Young Photographers Just Don’t Have A Chance Right Now

A reader sent me this:

“I’d like to thank you for the Simon Norfolk article that you brought to our attention recently, and your thoughts on him saying that all of us will soon become amateur photographers with other professions. This really hit home for me. In 2007, I graduated from a photography school with very high hopes. The following year, I moved to New York City, and I worked as a photo assistant sparingly, because the pros there weren’t getting enough new work to hire me as often or their current assistants (which they had for years), weren’t moving on to work on their own like they typically would. Towards, the end of ’08, after running out of money and feeling defeated, I moved back home. Earlier this year, I enrolled in school to get a Masters degree in Accountancy.”

“As disappointed as I am, I feel this is the only way to go to have any kind of success for myself in the future. I hope that I can go back to photography in the future once I get my finances together. I understand how the economy may not affect the industry’s best photographers, and they probably won’t have to take such drastic actions, but it’s just really unfortunate that a young photographer such as myself, and my 12 other classmates from photo school, never really had a chance to establish ourselves in the field that we truly love.”

The industry is shrinking right now so getting in on the ground floor has got to be nearly impossible. The pros fight over the scraps now. Is there a path anymore where you can grow and make mistakes and still make a living? I know there’s a strong future for photography but it’s not going to happen until the economy starts growing again. My advice isn’t necessarily to go find a different profession but to find a way to work on your craft and be poised for the comeback. Easy for me to say…

Jimmy Fallon On Twitter: I’ve worked with him before. Talented dude. Jake Chessum.

Off to do a photo shoot. It will be of me “fake” working on a computer at a diner. Test show tonight – so I’d rather really be working ah.. 7:28 AM Feb 17th from Tweetie

@jimmyfallon It’s just like when I go work out and then eat a whole box of mac and cheese. Also, is the shoot w/ entertainment weekly? 7:40 AM Feb 17th from web in reply to jimmyfallon

@hchermak yeah. This photographer is good. I’ve worked with him before. Talented dude. Jake Chessum. 8:02 AM Feb 17th from Tweetie in reply to hchermak

http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

Media Is Thriving, Media Owners… Not So Much

“For all the apocalyptic news about newspapers, there’s a distinction worth making: Newspaper owners are far more endangered than the medium itself.”

via MediaWorks.

It’s important to realize that media is booming right now. What’s broken is the system where crusty old men take the piles of cash they already had and make more piles from printing and distributing media. Of course part of the fallout here is that most of the media that’s being made right now doesn’t make any money. That will change. Nobody said reinventing the wheel would be easy.

Aric Mayer has a good recap of the publishing crisis (here) where you can clearly see how the decision publishers made to put all their eggs in the advertising basket is now going to cost them dearly. After all those years of watering down their product to attract a more general audience, lowering the subscription rate to boost numbers and producing pathetic advertiser friendly content it seems that most magazines not only no longer have loyal readers but now the advertisers are gone too.

If that’s not enough, in what amounts to a perfect storm for publishing all these laid off editors, writers and photographers will be creating original content with their free time:
Web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists– Media Shift

The tide will be turning quickly for small, independent, efficient content producers. The first bit of good news comes from Advertising Age (here):

“In the past several months, there has been increasing evidence that the most easily measured metric on the web, the click, is not the right metric to use for many advertisers. And that’s good news for publishers struggling to monetize their content with online ads.”

With the news that San Francisco will soon be without a major daily newspaper (here) some see a smoldering crater, I see thousands of tiny saplings starting to take root.

Getty Bullies Photographers After Buying Agency

In this example Getty buys Mediavast (Wireimage) where photographers have a 50/50 royalty split more or less and after several months realizes that’s not their standard split and that they’ve been “overpaying” all this time. The solution of course is to charge them 80/20 until you recoup your money and then apply the standard 60/40 (as far as I can tell because these agency terms are not easy to interpret). I love how they say “If you prefer to pay off the overpayment in a lump sum” …cause we know how you can’t wait to pay us back.

Dear Contributor,

Our internal audits and reviews recently identified an error in how we calculated the royalty rates and home territories used in reporting and paying your Getty Images royalties, since our acquisition of Media Vast.

As a result of this error you were overpaid royalties on previous statements. To correct this situation we will begin deducting the amount due as a result of the overpayment, from your January 2009 royalties, at 20% of the royalties due to you for that month, and from future royalties, until the overpaid amount is fully recouped.

Section 1 – Corrections

Our system reverses (reporting a negative amount in parentheses) all transactions prior to January 2009 that have been reported and paid at an incorrect royalty rate on previous royalty statements.  Each transaction is then re-reported on this statement as a positive amount at the corrected royalty rate.  Since the total for the negative transactions is higher than the royalty rate for the positive transactions, the result is a negative balance, or the amount we have overpaid.

