Photo Op or Photo Flop

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It’s now three days into Queen Elizabeth’s tour of Canada and (as expected) the photos are quite boring and even non-existent. Political conventions and campaigns usually have better photo planning. I don’t know why the same effort isn’t put into a royal tour. I suspect it’s because a royal tour is basically run by the police rather than a creative director or a public relations agency.

The purpose of a photo op can be completely lost due to poor preplanning. For example, what’s the point of doing a statue unveiling when the statue isn’t in the photo? Why have the talent stroll through a garden when the garden isn’t visible?
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HST for photographers

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Added: Much of this changed in 2012. Please see this government web page.

 

Photographers in Ontario and British Columbia (B.C.) know that their new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) kicks in on July 1. The HST is called the “value-added tax” which sounds like a fast-food combo meal: for just a dollar more, you can up-size your tax to our new value-added tax.

Federal government page for the HST has lots of (confusing) information.

The HST will benefit large businesses and government. Gee, guess who got left out? The consumer. Business will save billions of dollars annually, the government will earn billions more in taxes, and consumers will pay billions more each year. Notice any kind of pattern here?
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Reality Check

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The following quotes are from a web forum used by art directors, marketing and public relations people, web designers, and other marketing “experts”. The topic was: how much to pay a professional photographer for business portraits to be used on a business web site.
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Effectiveness of Adwords for photographers

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Advertising either works or it doesn’t, there’s no middle ground. If an ad is going to work, it will work right away. To know whether an ad is working, it must be measurable. If results can’t be measured then the ad is a waste of time and money.

I’ve been using Google Adwords for just over three months and I was planning to use it for at least one year.

Quantity of Results

After three months of using Google Adwords:

• My ads have been served up about 2,300 times per month.

• The click-through rate is about 1% (21 to 25 clicks per month).

• Number of enquiries is 10% of the click-throughs (about 2 or 3 per month).

• Number of paying jobs is 0.

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Proposed copyright changes for Canada

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Yesterday the Canadian government announced proposed changes to its Copyright Act.  While it contains many changes for music, video, performers, schools and libraries, it also has a some important changes that will affect photographers.

(Usual disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer so don’t believe anything after this).

Definition of Author

1) Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, proposes to repeal Section 10 of the existing Copyright Act. This will mean that the person who takes the picture will be the Author of that photo. This sounds obvious, right? But under current law, the party that owns the film or memory card used to take the picture is the Author.

“Author” is an important legal term because: (a) only the Author gets Moral Rights and (b) the default position is that the Author owns copyright, unless proven otherwise (more on this in section 2, below).

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Mind-boggling Google

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Two weeks ago, after being questioned by German authorities, Google admitted to invading people’s privacy in at least 30 countries for the past three years.

While Google was busy photographing everyone’s homes for its “Street View” project, it was also recording fragments of people’s online activities that were being broadcast over accessible WiFi networks. Six hundred gigabytes of data were collected.

Initially, Google admitted only to scooping up WiFi network names and MAC addresses, but later said it also grabbed a lot more information.
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