Customers

In October 2011, I wrote about the a photography store that advertised photography for weddings $149.99 at: $149 Wedding

In the blog post, I wrote:

The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win

— Famous saying that too many people attributed to themselves

Those guys won the race, they are out of business. Gone!

The new hottest Internet photo related social website: Pinterest with 1½ million people per day. People create a “Pin Board” and post their own photos or other people's photos that they like and want to share with their friends. Now get ready, we must all scream “Copyright Infringement!”

After the big cry of copyright infringement, now what? The problem is who will sue? Who has the deep pockets to pay for lawyers for years to come? Nobody is really willing to sink millions of dollars.

By now, you must have heard that Kodak has filed for bankruptcy. All the noise from the web is that Kodak is a bankrupt company because, although they invented many of the digital technology, they were not nimble enough… Those are mostly people that repeat what everybody else copied from the web. The problem is that these people don't have a “long enough” memory. Kodak's problems started long, long before the digital area.

What The Duck has this great cartoon about “Kodak's death”

Here are the 3 main events that caused “Kodak's death”:

I came from Pentax, ditched my complete Pentax system and switched to Canon. 2½ years later, I'm still rebuilding my system. It's amazing all the little things/accessories that one accumulates over the years. Luckily, I didn't switch to Nikon! It turns out that all Nikon photographers are incompetents! Looks like Joe McNally, Tim Page, Hernst Haas, Steve Curry … don't know what they are doing.

A photographer is only as good as the equipment he uses, and a good lens is essential to taking good pictures.

Nikon's Facebook page

1.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen, a Finish photographer, just like me, changes of specialty every so often. If we were kids, people would say that we have ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder and need to take Ritalin (methylphenidate.) Regularly, he took the bus from the Helsinki central bus station. Eventually he noticed that many buses took the same route at the beginning but at time and distance went on, there were less other buses.

Over the weekend, I was speaking with a 1 hour photo-lab tech. She works at one the biggest chain of drugstores in Western Canada, London Drugs. 75 super-stores and most of them have their own 1 hour photo lab. I was asked to keep her anonymous.

According to Anon Ymous, London Drugs prints around 3 million photos per year. And London Drugs is a “very sharp” operator, some will say ruthless. They analyse everything, including the returns, complaints…

According to their studies, there are 4 main reasons for people being unhappy with their photos:

In the last week of June 2011, Thomas Hawk wrote an article about the copyright lawsuit between Jay Maisel and Andy Baio. It was the first time I heard about it. Thomas Hawk took the point of view that Jay Maisel's lawyers “extorted” $32,500 from Andy Baio and he could do it because Jay had deeper pockets and bigger lawyers than Andy's.

132 comments later:

1. Most of the comments were in favor of Jay Maisel
2. The comments became a discussion between a ½ dozen people

Most people think that they are not being paid what they are worth. In the early 1990s, Robert Half, the employment agency, did a study in the workplace asking people how they rated their own work performance, then asked the employer the same question. The result was (from memory):

• 80%+ of the employees rated themselves as good and above
• 60% of the employees were rated as average by their employers

We have a disconnect here. There are 2 reasons why you are not getting paid what you’re worth:

1. You don't know what you are worth, or

Producing a foto-biz.com post is hard. It takes imagination, time and hard work. It takes me usually an hour to an hour and half every daily. It's tough:

1. What to write about?
2. What's the material? Research and verify.
3. Write the post.
4. Post the post.
5. And finally publish the post.

I get ideas from everywhere, I have a text file that is 28,560 lines long of text and ideas with most of them half baked or not baked at all. I do follow a few websites. And that's where the pirates comes in.

The competition is so fierce that art directors and editors receive daily emails, postcards, business cards by the hundreds. Art directors, editors… need to discover new photographers but they still have work to do. So the hundreds and hundreds of emails, cards… mostly end up in the spam folder, in the physical garbage, in the…

Some photographers manage to cut through the wall of indifference, the garbage… Casey Templeton did. He sent 300 promo pieces and at least 30 have replied! A 10+% is huge! It's a fantastic success.

It's extremely rare that somebody will spit in somebody else's face or say:

You are an asshole and you should die!

But it happens regularly in emails or in forums. Why? I don't really know, may be because the person isn't there, so you can work yourself up?

1. I do not personally know Scott Kelby, of Photoshop fame. Never met him, never spoke with him, never corresponded with him, but I follow his blog.

The difference between blueberries and apples (one bad blueberry spoils the whole bunch).

If you serve yourself blueberries by the handful, you won’t be able to inspect each one. And so just one rotten blueberry can ruin the entire bowl of cereal.

An apple is different. It’s hand picked. Pick the wrong one and it’s not such a big deal, you can just pick another. If you sell apples, then, the goal is to make the great ones great, really great. If you’re in the blueberry business, on the other hand, the goal is to eliminate defects.

Last week, I spent an afternoon with Kim. I “consulted” with Kim about a year and half ago. He already started being a professional photographer, so we spent a day on how to get him going. Every few month, we’d keep in touch via email, “How are you doing… fine… blah blah…”

Kim decided to do children’s birthday parties… The children spend the afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese… He takes the photos, sometimes he prints the photos, and sometimes he gives the mothers the DVD of the photos.

Over the last week, on a few photography forums, people have been talking the demise of the professional photographers and the photo studios. It's not just one forum posting, but a whole bunch of them. Is the same person seeding the forum or the mood? I don't know.

The summary is that everybody complains:

• Digital has killed the professional photographer business.
• The economy “stinks” and people stopped buying photos.
• Uncle Harry and the GWC aka the Girl With a Camera have killed the market by working for free…

Let's review the facts:

1.

Facebook is the largest photo website on the Internet. There are over 30 billion photos on Facebook. The vast majority of the photos are from smart phones, iPhones and from some from point and shoot cameras. This month, Feb-2011, Facebook changed the rules for posting photos. The maximum size of the photos used to be 720 pixels wide or tall. Now, the maximum size of the photos posted on Facebook is now 2048 pixels wide or tall. This also includes a new photo viewer for paging, saving the photo to your computers…

At 720 pixels, people can print a half decent 4” by 6”.