity to uncheck the box. I, very smartly, refused to uncheck the box and kept on checking the box. So I got audited.

I went to the accountant and had 4 weeks to prepare for the audit. I was ready when it was time for the audit. I prepared for the audit and checked everything in these 4 weeks. I spent at least 300 hours plus the accountant time. The audit lasted 45 minutes!

Last night I was one of three photographers at a reception. Three photographers, three different clients covering the same people. We all know each other. I arrived first, unloaded my equipment, and started to make the rounds to find the best spots and the best angles. The other two guys arrive and Joe asks for my help to unload his SUV, a Land Rover LR3, which he left at the front. I go and help when I notice at the back the warning sign stuck on the rear window: Baby On Board

Saturday morning, I checked my emails. In the middle, I decided to go and make myself an americano⁶. I started the screen saver, and came back 10 minutes later. Moved the mouse to reactive the screen. Nothing, dead! I checked that the computer is turned on, yes the fan is on and the computer light is on the computer case. Tried a few variations of the Alt-Ctrl-Del, nothing, no reboot. Nothing, dead.

I bit the bullet, turned the computer off, waited 15 seconds and turned the computer back on. Before the even Windows started, during the boot process, I got a hard drive SMART⁷ error, and the drive was completely dead. Obviously the SMART did not anticipate the drive failure.

Badmouthing The Competition

In North America, that's both Canada and the US, the auto bailout is front news. GM, Ford and Chrysler want to up to $200 billion dollars, in total from Canada, US & Mexico. They want 14 billion from the US and 3.5 billion from Canada by next week, or the will go bankrupt...

Ford's CEO, Alan Mullaly did a credible job of explaining how the bailout would help. At least he has a "plan".

How careful are you when there is a fine print? What's the fine print you ask? The fine print is what's printed at the bottom of a contract/agreement, and the print is so small that you need a magnifying glass to even see it, unless you received via fax then it's completely unreadable because it's all smudged.

1. I just renewed my mortgage. after long and hard fought negotiations, my bank offered me a 4.5% mortgage rate for 5 years. It's good but not outstanding. So I searched around, phoned... and finally found another bank that did offering me 4.01%. I almost took it. I was reading the mortgage contract, when 2 words peeked my attention: compounded semi-annually, this means that the principal⁸ was being reduced by my payments only every 6 month. So I ran an amortization table⁹ for both and: my bank at 4.5% was cheaper by $4,871 at then end of the 5 years than the other one at 4.01%, because the payments were compounded weekly.
2. I was recently negotiating a contract and they wanted worldwide copyrights, forever until the end of times. Eventually we agreed on 18 month, their campaign was going to be 6 month. Everything was done via email, except toward the end it was done via a "crappy" low resolution fax. Since I could not read the contract, I got them to email it to me. It turns out that, they changed the copyrights portion of the contract to point to a web page! The web page did say what we agreed [almost], but a web page is very easily changed, and has no history. Were they trying to bamboozle me? Make your own opinion, but I got it back in writing in the contract.

Becoming A Professional Photographer

With so many people deciding to become professional photographers, eventually they will have to face the realities of becoming a professional photographer as told by What the duck

• What does it mean to be a professional photographer?
• Do professional photographers take better photo?
• Do professional photographers have better cameras?
• Do professional photographers have better models?

The saying goes:

With the recession my business has slowed down, a lot. I am now 55% below February 2008. My 2 largest customers have closed. I am reexamining my marketing. Before I spend more money on marketing, I need to figure out:

1. Where do my customers find me? Ads, word of mouth, Google? I started phoning my old customers to ask. Guess what? From that I already have 2 small photo shoots! That wasn't the purpose, the purpose is to find where I should spend my time and work on my marketing.
2. What's my percentage of people, who call/email with questions, becomes customer?

A photo business, like any other, can only exist if money comes in. As a photographer, how do you get money in? By getting paid. How do you get paid? By invoicing your customers. Do I hear Duh? There are a few studies floating around claiming that:

On Main St in Vancouver, BC, we now have so many coffee shops. Some blocks have 3 coffee places, but where to go when you want the right coffee? Some people want organic coffee, some people want "fair-trade¹⁰" coffee, some people, like me, want good coffee, that means not burnt because it's was packed it to hard.

Yesterday, I had coffee with Danny, a friend. He had problems with a customer. The original "deal" was a photo shoot, 3 hours, including 2 outfits changes making a total 3 outfits with 20 8x10 photo prints and 5 11x14 photo prints for $1250. Half paid upfront and the other half to be paid on delivery. The photo shoot went well, Danny met with the customer, and she liked the photos but... Halfway through she said that she didn't want the 20 8x10 photo prints, but 30 8x10 photo prints, 10 11x14 print and 1 16x20 print. So Danny took his calculator out. She interrupted to say that she wanted these extra prints for the same price or she wouldn't pay. It was almost like blackmail. Danny left the presentation saying that he would think about it, and now was asking for my advice.

If you want to bore people to tears, talk accounting. That's for everybody, except accountants and some business people. I do my own bookkeeping. I don't have a bookkeeper because, early in the 80s, I hired one, and she did such as a good job, that I had to spend a day and half with Revenue Canada¹¹ to correct all the problems¹².

Ever since that time, I do my own bookkeeping. Every month, I have to deal with all my sales because I have to file my sales with the Provincial Government¹³. Every 3 month, I have to keep my accounting up-to-date because I have to file the GST¹⁴ with the Federal Government.

How do you raise your prices? The standard answer is to build a brand. Oh Yeah? What does it means to build a brand? How many photographers have built a brand? Two or three dozen of photographers have done it. Here are some:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Edward Weston

What's burn rate, you ask?

One of my clients was not paying me. It was a small invoice: $190 + $9.50 for the tax, for a grand total of $199.50. It's not a big invoice. He's Iranian, living in North Vancouver where there is a large Iranian community.

1. After 30 days, I sent him a reminder that I haven't been paid yet. Nice and polite.
2. After 45 days, still nothing. It's not worth taking the guy to the collection agency. I was pissed off. So I decided to be creative and I sent him this email:

Cameras and Competition

Every professional photographer screams bloody murder, there are millions and billions of free photos on the Internet. The 2 largest websites for photos are:

• Facebook: 17+ Billion photos [Nov-2009]

When I take photos, I always get:

Last week, I was at a presentation where some photographers displayed and projected their photos. Some were outstanding, better than anything I ever did. One guy spend 3 month tracking a tiger to get photos of the tiger in the sunset. I don't have the time or the patience to spend 3 month to make a photo. It was amazing. When the presentations were finished, we started chatting and he asked:

Can You Help Me Justify Spending This Much?

The Saddleback Leather Company sells leather bags. Everybody else sells leather bags, but these ones are expensive, tough and look great. Did I say that these leather bags are expensive? So how do you compete with Prada, and Tumi? Their bags are expensive, tough, look great. They have massive advertising dollars and the Saddleback Leather Company is small without the millions of dollars in advertising.

Last month, I was just leaving the office, when the phone rang. I picked up the phone; it was a company that I never heard from. John¹⁵ wanted me to quote for a large construction job.

Everybody, I talk to, wants a discount. I hate discounts, I am tired of discounts, unless I receive the discount. But lately, it feels like I am so much more on the receiving end of the asking for discounts.

Not of my own choosing, but Canada Revenue Agency — CRA, the Canadian Income Tax people, have dictated that I have to make a profit! No, I am not kidding! As a small business without any other employee, other than the owners, we only have 3 years to turn a profit or...

Can't Win?: Change The Rules

The Nissan GT-R, as a racing car, is so good and successful in the Japanese GT racing, that they decided to penalize Nissan, by added 50kg¹⁶ to the car to slow it down. It didn't work, the Nissan GT-Rs still won their races, so let's add another 50kg¹⁷. That's a total of 100kg¹⁸, the Nissan GT-Rs still won all of their races. So let's add another 100kg¹⁹, that makes a total of 200kg²⁰ just to make sure that Nissan can't win all the races.

Competitors

There are many scams that target photographers because photographers are easy prey²¹. This scam involves the offer of doing a local photo shoot from an overseas company. If you are in Canada/US then they are from the UK, France or Germany or even Nigeria. If you are in the UK they call from Canada, the US or Nigeria.

Scam

1. Somebody phones/emails you: They saw your photos on your website, on PhotoServe or you were recommended by a friend.

Cash For Clunkers

I have received the following email from PhotoShelter.

If you are in business, you must file with the "Income Tax People" an income statement and a balance sheet. That's how they calculate the taxes you will have to pay. Both the income statement and the balance sheet have all these "non-real/fake items" such as depreciation... Both income statements and balance sheets used something called "accrual basis": Accounting transactions are recorded when they occur instead of when payment for that transaction is made or received.

But that's not my real world. In my real world, I have to write cheques, I have to pay my Visa, my Mastercard and my American Express. I have to wait for payment from my customers. In the real world, I have to deal with cash. My monthly cash flow is how much money comes in during that month minus how much cash goes out during that month. This tells me how much business I have to "drum up" and how much I can spend.

New York, the centre of the universe, Wall Street has been seriously hit by the recession, banking fraud,... In the last year since January 2008, Wall Street has laid off 40% of its employees. The other 60% have had from pay cuts to no bonus²². It's been a slaughter fest in New York, especially Manhattan.

Jay Kos, an upscale men's wear boutique²³, on Park Ave in upper Manhattan²⁴ sells buttoned-up men's fashion—traditional hats, Italian-made shirts, cashmere sweaters from Scotland. Jay Kos is also the name of the owner of the "boutique". He put a huge sign in his window:

Charging for Travel

Should you charge for travel or not? It's a great discussion and there are many threads on forums. It's a question that people ask me regularly.

In the 1980s, I never charged for travel, but in 1991, I was at a customer downtown, when I received a phone call from Gerry, one of my "flux"²⁵ client. They needed a quick portrait for one of their financial advisor. I was already downtown, only a 15 minute walk with the lights... "I should be there in an hour".

I was talking this week with Sam, a friend of mine. He was "complaining" that he has all the cheapskates customers. His customers don't want to pay for the 14x14 or 16x20 prints. So I started asking where he gets his photography clients. Many of his clients came from his wife, Airin. Airin is a "barterer". She loves to barter. Barter is exchanging good or services without using money and the keyword is exchanging and not the word paying.

Sam doesn't barter but many of his photography customers do. It turns out that he promotes, actually his wife, at places where cheapskates congregate. A cheapskate is a cheapskate. a cheapskate doesn't pay for things that are not a necessity. A cheapskate pride themselves on being cheap and how little money they paid for ... including photography.

The Christian Science Monitor will be the first of the "major" newspaper to stop having a print edition and will be switching to the web: See Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy. They will be switching in April 2009. The Christian Science Monitor is planning to print a weekly version of the newspaper. The cost of producing, printing and distributing a physical daily newspaper is very high. Cutting all of those costs will remove many constraints, both physical and financial. On the web, there is no printing cost, no paper, and space is: "free and unlimited"²⁶.

My first reaction is: "Another paper biting the dust!" Upon further thoughts, I think that it's a great boon for photography and photographers. The Christian Science Monitor will "consume" and buy more news photos than before.

I have to come "clean". I just had one of my most embarrassing moments as a photographer. I went to a customer's house, Madeleine's, with Sam, a colleague. It was to make photos of her dogs. Like many home owners, she asked us to remove our shoes for the carpet. As I sat on the stairs and started to remove my shoes, Sam used one foot to remove his shoe, then the other foot to remove the other shoe.

Then... the big toe appeared. It wasn't a small hole in the socks. It was the full big toe. Sam tried to hide it, but it glowed in the dark, it had blinking lights, fluorescent and shined in the dark. Sam was so embarrassed that he mumbled something in way of apologies.

SWMBO²⁷ aka The Boss started looking for a Gucci watch for her birthday next February. She has a collection of them. Gucci watches mean "mucho dineros" i.e.: expensive. Last week she got a phone call from one of the most expensive jeweler in town, that they will be having a "sale" on Tuesday. Luxury and Sales. The recession must be on and it must be hurting. She went, saw the watch she wanted, asked for a big further discount, another 20% below the sale price, that the store manager approved. What a deal! I can't afford to save money.

Lets examine the situation:

CNN Trade Secrets

Here are CNN's "trade secrets" to take great photos so you will be published by CNN. This is a summary, the full document is available as a PDF at: CNN Trade Secrets. The same "trade secrets" are also at: CNN Trade Secrets with the "trade secrets" to shooting great videos and recording great audio:

Your worst nightmare: you finally got "a live one", a customer, a real one looking to buy your platinum extra deluxe package. She's convinced, she wants it, but she has to check with her husband, her boss, her best friend, her cat and her dog. Meanwhile, somebody tells her about how her friend used this guy that did everything, including washing the dishes, for half of the price!

What are you gonna do?

Either you differentiate yourself, you compete on price or you will go out of business. Can you compete on price? You think you can?

1. With her cousin who just bought a "real camera" and will do it for free!
2. With millions and millions of photos on Flickr that is available for the tidy sum of $0.

You've delivered your photos. A couple of month later, you hear through the grapevine that she is very unhappy with the photos of her kids. What is she complaining about? She selected the pictures during the review, so what's the problem?

