Over on Gizmodo (here) Teru has practical advise for photographers headed into the war zone:
The daily mechanics of photographing in a “war zone” don’t have much to do with photography—mostly it’s about getting from point A to point B without getting your head cut off, then finding a signal and an outlet.
For what it’s worth, here’s some advice for first timers heading out to the badlands.
Wear Your Seat Belt… it’s the traffic that’s most likely to kill you. Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten Stop Looking For the “Front Line”—It’s a Mirage..”battlefield” has been replaced by the “battlespace,” Equip Yourself With the Right Gear… Avoid the faux-commando stuff …Bring plastic (not your credit cards)… Pack your go bag – AKA, your grab bag, jump bag, snatch bag, bug-out bag, etc. Embedding Has Both Perks and Consequences… You can spend an entire deployment embedded with the US Marines in Diyala or Helmand, but don’t fool yourself that you know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan—what you’ve seen is the inside of an armored bubble. Get In Shape Before Deploying… I’m hauling a backpack that’s more than 50% of my body weight. Fixers: The Tour Guides of War Reporting… don’t trust them blindly… many of the ones I’ve worked with are dead now. Don’t Follow the Pack…by the time it’s “news,” it’s pretty old. Visit Lightstalkers.org… sharing network of people who do inadvisable things in sketchy places.
This was sent to me as an example of what people are charging now in advertising photography. You can certainly see they’ve trimmed all the fat out, which isn’t a problem if you don’t have a ton of overhead.
Bid number 2 comes from a Pharmaceutical job where the photographer had the middle bid, was not awarded the job and told the decision was strictly creative.
Here’s a couple editorial invoices for glossy celebrity lovin checkout mags. One is for syndication, next for a weekly and finally a monthly. Numbers look middle of the road to me.
While watching the 4-H youngsters going about their business at MontanaFair in Billings this month, I was struck by a parallel. Here I am in 2009, at a fair ground: a photojournalist, making pictures of cowboys in every direction I look. Don’t any of us know that none of us are supposed to exist?”
[…]Professional photojournalists have only their eye, their experience and their work ethic to create lasting images. It has nothing to do with what kind of lariat they’re carrying.
[…] if you can’t make a great picture in your own backyard, it isn’t going to happen anywhere else.
Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.
Taking a cue from the Creative Review Blog I wanted to ask my readers as well: How do you decide what to charge?
Here’s an excellent Cost of Doing Business Calculator (here), where you input your desired salary, then add up all the business expenses that can’t be billed back to the client and it gives you a day rate based on how many days you expect to bill for the year. In cases where the fee is fixed and below your day rate–editorial comes to mind– you would simply make sure you could subtract something from the promotion or testing category to make it all balance out (or your salary if it has some perceived future benefit).
Back when I used to work for photographers and negotiate the shoot fees the goal was to make the client cringe and not hang up. It would have been much better to do a budget and make sure we were making what we needed to. There seems to be a sudden spate of high end photographers headed for bankruptcy (here), don’t be one of them.
“Speaking as someone who enthusiastically sold out, every time I’ve done something just for the money, no matter how much they paid, it was never enough.” — Pentagram’s Michael Bierut
Here’s an interesting idea. Magazines can now do single issue reprints using MagCloud.
“To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, LIFE teamed up with MagCloud to release a Special Edition Woodstock Magazine. Originally released 40 years ago, this special issue has more than 100 photos of the performances and amazing community that attended Woodstock.” (here)
You can also make your own magazine from scratch using their archive:
“Life.com will partner with HP’s MagCloud to offer users a personalised “timeline”. They will get to print their own edition of Life magazine comprising a selection of catalogue images from any given date, as well as their own uploads.” (here)
It’s a cool idea along the lines of getting a picture on a mouse pad or coffee mug but I’ve had a couple conversations with people looking to make money off big magazine archives and I think the public’s ability/patience to put a magazine together from scratch is very limited. We’re on the firehose end of the information superhighway so finding someone you trust to edit everything down to something relevant is more important than having a trillion choices.
