Biz 101, Competition, Customers, Marketing, Pricing, Quotes, Rants, Scams

2013 and Your Copyrights

2013 is only 2½ weeks away, if we make it pass the Mayan end of the world on 21-Dec-2012 aka 21/12/12 or 12/12/21. As a photographers, I have a list to prepare for the new 2013 year. One of the item on my list is to update my copyrights. My problems is that I need to change the copyright ©2012 to ©2013 in too many places:

  • My website in the footers
  • My cameras
  • My various software
  • My contracts

What used to take 15 minutes now is almost a full hour.

1.

The Luck of the Draw

Just last week, the end of November 2012, was the biggest Powerball draw, $587.5 millions before tax. In the US, even lotteries are part of your earnings. “Lady Luck” smiled to the 2 people who won the draw and will share the $587.5 millions. The chances of winning were 1 in 175 million.

Meanwhile at the ranch, I was at a presentation, there would be a draw with some prizes at the end. 7 prizes + 12 t-shirts, grand total 19 prizes. They gave the half of the tickets at the entrance with the other half went into the bucket. Before the presentation started, I counted 21 people.

Who's Your Customer?

Seth Godin is an empire by himself. He has published a dozen books, created a few companies and has one of the most influential blog on the Internet http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. In November 2012, he actually raised a fantastic issue, “Four questions worth answering”

  • Who is your next customer? (Conceptually, not specifically.

Business Cards

Getting a business card is an important step. A business card makes you a legitimate “whatever.” As photographers, we are visual people but very of us are designers and even less of us are good designers.

There are a few alternatives:

  1. Hire a designer. My first time, I did exactly that. She was a friend of a friend and in the end I was not happy with her design. Good designers are just as hard to find as good photographers.
  2. Buy or get a template. Some are free but, they usually cost between a couple of dollars and the fifty dollar range.

What is a Professional Camera?

I was showing some photos and I got the usual “compliment”

You must have a good camera.

What made this compliment different is that the person kept on with:

It must be a professional camera.

The standard answer is “it's not the camera, it's the photographer that makes the photographs”, but we all know that it's not true even among photographers.

The Future of the Publishing Industry

Wired Magazine has released an “in-depth” article on the “shenanigans” of John McAfee of the anti-virus McAfee fame who sold his company to Intel, a couple of years ago.

Wired Magazine first wrote an article about their interview with John McAfee with good and unexpected photos. Now, they are reprinting and enhancing the article to become a stand alone $0.99 ebook for iPad, Nook and Kindle.

Buying on eBay from a Chinese Reseller

I'm a user of the Black Rapid strap. I was one of their first customer. I bought the original RS1 with the lousy clip that only staid closed with a plastic tubing and the bad connector to the tripod. Eventually I upgraded these weak points (at full price) and have been extremely happy since. Now the strap is starting to fray. Should I buy a brand new one? The Canadian price is around $70 + taxes.

I always hear people gloating about how they bought such and such on eBay and paid a quarter of what I paid.

The End of Facebook

It's not the end of Facebook, but it's the end of Facebook marketing for photographers.

By now, everybody must have heard about the financial problems at Facebook. On 18-May-2012, Facebook became a public company and started trading with the opening price of $42.05 per share on the first trade. Today, 16-Oct-2012, the share price is now: $19.48. That's a 53.6% price drop in just 6 month or in real terms 35 billion dollars lost.

Lightroom: Building a Portfolio

I need to build a new portfolio. This time it's commercial and industrial. I have 2 catalogs. One with 19 thousand photos and another one with 146 thousand photos.

The official story is pretty simple:

  1. Select the 5 star photos
  2. If you don't have enough 5 star photos, just add the 4 star photos to your selection
  3. Ten minutes later, you are done!

The problem is that life, sloppiness, laziness, sleep, family… gets in the way of a perfect world.

  • The 5 stars may not match the content of the portfolio.

Right-Clicking and How the Internet Works

Yesterday, I was talking to Jean (a guy) who is a semi pro photographer, meaning that he sells photos and he has a “real” job to support his family. I'm not sure how it started, I think he read on some bulletin board about the right-click protection.

The right-click protection is a small script that runs in the web browser that removes the pop-up menu to save the image or to copy the link…

Then he went to rant and rave about how he took the photos of a “football” team.

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