You are part of the problem

Today's 26-Jan-2009. The year is: 2009. Have you updated your copyright settings?

1. Your website's copyright
2. Your import presets copyright in Lightroom

Corrupted "Techie"

Last week I received a phone call from my largest customer.

The other day, I got a phone call from an existing customer. He wanted the same type of photo we did last time but much cheaper.

Do you know how much it costs you to be a professional photographer? Yes, this is you and your money. The cost of doing business is often as referred as CODB.

The CODB²⁸ is what it costs you to operate your photo business. The CODB is the yearly sum of your business expenses. Here is a list of some of the expenses:

• What's the cost difference between being polite and being rude?
• What's the cost difference between presenting photos and just throwing your photos on a website?
• What's the cost difference between a calibrated monitor and one that is not properly calibrated?
• What's the cost difference between a well composed photo and one that's not well composed?

Do you know what your costs in producing photos are? If you don't know what your costs are, how do you set your prices?

• Pick from a hat?
• Match the competition?

• I was in New York, NY, taking the photo of a 4 feet concrete barrier with the sign: "Do Not Enter". What did they expect; people would not figure out that you can't drive through it? 10 seconds after I finished taking my photos, a "rent-a-cop" pounced on me, I was threatening "National Security", he had a hand on his gun²⁹! I had to delete the photos.
• I was in Vancouver, BC when a female cop pulled over a car at an intersection and proceeded to arrest the driver. She left the cop car in the middle of the intersection. From the other side of the intersection, I started taking photos. I was at least 10 meters³⁰ away. She saw me, and started screaming at me not to photograph her. I immediately put my camera in my backpack and walked away very, very quickly.
• In London, UK, the cops are carrying between 12-13,000 S44 searches/seizure each month in London alone How are we doing section & stop and search section
• I had my camera with me, when 2 cops running their sirens went down Main St, Vancouver, BC, to a coffee place. I decided not to take photos. I first have to look after my own safety, in other words, I chickened out or it's also called self-censorship.

The craft fairs can be either a very lucrative market or a black hole that will suck down everything I have. It depends on how well the pictures relate to the people coming to these craft fairs. It also depends on how well I relate to the people coming to these craft fairs.
These craft fairs can be quite expensive, especially to setup until I have a workflow that works for me.

Costs

• Exhibition fees: I need to rent a table. Some of the craft fairs do include electricity, at other I will need to pay extra for the electricity. The fee also varies depending on the day of the week, with weekdays being cheaper than the weekend.

How to Ignore Customers

This morning, I was the Granville Island Public Market, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Granville Island is a very small island in Vancouver, a little bit industrial, a little bit craft, a lot of arts, a lot of boats and marinas and a public market. Inside the public market, in the middle of the permanent stands, they have "craft pods". Each craft pod is made of 4 tables in a square, with the owners/craft people in the middle of the pod.

Every year, in February, all the craft vendors have to go through a selection process to know if they will be approved for the year. Then, when they are approved, they will be assigned 7 days per month. There are many photographers, trying to sell their prints, the prices range from $5 for the small 4 by 6 to hundreds of dollars for the large prints on canvas. They've approved too many photographers, some days there are as many as 6 photo stands.

I received an email from "anonymous photographer" asking me if it's worthwhile to advertise on Craig's list.

There are all kind of people asking for photographers and many photographers at prices unheard of.

Many small businesses, including photographers, start the business with their credit card. They put everything on their credit card and pay the minimum payment every month or slightly more. Every so often, a business magazine highlights a small entrepreneur that started the business with their credit card and has become very successful.

According to Business Week, in the US, 44% of all businesses are using credit cards for some form of financing. 48% of small businesses are using credit card for financing. This means that half of the small businesses carry a credit card balance. Are you? Small businesses, including photographers, are using their credit card because the credit cards are easier to get than a loan from a bank. Credit cards do not require collateral.

In business CRM: customer relationship management, is the magic powder that allows you to improve your interaction with the customer so that s/he will happier and therefore buy more. Eventually that customer will become more profitable. With CRM, you capture as much information as possible about the customer's birthdays, family info..., the sale info interaction, profitability, how good the customer was...

With a good implementation of the CRM software, you can offer customers better deals for them and for you. You can remind/congratulate them on their birthday, anniversary, promotion...

CRM goals

Customer Finally Sees The Light

It's been a long term problem for me and my customers, they buy a photo, actually it's usually a series of photos, I get paid, then they decide the photo is so great, so beautiful and so wonderful will use it for their marketing piece and sell millions of dollars.

I come back to them to ask for more money and now they are not so happy with the photo. The photo is not worth 2 cents, it's a piece of shit. How could I do such a bad photo, and con them in buying and using it? Now that I want to be paid more?

Customer Service

On 11-Nov-2008 Grover Sanschagrin did an interview of Craig Mitchelldyer at Photoshelter. The interview is available at: My Nose, Your Business.

How do you deal with people who want to cut corners to save money:

Daylight Saving Time

Yesterday: 2-Nov-2008 was the end of the daylight saving time, back to standard time. I had to change 11 clocks manually³¹, and another half dozen were done automatically³².

The important question is: Did you change the clock on your cameras?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

Daylight Saving Time — Fall 2009

Today: 1-Nov-2009 is the end of the daylight saving time in North America. I still had to change 11 clocks manually³³, and another half dozen were done automatically³⁴.

The important question is: Did you change the clock in your cameras from daylight saving time to standard time?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

Daylight Saving Time — Spring 2009

Today: 8-Mar-2009 is the start of the daylight saving time in North America. I still had to change 11 clocks manually³⁵, and another half dozen were done automatically³⁶.

The important question is: Did you change the clock in your cameras for the daylight saving time?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

Deadbeats

What's a deadbeat? It's somebody that owes you money, and is not paying it. You took the photos, you've delivered the files, you've delivered the prints, and they won't pay.

Is it your fault they haven't paid?

In an other life, when money was plenty and companies did not count their pennies, I got this industrial photo project of documenting the operation of a "corrugator"³⁷. It was part of a project of eventually upgrading a few million dollars worth of equipment.

The photo project was supposed to be a month long, but it could be more and I was being paid by the half-day, with me doing the lab work at their location. Nothing left the plant. The month passed, I wasn't finished because I had to do "more stuff³⁸". Another month and I didn't really cared since I was paid for my time, more work meant more $$$. By the third month, something wasn't right. Nobody was asking any question, they were paying my invoices, it wasn't right. Eventually I got a meeting with one of the VPs of the company. I explained my concerns...

Dealing With Deflation

Every day on the radio, on TV and in the newspapers "they" talk about the impeding disaster of the coming deflationary era.

Delays

A couple of days ago, I got this email:

I have never shown a YouTube video on Foto-Biz.com before, but this one is fantastic. It's 2 minutes and 20 sec, short, sweet and discounted...

I hate discounts. I sell both prints and licenses for my photos. I regularly get asked for discounts. So I hate discounts (I love a discount when I buy something, but that's another story). Asking for discounts is part of the human nature. Look at all these people who are asking for deep discounts or even want your photos for free, when it's not even their money! They have no problem asking for perpetual rights and unlimited number of prints but they still want their salary and would never work for free.

Dealing with discounts

Discounts are never an easy thing to deal with. They very much change, depending on the mood, the business environment, the type of work, the industry and what I can get away with. I have set a policy, many times, but the policy change on regular basis.

As I get busier, I give less and less discounts, but give more and more extras. I wrote about this in: Discounts

From the "do as I say instead of how I do" department.

The Newspaper Association of America's job is to promote the printing of newspapers, to promote the survival of the newspapers. The NAA lobbies in Washington and prints a glossy magazine: Presstime.

Yesterday, I was trying to boost my productivity by surfing the Internet³⁹, I found:

Do you know who your customers are? My guess is that you know their name, maybe their address, sometimes the company name and that's about it.

Do You Specialize?

A few months ago, I wrote an article about squirrels. In the article also mentioned rabbits. So last week in the evening, very late in the evening, I got a phone call from a photo buyer from Switzerland⁴⁰, who was looking for at least a hundred photos of rabbits. Rabbits in the wild, rabbits in the home, rabbits as pet, rabbits as pest, rabbits as food…

He spent a couple of days looking for photos of rabbits, without much success, a photo here, a photo there but no collection, no choice. I mentioned “what about iStockPhoto, Fotolia and the other microstocks agencies with millions of photos”. He said that they didn't have anything. That was already his first thought. It's too bad that in the end I wasn't able to help him, the budget was over 10 thousand Swiss Francs or just under 10 thousand US dollars.

Doing Wedding Photography?

Usually, I don't pick fun at a whole group of people. I have commented and lambasted people doing or saying damn stupid things when they are related to the business of photography. The life of wedding photographers is tough. No testing, no trial, only one day and it must be done right. No second chance. what happens when you screw-up? But I have discovered this great website about wedding photography.

Wedinator. Their moto is:

A few weeks ago, lunch time is almost finished and I was making the portrait of 2 employees. A supervisor barges in my section of the warehouse. He starts ranting and raving, "What the fuck are you doing? Why aren't they at their work?..." The guy was drunk as a skunk. He wreaked booze, if I would have lit a match, the whole neighborhood would have gone up in flame.

I tried to explain, that Joe M., the owner, gave us permission to use this area. He would have none of it. He started swearing and to be very rude. I had enough. I told my "talent" that I couldn't continue under these conditions and started packing.

Dumb Email

I received an email from an photographer⁴¹. It was an email blast with mail merge that inserted my name and my email address. He just requested that I go to his website to “enjoy” his “fine and exquisite“ photography in the hope of getting assignments.

There were a couple of problems with his email:

You finally got a customer, a live one. She paid the $300 or $750 to book the photo shoot. She selected the "grand session" that includes 4 photos 8x10, 8 photos 5x7 and 1 photo 11x14. You came, you made the photos, you processed the photos and now you either go to her place to deliver the photos or she comes to your studio to pickup the precious photos.

Do you give the photos? or Do you start with the real "sales pitch". If you answered start with the real "sales pitch", you've just doubled or tripled your profit without increasing your rates.

The 3 largest photo websites are:

• Facebook
• Flickr

Email is one of the main communication form. we expect it to be almost instantaneous. When are away, they usually set an auto-responder to let others know that they can't reply or deal with their email. Here are some examples of what people have done:

Email Checklist

Email is the critical application. Everybody on the Internet has and uses email. I wrote about a few email stats in: Email Stats - Part 1 and Email Stats - Part 2.

• 25% of Internet users check their email immediately after waking up.

Last week, I had a discussion about email with one of my customer. He was "complaining" about my email being too hard to read. Most of the time, he uses his Blackberry. Nobody ever complained about my emails before. So I started investigating:

1. I have always been assuming that everybody uses their desktop, even the people with a Blackberry. I have always been assuming that they'd just looked at their Blackberry, just still get their emails on their regular computer/laptop.
2. The Blackberry has a resolution of 320 by 240. My desktop has a resolution of 1600 by 1050.

I don't know about you, but for me email is one of my important tools for my photographic business. I use it all day long. I get around 1 500 emails/day. Yes that's one thousand five hundred emails per day. With 1 200 to 1 300 emails as spam⁴².

I'm always interested in how people use email or receive emails

Email Statisitics — Part 2

This part 2 of Email Statistics 2008 - Part 1. Just a reminder that for me email is one of my important tool for my photographic business. I use it all day long. I get around 1 500 emails/day. Yes that's one thousand five hundred emails per day, with 1 200 to 1 300 as spam.

Everyday I get between 1,200 and 2,000 emails. Yes, you read it correctly between one thousand two hundreds and two thousands emails per day. You can buy CDs with 100 million email addresses for spamming, half of these addresses are mine. I am so well organized that it takes me only 20 minutes to half an hour per day to go through it. In another entry, I will explain my system.

What makes people open and read an email? The subject line. Here is a list of the best email subject lines used for marketing from Mail Chimp

I stumbled upon this surfing website. It's very different from any other that I've seen. They are trying and it looks like they are succeeding in becoming the MySpace of surfing. It has been up since June 2007. They are a portal for surfing. Photographers, any photographer, can upload their images, videos and any "dude" can order prints, mugs, t-shirts and sweatshirts.

What makes it special is:

Want to become a professional photographer? Easy, press the button. I'm not making it up. I couldn't make it up if I wanted. Preset Heavens wrote a couple of articles on how to become a photographer: Everyone Can Be A Pro. Preset Heaven is a website where you can download presets for Adobe's Lightroom. Since I am a Lightroom user, I look at some of these presets and see if they give me some idea.

Here's the exact quote of how to become a pro:

I was at this very fancy/expensive restaurant with SWMBO ⁴³ aka The Boss. We had a reservation, arrived on time, the Maitre D' showed us to our table.

The table was so small, at a terrible spot, just next to the entrance of the kitchen. I asked if we could get another table, the Maitre d' said NO! That's all there is. So I asked what about this other table? NO! It's already reserved! So I asked, "Are we getting something special for having this terrible table?" Outraged the Maitre d' shouted NO!, so we left.

