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

The photography business is all about copying what the other does. The current “fad” is HDR. In the “good old days”, every landscape was taken with 2 to 3 color polarizer. Now, all the weddings are “documentary style”… Photographers often get a friend or a family member to call their competition and ask for the prices… then copy it almost exactly.

The best that happened to me was: when people shoot from over my shoulder, literally, which not too difficult since I'm often on my knees. The worst was just a week ago, when a “turkey” instead of going behind me, just went straight in front when I had to shame him to get him to move. There are magazines, conferences… that show you how copy other successful photographers.

What the duck has captured it very well, except the most important, what makes me unique and that nobody can copy.

Yan of http://yanphoto.com wrote a blog post: sick of it, in which she states how hard the life of a photographer is: no business, dead… Her photos are good, so why can't she get any work?

Because like most photographers, she doesn't understand the business of photography. First the facts, then the solutions.

• Photography is booming
• Photography is exploding.

It's the new year, 2012. New year equals new resolutions but there are so many resolutions to forget from 2011. Here's a quick one that you can do right now and make us feel good as photographers, because we are asserting our rights.

Did you update your copyrights? It takes only from 5 to 15 minutes.

1. In your camera: almost all “pro-summer” cameras and all “pro” cameras have a copyright menu item to set it up. Many “amateur” cameras also have it.

   On the Canon 7D, it's in the Menu → Wrench 3 → Copyright Information

Trey Ratcliff of Stuck In Customs wrote an blog post: Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web. He spent $28,000 to advertise in 3 magazines and found that 2 of them were a complete waste.

He advertised in Popular Photography, Shutterbug and Photoshop User. Sales were dismal with Popular Photography and Shutterbug. Sales were very good with Photoshop User.

A few weeks ago, Adobe announced that from now on, the upgrades will be only from the previous version of Photoshop and/or the Creative Suite. If people are a couple of version behind, that's too bad, you will have to do a buy a full version or get lost or…

Scott Kelby, of NPPA fame, wrote an open letter to Adobe to complaint about the upgrade policy.

I think that most people are missing the point.

1. The prices vary a lot depending on the country and the markets.

One of the standard advice to a blogger do a “Top 10 List”. I've never like either doing or reading top 10 lists.

I always find these lists as superficial. It's usually a title followed by one or two sentences that do not explain anything.

When was the last time that a top 10 lists gave you the information that you needed? I can't remember one occurrence.

With some many photographers, everybody screams at the top of their lungs that you should specialize. Notice that this is often coming from a generalist that specializes in pressing the shutter button.

Here's a guy that takes specializing to the n^th degree: Martin Waugh of Liquid Sculpture. He lives in Oregon and makes a very good living making photos of water/liquid drop. Very nice, very profitable.

If you are looking for water drop photos or videos, he's your man.