Well if it wasn’t a struggle to find one’s own voice, what would be the point? Struggle is good! I think it helps to be an independent thinker. Be sure of yourself and your intention. Read and read more. The struggle is what makes it worth doing – what gives your voice the meaning.
— Susana Raab.
via MIAD-FA382.
I guess ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) can’t wait for 2009 to end because they’ve got the Best Magazine Cover of the Year award going already and this year the voting is open to the public on Amazon (here).
This is going to be a cool experiment to see what kind of cover the amazon buying public likes. There are quite a few covers missing the coverlines which I presume are the subscriber copies and just looking at those makes you realize how coverlines ruin a good cover. Then there are the illustrated covers which I’d be willing to bet will lose out to the photographs in any category where there’s a strong picture. The best part is that they have all the photographers properly credited so you can click on a cover and see who shot it. That brings up an interesting cover competition in the food category:
Nigel Cox vs. Kenji Toma vs. Roland Bello
Also in the Obama Cover section it’s Peter Yang vs. Nadav vs. Chessum vs. Joe Raedle/Getty
I thought this Stephen Wilkes cover in the Science, Technology and Nature Category was cool:
Sharpen your pencils peeps here’s an excellent multiple choice copyright test I found on the Art + Law + Blog via Photo Attorney.
1. Copyright protection comes from placing a “©” on your work.
a. Absolutely true. Why else would that little c be in the circle?
b. Sometimes true, depending on things I’m not really sure about.
c. Not true.
2. Copyright protection requires registering your work with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C.
a. This is a trick question. It’s true that copyright protection requires registering your work, but you don’t have to do it at the Washington office. You can do it at one of the many affiliated offices through-out the country. In fact, I think I saw one just the other day.
b. Not true. I created it, it’s mine, and there’s nothing more I have to do.
c. Of course. Why else would your tax dollars go to support a federal copyright office?
3. Placing the work in an envelope and mailing it to yourself has the same effect as registering it with the Copyright Office.
a. No. If it did, why waste the ink to print this article?
b. Of course it does. If it didn’t, why waste the ink to print this article?
c. Yes. And if enough authors send in their tasteless dreck, the postal service may not have to raise rates again anytime soon.
4. If it’s on the Web, it’s free for the taking.
a. No. Stealing is stealing.
b. Sure, why not?
c. This is true, but only if I use a 28KB modem, and the copyright expires before I finish downloading it.
5. Copying just a little bit does not constitute copyright infringement.
a. Maybe.
b. Maybe.
c. Maybe.
6. Company names and slogans, such as Microsoft, Coppertone, “Just Do It,” and “Things Go Better With Coke” are protectable under the copyright law.
a. Sure, they all originated from companies that are crawling with copyright lawyers.
b. No, or it wouldn’t be a copyright myth.
c. What things go better with Coke?
7. Once I have copyright protection, it lasts forever.
a. Nothing lasts forever.
b. Define “forever.”
c. Yes, this much I know.
8. When I acquire a copyrighted work, I also acquire the copyright to it.
a. How else would museum shops stay in business?
b. Uh, isn’t this why Napster got in trouble?
c. This better be true; otherwise, I just severely overpaid for “A Bug’s Life.”
9. Sure, you can copyright a book, a movie, or a song, but there is no way you can copyright a house.
a. This must be true. Just drive through Orange County.
b. Not so fast. I’m from Orange County, and the houses are not all alike; those shades of beige are distinctly different.
c. This is false; you can copyright a building, but only if it was built less than a dozen years ago.
10. Once a copyrighted work goes into the public domain, I can reproduce it and claim the copyright for myself.
a. Uh — no.
b. Sure, but you need permission from the former owner first.
c. Yes, as long as the copyright had been held by the federal government.
11. The concept of “moral rights” does not exist under U.S. copyright law.
a. Oh, please. Is this going to get preachy?
b. No. Like snobby maître d’s, stinky cheese, and sautéed garden invertebrates, it’s a French thing.
c. Well, maybe it’s not called “moral rights,” but the same basic idea exists.
BONUS: Is this excerpt a violation of copyright law?
a. APE, you will be hearing from an attorney shortly.
b. No man, links are like internet money.
c. Yes this is a little too much but nobody who’s reading this and is the least bit interested in copyright will not hit that link to read the original material so I give you a pass unless they ask you to take it down in which case you better not get all offended and start spewing about how links make the internets run and go on a jag on your blog claiming you will never ever ever give them any of your valuable link juice…
Answers are (here).
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, “How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?” and avoid “How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?”
That’s James Thurber in a 1959 memo to The New Yorker. via kottke.org
I also hated getting up at 7 in the morning to go to work, so being an artist would allow me to sleep late.
I was single at the time and being a good artist seemed like a sure-fire way to attract girls.
Tony Mendoza on Two Way Lens.
I’m not familiar with how assignments are made at the NY Times Magazine, but it looks like this policy is a part of the contract photographers sign when they start working with “The Times.” This memo just went out (presumably in response to the Edgar Martins fiasco) to remind everyone to only submit unaltered images. Except of course portraits, fashion and still life, natch.
Here’s the memo:
TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS
This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.
As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”
The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.
This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:
Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.
In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.
If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.