Are you using Facebook for promoting your photography? At least 2 photographers, that I know, are using Facebook to promote their photography business by posting regularly new photos. The only problem is that they've never read the terms of use: Facebook terms of use. In case they change their terms of use, here they are:

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt or FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.:

I had an appointment with a photographer. The appointment was for 10:00am, we confirmed it over the phone the day before. I arrived 9:50am, I waited. 10:00am: he is not here, 10:05am: he's still not here and he has not called. 10:10am: still nothing and nobody. 10:15am: I left and I didn't call him. 10:45am: he called and screamed "Where are you? You are late!". I replied: "No, I waited until 10:15am, you were not there and you didn't call me to let know, so I left."

He was fuming. How could I do that? That wasn't his fault, the traffic, the weather...

1. An acquaintance of mine got an iPhone from Apple and showed me web surfing. We ended up at a photo website that was only Flash based. It could not open the website.
2. Almost a year after the release the iPhone from Apple, and the iPhone still does not have Flash support.
3. Many photo websites are 100% Flash based websites.
4. Cutting edge people bought these iPhones and are using them. These cutting-edge people are photo editors, designer.. they are also the people that want to see your pictures. If they can't see your website, they can't buy or ...

SWMO⁴⁴ aka the "Boss" decided that we had too much unused space in the bedroom closet. I didn't know that I was wasting her "precious closet space". I'm happy with my system of piles of folded clothes and boxes. It must be "women are from closet space and men are from piles and boxes". So the "Boss" called one of these famous closet space companies to make an appointment. Pat, the sales rep, spent 2½ hours asking questions, counting piles and measuring. When she was done, she used her laptop to design the new space for the bedroom closet, and to give us a price quote.

These things aren't cheap! We are talking the price of a Nikon d700, after the price increase. For the optional doors, we are talking a Nikon 24-70/2.8. The optional shoe rack with doors is the price of Canon 70-200/4-VR.

Regularly I receive calls and emails, asking if they can use my photos for free. I don't know about you. If you are a professional photographer, and you give away your photos and your rights for free, you will not stay a professional photographer for long. I rarely give my photos for free. The keyword is rarely, meaning that I have done it.

How fortunate I am, that they have chosen to use my photos for free! It will raise my profile in the "industry." Most of them are outraged that I dared not give my photos for free. Some have even suggested that I should pay them for the benefit of being published. I don't give way photos willy-nilly. I have a policy. Depending on who asks and how they ask, I have agreed but under the condition that they fulfill my policy:

Free Publicity

As a photographic business, we will take any publicity we can get, especially the good one. Publicity is good, especially free publicity.

1. Free publicity is cheap.

As I have said in many postings, I don't like to give discounts. What I give frequently are "freebies".

Friends and Discounts

A couple of days ago, I had a discussion with John A. about giving discounts to friends and relatives. It turns out that we both had to deal with giving discounts to friends in the last month. The interesting part was that we came to very similar conclusions in different ways.

The question is you have a friend that knows that you are a photographer, they want you to do them portraits, cover a wedding… Do you give them a discount on your photo services? What about a discount on the prints? Is 25% off good enough? Or do I need to give a 33% discount or even a 50% discount?

Often, I need to phone somebody but there is this receptionist. She [it's always a she] has instructions to only transfer the calls from.... and I am not on that list of person that she should transfer the call.

Failed phone call

A phone call. A live one, I have a "could be customer" on the other side. They are interested in my work, they want to do a photo shoot. The keywords are they want to do a photo shoot with me. It doesn't mean that it will happen. There are those little pesky details like rates, rights... It's so easy to forget an item that I made a spreadsheet. Here's my form:

Getting Rich

Although my name is Ritch, I am not rich. There are 796539 results / books on Amazon.com. There only 2 books “worth” reading:

• How to Get Rich — Felix Dennis

A friend of mine, Dan⁴⁵ is almost a full time photographer. His photo income varies from 50% to 90% of his income. He wrote custom software a few years ago and he still gets paid for support and changes.

In Canada, Hockey is very big, and now's the Stanley Cup⁴⁶ is on. The For the first time in many years the Canucks, Vancouver's hockey team, won it's first round, and will go to the second round. Since the Canucks are doing so well, many people and corporations are on the band-wagon. There are many Canucks parties and events sponsored by various companies. A local children's charity asked Dan to cover and make photos of an evening event, they couldn't afford to pay him, and it's a fund raiser... You know the whole song and dance. They have no money to pay the photographers for his photos, but they have plenty of money for the champagne, the food, and the entertainers⁴⁷... Blah, blah... They promised him to have his name on the sponsors list, and his copyright notice on the photos whether they were used for print or on the web.

It started in the spring of 2008. I did a photo shoot of a construction project⁴⁸. My project manager, Dan, was happy with the photos... The fee was to be split as 50% on start and the other 50% upon delivery of the photos. My usual, for this type of photo project, is to meet with "my client" and show the photos on a laptop, with a few printed. I had the meeting with Dan and it didn't go well.

The problem was that Bill, Dan's manager, came to the meeting. Bill was very unhappy with my photos. Not what he had in mind... To make a long story short, there was no problem with my photos. The problem was between Dan and Bill. I don't know who started⁴⁹, but in June 2008 Bill tried its best to pick as many fights as possible with Dan, in the hope of getting him fired.

I have used this website to talk about the business of being a photographer and about Lightroom. How many photography websites are out there? One hundred thousand, a million websites? Nobody really knows, but my scientific, fully fact checked, gut feel is closer to a million photography blogs/websites than closer to the hundred thousand mark. How many of these blogs/websites deal with the business of photography, I would say about a dozen. Good photography business information is very rare. I could say that photo business information is a rare commodity, but commodity and rare in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

Photography books, there are so many photography books. I just did a search at Amazon.com and found 217,434 Results. How many photo business books? Not that many, may be a couple of hundred and very few books are:

Here are sections of Getty confidential info memorandum. How confidential and secret it is? Not too much since they posted it on the web. It's on the SEC⁵⁰ EDGAR⁵¹. The full document is available at: Getty SEC fillings
— Getty: EXCERPTS FROM CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION MEMORANDUM — Jun 2008

Trends in Imagery Market

Here are sections of Getty confidential info memorandum. How confidential and secret it is? Not too much since they posted it on the web. It's on the SEC⁵² EDGAR⁵³. The full document is available at: Getty SEC fillings
— Getty: EXCERPTS FROM CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION MEMORANDUM — Jun 2008

Trends in Imagery Market

Gift cards are a huge industry! All the big companies are using them, from Best Buy to your neighborhood mall. Gift cards are so big that are gift cards conferences!

Time to issue your own gift card? Lately, I have been giving away $50 gift cards. My own gift card for my own services. So basically, I am giving away $50 discounts. But, it's not a discount... It's different from a discount. People ask for discounts, they work you, they nag, they complain, they threaten to get the discount. Once they receive a discount, they always want the discount. A gift card is different:

Every once in a while, there is a book that can have an actual impact on your business. It's very rare that you can actually take what they mention in a book and apply it. It's rare, extremely rare. The book is Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein (Author), Steve J. Martin (Author), Robert B. Cialdini (Author). It's available at Amazon or any other bookstore.

They did an experiment:

It's official, the recession is here. A friend of mine owned⁵⁴ a small photo studio. He lived upstairs, a nice little space in town, in a good neighborhood. He operated a portrait and children's portrait photo studio. He occasionally did weddings, but his specialty was portraits.

He operated the photo business from his credit cards. He had 3 credit cards with a very large credit on them. He always carried a balance, but he always paid more than the minimum payment. 2 weeks ago, he received a phone call⁵⁵ from 2 banks telling him that his credit available on his credit cards was significantly reduced to less than his current balance. He only had 7 days to pay the difference between his balance and the new lower credit available on his cards.

All businesses have debt! Even the most highly profitable business such as Cisco and Microsoft have billion of dollars in debt. Only dilettantes⁵⁶ do not to have debt.

Debt, in itself, is not bad. Debt allows you to raise cash for specific projects, for operating,...

Groupies and the D300s

On 30-Jul-2009, Nikon announced the successor to their very successful D300, the Nikon D300s and... Nothing. Last year, Nikon released the D90 and every single photography blog, website... was saying how great the Nikon D90 was, sight unseen, without trying it or without taking any photo. I wrote an article about the Groupies and the D90. There was much more press and blogger coverage for the Nikon D5000 that was announced in April 2009 at the bottom of the recession.

Why?

I went to this beautiful house, on Wolfe St, if you know Vancouver, BC, to do some portraits. This was a rainy day. The living room was huge with this amazing window, ideal for portraits. The combination of the rainy day, the window and the sheer curtain, perfect. I was drooling, I could already taste the $$$ for the huge hanging print.

I had the window, my reflector... Everything perfect, I started the photo shoot. Then... this old dragon appeared, 4 feet 5⁵⁷ ranting and raving.

He's a Thief

I regularly go to networking events:

1. It gets me out of the house.

Horizontal or Vertical

I always keyword my photos with either the HORIZONTAL keyword or the VERTICAL keyword. I just did an analysis of my sales and 64% are verticals, but 78% of my photos are horizontals. Ooops!

I need to:

1. Do you bill by the hour?
2. What do you include in your hourly rate?

Whenever I receive a phone call⁵⁸ I always answer:

Florida based photo agency http://prphotos.com is giving 50% commissions to their photographers! Great, that's a decent commission. But a commission of what? They charge LESS THAN A PENNY PER PHOTO.

Check: Rates

Recently a regular client tried to low-ball me. Mattie knew my rates, but she asked if I would consider going lower. Of course it would only happen once. Their budget is quite tight... Immediately, 2 things came to my mind:

1. If I give them a lower price, they would ask for it again.
2. Are they really having a tough time or is she trying to squeeze me?

You receive a phone for a photo shoot, they ask you for a quote. How may quotes do you give? One or two?

I always give 3 quotes, like Goldilocks:

How Much to Charge?

When somebody turns professional, one of the first question is: “How much to charge?” There are basically 3 different ways:

1. Time based pricing

I work for a living making photos⁵⁹. My specialties were construction photography⁶⁰ and events⁶¹. A week ago, somebody called me to photograph a wedding. I don't do weddings, I had the choice of:

1. Sorry, we don't do weddings and hang up the phone.
2. Sorry, we don't do weddings. On the other hand, Martha specializes in weddings, her number is:... Oh by the way, when you call her, could you please mention that I gave you her name and number, that'd be appreciated.

How Often Should You Promote?

This year alone there will be at least a thousand new titles about photography and there will be approximately half a dozen new books on the photography business. Since the start of the new millennium, there has been only been 45 new books on the business of photography. I will have to say that the very best is: "Successful Self-Promotion for Photographers" from Elyse Weissberg. I already wrote about "Successful Self-Promotion for Photographers" in my article: Getting The Appointment

I'd like to quote another anecdote from the "Successful Self-Promotion for Photographers" book.

How to become an excellent photographer in a week

Scott Kelby, the Scott Kelby of the media/publishing empire that includes the NAPP and wrote 50+ books, must have a very good word-processor. When people see my photos, they say that I must have a good camera, so Scott Kelby must have a very good word-processor and type real fast. And on top of his numerous activities he writes a daily blog @ Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider.

How To Charge Full Price

If you think the photography is a cut throat business, let me introduce you to a really cut throat business. The sneaker's⁶² business is a cut throat business. Sneakers Runners are being routinely discounted 30% to 60%. Who cares were you bought your runners? As long as you have your Nike, your Addidas, your … Most people will go to the standard stores that are everyday 30% off, and some items are 50% off or 60% off.

There's a company in Canada that's doing very well, selling runners and running clothes at full price. They rarely have discounts, and they are doing well. It's the Running Room. They are mostly in Canada, but they also have a few stores in the US.

How To Make $1,000 A Week In Your Spare Time From Your Photography

I regularly see these ads:

• Make $1,000 A Week In Your Spare Time From Your Photography

This week, I was at a supplier buy, spending "mucho dinaros" i.e.: $$$. That place is a large warehouse, divided in 2 separate stores. The front, for the retail/"amateurs", including photo paper, camera bags... at the back for the "professionals", lighting and other specialized equipments. Both stores are owned by the same guy. Usually, when I buy more than a thousand dollars, I get between 10% to 15% discount depending on the items. On Tuesday, I wanted to buy over $1100 between the 2 stores, so I asked for my "usual discount" and was told:

In the mid-90s, in the business world and the computer world, the buzz word was CRM.

How To Say No

I received a phone call for what would have been an important photo shoot. During the conversation, Sheila⁶⁴ mentioned that she already spoke to 2 other photographers. She was trying to get the 3 of us to bid against each other. As I was asking questions about her requirements for the photo shoot, she mentioned that "another photographer" was going to do it for $3,250 less than my price. Was it true? or not? It was clear that was around what she was willing to pay.

I couldn't do it for that price; I would have lost money on this project. At this point, I knew that it was time to bail out.

How to Start as a Pro?

There are 3 ways of becoming a pro.

1. You are the lucky one. Somebody asks you to take their photos. Usually, it's a family or a friend. Or somebody asks you to sell them a photo you took for … Those photographers are the lucky one, and shouldn't be professional photographers. Photographers never become rich and since they are the lucky one, they should use their luck on winning the Lotto.