If Fred Woodward edited a copy of Life out of the archive I might actually buy that.
Media owners around the world are scratching their heads, asking why magazines and newspapers aren’t selling anymore. Why? Because you’ve downgraded the experience. When you are competing against digital, which can zoom in and animate? then your print experience needs to be tactile and exciting and, for magazines, a bit collectable.”
The frightening and most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from really and especially you don’t have any idea about where they’re going to come from tomorrow. — Hal Riney
Screenings (here).
New York, NY
Fri. August 21 – Thurs. August 27 12:50, 2:35, 4:20, 6:20, 8:20, 10:20 p.m. IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY
Denver, CO
Fri. August 21 – Thurs. August 27 5:00, 7:30 p.m. Denver Film Society, 900 Auraria Parkway, Denver, CO
Chicago, IL
Fri. August 21 5:45, 7:45, 9:45 p.m. Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave, Chicago, IL
David Turnley Photography Workshops is announcing two scholarship opportunities for the New York workshop being held from August 23 – 29th, 2009. The scholarships will cover the full tuition cost for the workshop, a value of $1550. Winners will be only responsible for a $200 guest speaker fee.
Applicants should send a link to an on-line portfolio or examples of work and a brief paragraph describing their background to workshops@davidcturnley.com. Please do not send images as attachments.
Information about the workshop can be found (here).
In 2007 Matt Mendelsohn heard from a friend about a recently graduated fashion student who had all 4 limbs amputated. At the time she was near death but soon turned the corner and a year later was teaching fashion at her alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University. Matt, a longtime journalist, decided he needed to go document her story on his own, he knew the story needed to be told but didn’t want to waste time lining up an assignment. He ended up photographing and writing a compelling 10,000 word piece about Lindsay that was recently published… on sportsshooter.com (here). He shopped it around to several publishers but they all turned him down. At one big national newspaper the publisher said “advertisers wanted happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones.”
Of course none of this is news to photographers who now regularly see important stories get trounced by the celebrity/fad of the week. In my own brief magazine career I would often get important stories handed to me with an edict to make the images “happy” so the advertisers don’t get upset. I have a little “lesson” of my own for publishers that I’d like to impart. No matter how much ass kissing you do, your advertisers are still leaving. In fact they may be leaving more quickly now because your readers no longer consider you a “must read” after you’ve taken the edge off everything (due to all that ass kissing, natch).
After the EIC of Self magazine defends their body image distorting cover retouching policy by saying “Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best.” The proper response is for a competing magazine to run Matt Mendelshon’s “the Lessons of Lindsay” and tell Danziger to go stuff it. Why won’t anyone do that anymore?
Panera has been bucking conventional industry wisdom during the downturn by eschewing discounts and instead targeting customers who can still afford to shell out an average of about $8.50 for lunch.
The St. Louis-based chain of 1,400 cafes says it has been able to persuade customers to pay premiums because it has been improving the quality of its food.
NY Magazine has a well reported story by Andrew Goldman on the financial predicament Annie Leibovitz finds herself in today. There’s some awesome quotes in the story referencing her legendary temper and insecure perfectionism but the financial meltdown is simply astounding to read about.
No matter what you think of Annie’s pictures today she’s clearly a very talented photographer, has long been a pioneer in this industry and deserves some level of respect from everyone. But, of course these quotes are too juicy not to republish:
[…]Her bloated work expenses were a chronic concern. Anthony Accardi, Leibovitz’s onetime printer, recalls that jobs were often rushed, like the time he had to show up to a lab at 3 a.m. to pick up film of Bill Clinton and have work prints ready by 7 a.m., a job so hurried that he billed Condé Nast three times his regular rate. Accardi was stunned by the number of work prints Leibovitz would order, and apparently so was Condé Nast. After Accardi printed 300 oversize work prints of a Roseanne Barr shoot and billed Vanity Fair some $15,000, he received a letter from Graydon Carter himself, informing him that after this job, he’d be paid for no more than 50 such prints. “Like I was going to tell Annie that?” Accardi says with a laugh. “She would’ve boxed my ears.”
