The business side of photography
What makes a photographer good?
Getting pictures in focus? Having proper exposure? Good colour balance? Accurate flash exposure?
It’s none of those things because cameras have auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto colour balance and auto flash exposure.
Producing technically perfect photos does not make a photographer good. So what’s left?
There used to be a newsroom term called a “Hey, Martha!” I’m not sure if this is still used today.
The phrase comes from an old editors’ tale, (not unlike an old wives’ tale), that said if a story or photo was so unusual, offbeat or funny, a husband reading his newspaper would look up and yell to his wife, “Hey, Martha! Come and see this!”
If you’re new in town and need to buy groceries, you can go to any supermarket because they all sell the same products and same brands. Most supermarkets even have the same store layout. So people usually shop at whatever grocery store is closest to them.
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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.
Early advertising illustrations for newspapers, billboards and posters were created from drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. The first use of halftones to reproduce a continuous tone photograph was in 1869 in Canada but it took several decades before it became common practice.
It may have been lucky that William Notman was born the same time photography was born.
Cameras have a changed a lot over the past hundred years. They got smaller and lighter, became more electronic, film gave way to digital sensors, and we now have flying cameras commonly called “drones.”
Aerial photography started at least as early as 1858 by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) who photographed from a hot air balloon in France. But most photographers didn’t have a hot air balloon handy so they had to find other ways to get a high camera angle:
Today I received this message through my contact form:
Name: John
Email: JohnBowles@xero.com
Message:
Hello,
Your website or a website that your organization hosts is violating the
copyrighted images owned by our company (xero Inc.).Take a look at this report with the hyperlinks to our images you utilized at
www.warrentoda.com and our previous publication to find the proof of our
copyrights.Download it now and check this out for yourself:
https://storage.googleapis.com/ . . .[redacted] . . .
I do think that you deliberately violated our legal rights under 17 U.S.C. Sec.
101 et seq. and could be liable for statutory damage as high as $150,000 as set
forth in Sec. 504 (c)(2) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”)
therein.This letter is official notification. I seek the removal of the infringing
materials described above. Take note as a service provider, the DMCA requires
you to eliminate and/or disable access to the infringing content upon receipt of
this letter. If you do not stop the utilization of the aforementioned
copyrighted materials a law suit can be started against you.I do have a strong faith belief that utilization of the copyrighted materials
referenced above as presumably infringing is not authorized by the copyright
owner, its agent, or the law.I declare, under consequence of perjury, that the information in this
notification is accurate and hereby affirm that I am permitted to act on behalf
of the owner of an exclusive right that is presumably infringed.Very truly yours,
John Bowles
Legal Officer
xero, Inc.xero.com
12/06/2021