I couldn't resist. It's so true, not just for photographers but also for small businesses, computer consultants...

How's Business?⁶⁵

I Am A Purist

The other day, I met this photographer who shall remain anonymous because... Very nice black and white panoramic landscapes, he makes a good living selling prints. Within 2 minutes of our conversation:

Three of the most useful words. "I am sure" will be your best friend when you are negotiating prices for a photo assignment or for stock photos:

1. I am sure you know that… — Will transform your argument into a fact.
2. I am sure you understand… — Will force the other party to agree with you.

I don't really like it.

I had lunch with Dany and we talked. You know the usual: “how's business”, “how's the kids”, “do you still work with…” About halfway through the lunch, Dany pulled a printout. It's was an email from a customer and here's just the interesting part.

This week, I got a phone call from "Jane" if I could photograph an office move. So I started to ask some questions:

1. When will the office move be?
2. How big is the office to be moved?

What? Pay more taxes? I must be gone mad, be drunk or been smoking those funny cigarettes! No, first let me explain. My company's year end was 31-Dec-2007, and in Canada, where I live, I had to file the company's income tax by 30-Jun-2008. So, I finished the accounting for 2007, and filed my income tax. I made a profit for the third year in a row. I made a profit after all the expenses, after the overhead and even after my tiny salary.

So back to: why do I want to pay more taxes? Let's look at it means. In Canada, income tax is a progressive income tax, meaning, the more profit you make, the more tax you will pay.

This morning I received a call from a web designer who wants me to make some photos for one of his client. I don't really know him, I just know of him through a common acquaintance. Right now, 7 photos for the end of next week, plus the possibility of more photos later⁶⁶. We start to discuss design, format... no problem, yes, yes... Then I start talking money, budget, the amounts sound reasonable. I can make these photos and still make an almost decent profit, and finally I say:

I don't know about you, but there are days when I run out of ideas. What should I write about? What should I take photos about? Sometimes, actually too often, I draw a blank, zero new idea. Google to the rescue! Every year, Google posts a summary of what people did search during the year.

Google Zeitgeist

Idiot at the Helm

AP, Associated Press, is a co-op owned by over 1500 newspapers. They have 240 offices around the world with local reporters to “gather” the news. AP has many problems of late on deciding and implementing an Internet strategy. Lately, they have often “stolen” news from the local news. But that's OK: “we are only reporting the news.”

When Google shows the headlines, the AP claims “It's theft and we should be compensated”. If you read the news headlines at the newsstand, should you pay for the newspaper? Should I get paid for having to look at their advertising?

All photographers [like everybody else] want to raise their income. There are two basic ways:

1. Work longer hours
2. Raise your rates

All photographers [like everybody else] want to raise their income. There are two basic ways:

1. Work longer hours
2. Raise your rates

The famous industry standards! Industry standards are great to justify pretty much anything you want or feel like...

and when you combine the "industry standards" with I am sure you get:

Most of the time, I measure my effort by the number of hours. I only measure my effort by the output one the 10th of the month, when I fill my provincial sales tax form to remit the tax collected.

My input is my labour and my outputs are the sales figures. I have come to realize that there is very little connection between my input — my hours and my output — my photos and my sales.

Inventory

Photography is a service industry, so what's that have to do with inventory? I don't any about everybody else, but I don't resell any accessory or supplies. I am still in the business of managing my inventory, and no I am not talking about photographing your household or business property for insurance purposes.

What's my inventory? Photos, be they digital or print. If I manage my inventory properly, I make a profit. If I don't manage my inventory properly, I lose money. Inventory has to be tracked and found, that why I catalog, use meaningfully filenames and use keywords and track what sells.

Inventory Turnover

Contrarily to what most people think, restaurants do not make money on the meals or even the liquor but on the "table turnover". The higher the table turnover, the more profitable the restaurant is. What's the table turnover? It’s how many times can they get new customers to a table on the same night. Their inventories are the tables.

Grocery stores have an inventory, the food. What do they make their profit on? Surprise, surprise: not on selling the food but on the concept of inventory turnover. If you do stock photography, photos are your inventory.

A customer got her photos, you get paid. That's the end of the story? No, not really, a month after you have cashed the cheque, you receive a letter from the customer complaining that the photos are not what she expected. The pictures were too artistic, the mole on her cheek still shows on the picture, the hairs on the children where not straight...

You reply to her letter with a phone call, that:

1. We discussed the look of the photos before the sitting session.

Is The Sky Falling?

If you follow the photography business news, the sky is falling:

• All staff photographers have been laid off. Every week, a media organization is laying off their staff photographers.

Is This A Good Workshop?

I just had coffee with Jane, an “almost” friend. We talk regularly but we're not really friends. Jane took photography as a hobby last year. She wants to improve so she decided that in 2010, she will take a couple of workshops and asked for my advice. So she paid for my coffee and muffin. There's no free advice…

Jane brought the flyer with her. I won't name the company since they are quite big in Vancouver. I know of them, but I haven't taken any workshop there. Here are some of their programs:

What do you mean: is my camera approved? I went to the store bought it with some lenses, I paid for it. Now I need a license? No, you don't need a license⁶⁷, but...

If you want to sell photos to stock agencies like Getty, your camera needs to be among the cameras that Getty has approved:

How to present alternatives to a "could be a customer" is extremely important. It will make the difference to:

• The conversion from a "could be customer" to an actual customer
• The bottom line

John Lund's interview with Charlie Holland

John Lund has been involved in stock photography for decades, centuries, even millenniums, so far 2 millenniums. His blog is: John Lund. He recently did an interview with Charlie Holland, she was the Director Of Photography at Getty Images, dated: Sunday November 8, 2009.

A point of view is from the other side of the glass. She was the buyer. Please note that the emphasis is mine.

Copyrights are the lifeblood of photographers. The basic rule is that if you are not an employee and take a picture, then you own the copyright, if not it's your employer that own the copyright.

The US copyrights laws are being rewritten, and it affect all of all⁶⁸. One of the best resource is: Keep Your Copyrights from legal academics at Columbia Law School, one of the most prestigious US law school.

Keeping Your Eyes On The Ball

My computer was slow, especially my Internet access. I was getting pissed off at my ISP, Telus. Everything was so slow, that I was considering switching to another Internet Service Provider. Last Tuesday, I had to use my laptop at home, which is very unusual, plugged it in and the Internet blindingly fast. What? Obviously something was wrong with my desktop. I started looking into it. The problem was with the networking card and the networking cable.

Since I was already at it and had to replace the networking card, I decided to reinstall the operating system… First the backup, then replace everything and start reinstalling… When everything was finished, cleaned and ready, it took a full day and half.

Keeping your eyes on the ball - Part 2

I have already written about keeping your eyes on the ball in many articles, especially with “Keeping your eyes on the ball”. Why am I bringing this subject again? Everybody knows that you should keep your eyes on the ball. So why again today? Because we have one of the “best” example of what happens when you don't keep your eyes on the ball.

President Obama. He has very important things that he needs to concentrate on. He doesn't seem to get it. This morning it was the Olympics for Chicago, the afternoon he “deals” with Afghanistan and the evening with health care.

Lawyers & Contracts

Every time I take a photo, every time I make a photo, I deal in intellectual property, IP. When I make the photo of somebody, there is often a model release involved. When I make photos of … there are often copyrights involved. When photographers sell their photos in one form or another, from print to digital, there's usually a contract involved. The contract is either from the buyer or from the seller. Large organizations usually have a contract ready for the photographers, and it's usually a take it or leave it. Most of the times, it involves you, the photographer, being liable for their misuses or any other screwup with your photos.

As a photographer selling “retail” to individual customers, I usually get the customer to agree to my contract where I try to keep all my rights, limit my liabilities…

Yahoo is currently⁶⁹ laying off thousands of employees. How do you do layoffs? Yahoos has come with top secret guidelines, that are published in Valley Wag and Alley Insider.

Here is the one I really like, because it's useful to us the photographers. We rarely lay off employees, but many of my customers are laying off their employees, not fun. This applies to me to:

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Lemmings At Work: Feb 2009

The lemmings are at work on the web. One person notice something, then everybody else repeats the same thing. The point of view is the same, they just reword blah, blah, blah... Somebody, on 15-Feb-2009, suddenly noticed that Facebook grabs all of your rights for anything that you post on their website! Duh! Facebook's policy has always been there, the current wording is at: Facebook: Terms Of Use. BTW, the terms of use change on regular basis.

People noticed the copyrights grabs from Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg had the disclaimer on his Facebook page. After the brouhaha, Facebook returned to the previous terms of use, but the effect is the same, Facebook owns all the photos, messages posted on Facebook and can resell them for whatever use they want.

When I negotiate rights or prices, I always:

1. Listen
2. Slow down the negotiation

Liability Insurance

What's that got to do with me? You are walking down the street, photographing a brand new fire hydrant; somebody turns around, looks at you taking your photos, falls on the street and gets hit by a car. You didn't touch the person, you didn't push the person or you didn't even take a photo of that person. You still get sued by the insurance company of the driver and by the person injured⁷⁰, because:

1. You are a photographer.

The SEC⁷¹ which regulates the US stocks markets and all companies traded on any company publicly traded in the US, including the OTC⁷², is proposing that:

Companies should be liable for content linked from the company's website as explained in this 47 pages PDF document from the SEC's website.

Today's Saturday the 24th of January 2009 9:15am. Many bloggers have spread the latest rumor: Adobe has released Lightroom 2.3. The current version as of today is: Lightroom 2.2. Don't believe these people. They either don't know what they are talking about or didn't their job properly. Adobe has NOT released Lightroom 2.3. What Adobe released yesterday was Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate. See: Lightroom Journal by Tom Hogarty from Adobe in the 23-Jan-2009 entry.

What's the difference between releasing the Lightroom 2.3 vs. Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate?

I am in the process of diversifying my business. One of the items that I am looking at is: Limited Print Edition. So I started to look into it, and what's a Limited Printed Edition? Many photographers on the web show Limited Print Edition with some 250 prints, some 100 prints and some 50 prints.

So I started to investigate: There is an actual definition of the Limited Print Edition: Limited Print Edition was defined in Basle, Switzerland in 1896 at the convention that defined the international copyright laws.

Long Term Relationship

I hate it. I really hate that expression. When I hear this expression, I know that it's time to get my gun, my dog, the beef jerky and run for the hills. They are trying to “screw” me.

I just had this conversation this afternoon. They want the photos, they want them hi-res, they want to publish them and they want the copyrights.

How long can you loose money being a photographer before calling it quit?

Most photographers do not charge enough to cover their expenses. The expenses range from cameras, lighting equipment to computers, transportation... In Canada, CRA⁷³ aka the income tax police has made the decision for you:

You can only operate a business for 3 years, if you are loosing money! After 3 years, the business must start to turn a profit or break-even. If the business does not at least break even, it's not a "real business" ⁷⁴. CRA will reclassify your photo business as a hobby. Converting your business to a hobby means that CRA will disallow all of your expenses and reassess retroactively your taxes, penalties...

Lost Photos

Wednesday morning, 7:15am, I just came back from walking my dog, and got a panicked phone call from "Hank"⁷⁵. He can't find the CF⁷⁶ cards from last night's reception. We were both at the reception and he was the photographer, I was just a simple guest. Luckily it wasn't me.

Lots of Visitors, Low Sales

I get a lot of emails, over a thousand emails per day. The majority is spam, and I have an extremely effective anti-spam system that cuts out at least 99% of the spam. But from time to time, I receive emails asking for help. Here's a recent one from Kathy:

Lottery

Every couple of years, I decide that I should try my luck at the lottery, and I buy a ticket. I always buy the cheapest lottery ticket. I never win, except once where I spent $2.50 for my ticket and I won! I was elated, amazed, finally I won. I went to cash it in, you know how much I won? $1. Yep, one dollar. I spend two dollars and fifty cents to win a dollar.

Canada has 33 million people. The government lotteries run on Wednesday and on Saturdays. The government sells around 25 million tickets on the Wednesday lotteries and around 45 million lottery tickets on the Saturdays, and that's if the big prize is under $10 million. Over the $10 million mark, they almost double the number of lottery tickets sold. Some lucky dog has to win. 1 chance in 14 million⁷⁷? Even a blind squirrel finds acorns now and then.

I just had a phone call from somebody wanting to "dicker" with my prices. If I lowered my prices, he would recommend me to his friends. After a few minutes, I basically ended up saying:

Luxurious Wedding Photographer

Here's another great one from Photographer's Math. It's hard to resist and I'm too weak to even try.

Attach:luxurious-wedding-photographer.jpg Δ|Luxurious Wedding Photographer

Magazines & Newspapers Going Out of Business

Conde Nast is closing some of their magazines, Time Inc. is closing publications and laying off people by the thousands. Everybody's blaming the Internet. The Internet is killing all the newspapers and the magazines. There are plenty of websites that keep track of which publications are dying. The 2 big ones are:

• Magazine Death Pool

Make Your Own Luck

Stock photography is a numbers' game. The more photos you have in stock libraries, the better your luck. Or is it?