Sincerely,
[Redacted]
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company
I wanted to give a quick plug to Hannah and my former colleagues at Outside who’ve finally collaborated with Santa Fe Photographic Workshops Director, Reid Callanan to create their own series of workshops with magazine contributors (here, here and here); an idea I had at one point that’s almost as good as the one where I proposed writing a blog. The workshops were always a bright spot of working in the relative isolation of Santa Fe as they brought high caliber photographers to town–I first met Dan Winters, Antonin Kratochvil and Keith Carter after the workshops. Instead of just a plug I thought I’d ask Reid a couple questions.
Can you give me a little background on the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and your involvement?
After working 14 years at the Maine Photographic Workshops and doing every job that business had to offer, I felt it was time to venture out and start my own business. So, in 1990 I moved with my young family (wife Cathy and son EJ) across the country to New Mexico to start the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. This year we are celebrating 20 years in business. It has been a great success — due mostly to picking the right location at the right time, hiring an amazing staff of energetic and dedicated people then getting out of their way, and convincing the most creative and influential photographers worldwide to join us as teachers for our week-long workshops.
I’m surprised by the caliber of photographer that teaches at SFPW. You have commercial and editorial photographers in their prime, who probably don’t have much experience teaching amateurs or time to develop a curriculum. How do make it so it’s easy for someone like that to come teach?
One of the foundations of this business is to bring the best photographers in the country to teach workshops. We have been fortunate to have people like Albert Watson, Mark Seliger, Brigitte Lancombe, Platon, Jim Nachtwey, and Nadav Kander join us. Teachers at this level can attract working pros to take their workshops. We prepare our instructors by scheduling their week for them in advance. We have a formula, honed over 20 years, that works incredibly well of: daily critiques followed by assignments followed by shooting and then more critiques of the images just made. The instructors follow this structure and work with each participant to improve their vision and craft. Lectures, demonstrations, and discussions led by the instructors round out the intense week. So, the Workshops staff provide the overall structure for the week enabling each guest photographer to focus on imparting their years of experience and inspiring the class to create new images. As long as the guest photographer is open and giving of themselves and follow our lead, their teaching week is a success.
Do you attract a lot of semi-pro photographers to these workshops?
Our core audience right now are advanced amateur photographers – people who have a passion for photography and are willing to spent their free time and money to follow their dream of becoming a better photographer. These folks don’t make their living as photographers. We also have a healthy audience of emerging and professional photographers who take workshops for two main reasons – to improve their technical skills and/or to rekindle a love of imagemaking that may have become lost while building their careers. And pros come to take workshops with photographers whose work they find inspiring–like Chris Buck, Jonathan Torgovnik, Joe McNally, and Karen Kuehn to name a few of our guest instructors this past summer.
What are the traits and skills that photographers who are good teachers have?
All great teachers are articulate, caring, thoughtful and have their egos in check. If they can’t get outside their own box and be open to what their students are doing in the class, they won’t be successful as teachers.
One criticism I have of just teaching people technique and leaving out the business part of being a photographer is the potential that students will not understand the value of photography and not grasp their responsibility to the photographic community to help it remain a profession. What are your thoughts on this?
Since almost all of our instructors are professional photographers, they understand the importance of discussing business practices and the financial value of an image in their classes. I wouldn’t say it’s a major part of their workshop week (unless you are taking a workshop with Mary Virginia Swanson), but it does get the point across that images are valuable and need to be protected and treated as such. I think our audience places a high value on photographs because of their commitment and passion for photography. And, they also understand how difficult it is to make a really great image, so selling images for $1 is not the right thing to do. I do believe that it is our responsibility to impart this message to our audience.
Have you seen enrollment dramatically rise with the explosion of public’s interest in taking pictures?
Our enrollment has seen slow and steady growth over 20 years. We haven’t seen a dramatic rise because this wouldn’t match with our business and marketing philosophy of steady growth. Likewise, we haven’t seen a dramatic decrease in our enrollment because of the recession. I believe in moderation in all that I do and have placed a high value on this practice in my business. There is not much that is overly dramatic nor explosive about the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. We do what we do very well and will continue to be successful for years to come.
What have you got coming up that you’re excited about?
Besides working with Outside Magazine to produce a series of week long workshop with some of their key contributing photographers (Jake Cheesum, Jeff Lipsky, and Paolo Marchesi), we are also offering workshops this Fall in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This will be the 9th year we are moving our workshop operation to this amazing colonial town and producing 12 workshops with the likes of David Alan Harvey, David Hobby, Sam Abell, Greg Gorman, and Paul Elledge, to name a few. I know travel to Mexico has gotten a bad rap the past couple of years, but San Miguel is a safe haven that is easy to get to. We wouldn’t be going if we didn’t feel it was totally safe. It’s such a great venue to explore photographically and also to build a closer relationship with your own imagemaking process.
“I empathize with people who are being fucked,” he says. “When I photograph them, I am photographing myself.”
via Outside Online.
“One of my pet peeves—the biggest one—is that photographers don’t seem to think about the target audience,” he says. “In our business, you’re always thinking about the target and how to appeal to them. So if you’re thinking about the audience, then you have to consider not just the content but how that content is best delivered. The successful photographers are the ones who understand that.”
via Via Photoserve.
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.
Found it on Exposure Compensation.
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.
AdBid –
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.
If anyone else wants to send examples I’ll black them out for you.
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.
Nice piece by Kenneth Jarecke on the Lens Blog.
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.
via Seth’s Blog.
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.
Found it on Magtastic Blogsplosion.
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.”
— Tyler Brûlé
via The Independent. Thx Myles
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
