For Photographers

Filling in the blanks

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Corporate photographers and commercial photographers often produce pictures of buildings, factories and retail locations.

Customers will sometimes request the digital removal of objects such as poles, road signs, overhead wires, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc., from exterior photos.

What’s funny about such requests is the customer assumes that once an object is erased, whatever was behind that object will automatically become visible. But as every photographer knows, when something is digitally removed from a photo, it just leaves a blank spot in the picture.
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Business Advice for Photographers

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The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has a few dozen videos to help professional photographers improve their business practices. Topics include negotiating, marketing, pricing, paperwork, licensing and copyright.

These videos were produced for American photographers and so there are a few legal and business issues that either don’t apply or are different here in Canada. However many of the concepts and principles are equally applicable to Canadian photographers.

 

Commercial Photography For Web Sites

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When licensing pictures, commercial photographers must remember that there’s no such thing as “web use.” The Web is a medium, not a use. Photos used online can be editorial, advertising or anything in-between.

Many business clients use photos not only on their web site but also on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. A photographer has to decide whether such use is no longer editorial or public relations but rather a form of advertising. The common definition that only a “paid placement” is advertising may no longer apply.

For a corporate client, its own web site is usually considered marketing collateral and not advertising. All advertising is marketing but not all marketing is advertising.

But for a client such as a retailer, is its web site a form of advertising? What about that company’s Facebook or Twitter account?

Perhaps every use on the Web should be priced higher than similar use in print. This is not just for the larger and longer-lasting “circulation” of a web site but also for the increased shift towards advertising use.

 

Marketing Professional Photography

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When marketing its products or services, a business is usually told to focus on selling the benefits of those products or services. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. But this isn’t entirely accurate.

Human nature is such that people are motivated by the need for risk aversion. People will act more to avoid a loss than to gain a benefit. We fear loss more than we desire a benefit. This is known as the Prospect Theory.

From the New York Times:

…most of us find losses roughly twice as painful as we find gains pleasurable.

A professional photographer seeking new clients should frame their marketing more around loss avoidance and minimizing risk rather than just pointing out potential benefits. New clients are usually concerned with avoiding risk since they’ve never worked with that photographer before, (i.e. “Can we trust this photographer do the job properly?”).

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Budgeting for Success

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Many photographers fail to understand that a customer’s budget determines their work. In an ideal world, it would be the other way around. But sadly, the ideal world and the real world don’t often intersect.

Don’t confuse “work” with “effort” or “creativity”. The latter two should be independent of the customer’s budget. Whether the budget is $1,000 or $10,000, the photographer should put forth the same effort and creativity.
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Pricing Editorial Photography

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When it comes to pricing their work, photographers need all the help they can get. fotoQuote and Blinkbid are two common software tools used.

An overlooked tool for editorial photographers is Editorial Photography Estimator. The free version is still available but not the commercial version which included data for advertising photography. A new edition of the commercial version was supposed to have been released in 2011.

It’s important to remember that the Editorial Photography Estimator (EPE) is from 2001 and its numbers are out-of-date. However, the underlying concepts are still valid. Editorial fees, for both assignment and stock, are based upon the circulation of the publication and that publication’s ad rates.
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How to insult a photographer

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One of the more popular ways to insult a photographer is to look at their pictures and say, “Nice pictures! You must have a good camera.”

Here are a few gentle ways to insult a fellow photographer:

  • He’s a few pictures short of a slideshow.
  • She’s obviously not working with a full frame.
  • His zoom doesn’t extend all the way.
  • Her flash isn’t firing on full power.
  • Her shutter speed is a bit slow.
  • His aperture isn’t exactly wide open.
  • She’s dragging her shutter.
  • He’s been spending way too much time in the darkroom.
  • He’s working with a shallow depth of field.
  • She’s not exactly high definition.
  • “Low resolution” is his middle name.
  • His lens cap is on.
  • Her memory card is empty.
  • She’s not exactly the sharpest lens in the bag.
  • He’s not exactly the fastest lens in the bag.
  • His camera is clicking but nothing gets recorded.
  • Her camera is firing but her film isn’t advancing.
  • He’s a couple stops short of a good exposure.
  • The carousel is in place but the projector isn’t turned on.

 

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