Contributor Photo

Why do photographers have such bad photographs of themselves? I mean, it seems like, as a photographer at some point in your career you should have a great picture taken by your assistant or another photographer you know and respect but I’m here to tell you, universally, photographers don’t have good contributor photos. I’m not immune from this phenomena either as I struggled to find photos of myself without a hat and sunglasses when my time came to appear on the contributor page so I’m offering this criticism more as a public service announcement.

“Photographers get decent portraits taken of yourselves.” I’ve had to remove dozens of photographers from the contributor page of the magazine over the years because the photos sucked. The two biggest violations are obscured face and a camera unnaturally placed in the frame somewhere.

I suggest that you have two options ready. Something from the field of you working and more of a formal portrait shot so the magazine has options. Also, some of you who are attempting to stop the aging process by submitting the same image from 20 years ago should update your picture.

Details magazine gave up several years ago and they now unnaturally crop and convert to B&W all their contributor images. Vanity Fair on the other hand treats all their contributors like mini profiles in the magazine and assigns appropriate photography (and styling) to each.

Do yourself a favor and make it easy for magazines to put you on the contributor page. You may think people land there all the time because of their status in the industry and that’s part of it but they also land there because they have a great contributor photo.

Bonus Time

The end of the year is when corporate people start to think about bonuses and so far I’ve been lucky to work at companies that give them out. The problem has always been that the formula to determine who gets them and how much they get is a closely guarded secret. I have uncovered evidence that it’s loosely based on this top-secret formula: The bare minimum we can get away with where employees only grumble and don’t actually quit. I think back when media companies were setting new highs the bonuses were probably pretty good but now that the new highs are old lows it’s perfunctory at best.

This also reminds me that many photo directors and editors get a bonus for hitting the budget at the end of the year that can be $5,000 or more which is pretty significant for your bank account but when you’re dealing with multi million dollar photography budgets it’s a total joke. I can spend 5k in half a second so I don’t know why the CFO thinks that paltry bribe will get me to try and make photographers eat expenses on shoots or use stock instead of shooting something original, so I can meet some number they pulled out of their ass. I even argued once I should still get my bonus, even though I completely blew the budget, because it could have been worse. Hah.

I Fixed That Copyright Problem On The Internet

I decided to take it upon myself to address the raging debate about copyright on the internet. I created an alternate internet for people who want to give their content away without attribution or payment.

I’m calling it the shitternet. Just direct your browser to shit://www.yourblog.com and start grabbing stories and photos and video to make a page everyone will want to visit. This is going to be so AWESOME. It will be a place where people can mash-up and repurpose everything thats posted and consumers can go and look at the same photographs and stories and videos over and over and over again only reposted on millions of blogs. And, everyone can link everyone else until the internet resembles a giant donut. Sweet. It’s for people who use the internet as a side job. It’s no good for people who want to make a living off original content creation because everything is free.

There was another round of debate on the tech blogs just before the holidays about photographers copyright and the idea of fair use on the internet. I won’t bore you with links because it’s old news now but I wanted to point out that a few people commented with links to Larry Lessig’s speach at TED (here) where he talks about mashing-up copyrighted content to make cool new content and they all seemed to miss the point he makes at the end that the content originators should decide how their stuff is used.

I think it’s cool that people want to create material and give it away because that’s exactly the value of the material they’re creating. The creative commons license which Larry is a big supporter of was created so people can broadly release copyright restrictions on material they would never profit from. I’ve always had a problem paying for horrible photography and now I know I can get it for free.

High quality photography is still very expensive.