Section 2 – Jan 2009 Royalties

January 2009 royalty transactions are reported in this section and separated into US and Non-US sales and totaled.

Earnings Summary

A summary is provided at the end of the statement to show that 20% of your royalties (total of section 2) are being applied to the corrections (total of section 1).  The remaining overpaid balance will be added to your next royalty statement as an advance and 20% of royalties will be applied to reducing the balance each month until it is zero.  The remaining 50% of the royalties will be paid to you according to the normal royalty payment schedule.

If you prefer to pay off the overpayment in a lump sum or at a higher monthly percentage, we are happy to accommodate you.

If you have any questions, please contact royalty.questions@gettyimages.com

With apologies for this inconvenience,

[redacted]

Email 2:

Hi all,

Thank you all for your understanding in the matter.  There was a lot of deliberation among [redacted] at what a fair recoup amount would be.

Granted this was not easy news to give and likewise for you to receive.  It is our hope that 20% is fair and won’t be felt negatively in your monthly earnings.

There was a typo in yesterday’s communication in the below paragraph.

Earnings Summary

A summary is provided at the end of the statement to show that 20% of your royalties (total of section 2) are being applied to the corrections (total of section 1).  The remaining overpaid balance will be added to your next royalty statement as an advance and 20% of royalties will be applied to reducing the balance each month until it is zero.  The remaining 80% of the royalties will be paid to you according to the normal royalty payment schedule.

Best regards,

[redacted]

Getty Uses A Nefarious Tactic To Raise Rates

In this letter to a photographer Getty claims the 50% split was a typo and should have been 60/40 in favor of Getty [correction] claims the 60/40 split in favor of the photographer should have been 50/50 and justifies taking the extra 10% due to a typo. Seems like a slimy tactic to me.

getty_letter

Friday Link Love

Palm Springs Photo Festival has a free photo contest (here). [Your work will be seen by thousands of retirees! Kidding, important people will be in attendance.]

PhotoShelter has an image buyers survey with lots of powerful information (here). [Is it me or do the image buyers–PE’s included–sound like a bunch of whiners… don’t make us do this, don’t make us do that, we’re busy, we have no time… do you want cheese with that?]

Facebook does an about face on their TOS changes (here). [Imagine how long that would have taken if we needed newspapers to react to this shit.]

Photographer Zack Arias spills his guts in this video (here). [Who knew Avedon sucked at one time ; )]

Five Papers named the world’s best designed (here). Money Quote: The rising trend of strong photography in the 1980s and 1990s seems now a distant memory. Often, photo departments and staff shooters are the first to go during management cutbacks. Yet, as the global culture becomes more visual, newspapers must keep pace, even lead. Publishers must recognize that the core value of their product is good journalism — the integration of writing, photography, graphics and design. [So you’re saying publishers should pull their heads out of their asses? At this point they need to just cut a window in their stomach.]- [Whatever you do don’t watch the video they made you’ll want to claw your eyes out part way in… stick to making newspapers people!]

The HCB (Henri Cartier-Bresson) Award is a prize to stimulate a photographer’s creativity by offering the opportunity to carry out a project that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.It is intended for a photographer who have already completed a significant body of work, a talented photographer in the emerging phase of his or her career, with an approach close to that of reportage. The prize is of 30 000 Euros and is awarded every other year (here). [You are sooooo dreaming… but click anyway.]

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Photoshop via the Adobe blog (here).

On the Set with Mary Ellen Mark

[Mary Ellen] Mark had earned his trust a year before by simply enduring some subtle abuse during the making of The Missouri Breaks, for which Brando’s rule was that set photographers must always ask permission before shooting him. Every time. And the answer was always no.

via Los Angeles Art+Books.

Mikhael Subotzky on Conscientious

I do believe in the power of bearing witness, but I see it more as responsibility to ourselves… I do have a real problem with the assumption that photographers can change the world by telling these “truths”.

More (here).

Choosing Photos

I got an email from a photo editor this week asking for advice in a situation that he’s found himself in at a magazine. His Art Director is an “old-schooler” where you pick your images based on physical qualities like focus and level horizons. He also has a penchant for sunny blue skies. The editor on the other hand wants the literal translation of the story in pictures and will pick the worst image of the bunch as long as it contains the who, what, when, where, why or how of the story. Top that all off with the fact that the two of them have been around for a long time and tend to use the length of their experience as a way to push their same as it always was agenda.

This situation is a little unusual in that it’s usually only the editor that favors literal images and uses things like the meteorological conditions in the image as a point of argument for or against using something. In the past I’ve always had good luck teaming up with the Art Director to get things past the editor and I made a post awhile back about my techniques for getting new photographers past them for assignments:

1. Gang up. Get the Creative Director to back you in the meeting. “Oh yeah he’s great, I worked with him at my previous magazine and he always delivered.”