Meeting Canceled

For the 3rd time in a row, I just had a meeting canceled and rescheduled. This is not a new customer, it's one of my regular, and I realize that it's August, vacation time, but now it's been already 2½ month and we are talking end of August for the next meeting.

What's the problem? In the spring, the owner wanted some updates for their brochures. We just need to have a meeting with the owner, the general manager and the sales manager to discuss the existing brochure and how to improve it. No problem. The spring turns into summer and now the owner is semi-retired. I'm not sure if this is the sales manager or the general manager that's afraid of changing anything, rocking the boat, now that John is semi-retired but it's delay after delay and emails after emails.

Money Back Guarantees

Seven weeks ago, GM, yes that one the bankrupt trying to get revived, announced in North America, Canada and the US a 60 days money back guarantee on Chevrolets⁷⁸, Cadillacs and Buicks. I don't know if they have the same program in other countries. You can drive the car, the SUV or the cross-over for 60 days and up to 4000 miles or 6400 kilometers.

What large companies do when they offer an expensive guarantee such as money back guarantee on expensive items or good weather guarantee? They buy insurance from an insurance company, and it's cheaper than I thought.

This weekend, I met a "wealthy" photographer! He makes a few hundred thousands of dollars per year in stock photography, seminars and workshops. He is well off, drives a Lexus, but he's no Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. He will never be rich. Why is he so successful, because:

Moo Business Cards

Last week I ordered 50 Moo business cards. By the time the shipping was included it was $30. $30 for 50 cards, that's $0.60 per business card. Wow, expensive. Kind of.

The moo cards allow you to upload photos, as many photos as you want, up to the total number of business cards. This means custom business cards. I went to my local printer, he can't do that, but he could farm it out and it would cost me around $8 per card! Now 60 cents per card is not that expensive.

Whenever I need to negotiate with a "soon to be customer" (I hope she will become a customer) and she asks for a discount or for... I don't like to give discounts. So usually, I come up with something else, but it's never the price she wanted. If this is not handled properly, she will go somewhere else. I usually present my alternative as:

Naivety

I am amazed at people's naivety when it comes to the Internet! Somehow people think that they can control what's on the Internet. The latest example is Obama⁷⁹. The Obama team has removed many policies⁸⁰ from their website see: Agenda vanishes from Obama's transition website as reported by CNet.

• Did you put in foot in your mouth on your photo blog⁸¹? and now wish to retract it?

The New Year is coming soon, meaning that the existing year is ending (duh!). It's a good time to pause and reassess the situation. For me, as a photographer, many things have changed this year. I have 2 groups of customers:

1. Corporate
2. Private

On December 1st, 2008, Nikon announced that it would release a full frame camera 24.5 megapixels. Everybody was waiting, getting ready to praise Nikon for finally having the highest pixels resolution in the 35mm format⁸², then things unraveled. Actually things started to unravel for Nikon the week before when someone from Nikon Germany leaked the Nikon D3x specs 4 days before the official release. Then everybody, and their dogs, started to pan Nikon for daring to charge US$ 8 000. Many people even called for a boycott of Nikon until they lower their prices, including Ken Rockwell dated: 7-Feb-2009.

Fast forward a month later, and now I'm dreaming awake, drooling and tripping over my own tongue over it. This is not for "pleasure" but for business. So now here are the questions:

No Free Lunch

In 1984, the first Hackers Conference was held in Marin County, California. In 1984, being a hacker was complimentary⁸³. Apple just produced the first MacIntosh. It wasn't a Mac yet, it was a MacIntosh, black and while only. IBM just introduced the first IBM PC, 64K of RAM and 2 floppies. At the time, we didn't talk Gigs or even Megs but only Kilobytes.

At that conference, there was an argument between Steve Wozniak⁸⁴ and Steward Brand⁸⁵. The argument was about computers, data and programs, but it's affecting us, photographers, every day, especially the professional photographers. Brand's remarks were transcribed in 1985.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Summer is here, times are slow, so I use this time to see friends, acquaintances, renew networks. This week I had coffee with Georges, it's a French Georges with an s. He recently did a favour to a friend, Tracy, by offering her to do a photo shoot for free. Tracy needed some samples for her portfolio, times were slow, and she's a very good friend. Did I say that the photo shoot was free? The photo shoot went well and Tracy was very happy with the photos, she paid the actual cost of the 3 prints for her book.

Last week, George got a phone call from Tracy and she was ecstatic. When she was doing rounds, showing a portfolio, a local publication wanted to use one of her photo for their calendar, and they will need the raw file.

Non Compete Agreements

In Trust Me, I wrote about the friend of a friend who wanted me to participate/invest in his new Internet venture, mostly the technical end. The first thing he did, was ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. I agreed and signed, no question asked. I did read the non-compete agreement before signing, and still I didn't ask any question about it. Why?

This non-compete agreement was worthless and not worth the attorney fees he paid. I'm supposed not to compete with his idea for a full year. The problem is that you can't patent or copyright ideas. You can only patent processes, and copyright finished goods, such as photos, writings. I could implement their idea for 0, yes zero, dollar with open-source software.

Not Even In The League

Everybody, and their dog, thinks that a camera's all they need to get into the business of photography. On average, I spend about $6000 Canadian per year on equipment: that's camera updates, accessories, computers, software upgrades… I'm chicken feed, a small potato. Rod Mar wrote, on the PhotoShelter Blog, an article about doing Football photography. That's American Football for everybody else, because what the North American are calling soccer is football for everybody else in the world⁸⁶.

It's a very interesting article, but at the end of the article Rod Mar list his equipment:

Obama's Coronation

Obama has been sworn in, he's now President #44 of the United States. The royal coronation⁸⁷ had the same worldwide coverage as the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the final of the FIFA soccer world cup final or the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana.

What's that got to do with the business of photography? Apart from the photo coverage of the ceremonies, the photo coverage of the people in Washington DC, the photo coverage of the people watching the sworn-in ceremony around the world. Obama did an outstanding sell job. What did he sell? He sold hope⁸⁸. Hope is something that is in very short supply and it's something that everybody wants. Hope is an attitude. Hope makes everything else better.

The other week, I was at a nice reception as a "plain" guest. We were all well dress, no tuxedo but half of the people suits and the other half with nice casuals. There was a photographer with 2 Canon 1D Mk3 cameras with an assistant holding a wireless flash with a small Lumiquest softbox. Too bad it wasn't me doing the reception. The photographer was dressed in jeans with a smart-ass t-shirt and runners.

He was in everybody's face, interrupting people, rearranging everybody by pushing and shoving people with his assistant. Worst of all, this guy was a very loud and obnoxious. Every third word was either:

In the 1970s, there was a TV show called Colombo, a Los Angeles police inspector in the homicide section. He would keep asking question and whenever he was just about to leave, by the door, he would say:

Old Computers, Old Software

One of my customers has a collection of almost 1 million photos of birds! They have been doing it since the late 1970s. First as film based, then finally digitally based. The collection started to grow into the tens of thousands in the late 1980s, they got a database "Q&A" that has been discontinued in the mid 1990s.

They scanned and digitized their photos with bird names, Latin names, tags... and placed it all in that database.

What if you only had one customer? Basically you are an employee without a regular paycheck. In my country, Canada, the Income Tax people⁸⁹ will deem you to be an employee⁹⁰ and therefore your employer has to collect taxes, unemployment and all the other payroll deductions.

So if you had only one customer?

Outsourcing is a word used as a threat in the computer industry. We will outsource your whole department to India, China, and Shri-Lanka... In the photographic world, outsourcing has existed "forever" or more commonly known as freelance.

Most photographers outsource large section of their businesses:

The dreaded word: overhead. What is overhead?

Photography can be either a business or a hobby. If you are reading this website, it's because you are already operating a photographic business or want to become a photographic business. All businesses have customers.

To put more simply: No customer = No business. If you have customers, you will need to charge for your photos.

There are many scams that target photographers because photographers are an easy prey⁹¹. This scam involves the offer of doing an overseas photo shoot, usually a very exotic location in the Caribbean islands, Africa , or even Asia. To work overseas, you need to get a shoot permit, just like any foreign photographers needs a photo shoot permit to work professionally in your country. These permits can be expensive between the administration fees, the lawyers fees, and the baksheesh⁹² to grease the wheels to make sure that the permit is ready in time...

Scam

1. Somebody phones you: They saw your photos on PhotoServe or Blackbook or you were recommended by a friend.

Paparazzi: photographers that take candid photos of celebrities. They usually do it through following, ambushing, and stalking the celebrity. Many celebrities share their schedules with the paparazzi so they can raise their profile in the media.

There various surveys, but these surveys are from photographers that volunteer for these surveys. The average income of a paparazzi is around $100,000 per year with the possibility of getting the shot that will make them a million dollar. Good paparazzi earn around $250,000 per year with the possibility of getting the shot that will make them a million dollar.

Confession time: I am a news junkie. I used to read as many as 14 newspapers, now I read them online.

The difference between a journalist and a writer, is that the journalist does not state his own opinion, s/he quotes somebody's else opinion⁹³. One of the most often quoted sentence:

I am going nuts! Between work, the blog, the family, and sick relatives, I am going nuts. SWMBO⁹⁴ aka "The Boss" says that I have always been that way. It's been a while that I have had a personal pet project. My requirements are:

1. It must be local, so I can do it on my own time. I can't go away for 6 month and loose my current customers.
2. The project's time line: some results within 6 month. This does not mean that the personal project can only be 6 month, but at the end of the 6 month, I will reevaluate if I still want to be committed to it.

Photo Contracts

I'm in the process of rewriting my contractS. Please note that I am 100% unqualified to give legal advice. I'm no lawyer. I'm not even studying to become a lawyer, so before taking what I say in consideration, ask the following questions:

1. Does your photo contract make sense?

Photo Ideas

Traveling to an "exotic" location? What do you need to photograph? What should you photograph? What's out there? And much more importantly, what's missing? What can you differently?

1. Go to iStock

Today's Monday 16-May-2009. I'm writing this article now, and will publish it soon. So what's special about this Monday? In Canada, it's a statutory holiday, it's Victoria day, in remembrance of Queen Victoria. One of my neighbor had a leak, not a leak but a geyser. I had to help to find and close her water main. Edith had to call a plumber to repair the water pipe while we helped with the soaking up some of the water. Edith asked if I knew a good plumber, I did, but he was away for the weekend. So Edith called the "big plumbers" from the yellow pages.

1. The first one charged $275 per hour with a minimum of 2 hours.
2. The second one charged only $250 for the first 1/2 hour, then $250 per hour.

Photographers and Gloves

I live in Vancouver, Canada. Canada's the second coldest country in the world after Mongolia. Vancouver's a city on the West Coast, next to the Pacific Ocean. It can get cold, by my standards. Today's the high was -2°C, the low will be -7°C, that's 19°F to 28°F. The people in Thompson, where today's high is -40°C or -40°F, laugh at us. But it's cold. When trying to take photos outside, without proper gloves, you can quickly get frostbite. Frostbite is when the end of your fingers freeze, they go black and if left long enough, they have to be cut off.

There are a couple of companies that make gloves for photographers and the cold, but I haven't found them to work for me. So I have come up with my own solution, borrowed from people that have to work with their hand outside in the cold.

Everyday, I hear on the news that a whole bunch of workers are being laid-off. GM will lay-off another 24,000 layoffs as part of its bankruptcy. Many photographers are feeling the pinch of the recession, but very few hare being laid-off. Why? Because photographers as employees have been an endangered species since the late 90s. In the eighties, 25 years ago, I knew of at least a couple dozen of full-time photographers in the lower mainland⁹⁵ receiving a monthly salary. Today, I only know of 2 salaried full-time photographers, and 1 will either loose his job or quit this year.

Almost all professional photographers are self-employed, and we aren't receiving any bailout. I want my money! I want my bailout, but... In spite of the recession, and the contracting of the economy, the photographic requirements are expanding. People are still getting married, families are getting babies, kids are still graduating from schools and they still want their photos to remember these events. Businesses are still advertising, flyers are still being printed, billboards are still being used... In spite of the recession, photo usage is significantly higher, whatever it's source.

These forums are a very good source of information and interaction with other photographers than can answer your questions:

• Advertising Photographers of America
• APAnet Professional photographer business forum

If you are a professional photographer, you must have a website. No if, then or but. You need to have a website. You may not sell photos or prints from your website, actually most unlikely, but you need to have a presence. Your existing customers, your potential customers will go and see your website.

If you don't have a website, your customers and potential customers will be asking themselves why. Just like if you don't have a business card, why don't you have one?. Is this guy or gal a "fly by night" photographer?

Every year Photo District News does a survey of wedding photographers. The 2009 survey is at: PDN's 2009 Photography Wedding Business Survey Results. It does yield some interesting results that I think apply to most "retail" photography: weddings, portraits, children...

1. Fewer bookings with a 6.5 percent drop in wedding photography income with a few less hours per week on wedding photography work.
2. Wedding photographers who offer a la carte services have raised their prices by 1½%. The wedding photographers who offer packages have raised their prices by 3%. The most interesting part of it is:

Photos: Facebook Size

Many people want to display photos on their blog, on the the Internet. As a customer, the user of the photo, I want the photo to biggest size possible. As a photographer, the producer of the photo and the seller of the photo, I want the photo to be as small as possible.

