Photography business
awild | March 30, 2010The New York Times on the changing face of the photography business:
Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.
âThere are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,â said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.
It's worth pointing out that what's…
awild | December 14, 2009A couple years back I posted a short bit on how to register photo copyright with the U.S. government. That turned out to be the last time I filled out a registration with pen and paper. For all subsequent submissions I've used the new ECO system at http://www.copyright.gov/eco.
Let me disabuse you of any preconception that the online method is easier. You'll need to clear an hour or two out of your schedule to prepare a submission. The new process involves clicking though an interminable array of confusing steps, filling out an order of magnitude more information than was requested in the…
awild | October 22, 2009Malcom Gladwell to aspiring journalists:
The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going…
awild | October 15, 2009Every year my part-time photography business does a little better than the year before. A few new clients, a few new venues, a few more visitors to my web sites. It's not a meteoric rise by any measure, but considering the current economic situation I am counting my blessings.
Naturally, of course, when business is good I muse about expanding it. What would it take to become a full-time professional photographer?
If I replaced all the time I spent running PCRs with time spent calling up potential clients and marketing my wares, and replaced the time I spent writing papers with time…
awild | October 1, 2008This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology. I hate doing that. Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research.
The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) licensing scheme. I don't do CC. Overall it's not a bad licensing scheme, but for one sticking point: CC allows users to re-distribute an image to external parties.
In an ideal world, non-profit users would faithfully tack on the CC license and the attribution to the photographer, as required by the…
awild | September 11, 2008My favorite upstart stock photography business, the Photoshelter Collection, has decided that their experiment was not successful enough to continue.  This is a shame. The quality of imagery at Photoshelter is competitive with the industry giants, yet they treated photographers more fairly than the traditional agencies and used a more democratic, more merit-based criteria to recruit their talent. According to CEO Allen Murabayashi, the problem was one of competion with the entrenched corporate heft of the traditional agencies, especially Getty:
The largest consumers of stock…
awild | July 14, 2008While I was away the Photoshelter blog posted a recent interview I did with Allen Murabayashi, the company's CEO. You can read it here, and I've also pasted it below the fold.
I don't market my photos through an agency- my own sites work pretty well- but if I did, Photoshelter is one of the first companies I'd consider. They've navigated the emerging internet market more successfully than the traditional photo agency giants like Getty and Corbis, but unlike the microstocks they also pay their photographers decently.
Alex Wild is a biologist at the University of Arizona with a doctorate in…
awild | February 18, 2008The rise of microstock photography has many established photographers wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over how microstock companies are destroying the business.
What is microstock? It is a relatively new internet-based business model that licenses existing images for scandalously low prices. Traditionally, images are licensed through highly selective stock agencies for amounts in the hundreds of dollars or so, but microstock turns everything upside-down, moving images for just pennies each. Microstock companies aren't choosy about the images they peddle, as they need vast…