Eccles says Leibovitz could be downright tyrannical. “I once narrowly escaped being hit by a pair of shoes,” he says. “To this day, I’ve never been as nervous photographing a subject as I have assisting her. And that includes the several times I’ve been sent to the White House.” Leibovitz, Eccles says, once slammed her fists on a table, swearing she was going to kill him after a lighting test hadn’t gone well. “Go ahead, hit me,” Eccles said. He was by then so accustomed to the behavior, he says, that he didn’t flinch. “You’re not afraid of me,” Leibovitz lamented, skulking off. “It’s not fun anymore.” After her outbursts, Eccles says, Leibovitz would almost always call and apologize. Still, he left on good terms. “I adore Annie,” he says. “I’ll go to the mat for her as the greatest photographer there ever was in any genre.”
[…]In 2007, Leibovitz agreed to take Tina Brown’s portrait for her Princess Diana biography. “I thought she would just take a snap at my home,” Brown says. Leibovitz insisted that the shoot be on the beach near Brown’s summer home in Quogue, even though it was March and freezing. Leibovitz showed up in a van with a stylist and assistant. A second car stuffed full of clothes soon arrived. A wind machine would eventually be engaged. This was all on Leibovitz’s dime; she refused to charge Brown a cent. Unsatisfied with the day’s work, Leibovitz suggested that they try again the next day. “We’re through!” Brown told her, appreciative but worn out. “She’s a massive perfectionist,” Brown says, “and absolutely doesn’t care about the impact on her own bottom line.”
[…]Leibovitz has to come up with $24 million, plus interest, by this September. Under the terms of the agreement, says a person familiar with the loan, Art Capital could be entitled to up to 22.5 percent of all the proceeds from the sale of any of Leibovitz’s work—even for two years after she’s paid off the loan. And that percentage could increase to close to 50 percent if she were to default.
Read the entire story on the NYMag website (here).
Joerg is running a free portfolio competition over on Conscientious aimed at discovering some emerging talent:
The winner of the competition will have her or his work featured here on this blog, in the form of an extended conversation/interview (which, of course, also showcases the photography). Details below.
First of all, the Conscientious Portfolio Competition (CPC) is free. It’s no pay-to-play scheme. There are no costs involved for you, other than whatever time it takes to send me your stuff.
Second, CPC is aimed at emerging photographers. Of course, the term “emerging” is not extremely well defined; what it means that photographers not represented by a gallery will get preferential treatment over those that already are (but of course, the quality of the work also plays an important role).
Read about it (Here) It will be interesting to see what he turns up. Whenever I’ve done something similar in the past I’ve discovered excellent photographers I knew nothing about.
Stella Kramer interviews (here) photographer Louie Psihoyos (spent 17 years traveling the world shooting for National Geographic) about his career and his new movie The Cove.
Any advice for new photographers?
The only advice I would have for a young still photographer would be to forget all advice and follow your passion with a passion. The Universe has a strange way of supporting lunatics like us that refuse to live inside the box.
Robert Michael Murray, the developer of emerging technology platforms for Georgetown University, the 2000 Democratic National Convention and a former tech liaison for multiple TV series, will be in charge of leveraging NG content throughout the new and emerging social media platforms.
Miki Johnson who runs the Resolve blog had a nice theme running all week called “after staff” (here). She interviewed and gathered advise from people who’ve either moved on or been laid off from a staff job. As a former staffer myself I can tell you… well, I’m not a good example because I worked with freelance photographers before getting a staff job and couldn’t wait to become a freelancer again some day. One thing that I remember clearly tho is that after many years of having a deadline each and every month, as a freelancer or independent business person you have an unending list of things to get done and no deadlines. That can be somewhat crushing and paralyzing to deal with.
“All of my photographers would be successful without me, but hopefully I make things better– I’m a good collaborator, and I represent where they want to be going and the clients they hope to be in contact with.”