As a professional photographer, I need to show photos on my websites. As a professional photographer, I don't want them stolen by somebody for their own website without me getting paid.

Adobe claims that Photoshop is the single most pirated software. Microsoft claims that it's Windows and Office, mostly from reseller preloading it on the computers. Software piracy is big business. Software piracy is the equivalent the photographer's copyright infringement.

Companies have lot to do the piracy of their software! Even now with the stronger dollar against the UK Sterling Pound, it still cheaper to fly to New York and stay a couple of nights in New York⁹⁶, than buying Photoshop in London, UK.

The other day, a radio station interviewed Sharman King about books and book business. Sharman King owns a chain of 7 bookstores, the Book Warehouse in Vancouver, BC and around Vancouver.

Pissing Match

Photography is the intersection of technology and art. Painting started on the walls of caves. Music started with the voice. Sculpture with made with stones. All these arts do not need technology. Photography does. We need some kind of media to record and some kind of optics to direct the light. So there is no photo without technology.

There are millions of forums on the Internet, there are a few big forums that are dedicated to photography, the biggest ones are:

I am on one of those credit card reward program that is tied to an airline company. To be part of it, I had to give them my name, my address, my email, my first-born, my dog and my dog. So every month, they send me a promo email. Part of that email is a statement of how many points I have. According to the email, I am missing over 5,000 points!

At the top of that email, it says:

We all have policies for customers. Do they actually make sense? When was the last time you checked? Even some of the biggest names don't even know what they are doing.

Dilbert.com is one of busiest website on the Internet, it is ranked in the top 5,000 by :Alexa. But somebody did not think about it's term of use:

I don't receive postcards any more. I use to, you know the cheesy postcard, the photo of a local landmark shot at 2 in the afternoon, but nobody sends me those postcards anymore. My friends email me photos instead.

In the direct mail advertising business, the standard response rate is between 1% to 2%. This means that 98% to 99% of these letters end up in the recycling box. And if you are like me, the vast majority of them don't even get opened before being tossed in the recycling box. Instead of the closed envelope that needs to be opened, you can use a postcard. The person receiving the postcard does not need to open it. She MUST look either at the front or the back. It's not possible to discard it without actually reading it⁹⁷. This gives you a much higher response rate, as high as 7%, but more realistically 3 to 5%.

What's The Price Of A Photo

What's the price of a photo? You can buy photos for $1 on iStockPhoto and use it forever for whatever you want. You can get millions of pictures for free on Flickr. So what's the price of a photo?

Pricing Don't Explain

This is for a corporate magazine or for internal use of a stock photo.

This is for a corporate magazine or for internal use of a stock photo.

This is for a corporate magazine or for internal use of a stock photo.

This is for a corporate magazine or for internal use of a stock photo.

There are some photographers that are extremely successful, some are moderately successful. Some photographers even earn a good living from being a professional photographer. What's the common thread between all of these photographers?

People! How they interact with people. The number one skill to master to become a professional photographer: people skills. Wedding, portraits, fashion, advertising, photo journalist, paparazzi, travel, food⁹⁸, corporate, industrial... all of them require you to deal with people at some point during you job. Note that these times, where you have to interact with people as a photographers, are the critical times to being a professional photographer and earning a living from professional photography.

1. The profit / loss⁹⁹ tells you whether you have made money or not.
2. The cash flow tells you when money comes in and when money goes out.

Profit & Loss

The main goal of a photo business, as a matter of fact all businesses, is to make a profit. It's not me who says so. In Canada, CRA¹⁰⁰ aka the income tax police, has made the decision for me:

You can only operate a photography business, any business, for 3 years, if you are loosing money! After 3 years, the business must start to turn a profit or break-even. If the business does not at least break even, then it's not a "real business"¹⁰¹. CRA will reclassify your photo business as a hobby. Converting your business to a hobby means that CRA will disallow all of your expenses and reassess retroactively your taxes and penalties…

What's a proofsheet? It's usually an 8x10 print with 8, 12 or 16 photos. Some photographers, that don't want to earn a good living, use them to show their clients¹⁰² their photos to select which photo they want printed as an 8x10, 11x14 print or even as a 16x20 print.

It doesn't work! A non professional can't imagine what a 11x14 print will look like from a 2x3" photo on a proofsheet. If you want to sell 11x14 prints, show them 11x14 prints, at least one. If you want to sell 16x20 prints, show them 16x20 prints. It doesn't have to be their¹⁰³ photos, but show them what it would look like. How do you expect somebody to see a 2x3" photo and know what it will look as a 16x20" print?

There are many resources on the Internet to help you set your prices. You should use them as guides, they are not cast in stone.

Lists

• National Union of Journalists Freelance

I just met with a friend of a friend. The project will take about 2 weeks with 3 days for the photo shoot. We met, we spoke, I think that I understand what she needs, I emailed the bid and now what? Do you just sit tight and wait for their answer? I can't!

1. I have to pay the mortgage.
2. I have to feed the dog.

Questions for 2010

This is already January 2010. Photography is a tough business, prices are going down, competition is growing and the market is expanding significantly. To be ready to get a good piece of the pie, here are 3 questions that will shape your year in the business of photography.

1. What are you promising?

• Scalped tickets at the concert cost more than tickets ordered month ago.
• Airport food is so not only more expensive than any other place in town and the quality is...
• Out of town towing is always very expensive.

The recession is biting, and the photography business is hurting. Photographers are not immune to the general economics. "The Boss", aka SWMO¹⁰⁴ is looking to buy new appliances, she walks out of the store if she can't even get a 20% discount! And I'm looking at raising my prices.

The only purpose of cutting prices is to be cheaper than the competitor to grab their customers. So let's make a leading promotion of $25 for the portrait session to grab market share. The $25 portrait session will include:

Every photo business must have customers, or it's not a business¹⁰⁵. To grow, you will either have to sell more to those existing photo customers or find brand new customers. The recession will make it easier to grow. Why? Because many photographers will not stick around, and more people will be asking their brother-in-law to take their photos, and will have been severely disappointed.

• How easy is it to contact your existing customers?
• How easy is it to get referrals from your existing customers?

Read The Darn Contract

I used to do construction photography. I had a few customers. I was well paid and had very little competition. That was before the recession. All of my customers either closed, went bankrupt, or are doing nothing at all. Last week, I got a phone call from Cherryl. Cherryl used to work at a large firm, that owns a big patch of land. That firm was a customer and was developing the land by building offices/high tech buildings as needed.

Now Cherryl works at another construction company. That construction company is very special, it's still working and building 2 towers. My usual terms are 33% to start, 33% on delivery and the rest usually 30 or 60 days later, but they must pay before they have the right to use the photos. I know Cherryl quite well, but this is a new customer for me, so when they emailed me their contract, I read it carefully. Buried in the contract, on page 3 in the terms, I found:

Everywhere you read or anybody you talk to always say:

Religion

I have known Danny¹⁰⁶ for years, we often bump into each other. He's a good photographer, but business is not what it should be. He always complains about how bad business is, then he always asks, if am too busy, that I send him some customers. I have not. I have recommended a few other photographers but never Danny. Why? Because he wears his religion on his sleeves, he makes everybody uncomfortable with it.

1. I can't remember a conversation where he didn't quote the bible.

Joe M. died last year at the age of 77. I am not here to tell you how good of a man he was, that he was a good father, a very good husband and so on. As a matter of fact, I only knew him professionally. He worked for 27 years for the RCMP¹⁰⁷ as a crime scene photographer.

When he retired, he decided to do a couple dozen of weddings per year to keep him busy and have some extra income. This was a complete "flop", it didn't work, and weddings were so different from working with other cops that...

It's Friday, you have a photo shoot tomorrow and your camera is dead. What are you going to do?

• If you have a backup camera, you do nothing, your almost OK. You can't afford to have the backup camera go on the fritz, but you have some breezing space.
• If you don't have a backup camera¹⁰⁸, because you can't afford to have one. Now what? Quick run to the Best Buy and buy the cheapest camera that is compatible with your lenses?

Reply To Lowball Offer

Whenever I receive an email, I usually respond very quickly. But sometimes, especially when I want to smack the sender and give them a good kick in the ass, I will wait for the next day, so I have time to cool down. Yesterday was one of these days. Here is an extract of the email:

Retouching vs. Enhanced

• Are you saying: "All our photos are retouched with Photoshop."?

Or

• Are you saying: "We use Photoshop to retouch your photos."?

How many pixels do you need? Is more better?

4 megapixels is definitely not enough, 6 megapixels is really on the low side. What about 8 megapixels? Depending on the camera and what you are shooting, 8 mega pixels may be more than enough, especially for portraits, weddings,...

Right now, August 2008, the sweet spot for DSLRs is around 12 mega pixels. This seems to be where the best compromise seems to be. Look at the Nikons D300, D700 and D3, great success technically and even greater commercial successes, Nikon is making a mint.

Returning a Canon 1DsMk3

How many pixels do you need? Is more better?

4 megapixels is definitely not enough, 6 megapixels is really on the low side. What about 8 megapixels? Depending on the camera and what you are shooting, 8 mega pixels may be more than enough, especially for portraits, weddings,...

Returning Phone Calls

Last month I got a call from Junique, never heard off her before, 2 phones and 3 emails later, I got this small but interesting job, photographing her in the South Shore of False Creek in Vancouver, BC.

After the photos were delivered, I was chatting with Junique as why she used my services, since it was not my specialty.

Returning a Canon 1DsMk3

Here is the link to the original entry: Returning a Canon 1DsMk3

Revisiting Returning a Canon 1DsMk3

Here is the link to the original entry: Returning a Canon 1DsMk3

Revisiting the $100 Wedding

Here is the link to the original entry: $100 Wedding

Sitting on the side of a curvy road, take photos of cars and motorcycles as they pass by. Can you believe that not only you can make a full time living but also employ a few more people. This is exactly what Darryl Cannon of Killboy and his blog: Killboy Blog is doing. By the Smoky Mountain National Park between Tennessee and North Carolina, there a famous road, the "Dragon". People travel hundreds and thousands of kilometers to drive the "Dragon". Darryl and his people park their cars on the side of a nice spot and take their photos.

And now for the important question: How do they sell the photos? Their cars have the website name painted in huge on the side. People go to their website to buy prints of their riding. This is nothing new; this was done for decades with river rafting. Except that the photos done, with the river rafting, were done in conjunction with the river rafting company. What attraction exists in your area?

Rolex Watches

What's Rolex watches to do with professional photography? Actually, plenty. We have a lot to learn from Rolex. Rolex sells watches, not just watches, expensive watches and extremely expensive watches for as much as five hundred thousand dollars. Rolex official retailers are reporting good sales. In spite of the worldwide recession, 2008 has been the best year ever for the luxury watch industry, Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, Breitling, Panerai… 2009 looks like another great year of the luxury watch industry.

Rolex sponsors many high-end sports tournaments like yachting and tennis. As a sponsor of Wimbledon Tennis, Allen Brill, President of Rolex Watch, US was attending the men's final when asked:

Many photographers, including me, run their photo businesses from home. It's a lot cheaper than running the business of photographer from an office. What about a studio? That will depend on your needs and your photo business volume. It's not always easy. I have doing it for decades, centuries and millenniums. The main problem is where will you meet your clients?

• In your house?
• At a rented office/photo studio

I work hard. Not only I work hard, but I try my best to keep my photo customers satisfied. Why? Because a satisfied customer = $$$$. A satisfied customer will refer me to their family/friends. It's not a theoretical, it happens. It happens to me on regular basis, a couple of photo jobs with referred customers every 3 month. This means an extra $500 to $2000 every 3 month.

I work hard at keeping my photo customers happy. Since I am already doing the hard work, why not offer them the satisfaction guaranteed? My guarantee is: 110% money back satisfaction guarantee. You are satisfied or not only you get your money back but more. I never had anybody collect on my satisfaction guarantee.

What's a schmexpert you ask? A schmexpert is somebody that is:

1. A schmuck
2. An expert

School of Stock

Every stock photographer always asks the question:

If you are operating a photographic business, you must have clients. It's very simple, No client = No business then you would be operating a photographic hobby. If you want to sell more, there are only 2 solutions and that's it:

1. Sell more to your existing customers.
2. Find new customers while keeping your existing customers¹⁰⁹.

Selling A Commodity

Do you need to lower your price? or do you need to increase your value?

People don't want to pay your prices? Are you delivering enough value for those prices? You are selling a commodity because you do not provide enough value.

Did you know that you can sell your photos on eBay? As of 15-aug-2008, there were only 1891 photo prints on sale, directly from the photographer.

Home -> Buy -> Art -> Direct from the Artist -> Photographs -> Search results: 1,891 matches found. eBay breaks it down by category.

It does not matter what you sell, people will only buy if they have a problem. It does not matter if you are selling photos, coffee, cars or food. Food is easier, people get hungry and need to eat. Coffee is different, it's a luxury, as Starbucks is finding out¹¹⁰, when people realize that they have bigger problems than wanting to buy a "good" coffee.

