The business of photography and retouching
You might someday have the need to photograph banknotes, coins or postage stamps. Do it wrong and you or your customer could get a visit from the RCMP or be on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Copying currency and stamps isn’t just about counterfeiting, it’s also a copyright issue.
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Do you have a business? Then you’re involved in marketing.
Do you have a business web site? You’re involved in marketing.
Is your company active on social media? Yes, more marketing.
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If you’re like me, you probably buy too much photo gear. Not so much cameras and lenses but things like bags, light modifiers and various accessories. Here are some of my purchases in 2018:
I’ve been meaning to get a half-decent cart for some time. A homemade dolly-style cart with a bright yellow mat ($55 in parts and plywood from Home Depot in 1985) has served me very well. An over-priced Tri-Kart 800 is something I regret buying about 18 years ago because it was of limited use to me. But many local TV crews use the Tri-Kart.
This year I bought a RocknRoller R12RT. It’s pretty good but it takes up extra space because it’s not small and it weighs 33 lb. Fully extended, the R12RT won’t fit in some elevators.
A TV news article reports on a Canadian photographer who didn’t bother to read the contract when submitting one of his favourite photos to a cheap, royalty-free, stock agency. Apparently he was only thinking about the easy money.
His photo was used on 500,000 calendars and greeting cards.
He earned US$1.88.
Other photographers would probably laugh at this person because this is not news. It’s well known that cheap stock photo agencies have been taking advantage of unsuspecting photographers for 20 years.
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A very long post on a very simple subject.
Every photographer thinks they know how to write a photo caption. Yet many photographers either don’t caption their pictures or they do it very poorly.
Two days ago, I edited 170 editorial photos from a couple dozen photographers to prepare the images for a slideshow. The slideshow will display each picture’s caption.
Many of the captions had spelling and grammar errors, broken or incoherent sentences, factual errors, no names, no locations and/or no dates. All of these captions were written by professional photographers.
Photo captions have to provide relevant information using the least number of words. Easy, right?
A public service announcement for photographers: Get your eyes checked every few years.
We take our eyes for granted but they need to be properly maintained.
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Four weeks ago, Google made a small but potentially good change to Google Images.
When someone searches images on Google, there is now a tiny, barely noticeable, new link below the larger version of some images that reads, “Image credits”:
