Industrial workwear for photographers

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Most corporate photographers and editorial photographers will, sooner or later, have to shoot in a factory or on a construction site. This means you have to wear safety gear.

Having photographed in factories and construction sites for many years, including two assignments today, (one at an aerospace manufacturer and the other at a hospital construction site), may I offer a few suggestions to photographers who will be shooting in a similar situation:

 

• Although they may look fashionable, do not buy safety shoes. Get 6″ or 8″ safety *boots*. The reason is that safety shoes may be allowed in factories and warehouses but they’re not permitted on construction sites.

Safety boots must have the CSA green triangle patch which confirms that the footwear has a Grade 1 protective toe and a puncture-proof sole. It helps to also have electrical shock resistance.
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A matter of inches

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The more you use Photoshop, the more you find little issues with the software. For example, Photoshop lets you set the default unit of measurement for almost everything:

Almost everything.
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Business policies for photographers

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It’s important for every professional photographer to have a written set of guidelines to help define how they run their business. The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has a blog post with a suggested list of policies.

Policies should be guidelines for your business and not carved-in-stone rules. We’ve all run into companies that hide behind policies that don’t always reflect the situation at hand. Your policies should help customers into your photography business and not push them away.

A company’s policies should also be reasonable and legal.

Some policies may be legally required (e.g. privacy policy) and some may be strongly encouraged (e.g. PCI compliance if you accept credit cards; a refund policy).

Your business policies can be part of, or supplemental to, your Terms and Conditions. Either way, having a clear set of written policies is an absolute must for every photographer.

 

Cheap stock pictures fail yet again

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Was the federal “Department of Canadian Heritage” named ironically?

The National Post this week pointed out that the cheap stock pictures used by Canadian Heritage are from a foreign-owned picture agency and were shot by foreign photographers.

Why does this federal agency use foreign photos to promote Canadian culture? It suggested that Canadian photographers are too expensive.

Unfortunately, the National Post article is many years behind the times. The federal government’s practice of using cheap stock pictures from foreign photographers has been going on for a long time. That’s correct: the Canadian government avoids Canadian photographers and buys cheaper work from abroad.
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The not so deep freeze

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Today in Toronto, it was about -8˚C. A normal winter day. My cameras worked just fine outdoors. My flashes worked as normal. After less than an hour outside, I reached into an inside coat pocket to retrieve my cell phone and my iPhone 5 said:

Of course, it probably meant to say that it needed to warm up. The phone was completely useless. Thank goodness it wasn’t an emergency.

It turns out that an iPhone doesn’t like to work below 0˚C. Not even this will help.

I know that cold weather affects all batteries and can freeze LCDs. But I don’t recall having any previous cell phone freeze on me. My digital cameras have never failed even at -20˚C. The iPhone seems to be my only electronic device that fails when the temperature is less than ideal.

Perhaps today’s smartphones are wimps or maybe they’re just turning us into wimps.

 

Photography production value

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Let’s say you’re planning to have live music at your business conference or other corporate event. You might hire a soloist, a duo, a trio, a quartet or maybe even a symphony orchestra.

The music from each type of ensemble will sound different depending on the amount of musicians and instruments available. A soloist will never sound like a quartet, a duo will never sound like a symphony. It goes without saying that the bigger the production, the higher the price.

The exact same thing applies to photography.
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If it’s on the Internet…

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Let’s say a photographer owns the copyright to a photo. Without any other agreement in place, if that photo was published in a newspaper, would the photographer still own the copyright to that picture? Of course they would.

What if the photo was used in a book, on a billboard or on TV? Would the photographer still own the copyright? Yes they would. The medium in which the picture is used doesn’t affect copyright. Surely this is obvious.

So why do some folks think that a picture “found” on the Internet would have no copyright?
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