Photography: graceish

Everyone makes mistakes, and that includes photographers.  For most of those mistakes, there’s a delete button that removes the missed shots and wipes out the worst pictures, but when it comes to building a photography business, even the smallest error can prove to be expensive.

That’s certainly true of what must be the most common early mistake: pricing. New photographers tend to come into the business with a background in shooting for fun. While they might have spent a great deal of money on equipment and travel in order to take great pictures and hone their skills, those expenses were usually written off as the price of a passion rather than the cost of doing business.

They neither know how much it really costs to produce a picture, nor do they care a great deal.

When you’re starting to charge clients, however, and when you plan to live off the income those sales generate, failing to calculate and include all of the costs involved in photography means that you will, inevitably, be dipping into savings.

The good news is that it’s not a mistake that photographers make too often, and when it does happen, it tends to occur before turning professional. Early bookings might not cover all of the costs involved in travel, time and printing but they do deliver valuable experience and a portfolio of shots. Even cheap one-off print sales or low-cost stock licensing that benefit the buyer more than the photographer teach the seller a useful — if painful — lesson about the true costs of printing, mailing, framing and usage. Those early pricing mistakes are avoidable with a little care, but they’re not fatal and as long as the lessons are learned, they can help to build the foundations of a successful photography business.

It’s a Mistake Not to Market

Failure to market is more serious. This is something that photographers do all too frequently, usually because it’s just so difficult, slow and time-consuming. Photographers would much rather be behind the lens posing the model or instructing the couple than sitting at a computer writing metatags for search engine optimization.

But it’s still essential. It’s essential to have an attractive, effective website. It’s essential to market that website, to use Facebook to push images and stay in touch with clients, to encourage referrals and recommendations, to send out press releases that maintain the profile of the business, to advertise in the places you know clients are likely to be looking, and to invest time, effort and even money in marketing copy that builds trust and converts leads.

Jasmine Star, an award-winning wedding photographer in Orange County, California, listed failing to build a website as one of her top five photography mistakes. It didn’t kill her business but it is likely to have cost her a lot of valuable work until her — now very impressive — site was up.

Errors in pricing and marketing can hit your bank balance or retard your growth but they aren’t fatal to a photography career. That’s not true of all photography mistakes though.

Theft is a Career-Killing Mistake

Two months ago, Dana Dawes, of Dana Dawes Photography, an Atlanta photography business, posted an ad on Groupon that offered a one-hour shoot, a DVD, a free print, and a 20 percent discount off additional prints for just $65.

That might have been a mistake in itself. The price was so low that the ad quickly picked up orders and responses, including a note from one commenter who speculated that it would have been impossible for a single photographer to complete all the bookings the offer would bring in, “even working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

The real trouble though began the following day when “SP” added a comment that began:

“Groupon, you are dealing with a thief here. This photographer does not own all the photos on her website.”

Describing himself as a professional photographer, “SP” explained that he had become suspicious about the lighting and conversions in the pictures on Dawes’ portfolio. He took one of the images off the website, un-distorted it, ran it through image recognition software and discovered that the image actually belonged to a photographer called Morgaine Owens. Additional stolen images were identified, and Dana Dawes was even accused of copying her About page from another photographer’s website.

Despite claiming that she owned the rights to all the photos on her site, Dawes quickly deleted the pictures — a move which had all the effect of a signed confession. Groupon eventually refunded everyone who had bought her Groupon but not before Dana Dawes’ reputation took an enormous beating.

She’s still offering photography services, but anyone Googling Dana Dawes’ name is likely to come in for a nasty surprise, and while the shots in her portfolio are now likely to be hers, they’re also poor enough to turn away most leads with an eye for an image.

Plagiarism is never excusable, especially when you’re using stolen images to win work, but the lack of a broad portfolio can be a real problem. New photographers who want to demonstrate their ability to shoot weddings need to work as an assistant or offer their services to friends and family for free in order to build a collection of images that show off their talent. Looking for an unethical shortcut is an error of career-killing proportions.

That mistake is unusual, although not unique. There is one other mistake thought that is no less dangerous and far more common: having unrealistic expectations. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income for a professional photographer in 2009 was just $29,770. A quarter of photographers earned less than $21,150 and only 10 percent picked up more than $62,340.

Believing that you’ll be happy as a photographer is a reasonable expectation. Believing that you can build a business, pay your bills and enjoy your work is reasonable too. But believing that you’ll get rich from photography? That’s probably a mistake that experience will quickly correct.

Related posts:

1. How Local Businesses Can Help Your Photography Business
2. Making the Most of Local Businesses
3. What’s Wrong With Microstock?
4. When it all Goes Wrong
5. Art Will Solve Photography’s Problems

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/ffnMVL6lOvo/when-new-photography-businesses-go-wrong

Photography: L.C. Nøttaasen

Flickr isn’t the only photo-sharing site that’s been cosying up to stock companies this year. Back in June, Angelo Sotira, the co-founder and CEO of art community deviantART, wrote on his blog that “most of the players” in commercial stock had been in touch with him. deviantART, he noted, had a population of “hundreds of thousands of professional artists” who needed “dependable access to assets that have uniform permissions and contracts.” It also had “thousands of artists who might want to participate in selling stock to a larger user base than the artists on deviantART.” As a result, he had been looking for a way to add a stock offering to the site in  a way that matched its unique culture.

That couldn’t have been easy. deviantART has about 14.5 million registered users who have submitted over 140,000,000 works of art. Those works fit into 2,600 different categories, including painting, literature, artisan crafts, and digital arts, as well as photography. While Flickr allows members to upload an entire folder of images to their streams, contributions to deviantART have to be made individually, forcing artists to  think about the work that they share.

“Each user submission to deviantART has a level of intention,” explains Nicole Jordan, a spokesperson for the site. “Users do not dump 120 snapshots from the trip to Hawaii.”

Perhaps most importantly, deviantART operates as a community in which artists are accustomed to sharing works freely on which others can build. Many submissions come with creative commons licenses (although often restricted to works published on deviantART) and some 12,000 members identify themselves as community stock contributors — providers of free raw material to other deviantART artists. It’s not unusual to find a photomanipulation made up of the contributions of as many as ten different members, says Nicole.

The Free Images Stay

One big challenge then was assuring members that any introduction of a paid stock channel would still allow artists to help themselves to a rich inventory of creative commons-licensed works for their own productions.

“Some were nervous at first that we would upset the ‘free’ stock culture now available on deviantART,” says Nicole, “but they since understand that a commercial offering is not intended to get in the way of artists supporting each other.”

Certainly, the announcement in mid-October that deviantART had teamed up with Fotolia should have set most minds at rest. At the moment, the agreement only provides for a branded version of the microstock site, providing an easy way for artists to buy from Fotolia while supporting their favorite artist community — and giving the microstock site access to a large market of image users. The launch of the site however doesn’t allow artists to do anything that they couldn’t have done in the past directly from the stock company’s own site, although they may be able to enjoy some special offers. The choice of Fotolia was deliberate. deviantART spoke to all of the microstock providers, settling on Fotolia in part  because of the company’s international outlook but mostly because it was the only company that saw unique opportunities in working with a community that was more focused on art than commercialism.

“Fotolia understood, and others did not, that having an arts community as a resource enables more people to be interested in stock, more people to use stock to complete their works and more people to try stock who might not have before,” explained Nicole.

The new portal is only the beginning though. A plan to allow members to license their works through Fotolia is now in process and is due for rollout next year. In the meantime, deviantART has created a discussion forum to provide a space for members to express their concerns about the agreement. Most notable among those concerns have been ways to separate licenses for free use by other artists exclusively on deviantART from licenses sold to commercial buyers. An encouraging number of artists have also expressed an enthusiasm for signing up to Fotolia as contributors.

The Differences Between Stock and Art

But once the members of deviantART have finished grappling with the idea of selling their works to commercial buyers without harming their free contributions, they’ll have to come to terms with the differences between the demands of a commercial stock house and the needs of a free-sharing artistic community. When Flickr joined up with Getty, it forced members to license all of their images or none at all, sending a flood of potential new pictures to the stock company. But deviantART has a much smaller library of works, not all of which are photographs and many of which are photomanipulations built on non-commercial creative commons licenses. The inventories increase singly, while stock contributors have to build their portfolios by uploading large numbers of images if they’re to make a reasonable number of sales.

And the kinds of creative images usually shown on deviantART are a long way from the traditional smiling executives and leaping families of microstock.

“What a commercial stock house does and what a liberated free-sharing artist community does are completely different,” wrote Angelo Sotira on his blog. “That’s understood. At the same time, what a commercial stock offering provides – – like money to artists, access to standard use agreements that can be transferred to clients, focused search for items and tracking the people using the content  - – is a package that goes past artist exchanges.”

The real question for deviantART members hoping to earn from their artistic images then isn’t whether there will still be free works available for them to use once their fellow members realize that they can sell their pictures, but whether there’s a commercial demand for the kind of creative works that give them the greatest satisfaction to shoot — and whether they can produce enough of them to make any money.

If there is that demand, and if a microstock company can send back enough money to contributors, then the artists of deviantART may have found a way to support their passion. And Getty will have some real competition.

Related posts:

1. Professional Photographers Turn to Microstock
2. Facebook Claims Right to Create Derivative Works from Members’ Photos
3. Photographers Turn to Fair Trade to Beat Microstock
4. What’s Wrong With Microstock?
5. Ad Men Seek Flickr Photos and Flickr Members

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/LkxUkazgni4/deviantart-members-prepare-to-sell-their-art-as-microstock

cover from our new book, Inspired Photography: 189 Sources of Inspiration For Better Photos
Whatever the end result of a photography shoot, whether it’s a bunch of images that pick up comments on Flickr, generate praise from friends and family, or win sales to stock buyers, magazines or even art collectors, all images start from the same place.

They begin with a spark of inspiration.

That inspiration will be different for every photographer. Some photographers will pull their first DSLR out of their box and immediately point it at the flowers in the garden and the leaves on their trees. Others will only be interested in capturing faces, shooting portraits and turning people into works of art that reveal personality and reflect character. For some photographers, it’s city scenes and urban decay that are most likely to have them changing their lenses and playing with aperture settings.

That inspiration, whatever it may be, is the vital element that runs through every great photographer’s career, from the landscapes of Ansel Adams’ images to the male form in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. But while that initial spark is always natural and instinctive, it’s not always easy to maintain the enthusiasm through years of photography. Once you’ve shot the same scenes or the same subjects in a hundred different ways, once you feel you’ve mastered a technique or entirely got to grips with a style, what do you do next?

Ansel Adams, Photojournalist

While the first spark will happen automatically, future explorations might require a bit of prompting. The right prompts though, can really push photographers in exciting new directions and deliver surprising results. If Ansel Adams hadn’t been moved to take time out of the American wilderness to document life in a Japanese internment camp during the war, for example, we wouldn’t have this powerful collection of documentary images. If Robert Buelteman hadn’t chosen to put down his camera and look only at the images of the natural objects he was photographing, we wouldn’t have this incredible collection of unique Kirlian photographs.

Few photographers though can count on something as dramatic as government internment to provide new photographic ideas and not all photographers know about Kirlian photography, so over the last few months we’ve been putting together a new book describing 189 points of inspiration that photographers can use to start brand new photographic journeys.

The book contains ideas for actions and for styles, for city scenes and for country views, and always for inspiring, exciting photographs. In fact, when it came to the image themselves, we really pushed hard to include as many creative, artistic and original photographs as we could. (It was an exercise that provided a useful insight into the habits of photography buyers, as well as the prices they pay. Photographers might complain, perhaps justifiably, about the low rates charged by microstock firms for the smallest Web-use licenses, but start looking for licenses for top images in sizes big enough for print, and even microstock prices soon start to approach those of traditional stock.)

Hours of Creative Exploration

Each idea includes a summary of the concept itself, a description of some of the different ways a photographer might approach the subject so that they can make their own unique contribution to the form, and directions for further research.

The ideas are as varied as we could make them. Some are simple, such as joining a Flickr group or taking a photography class — both easy ways to pick up ideas and inspiration. Others might require some specialized knowledge or at least the willingness to obtain that knowledge, such as underwater photography or high-speed photography. And while some subjects, such as the night sky or gas stations, can lead to a collection that takes a lifetime to build, other ideas, such as shooting for contests, illustrating poetry or focusing on an antique market, will help to turn a quiet weekend into hours of creative exploration.

Clearly, we don’t expect any photography enthusiast to use every one of the 189 ideas in the book — although trying might be fun. But if it prompts a photographer try even three or four concepts that they might never have considered, if it means that a photographer never looks at his camera and wonders what they should be shooting next, it will have fulfilled a large part of its job.

The rest of the job is up to the photographer.

Unlike our other photography books, Inspired Photography doesn’t offer advice on marketing or sales. Instead of thinking about the last stage of a photograph’s life, the point at which it leaves the photographer and begins a new use in the hands of a buyer, we wanted to look at the beginning of the process: the idea that forms the image.

But that doesn’t mean that the beginning has nothing at all to do with the end. The ideas that inspire photographers the most are also the driving forces that define their look and the shape of their careers.

When commissioning editors examine the portfolios of photographers they’re considering hiring, they don’t just look at the tear sheets and the professional shots. They also look at the photographer’s personal projects because it’s that work that will tell them not just what the photographer has shot in the past but how they think about all of the photography that they’ll do in the future. It reveals their style, their approach and the kind of aesthetic that they’re aiming to reach every time they take a shot. As top microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs told us once, when his buyers need an image, they look for his portfolio because they want a “Yuri Arcurs” photograph.

Before you can create the personal projects that are most likely to inspire a commissioning editor to hire you, before you can settle into producing a line of images that define your brand as a photographer, you first have to know what inspires you the most — and that means trying out different ideas and looking for surprising new directions.

A photographic journey should last a lifetime, and while it might not have a definite destination, every turn and every direction should show you something new. You can find (189) new photographic directions on amazon.

Related posts:

1. The 5 Most Inspiring People on Flickr
2. The Secrets of a Winning Photography Book
3. How Good Photography Ideas Can Go Bad

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/qnXYTzmDMmg/inspiring-your-photography

Image courtesy: SmugMug

When Flickr announced its deal with Getty, allowing members to license their images through the stock giant, reactions were mixed. On the one hand, there was a feeling that it was about time. Photographers had been negotiating individual deals with image buyers keen to use their creativity for years but making those agreements was often a slow process that resulted in enthusiasts handing over valuable rights to experienced buyers who knew a bargain when they saw one. Those buyers, too, would often find that sellers disappeared when contacted, lacked model releases or didn’t have the images in the size they needed. Letting Getty sort through the process should make life a lot easier for both sides.

But Flickr photographers can’t yet choose to offer individual images, only their entire collection, and Getty takes 70 percent of the sales price of any image sold. That might be the stock industry standard, and it includes the cost of ensuring all the legal requirements have been fulfilled, but it can look steep if the buyer has come in through the photographer’s own Flickr stream rather than as a result of Getty’s marketing. That’s why some photographers have suggested cutting out the middleman, making clear that their images are for sale under their pictures and treating buyers professionally themselves.

Flickr though, might not be the best place to do that. SmugMug might be.

