Christmas Wish List

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Dear Santa,

Here’s my list for this Christmas. Please read it carefully so you don’t mix it up like you did last year:

• Less stress and more success.
• More spare time and less spare tire.
• Less grey hair and more grey matter.
• Big bank account and small credit card bills.
• Pay rates go up and camera prices go down.
• Large photo budgets and small copyright demands.
• Faster computer and slower deadlines.

I’ll be leaving some gluten-free, sugar-free, fat-free, nut-free, taste-free cookies on the front table along with a glass of soy milk. If things go well this year, I’m sure we’ll see the return of the frosted, double fudge, chocolate chip brownies and the grande caffé mocha with extra whipped cream next year.

 

Title Role

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Look through LinkedIn and notice how self-employed people describe themselves.

Corporate employees are often given a title by their company but a self-employed person can create any title they want.

It’s a safe bet that anyone who declares themselves to be an expert, evangelist, guru, life coach, influencer, disrupter, ambassador, thought leader, ninja or even a rockstar, probably isn’t.

What exactly do the titles “innovator” and “visionary” mean? One might wonder if “self-employed” is somehow related to “self-important.”
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Picture This

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On this blog, I’ve repeatedly mentioned that a company should never use stock pictures for its business image or marketing. This applies to running a photography business as well.

There’s a commercial photographer here in Toronto whose web site uses cheap, stock pictures taken from other web sites. In a slideshow to showcase his “talent”, none of the pictures were shot by this photographer. None whatsoever. Through the magic of the Web, stock pictures are easily traceable back to their sources.

If a photographer has to use someone else’s pictures, what does that say about their own work?

Not only does this make the photographer look bad, but one might wonder if this is legal. Ontario’s Consumer Protection Act (14(2) s.3, 8, 14) seems to suggest it isn’t.

Using stock pictures in place of real corporate photography or other custom business photography always costs too much. It can harm a company’s reputation and even land the business on the wrong side of consumer laws.

“We used stock pictures to save a few dollars,” is not a legal defense.

 

How to fail at media handouts

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Earlier this week, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab announced their development of an imaging system that can capture the equivalent of half a trillion pictures per second:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second.

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Does creative mean dishonest?

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Last week, an interesting psychology paper was published, titled “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest”. Written by Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University, the paper’s abstract includes:

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals’ ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior.

In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence (…)

The results provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonesty, thus highlighting a dark side of creativity.

The full, 47-page study can be downloaded from Harvard (note: PDF file) but I doubt you’d want to do that. It’s a long and technical read.

Harvard Business School has a short review of the paper that’s much easier to read.

 

Pricing commercial photography

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From time to time, potential customers and photo students will ask, “What’s the day rate for a corporate photographer in Toronto?”, “What does the average Toronto commercial photographer charge?” or “What’s the standard hourly fee for business photography?”

The answer to all of those questions is the same: no such fee exists. There is no day rate, no half-day rate and no hourly fee.

It would be like calling a restaurant to ask, “What’s the going rate for a dinner?”

Does anyone ever ask a dentist, “What’s your hourly charge?” 

Can you ask a shoe store clerk, “What’s the standard price for a pair of shoes?”

Professional photographers base their fee on how the pictures will be used, what’s involved in producing those pictures and the photographer’s talent, experience and overhead costs.

Since every job is different, there’s no one-size-fits-all price, no going rate, no standard hourly fee.

 

Corporate photography policy

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Most companies use photography on their web sites, social media sites, corporate blogs, printed brochures and marketing materials, in-house publications, trade show displays and probably in several other ways. As such, it’s very important that companies have a policy regarding the handling and storage of these photographs.

• By law, almost every picture is copyrighted. Permission to reproduce such photos needs to be in writing. Does a business have written permission for every picture it uses? Where are these written permissions kept?

• Professional photography is licensed for use and rarely, if ever, sold outright. Where does a company keep copies of these licenses and how are they tracked?

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