For Photographers

Make Sense

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A few things don’t seem to make sense:

— Order a $1.49 hamburger at a fast-food joint and you have to pay before they give you the food.

Order an $85 steak dinner at a restaurant and you don’t pay until the food has been eaten.

 

— Some amateur photographers spend thousands of dollars buying top-of-the-line cameras to photograph things a $400 camera could do as well.

Some professional photographers who own top-of-the-line cameras use a cheap toy camera to do their photography.

 

— A company spent about $47,000 to buy five full-page black-and-white ads in a Toronto tabloid newspaper. Then it budgeted less than $500 for the photography for those ads.

Why not spend $25,000 for five half-page ads and then budget, say, $2,500 for the photography? Not only would this save the company thousands of dollars but the better quality photography will earn the company more attention.

 

Annoying pop-ups

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Attention photographers. This is why you never use those silly, big flash brackets while standing in front of other photographers:

I’m standing in the second row – on a 20-inch riser – at a Toronto entertainment event. I’m shooting overtop a front row of standing photographers. 

Notice that you can’t see the front row of standing photographers nor can you see their cameras or flashes. Except . . .

Except that one guy, in the front row, using one those big flash brackets. In the front row. In every single picture.

The musicians are standing 17 feet away and they’re fully lit by two large front lights and two hair lights, all supplied by the event. These four large lights were specifically colour-balanced to match the existing eight overhead lights, (ISO 1000, f5.6 at 1/160). Why even use a flash?

News and entertainment events are not weddings. In these situations, big flash brackets serve no purpose other than to block other photographers.

 

Better Than Nothing?

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Earlier this week, British journal Occupational Environmental Medicine published an  article with the catchy title: “The psychosocial quality of work determines whether employment has benefits for mental health: results from a longitudinal national household panel survey”.

This Australian study looked at the relationship between the mental health of 7,155 people and the quality of their employment. The study suggests that a bad job may be worse than no job at all:

Overall, unemployed respondents had poorer mental health than those who were employed. However the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable or superior to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality.

The study concluded:

Work of poor psychosocial quality does not bestow the same mental health benefits as employment in jobs with high psychosocial quality.

Of course, most photographers already knew this.

This is why professional photographers don’t accept bad contracts or ridiculously low-paying jobs. It’s never wrong to turn down a bad deal. Bad deal => bitter photographer => stress and poor mental health.

Photographers, who love what they do, must respect their profession by charging proper fees. Doing anything less harms the photographer both financially and mentally.

 

Lower The Bridge or Raise The Water?

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Having to lower your price is the penalty you pay for not having raised your value.

If a photographer can’t sell value then they may have no choice but to sell (low) price. Choosing to lower prices is a business strategy that will follow that business for a long time. For example, WalMart will always be associated with “cheap” and everyone knows cheap isn’t really good because good isn’t cheap.

Remember that value is in the eye of the customer. Extra prints or fancy leather albums may have value to retail customers (e.g. weddings and family portraits) but they won’t have any value to commercial or corporate customers.

Part of the job for commercial photographers and corporate photographers is to understand what their business customers need, what has value to them.

Low prices might be okay if the photographer can compensate with a continuous high sales volume. But a high sales volume means a high work volume. To support a low-price business strategy, a photographer will have no choice but to work more and more.

Makes no cents.

 

Two-handed Catch

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A few days ago, I was watching a commercial photographer do his thing before the start of a company’s annual meeting. The photographer was shooting a group picture of the chairman, the CEO, the president and the entire board of directors.

The photographer had one camera, one lens, one tripod, one large strobe, one light stand, one sync cord and one power cord for the flash. Since the group photo was to take only a few minutes, why bring backup equipment? What could possibly go wrong?

Let’s see:

• His power cord failed. The cord was frayed and worked intermittently. It didn’t help that the cord was left loose to zig-zag across the hotel conference room floor where everyone was stepping on it. Hotel staff had to run and find another cord.

• His lens failed. Something apparently went wrong with the focusing. He borrowed a lens from me since I use the same brand of equipment.

• His sync cord malfunctioned. So with one hand, the photographer fired his camera (on a tripod) using a slow shutter speed and then, with his other hand, quickly reached over to manually fire the flash during the exposure.

His two-handed performance was certainly entertaining to watch.

 

One Price Fits No one

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One problem when a photographer charges a one-size-fits-all photo fee, (i.e., an hourly fee or a day rate), is that the photographer ends up providing a variety of services to their clients all for the same price. 

For example: an editorial customer may require the photographer to use one camera to cover a one-hour press conference. A corporate customer may need the photographer to bring four cases of equipment to produce several studio-quality executive portraits within an allotted one-hour period.

Those two assignments require different equipment, different skills and different talents. So why should both clients pay the same price (i.e., the same hourly fee or day rate)?

Charging by the hour can even penalize the customer.

For example: a certain photo might take one hour to shoot or it might take four hours. Either way, the benefits to the customer are the same. Charging by the hour would mean that the customer pays more for the “slower” photographer yet gains no additional benefits.

Pricing based on photography and usage may be confusing to some customers but it allows the photographer to customize the price to suit each customer’s exact needs.

 

Colourful Year

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Are you feeling stressed? Does your spirit need to be lifted? Do you need a healthy glow? Then have we got the cure for you: a big dose of Honeysuckle 18-2120.
The colourful folks at Pantone have declared that this is the colour for 2011. Please adjust your life accordingly.

 

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