A Growing Family Business

The site was founded in 2002, some two years before the launch of Flickr, when Chris MacAskill discovered that members of his motorcycle forum were looking for ways to embed images into their posts, something that photo-sharing sites at the time didn’t offer. His son, Don, however, had a gaming network that included a photo-sharing component.

“Everyone we demoed it to asked if they could use it for regular photos,” Chris recalled in an email interview.

With no one willing to provide funds, the father and son team bootstrapped the service by charging photographers $30 per year to host an unlimited number of photos. Early growth was slow  but eight years later, the site has grown to employ 55 staff, including nine family members. It also hosts over a billion photos and receives 15 million unique visitors a month.

The annual fee however has remained, providing one important difference to Flickr, most of whose members use the site for free. SmugMug is free to browse and provides a two-week trial period for contributors, but fees then range from $5 per month to as much as $20 per month (or $150 per year) for Pro membership. What contributors get that for that money (that they can’t receive from Flickr) includes the ability to choose themes for pages, customize their websites and place their SmugMug galleries on their own domains.

More importantly, Pro members can also sell their images not just as prints but as digital downloads. The licensing options are pre-set and consist of just two royalty-free usages: one commercial, and one personal. It was a choice that provides the most simplicity, explains Chris MacAskill.

“RM licenses make customer heads explode and are hard to execute.”

The Fine Line Between Commercial and Personal

That still leaves the photographers with the challenge of pricing their pictures. Members are free to choose whatever price they feel their images are worth and can demand different rates for different image sizes. Buyers too are forced to decide whether the usage they have in mind is commercial or personal. A blogger looking for an image to place on an ad-supported website is likely to feel that a creative commons license that prohibits commercial use will qualify. Not on SmugMug, which expects even ad-supported bloggers to pay commercial license fees to photographers.

According to Chris, about 30 percent of SmugMug’s accounts are “Professional,” the type that can make sales. About a third of those are run by companies and organizations, leaving about 20 percent of SmugMug accounts that are actually owned by professional photographers. The remaining members tend to consist largely of travelers who want to show off pictures of their once-in-a-lifetime trip. Families make up the second largest group, and enthusiasts make up the third group of users.

Chris wouldn’t reveal the value of the sales Pro accounts have generated but says that he’s always surprised in general at the number of photos and prints sold on the Internet.

“Many companies are thriving online who sell prints and gifts, and it’s a higher percentage of our sales every month because one subscriber can sell so many prints.”

The ability to customize galleries and make sales both digitally and in print make SmugMug very different to Flickr — different enough for many of SmugMug’s members to have accounts on both sites. Chris himself often uses Flickr to search for interesting photos but, he notes, the Yahoo-owned site is about discussion rather than display. It’s about getting your pictures “noticed and talked about” while SmugMug provides better customization, privacy and, for professionals, more efficient interaction with customers. Some image protection is also built-in to SmugMug, with right click disabled even on mid-range accounts and custom watermarks and printmarks (that place logos or signatures on prints) available to Pro members.

If the biggest benefit for photographers hoping to make sales is not handing over 70 percent of their revenues to a stock company, there is a challenge to using SmugMug too. Flickr is known for hosting creative, unusual images placed there by enthusiasts. It’s a brand image that attracts buyers looking for photos that are less formal than traditional stock. SmugMug’s brand as a place for photographers to show off their pictures — rather than discuss them with other photographers — means that its members will have to work to attract buyers and sell their pictures, especially if they’re placing them on their own domain. SmugMug might give photographers the tools they need to cut out the middleman but it does mean they have to do the work that middleman is used to doing on its photographers’ behalf.

Related posts:

1. Ad Men Seek Flickr Photos and Flickr Members
2. Understanding Model Release Forms
3. How to Get Paid for your Flickr Photos
4. Flickr Still Beats Facebook for Photographers
5. Getty Has Already Sold ‘Thousands’ of Flickr Images

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PhotopreneurBlog/~3/opkid86GkMU/understanding-the-difference-between-smugmug-and-flickr