Everybody's dream is to have Google show their website as #1 when somebody asks for photography and they'll be rich, beyond belief. Now everybody and their dog¹¹¹ claims to be an SEO expert.

Set Your Hourly Rate Where You Really Want It

Setting Prices

How do you set prices? Setting prices is one of the most complicated part of the business of being a photographer. You only have 3 choices:

1. Charge for your time: either on an hourly basis, half day rate, the photo session...

Show Yourself As A Professional

I was at a reception, taking photos of the guests, and suddenly this guy¹¹² turns around with 2 Canon 1DMk3 cameras around the neck, a monster flashes and L lenses: $20,000 hanging around his neck. He had more gear than me¹¹³. I think he said he was the cousin of the master of ceremony, not that I actually listened to him. I'm the "professional", he's the "jerk" who followed me around, and whatever I did, he always said:

Can you shut up? It's actually very hard, but it's a skill worth learning.

A regular customer asked me to return a 8.5 by 11 inch canvas print. She wanted another photo on a 16 by 20 inch canvas print. She asked if I would give her a credit for the smaller one.

Most people are creatures of habit. When we found something that works for us, we keep on doing it. I was speaking last year with Wayne Kaulbach of Skylight Images. He specializes in portraits, high-end portraits, and expensive portraits.

During the conversation, I asked him how he gets new customers:

How narrowly can you slice and dice your photo specialty? Apparently, extremely fine. Have you ever heard of Park City, Utah? I have not, but David Kirkland, a Park City photographer, earns a good living by licensing his stock photos of Park City, Utah.

I do not mean to be impolite or belittle the people of Park City, but living only a few hundred miles from there, I have never heard of Park City, Utah.

Small and Medium Businesses

Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands to do market research. Often they release them to the public. This is what Getty did in the UK for iStockphoto.

Tickbox.Net did the following study in the UK for iStockphoto/Getty and Octopus Communication released the following press release on 12-Jun-2008.

Would you prefer to be smart or be lucky? Personally, I'd rather be lucky than smart. If you are lucky, you can always hire somebody that's smart.

A few decades ago, the previous century, it was the previous millennium, when I came to Canada, I tried to meet with Pat H., a senior managing editor. I spent 6 weeks, trying to get that appointment. After contacting the man who saw the man, who saw the bear, I finally got my appointment. Pinni and I went to the meeting, it was with somebody else! Pat couldn't make it; his wife delivered their second baby just the day before. So we met with Dan S. Dan was a consultant that assisted Pat. We got the job and 2 month later, we were done.

I was looking at a website that offers what looked very interesting workshops. It looked very interesting, so I clicked on the workshop link. Here is what was on the page word for word:

Last month I got this phone call from Diana:

Specialties

Yesterday morning I was downtown, when I bumped into an old friend, actually more of an acquaintance, than a friend. We went to the nearest coffee shop and had coffee with muffin. We started to yak... How's it going? How's business? I'm a good listener, and I let him talk. 30 minutes later, his business was doing very poorly. Eventually he gave me his business card, he specializes in:

1. Database programming

In 2004, the Detroit Big 3 automakers¹¹⁴ more commonly known as the domestics, spent $24 billion¹¹⁵ in advertising in the "mainstream media". The same "mainstream media" has been panning the US cars manufacturers, and swooning over the imports¹¹⁶ and how much better they were. 3 years later, in 2007, the same Big 3 only spent $15 billion dollars in advertising in the "mainstream media". On top of that, newspapers took a $131 million¹¹⁷ hit in the first quarter of 2008 as dealers have pulled back on full and half-page ads because of slow sales and limited cash flow.

And now, you have the mainstream media loosing money left, right and center, laying off staff¹¹⁸, including photographers.

The largest European photo magazine is Chasseur d'Image¹¹⁹, a French photo magazine. The January 2009 issue had a very interesting article on one of most misunderstood critter, the squirrel. Many people see them as cute and friendly, other see them as pests. It was not a one pager on squirrels like in Pop Photo magazine, but a full 10 pages on how to make photos of squirrels: the good, the bad and the ugly...

Squirrels are everywhere, in almost every park, people feed them, and people take photos of the squirrels eating in your palm.

I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Vancouver is fairly large city with 2 million people including the suburbs¹²⁰. In 2010, Vancouver will be hosting the Winter Olympics. Over 1200 photography businesses are registered in the Lower Mainland. I am sure that there are many more photographers, but they are not registered as businesses with the tax people¹²¹.

I only know of 2 staff photographers. One is in his late fifties, he is very likely to be laid off this year because his newspaper will likely close. He will likely retire and do odd jobs on the side. The second one is a "youngen", in his late thirties working for a few small weekly newspapers. Very strong, promising career, has already published a book and his job looks fairly secure.

On 10-Nov-2008, Starbucks announced that:

If you are an employee, you show up for work every day, do what they tell you to do, and collect a paycheck. In today's world, where most of the full time salaried photographers have been laid off, professional photographers are not photographers, they are small business men/women that happen to sale a product¹²²: photos.

Want to talk to any business man? talk about finances. Every business owner has many scary stories and hate stories about the banks, the investors...

Stealing Keywords

Keywords are one of the most difficult task in the photo business. Most photo buyers do not browse the photos, then decide of what to get. My experience has been that they search by keyword, then look at the photos based on the keywords.

Yuri Arcurs claims to be the most successful stock photographer. He created an "almost great" tool for keywording Keywords. The great idea is that by entering a few basic keywords, Arcurs will return you photos that will match these keywords, then you select the photos that look like yours, and he will show you:

Stealing Photos

Somebody stole your image, and is using it on their website! You are pissed off! They stole your photo! Slow down.

1. Send a cease and desist letter¹²³

Yesterday, I was in Krakow, Poland and I just spent an hour and half long distance on the phone with a "could have been a customer". Who knows how much this long distance phone call will cost. I should have known better. When he said:

Stop Wasting Time — Part 2

I wrote earlier in Stop Wasting Time about not keeping your hopes up when somebody is only "fishing" for information. Here a couple more sure fire sentences that indicate that they are wasting your time.

I rarely print, I'd rather use a professional lab, but I needed to do a few small prints, so I went buy new ink. In Vancouver, BC, Canada: $39.95 per cartridge for a cartridge with 55ml of ink. That's $726.90 per liter or $2733.75 per US gallon or $3300.13 per imperial gallon. In my case, I estimate that I lose 50% of the ink due to nozzle cleanup... so my costs are doubled¹²⁴. Ink is so precious that I should keep it in a safe.

It's more expensive than the price of an ounce of gold. Gold is a finite good. Nobody makes it anymore. There's only what's inside the earth and that's it. Ink is a manufactured good. Ink is unlimited.

In the western world, that's North America and Western Europe¹²⁵, photography is treated as a marketplace. It's subject to the basic laws of supply and demand, and the customer is always right.

The law of supply and demand is what has governed the world for the last 75 years. You can argue whether it's good or bad, but as photographic businesses we are all governed by the law of supply and demand.

Do you take photos? or do you make photos?

There's a huge difference in the quality of my photos, in my fulfillment. It turns out that there is also a huge difference in the business of photography. If you take photos, you will also wait for the phone to ring, you will also wait for the email to arrive and you will wait for the customer to walk through the door... You are waiting for other people and you will do their bidding. If you make photos, you will build your business by:

Take The High Road

I was sending emails back and forth with a guy about some interview, then suddenly out of the blue I got the following email:

Tamrac AeroSpeed 85 Backpack

I don't do too many reviews, because I only review what I buy, from my own money. I'm not important enough for the big manufacturers to send me their goodies. I don't really write glowing reviews. This just what I think and what I experienced.

I'm a backpack freak. Every year or couple of years, I buy a new one. It's always the last one for next while, but… Women buy shoes, I buy backpacks. A short while ago I bought the Tamrac Aerospeed 85 backpack. It was on sale. Before buying it, I searched, Googled, Amazon reviews… The reviews were not too kind. Many people complaining of the zippers, too hard, not strong enough…

People love to complain about taxes. Even worth, some will go to great length to reduce their taxes by cheating.

I love paying taxes! I even hear people say, another wacko! No, why do I want to pay taxes? This means that I made a profit!

I hate it! I hate phoning/cold calls. I'd rather have my gums cut and the my teeth pulled than doing cold calls. When I have to do cold phone calls, I always find something else to do: I need expand that hard drive, reinstall that software....

On occasions, I have even convinced SWMBO¹²⁶ to do some phone calls for me.

You receive a phone call from somebody making inquiries about your photographic services. Great! Finally they call you, instead of you, cold, calling them. Now what? Do you answer their questions? How much do you talk? How much do you ask questions and listen? Do you give your prices? Answer: Yes, yes, yes and yes.

1. You should answer their questions as much as possible.
2. Part of your answer is to ask them more question, so they can describe their photographic want and you can understand better their photographic needs.

You got the assignment, you've delivered the photos, sent the invoice. Now you wait for payment. Before you start waiting for payment, the next day after delivering the photos I almost always send a handwritten card:

Thank You Note After Meeting

The meeting went well, they haven't decided yet. I have a good feeling, the presentation went well, and they seem to know what they wanted.

Now what? If I need to change the proposal that's OK. But if I need to sit tight and wait, I hate that. Patience is not my forte. Have they decided? What are they discussing? I can't push. But I can write a handwritten thank you note. I have a whole bunch of cards that say "Thank You".

You have the great idea. You are going to do it. You prepare your website. You are ready to launch. You can either "go big" or "go incremental".

I have tried the "big launch" and the "go big" spending half of my marketing money only to go flop. I did buy advertising. I did print and delivered over a thousand invitations. I got the reception, the caterer, the food...

The Check Is In The Mail - part 1

Last year, I did some shoots for this large company. I submitted the invoices and was being paid within a couple of weeks. This was for most of the 2007 summer. Interesting...

New manager comes in, it's the end of my work. I submit my last invoice and nothing!

At the bottom of all my invoices, I have the following:

The Check Is In The Mail - part 4

The payment is late, you phone your contact to inquire if there is a problem, and you are being told:

Vincent Laforet wrote a great article on June 2008 at sportshooter.com where he says there's plenty of blue sky above - and the possibilities are endless.

Vincent Laforet left voluntarily the New York Times, a union staff job to become independent. As he realized what he described in the "the cloud is falling" article, he is extremely successful. He is the guy behind the "reverie" video shot with the Canon 5D Mark2. Over 2 million downloads!

A few years ago, I was, at a customer of mine, roaming the warehouse. Then I went into the office to talk to the owner of the business. Nobody had an office, just a desk. The owner was talking to the manager about expanding and she said:

As the official photographer of many people or even of some strangers, I am regularly asked:

Actually this will be about the good and the bad only, but, I couldn't resist.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new Manfrotto ball head for my tripod. I bought it from a reputable camera dealer in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I checked the prices around, I was ready to buy from a local photo store in Vancouver, BC, Canada, but none of them had the model I wanted.

The Information Age and Photography

I'm sure that you have heard this many times over: “we are in the information age”. With the Internet, information has multiplied exponentially¹²⁷. The growth of the Internet is so big that even Google can't cope with it and has abandoned many sections / areas for the Internet. If your website doesn't follow Google's rules, your photographic website will not be indexed.

Then you have some academics or digerati that say there's too much information. I think that they are missing the boat. They are confusing data with information.

The Last 10 Years

The last 10 years have been the most momentous years of the whole 150 year history of photography. In January 2000, digital point and shoot camera were starting to come on its own. The Sony Mavica family had 1 and 2 megapixels and was a big hit. Kodak had a DCS digital back for the Nikon F5 camera with their 2 and 6 megapixels DCS series. Kodak also had a DCS digital back for the Canon EOS-1n. Almost all professional photographers were using film cameras. A few newsprint photojournalists were already using digital cameras so they could transmit their photos in black and white, but that was it.

The Kodachrome 64 was a fading king. The Ektar 160 was the bread and butter of the wedding photographers. Kodak was still huge but with the cheap Japanese point and shoot cameras coming at 1 and 2 megapxiels, it's power was starting to wane. Kodak could not control the photography market any more. Kodak use to be one of the Dow Jones Industrial 30s. It went from a 14 billion dollars company that dominated the photography world to a 7 billion dollar company that is mainly a health care supplier now.

Service Department

Here's another great one from What The Duck. It's hard to resist and I'm too weak to even try.

Attach:what-the-duck-service-department.png Δ|The Service Department According to What The Duck

She has looked at your photos, asked many questions and still no sale. She needs these photos, and she knows that she just needs to click on the "Buy Now" button and still no sale. Why? Where's the urgency? Why should I do to make them buy?

• Should I discount?
• Should I make bigger website?

Years ago I lost my shirt on a large project. It involved a Canadian company¹²⁸, a large US company and the US government. The contract was to be a 5 year contract with at least $250 000/year for me. There was another 4 other guys in it. We all drooled at the possibilities. Think about it, a quarter million dollars per year each. I was the West Coast, one was central Canada, another the US east coast,...

Because we were so diversified in place, style and work, we had to meet in Chicago, Toronto, and Ottawa... Then 11-Sep-2001 came, and the role the US government in the project changed¹²⁹! First they put a delay on the project until they figured what they wanted. Then every month at every meeting, they changed their position, their technical requirements¹³⁰...