2. Shiny Objects. Toss out important people or magazines they’ve shot for. “He shot a feature in Vanity Fair recently.”

3. Padded Portfolio. Print the portfolio shots that back your case. “See, she really gets what we’re trying to achieve here.”

4. Play Dumb. Assign and feign telling them about it recently. “Oh, I thought we discussed that she was shooting this earlier.”

The same sort of ideas work well for getting the images you want published.

1. Stall- I used to find myself in a situation where the editor would end a layout review with “Let’s see if we can top that.” To which I would spend the rest of my time that month not trying top it, because I was perfectly happy with the images we had picked. I also recall a separate situation near the end of my tenure where I had commissioned a heavy hitter to shoot a portrait for the opener of the story. The editor was not pleased with the results because he was expecting… something more literal, so I was tasked with dredging up every little bit of stock that might work instead. I didn’t completely phone-it-in, so as not to arouse suspicion, but I did find it handy to read blogs instead of scour Getty for hours on end.

2. Withholding- The classic technique is to simply leave out the obvious choices. This is like playing chicken: “Is this all there is?” “Well, these are the best.” “Can I see all the images?” “I’m still working on it, can we try these first?” “Ok, but then after this I need to see the rest of the images.” “I have a doctors appointment so it will have to wait.”

3. Showdown- First, you need to lean on the Art Director to include your images in the layout choices for the editor. Looking at pictures in the layout is so much better than on your screen or the light table (sadly only used for printouts now) and brings you one step closer to the final OK. When your variation comes up on screen or is presented you need to fight tooth and nail to defend it. This is where reading books that talk about photography comes in handy. Defending an image by saying “I like it a lot” will get you nowhere. Sometimes, honestly it comes down to a fight where telling them they’re making a huge mistake and the picture they picked blows is your only choice.

4. Build Your Case- Changing someone’s mind about the photography they think is “good” can take months and possibly years of laying a foundation with examples of work you think is important. You need to provide examples and reinforcement of quality imagery in the field. I used to have a huge bulletin board where I would rip pages out of magazines, tack up promo cards and prints of the images they didn’t pick as sort of a massive mood board to the direction I wanted the photography to go. Also, buy plenty of magazines that are using photography well and show them to the editor whenever you get a chance. Anything redesigned by Luke or DJ at Pentagram is always a sure bet.

None of this is easy. Expect your stomach to be doing back flips and your hair to tingle as you try to steer the Titanic away from the ice.

Finally, I will say this about the future of magazines and photography. There is no future for magazines that don’t challenge and surprise their readers with original sophisticated imagery. The internet has set the ground floor and if you can’t rise above it, you will disappear.

Photographers Are Now Terrorists In The UK

Under an idiotic new law, photographers in the UK can be stopped and their cameras, memory cards and film seized:

“If officers reasonably suspect that photographs are being taken as part of hostile terrorist reconnaissance, a search under section 43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 or an arrest should be considered.” More here.


Photographers Rights UK.

This seems to be part of a continuing fear the police there have of photographers. Here’s a poster from last year asking the public to look out for suspicious looking snappers:

photogterrorist
Thanks, Sarah Ewing.

Enormous And Fragile Egos

In journalism, my workplaces often felt like rooms filled with balloons, enormous and fragile egos rubbing and squeaking up against one another until, inevitably, several burst with a bang.

In journalism, all too often perception helps people get ahead. One editor’s star performer is another’s nightmare.

via  NYTimes.com.

Mark Zuckerberg Added You As A Friend On Facebook…

UPDATE: The Zuck backed down and returned to the previously shitty TOS that is not nearly as horribly shitty as the new one. They say they’re going to rewrite the whole thing so maybe there’s a chance they can come up with something besides a lazy ass rights grab. Story on CNN.

In order to become friends with Mark you need to grant him rights to whatever you upload to their servers forever.

The story about facebook’s revised TOS  is making the rounds (I think the consumerist broke the story) and even garnered a response from the Zuck hisself (here) that I discovered on Harrington’s blog. In general all these sharing sites use similar language for their Terms of Service and User License Agreements because most of them have no clue how to handle the situation they’ve created for themselves with copyrighted material and figure it’s just easier to grab a license and sublicense.

I hope all the attention this issue is getting will force Facebook and other companies that allow you to upload images (pretty much everyone) to figure out better ways to restrict how content is used, where it’s displayed, where it’s stored … translated, cropped, scanned, edited…, so they don’t have to be so lazy and grab all the rights instead. After all none of these sites are worth a damn without the content people add to them.

Jim Goldstein has a good post all about the terms (here).

NY Times Article Skimmer

This new article skimmer for the NY Times is pretty sweet (here). They could improve the thing 1000% if they just added original photography to each of the story excerpts. I don’t actually expect them to value photography above headlines and text (it’s still the NY Times after all), but someone out there will finally wake up and realize that photography is the fastest way to communicate online.

articleskimmer