It is a new day and we get our information and resources delivered differently. Visual Digital drives all of our information.
If we worry, hoard & seclude ourselves. We will remain safely in the dark (ages).

The crummy people that steal our work out of our portfolios would never be our paying customers in the first place.

So…shrug it off and direct that nervous energy to setting yourself apart from the other millions of photographers.

There is more than enough for all of us!

“there’s no such thing as a free meal”

Codeine….

Whenever I do a Google image search of musicians I shot, I find my photos, unattributed, on other sites. If it’s a non-commercial site I usually tell them to remove it, or give me a photo credit and a link. If everyone did that I wouldn’t mind. What scares me is that my non-watermarked photos could be on thousands of sites with no way of anyone knowing I shot the photo. If someone finds one of my shots unattributed, they couldn’t ask permission or credit me even if they wanted to.

Am I missing something here? If you don’t watermark, how will people know it’s your shot?

Boilerplate. You gotta love it.

8. Use of Your Content.

1. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Sneaky, sneaky…

Here’s the link:
https://www.photoshop.com/express/terms.html

“Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.”

http://www.photoshop.com/express

Not really something for nothing. They’ve got a plan.

My personal opinion on this matter is that many discussions have all gone into personal points of view because of an incomplete reading of Wired’s reportage on Free.

Sinking deeply into “free is wrong” or “free is beautiful” leads nowhere if we are talking of free for real, free like in nothing but Anderson is far from there.

Everyone seems to have missed the term ” Crossed subsidizing” spread all over the Anderson’s text, as a key process to generate THE ILLUSION OF FREE to the consumer, while in fact, some other aspect of the business is actually covering the expense, and ultimately profiting.

If photographers can not find their own way of giving away some
-seemingly- freebie, with all Copyright protection included, which later translates into more profits, then I guess it is our lack of imagination.

The digitalization of products and services should not necessarily work against us, but I can say for sure, that photographers still have to find a way to make this into a profitable venture, as our classic methods for doing business will eventually go away. This does not mean that we have to just accept each and every proposal on the road to give up images for nothing. Maybe that is the difference, free and the illusion of free is still something, while nothing only means nothing.

Contests and companies asking to retain full ownership of the submissions take away from the photographer the alternative of cross-subisidize their images and services and therefore it makes no sense to go there. Instead, targeted submissions may actually become a business in itself.

So Rob, if you are into this concept of asking shooters to send you their images, why not make it into a full virtual repping thing?

You receive images from photographers, you edit the sample yourself ( you have been a successful editor, right?), you make your edit choice visible to targeted audiences( newspaper and mag editors to editorial shooters, art buyers and creatives for Advertising shooters, etc,etc), and those who get a job pay you a commission.

This is an actual way to turn free into cash. You cross subsidize your business just as much as photographers do, for the profit of both.

You turn your database of contacts into a cash cow and everybody wins. No more silly discussions about copyright, or rights-grabbing proposals or free like in nothing.

Regards.

Jorge

“Widgets” sounds a bit like commoditization. I’m hoping that’s not how you see photography.

I’m all for ways that I can make more money. I like your example of NIN because they used “free” to drive prices UP not down.

That’s definitely more applicable to photography than razor blades….

Though come to think about it, photographers who give away too much for free may find themselves headed for a razor blade…good point!

You’re talking about widgets as if they’re interchangeable. One is as good as the next. That’s not how I define a widget but maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe Rob, but I’m willing to bet that:

There are widgets you’d never, ever, ever use.
There are widgets that are ok as 1/8 page stock.
There are widgets you might take a chance on.
There are widgets you count on 3-5 times a year.
There are widgets you absolutely L-O-V-E!
There are widgets you just WISH you could get your hands on.

Are they all really the same?

the second component that you seem to be missing in your gillette and epson comparison (which I never mentioned by the way because I know better than to use the past to predict the future) is the distribution. photographs are worthless without distribution. happily sitting on your hard drive or on your wall earning zero dollars. that’s why working for magazines and winning awards and using mailing lists is so good for business. use the internet to distribute yourself for free.

we can debate this further as I’ve got more posts to come on this subject.

yes, tell Nadav about the widgets.

Also with no comparison is the Chris Anderson article to marketing photography. The reason King Gillette was able to give away razors and create a successful business was because they were totally useless without the blade, which is where he made his money. Not unlike Epson, who is able to sell printers at a fairly reasonable price and make their money on the ink. There is no second component when it comes to purchasing photographs, therefore, your notion is seriously flawed.

The dot com bust occurred for the exact reasons I stated. And yes, there are radical changes in store for photography and should photographers heed advice about distributing their work for free, none of those changes will be pretty and in the least bit beneficial to them.

You can’t possibly touch the photographers as hookers analogy because there is none. Please twist your own words, not mine.

Photographs are widgets? I must remember to tell that to Nadav the next time I run into him.

At least photographers who visit your blog now know where they stand with you.

http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/

Photographers already have websites, portfolios and produce promo cards which they send to their potential fans for free. I think you even tell them to do this. I’m just saying expand that group to include regular joe’s.

Don’t kid yourself, photographs are widgets and all the normal laws of economics apply. Do you think google is a successful company? They gave their services away for free except now they’re worth billions. I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree or get what I’m talking about but your assumptions about the economics of the dot com companies is way off base and if you think there’s nothing radical in store for photography… well, good luck.

I’m not touching the photographers as hookers analogy.

2. What if Joni Mitchell, or the Beatles, or Ani DeFranco, had set up their business model so that they only pressed twenty-five copies of their recordings? What if they said, “Instead of running an ‘unlimited edition’, we’re going to limit the edition, and each copy of the record/CD will sell for fifty grand. The edition is limited to twenty five. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. No more. The master will be destroyed. Would they have gotten their career off the ground? How many, at fifty grand a pop, would they have sold? Is a copy of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” record any less a work of art than say, a Richard Misrach print, or an Avedon portrait?

I think Debra Weiss (and others) make some interesting points, but I think also Rob’s suggestion to think outside the box has merit too.

In a way, the “limited edition” approach seems to be the way that most advertising photographers are running their business — sitting around waiting for the phone to ring “with that big job” — the one with the fifty or hundred grand fee.

And it also calls into question, for a fine art photographer, whether to limit his editions, to artificially create scarcity, and therefore hopefully up the value of each image. But the question arises again, what if he chooses the limited edition route, but there’s simply not enough “ten grand buyers” out there to ever generate enough buzz about the work, therefore he stays in obscurity?

I’m not arguing; I’m just questioning.

Interesting concept, I suppose. Let me throw in a term I didn’t see on here: devaluation. If you’re selling to 10,000 “small-pocket” fans instead of 500 “elite” fans, scarcity disappears and so does interest in your work. Value goes down. Profit goes down. Surely we have all seen it happen at least once in our lives.

Reckon I’ll stick to that “hard road” of the top tier clients who actually want to cover costs rather than devaluing my visual integrity in order to be more like Wal-Mart and less like Neimen Marcus.

The real mistake nearly every photographer makes is having only one source of revenue. These days, to truly be rich, to build wealth, each person needs multiple revenue streams. And for many professional photographers, shooting is the only way they make money, which means they’re also missing out on a lot of income then.

Treat photography as a fun, exciting career that supplements your other income (re-read what I just said) and prosperity is much more likely to be abundant. This industry becomes very dangerous when put in place as a last resort.