Whenever I receive a inquiry either via phone or email for a photo shoot, I always ask:

Times are tough everywhere, even Hasselblad is feeling the punch. Hasselblad is feeling the heat from the latest batch of full frame cameras, especially at the "low-end"¹³¹: the Canon 5DMk2, the Sony A900 and the Nikon D3x. So they came up will a couple of promotions.

1. "Special pricing" aka discount on their "low-end" H3DII-31, a 31 megapixels for US$13,000, until 30-Jun-2009.
2. "Buy Now and get the full credit for it" when you buy a new Hasselblad H3DII-50, before June 30, 2009, you will be able to upgrade to the even newer H3DII-60 the moment it's released for the difference in MSRP price.

John Lund did an interview with Tom Grill. Tom Grill is:

1. One of the founder of Comstock
2. One of the founder of Blend Images

Trade Guilds and Associations

There are many trade associations. Their job is keep the status quo as of before, when "the times were good and easy".

The Author's Guild official policy was is still to be against:

A distinctive name, symbol, motto or emblem that identifies a product, service or firm that has been legally registered as the property of the firm.

Consequences

Many things are trademarked:

Traitor

Last year, in November 2009, I upgraded my equipment and got a Canon 7D. Before buying the Canon 7D, I did some inquiries around. I was looking at the new Nikon D300s. I know this guy, Jon. He's been a Nikon guy since dinosaurs roamed the earth. His first camera was a Nikon Nikkormat. That's an “amateur” Nikon SLR build in the mid-60s. Jon only uses Nikon/Nikkor lenses. Always had Nikon, will also be a Nikon guy. A true Nikon guy, the camera strap is big and say Nikon, his camera bag has a huge Nikon logo…

So I was asking him about Nikon. The lenses… He was telling how great his Nikon prime lenses were. He even had a couple of zooms but… Somehow, he got in his mind that I was going to bow to Nikon and get the Nikon religion. Last week we saw each other, so the first thing he did was to ask me which Nikon did I buy? I told him that I got a Canon 7D. You should have seen the disgust in his look and he muttered “Traitor” as he walked away.

When I travel for business or pleasure, like most tourists I take photos. The problem with "professional photographers" is that many of these photos cannot be used commercially¹³² unless you get a model release.

Everybody knows, that if you take a photo of somebody and want to use it commercially, you should have a model release. The problem is that many places, buildings and events, have been either copyrighted or trademarked. You will either have to get permission or buy a permit, if you can get one.

Next weekend I will be going on assignment to Eastern Europe. On the side, I am planning on doing some stock photography, weather and time permitting. If you follow the various newsgroups, and some of the blogs related to stock photography, you will notice a huge amount of people complaining about their photos being rejected by the various stock agencies.

Photoshelter with their school of stock photography has published a couple of great article on why they accept and more importantly examples of photo they have rejected including the why of their rejection:

We all have policies for customers. Do they actually make sense? When was the last time you checked?

Comcast broadband

Comcast is one of the largest broadband Internet provider in the US. By using Comcast as your Internet service provider, you have to agree to:

I just had coffee with the friend of a friend. He wanted me to participate/invest in his new Internet venture, mostly the technical end. First he asked me to sign a non-compete agreement see: Non Compete Agreement

Turning Down Business

Every so often, I get phone calls asking about wedding photography. I don't do weddings. Why? Because of the stress, not of dealing with the BrideZillas but with the parents. Too many of them go nuts. So usually I turn them down and depending on my mood and where the wind comes from… I will recommend some other photographer.

I don't take job that I can't do. Some people would say, take them as a learning experience. I don't, I prefer to specialize. I can earn a better living, I can charge more, and I'm more pleased with myself.

I received an email asking for advice. I kept the important parts and removed the names.

Here is an email sent by Bill Gates, yes, the big kahuna of MS fame. This email is from 2003, but I feel that it still applies today. Bill Gates was recently asked about this email, if it was his, and he said "Yes, I send emails like this daily, it's my job¹³³."

Vancouver, BC, Canada is a small city of only 600,000 according to the 2006 stats but the region has almost 2 million people. There are 1243 registered photography businesses in the City of Vancouver itself. There is another 5194 registered photography businesses in the Lower Mainland, the suburbs. On top of that, there are at least another 5 million people that will take "commercial grade" photos of their aunts, nephews, brother-in-law, weddings,...

Unless you have a multi-million advertising budget¹³⁴, you will need to differentiate yourself.

If you want to grow your photography business, you will need new customers. Duh! What an obvious thing to say. It's obvious but too many people forget it. In marketing lingo:

1. Identify and reach the customers. Who are they? Demographics. Young, old, an income between $75,000 and $200,000, reside in... Can you reach your potential customers? Do you have the money to buy the advertising to reach these people. Will you phone them one by one? Will you send them emails or snail mail? Or they find you on the web?
2. Your potential customers must have a problem that they want to solve using your photos. It could be memories such as wedding, portraits or editorial to bring in advertisers to their publications. Your vision must be in close relation with their vision of their problem.

Watermark: Photographer's Math

One of my most viewed webpage is how to set watermarks in Lightroom: Lightroom: Copyright Watermark. There is this great website: Photographer's Math. Photographer + Humor + Blog. Today they had a great entry on watermarks:

Attach:math-watermark.jpg Δ|Photo Watermark Math

As I mentioned a few times, I live in Canada. For most times, Canada is a quiet place, without big fireworks. We've never had a civil war. There is even an official party, elected in Parliament, whose only official goal is to break up of the country. In any other country, their leaders would have been jailed, run over by an errand truck... Here, in Canada, we elect them to the Parliament. Some countries have "drive-by shooting", we have "drive-by nagging".

Currently¹³⁵ we have a minority government. The Conservatives¹³⁶ form the minority government. The 3 other parties¹³⁷ signed an accord to topple the government: Liberals, NDP, Bloc sign deal on proposed coalition. People were going to demonstrate in the streets of the major cities either in support of the government or in support of the opposition.

With millions of photos from iStock and Photobucket available for $1 how do you compete? Selling photos is a dying business, millions and millions of photos are available for free from Flickr the value of a photo is $0 [zero].

This is the story about how a tourist who was not interesting in buying a carpet, spent $1,100 buying a carpet and was very happy with the experience.

What The Duck: Work For Free

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

Attach:What-the-duck-work-for-free.gif Δ|What The Duck: Work For Free

There are times when What The Duck hits the right note, this is one of these. We all know people who like to do beautiful diagrams to impress. But how do you intersect photography and blogs?

Attach:what-the-duck-blog-summary.gif Δ|What The Duck, Blog Summary

Last summer, I was on a photo shoot, an expensive photo shoot, a construction move. The equipment rental was $15 000 per day¹³⁸! Plus all the people. The photo shoot did not work. The photos were terrible, what a disaster, for me, for the customer... Now what? Who do you blame? Somebody had to take the fall. We need to punish the guilty party, we need to find the scapegoat, and fire somebody, get somebody out of business. Part of the blame was mine, within the first hour I did realize that it wasn't going as planned. Part of the blame was the customer's, he was on site supervising.

Or we could ask:

What's the best …

I regularly get the question: “What's the best …?”

• The best camera

I was looking around the web when I went to a UK photographer's web site. He claims that he specializes in:

• creative location
• lifestyle

Since I am world renown¹³⁹, professional photographer¹⁴⁰, and know everything, somebody from a local camera club asked me:

15 years ago, the quality of the camera did not affect the quality of the photo. The quality of the photographer made the difference. You couldn't tell the difference in a photo between a Nikkormat and a Nikon F3. Same film, same lens, same photographer therefore same photo. The recommendation was always spend you money on glass. Good lenses, better lenses and if you could afford it buy professional zoom lenses.

Today, the quality of the camera is the difference¹⁴¹.

Photo District News magazine wrote, in the Feb-2009 issue, an article on medium format cameras vs. high-res DSLRs cameras for professional photographers. I'd like to quote what David Prince, a Manhattan-New York based commercial photographer, said. David Prince uses mostly a Mamiya RB67 with a 39 Megapixels Phase One P45 digital back, he also uses a Canon 5D for scouting locations. He said:

• Microstock commissions are in the pennies per photo.
• The brother-in-law of your first cousin is shooting weddings for only a $100 with all the photos on CDs.
• 65+ millions stock photos are available for free on Flickr.

Who Are Your Customers?

“Repeat a lie, long enough and it becomes true”. We've all heard that newspapers can't compete in an Internet world. The newspaper industry is dying, unless we give them bail-out money, kill all free Internet so they are privileged and don't have to compete.

Many newspapers and magazines are closing. David Radler, the ex-associate of Conrad Black and COO of Holinger Inc from Sun-Times fame, who served 8 month of a 29 month sentence for “diverting $32 millions from the shareholders into their pockets”, is currently owning 11 newspapers and is looking to buy more newspapers with his “Alberta Newspaper Group”, if he can raise the cash.

Who owns your photos?

You make photos, be it portraits, wedding, landscapes... You sell them, now who owns these photos? Simple, you took them and are not an employee of the company, you own them, right?

Lets change the subject from photos to software. We all bought software and you had to, you are using the computer to read this article. If you didn't pirate the software, then you bought it. Then you must have seen on the screen or on the software itself that you didn't buy the software but you only bought a license to use the software, you are not allowed to make copies... and you are not allowed to resell that software.

I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Vancouver is fairly large city with 2 million people including the suburbs¹⁴². In 2010, Vancouver will be hosting the Winter Olympics. Over 1200 photography businesses are registered in the Lower Mainland. There are many more photographers, but they are not registered as businesses with the tax people¹⁴³.

I was talking to a photographer friend and we were discussing wedding photography. How many wedding photographers?... and the like¹⁴⁴. Then we went to the web and going through various wedding directories... we estimate that there is around 4000 wedding photographers in the Lower Mainland¹⁴⁵. Some photographers only do a couple of weddings a year, but I know of at least 2 photographers that do more than 100+ weddings per year.

In today's world, almost every photographer has a website, even my dog has decided to be Internet savvy and put up his own website. In a fully unscientific research¹⁴⁶, I found that the vast majority of photographers use Flash.

I hate Flash, actually I retract, I strongly dislike Flash:

I often scour the Internet, lurk in photographer's websites. I look for ideas for myself and too often two hours later, where did the time go? But sometimes I find gems, here's one from photographer Anon Ymous¹⁴⁷

Occasionally I get a request for free images:

This month I received a phone call from a local charity. She wanted to use a couple of my photos. And BTW, since they are a charity they wanted it for free. They would mention my name and give me a tax receipt for my regular rates. I told them:

For some photographers, the recession is here, for all the other photographers, the recession is coming. You will need to get ready because your customers will be affected by it. How do you know if your customers will be crushed by the recession. Your customers will be in trouble when you hear any of these:

December, Xmas¹⁴⁹ and New Year is coming. Many suppliers send Xmas cards, food, candies, and chocolates to their customers. Should you do it? I used to give very elaborate Xmas cards, and cakes or custom chocolates. Used to, up to 2 years ago, now I have stopped.

2 years ago, I was at my largest customer, talking to the owner, John, when one of his supplier¹⁵⁰ brought a fully catered meal, including wine and beer! Guess what? They didn't remember my $125 trifle¹⁵¹ for 30 people. It didn't matter what I did, I wasn't even on the radar. So why bother?

Let your fingers do the walking! This was the slogan of the yellow pages. Even today, in the Internet age, businesses advertise in the Yellow Pages. Are you advertising in the yellow pages? I'm not! Why, because I tried. I did it for 2 years. The first year, I did a 1/8th of a page ad. How much business was generated? 0, Zero, Nada, None. Every month, I would get 3 or 4 phone calls, but this was from people trying to get the cheapest deal they could get.

If an eighth of a page is not enough to generate business, what about a quarter of a page? The second year, I took a quarter of page ad. How much business was generated by a quarter of a page? Again 0, Zero, Nada, None. Every month, I would get a dozen phone calls, but again this was from people trying to get the cheapest deal they could get and I am not the cheapest or wanted something I did not do. Once I was able to actually ask a few questions like where did you get my phone number,... The most important was:

You'Ve Got To Be Kidding Me!

I regularly go Photography On The Net - The Business of Photography. The moderator got the following email:

• 1001 Noisy Cameras Digital Camera Reviews and photo links.
• A Photo Editor Rob Haggart, former photo editor. Updated daily.
• Chase Jarvis Very interesting photographer. Updated almost on a weekly basis.
• Epic Edits For the aspiring hobbyist. Updated daily.

Lightroom & the copyrights for 2010

Today's 8-Jan-2010. The year is: 2010 and have you updated all of your copyright settings? That's:

1. Your website's copyright

Lightroom 2

Everybody, and their dog¹⁵² has a review or announcement about Adobe's Lightroom 2. It's supposed to be the best thing since slice bread, it will even reduce global warming.

Since this blog is about "the business of being a photographer", Lightroom has a new interesting feature¹⁵³: It will show you the tags already used in the other photos in the current catalog. This will help me in being more consistent with keywords.