rant

Toronto Film Festival 2016

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Another ridiculously long post. If you’re not somehow connected to, or involved with, the Toronto International Film Festival then it might be better to skip this post. I’m just trying to reach a certain audience.

tl;dr:
• It took 41 years but Roy Thomson Hall finally got lights; they weren’t set up right. Red carpet made narrower. More advertising added. Photo pit made smaller and still left open to the rain. Most fans stuck far away from event. Publicists in the way.

• Princess of Wales Theatre still without lights at night. Still overcrowded. Publicists in the way.

• Press conferences are okay. Publicists occasionally in the way.

• The four-day street festival still a waste of time.

• From a photographer’s point of view, the Toronto Film Festival has improved very slowly over the past 41 years. Although some years, it regresses.

• From an onlooker’s point of view, the film festival is an overly big, confusing mess of films. It has lost sight of its purpose. A major overhaul is needed.

Reduce the numbers of venues to a handful. Cut the number of films by at least 50%. Eliminate many of the film categories. Have red carpets only at Roy Thomson and the Princess of Wales. Be more fan-friendly. (This year’s festival was 397 films, in 16 categories, scattered across 28 screens).
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Ministry of Photography

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cop21a

Opening day at the COP21 Summit in Paris, France, 29 November 2015.

These conference photos were shot by France’s Ministère de l’Environnement, de l’Energie et de la Mer (MEDDE) photographer. These French government photos were put into the public domain.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is being criticized for paying a photographer $6,662 to take pictures of its minister and her staff at the Paris COP21 climate summit late last year. [The French government’s COP21 site.]
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Next-day photo delivery

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“And we need the pictures delivered the next day!!!”

A business conference organizer will sometimes want finished pictures delivered the day after the event. It’s no problem to deliver a handful of images the same or following day, if the event needs them for a press release or its social media. But when a day-long event expects hundreds of pictures to be delivered the next day, or even the next morning, then there’s going to be a problem.

Let’s do some simple arithmetic. If you’re expecting 100 finished pictures and the photographer spends a minimal editing time of three minutes per image, then that’s 300 minutes — five hours — of work. If you’re expecting 200 or 300 photos then that can amount to a few days of work.
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The (F)utility of Low Prices

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Photographers, how much would you charge to deliver 24 business headshots, 12 full-length environmental portraits and 4 environmental group shots?

Well, a Toronto photographer quoted $800 for this recent corporate job. This works out to $20 per delivered picture. The corporate client turned down this quote because even they knew the low price was ridiculous.

Photographers who try to discount or lowball their way into a job only hurt themselves. It’s been shown that customers are not fooled by bottom-end prices. So why do some photographers keep doing it?
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Through the looking glasses

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It’s amazing how many business portrait photographers don’t know how to properly photograph someone who’s wearing eyeglasses. Photographers like myself, who wear prescription eyeglasses, might be more sensitive about this than photographers who don’t wear glasses.

Creating a good business portrait of a subject wearing eyeglasses is not difficult to do. The photographer has to pay attention to the position of the glasses and the lighting. The subject’s eyes are the highlight of the photo and should always be unobstructed.

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Cut Out The Middleman

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If you’re an event photographer, you may have noticed there are some online businesses that offer to connect you with customers. How nice of them.

One such company, based in Europe, is currently sending emails to photographers in several cities around the world. This company claims in its email that it has a customer with an urgent need for photo services in the photographer’s area.

You might ignore this email because of its generic wording or because it looks like spam. But you’ll get more similar emails in the following weeks and months. The emails have a fake “unsubscribe” link that does nothing.

All these additional emails claim that the company has yet another customer with an immediate need for event photography in your area. Of course, there is no customer. The oddly worded emails are often the same with the name or date of the unidentified event changed.
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Yet Another Toronto Photo Rights Grab

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The City of Toronto is desperate for free pictures. The city is running yet another photo-rights grab disguised as a photo contest.

The city is asking people to send in winter pictures taken in city parks, ravines and recreation centres. The latter case, taking pictures inside recreation centres, violates the city’s own code of conduct for recreation centres.

In public parks, the city’s parks people are known for harassing photographers who have “big cameras” but no photo permit. Toronto even says that news photographers need prior city permission before shooting in a public park. But now, Toronto has a contest asking people to do what the city tries to ban.

Just like all previous Toronto photo contests, the rules say that Toronto gets:
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