Increasing Your Photography Prices

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A fun photo by Canadian-born photographer Joseph Ernest Pasonault in his studio in Cando, North Dakota, 1902. (US Library of Congress)

Joseph Pasonault’s family moved from Newfoundland to the US, circa 1882, when he was six years old. In 1896, a twenty-year-old Pasonault opened his first photo studio in Cando. He later moved his studio to a larger town in North Dakota.

Canada’s pandemic case numbers today (April 2022) are the highest than at any time in the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic when everyone was panicking and hoarding toilet paper. But no one is panicking today and, figuratively speaking, the news media is no longer reporting in all caps. What’s changed?

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Business Photography of Yesteryear

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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.

 

An advertisement for the McLaughlin Carriage Company of Oshawa, Ontario, circa 1907. Early advertising used drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. (Library and Archives Canada)

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.

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Sky High Photography

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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:

Circa 1909. (US Library of Congress)

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Photo Gear Purchases 2021

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I’ve always wanted a panoramic tripod head to do real estate photography. A stitched panorama will have much less lens distortion than a single image shot with a very wide-angle lens.

High-quality panoramic heads are priced from about $400 to $900 and they have many features. But I only need to occasionally shoot a horizontal row of photos which can be stitched together.

Before buying an expensive panoramic head, I bought a 240mm nodal rail with a sliding camera mount for $35. There are shorter rails but a longer nodal rail can work with a wider range of lenses.

It turned out that this cheap, little attachment works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Did I mention it was cheap?

A $35 nodal rail purchased from Amazon. This 240mm rail is sold under a few different brand names and there are other nodal rails as low as $20. A nodal rail is easy to carry in a camera bag or even a coat pocket.

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Copyright Phishing Scam

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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

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