Marketing

Every month, I buy PDN, Photo District News, the photo magazine. I do not subscribe to it, the subscription is more expensive than buying it at the newsstand. PDN is a magazine directed toward the professional photographers and is a must-read for anybody/everybody that wants to keep current with the business, the marketing of photography and the commercial photography trends. Every issue has big ads from both Canon and Nikon.

In the May 2012 issue, Nikon USA did a double truck spread, that's a two facing pages, about a wedding photographer, Doug Gordon, on page 42 and page 43. Two large photographs, and two smaller ones. Excellent photos (they'd better be), great inspiration…

His go-to cameras: the Nikon D3x and the Nikon D3s…

Then Nikon USA goes on explaining the D3X and the D3s… engineered for professionals…

There's only one problem with the ad, it's a small photograph, 3 inch by 2 inch, of Doug Gordon, the photographer, taking photos with a Canon camera (that looks like a Canon 5DMk2) and a Canon 70-200L f/2.8.

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.

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

Last Saturday, I went to Reifel Bird Sanctuary, things didn't go well.

Sandhill Cranes Cleaning Themselves   click on image for gallery

1. It was “supposed” to be nice weather.

The Olan Mills studios started in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1932 by Olan and Mary Stephenson Mills. They are still today the largest photo “empire” in North America. Their studio sales have been plummeting in the last five years with the advent of digital, but it's still a $250 million per year business. It's based on three free 8 by 10 photos! The three sessions are spread out 2-3 months apart and the “customer” receives a complimentary 8 by 10 print from each session. Bring the kids; bring the family…

Sales are not as good as it used to be.

In its post of the 8-Jul-2011, PetaPixel reported that CNBC has declared the end of the point and shoot cameras. This has been reported many times by many business analysts.

Point and shoot camera sales are down, significantly. The top 2 point and shoot camera manufacturers are:

1. Canon
2. Sony

And they represent 65% of the worldwide market. This year, Canon has introduced only 1 new camera, and Sony only 2 new cameras.

Alain Briot did an interview with Gordon Lewis of Shutter Finger. Alain Briot is a successful fine art photographers with a few books under the belt.

My matted and framed prints sell for as much as $3900. But again, understand that I am selling much more than a print in a frame. I am selling my unique vision and style. I am selling prints of exceptional quality and beauty. I am selling luxury-level customer service combined with a one-year 100% money back guarantee, a lifetime fade-free warranty, and a lifetime framing warranty.

In February 2011, Google got shamed by JC Penny who cheated to be ranked in the top 5 websites for common words like dress, jeans…. I wrote about in SEO: How To Cheat JC Penney Style

Fast forward May 2011, and last week, I was talking with a Google engineer.

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.

Photoshelter is a company that offers Internet photo storage, aimed at professional photographers, with many associated services. They regularly publish market research reports. These reports are not just directed at their existing customers but to all the professional photographers. Many of these reports provide great insight.

Everybody's hope is to be placed very high on Google. Then we are all set, just sit and wait for the people to come and spend their hard earned money on your website. The problem is that's not how it works.

1. Who is the “customer”? Another photographer? A potential customer? Somebody looking for prices?

If you want to sell any photo on the web, you have only 2 choices:

1. Microstock like iStockPhoto and the others
2. Your own website

The problem with using your own website is that people have to find you. Google, here we come. You are indexed by Google and nothing! No inquiry, no sale, nothing, nada… What's happening?

What's the problem?

Google has the standard Googlebot. That's the standard index spider. That's the one that everybody looks for.

The Sartorialist is a very popular website. Scott Schuman gets an average of 2+ millions of visits per month to his website. He lives in New York and makes street photos of people that are well dressed or interestingly dressed.

Sartorial: about a tailor or their trade. A tailor is a person who makes, repairs, or alters clothing professionally, especially suits and men's clothing.

He has done many YouTube videos, but in this video Scott explains how he became so popular and how the blog drives his business.

I've said many times in various blog posts, that one shouldn't disparage other photographers. But like I say to my kids:

Do as I say, don't do as I do, so you can learn from my mistakes.

— Syv Ritch

This morning, I went to Reifel Bird Sanctuary. Once off the freeway, it's a small 2-lane road almost all the way to Reifel. Just in front of me was this American, driving 30 kilometers/hr around 20 miles/hr in 50 km/hr speed zones. He was weaving all around looking at eagles.