Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Lilith __,
Musicians can make money touring, even if they’re not making anything from selling albums. I don’t really see how photographers can do something analogous. It’s not a performance art! How can we add value?
At the risk of starting yet another shitfight about copyright, I’ll try to give you an answer.
Musicians can make money doing a lot of things aside from touring. Merchandise is one (t-shirts, posters, calendars among other stuff). They can even make money giving their music away (cf Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and others).
What Mayes is saying (and this I do agree with) is that a) the old advertising business model has been demolished by the Internet, on both the demand and supply side, and b) photographers must reinvent themselves and their business models if they want to stay in business. He also says that that same Internet could be the way to do that.
Example: If the only way you earn money as a photog is by taking stock shots of, say, Lyttleton Harbour and selling them to Getty et al, your time is over, as there may be hundreds of amateurs whose shots, while not as good as yours, are good enough for the person who wants an image of Lyttleton Harbour for their magazine. And the amateur image is free, whether they’re giving it away or not, as the odds are in favour of the person using it being unlikely to be found out. Stock imagery, as a business line, just lost value considerably. Factor in, also, that many new stock outlets have sprung up online catering to the amateurs taking nice shots enabling them to sell copies of their images for peanuts with the site taking a cut.
So, what about creating a project from scratch where you go out every weekend and take shots of Lyttleton Harbour in a way that no-one has before, finding the soul of the place, looking at things with fresh eyes. And you publish these on your website in high-def, mention to a few bloggers and on Twitter that you’re doing this, make prints available so that people can buy them online for those who want a special hard copy (say on canvas, or special paper) but don’t down-grade what you put online to force people to buy YOUR prints rather than print their own, use Zazzle to put images on tshirts and mugs, encourage visitors to comment and interact with them etc. There are many ways to turn a dollar by having an authentic skill that people want to reward by buying your stuff.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt promotes a formula he derived from Trent Reznor’s activities with Nine Inch Nails:
**CwF+RtB=TBM – Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = The Business Model**. It meshes with something Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008 called 1000 True Fans and gives you a way to collect those fans, by connecting with them rather than waiting for them to find your genius ;-)If you want to charge the sort of licensing fees for your images that we’ve seen in the past, they’re going to have to be really special, or you are.
Imagine, if you will, that you were planning to put out a calendar for 2012 and you had the chance to hire Ansell Adams to do the landscape photography for a share of the profits, or just score a few pictures of Flickr for next to nothing. Which would you choose?
My take on Mayes’ use of integrity is that he means reputation and brand, but figures “integrity” is better marketing. He’s saying the photographer has to bring more to the table than just a camera, that you have to be able to offer your creative expertise to fulfil the client’s need instead of just taking a picture to meet a brief, and that you have to develop a unique authorial “eye” that people want to make use of in their projects.
Essentially (and this is the point that really seems to get the goat of the copyright-based professions), digital anything means that there is no longer an inherent value in a unit or copy. If your business is based on that proposition, you will fail. It’s not a matter of whether this is a good thing or bad – it just is and there’s no avoiding it. If one wants to survive as a professional photographer, one has to look for the scarcity in what one does, for the value that one brings to the project and, if it’s just lighting, focus and clicking the button, that may not be enough.
Check out that Techdirt link, especially the CwF+RtB section, where Masnick is exploring new business models of his own.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Lilith __,
So they’re talking about working to commission rather than licensing stock images? Or something else?
Working to commission, establishing partnerships, creating specific types of images as art - all of these things play to creating a valued authorial "eye" (as opposed to "voice" for writers) which means getting paid for who you are and what you bring to your photography, rather than for the photo itself.
The elephant in the room that no-one's talking about there or here is copyright. The current business model is based on copyright, and Mayes is saying that's not going to cut it in the future so you should base your business model on your reputation and what you can bring to a client.
He says (if you click through to the blog notes) "we are stuck on licensing/selling intellectual content by the “unit” (a book, an album, a photograph)" and that photographers need to realise that we're now in "a “streaming culture,” that moves away from the unit".
This is similar to a lot of discussion over at Techdirt (link goes to a specific search on photography, but the arguments around music are also valid).
And thus we discover again the PAS rule that all threads lead to copyright ;-)
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Lilith __,
There is a large amount of philosophical bullshit in the article, and even more in the event it's reporting on. My read is that Steven Mayes has realised that the money is no longer in selling reprints and licensing images (dare I say, "the copyright culture") but in partnerships and reputation, but he's marketing it as "integrity" so it sounds better.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Mr Mark,
But 'e was a gentleman, was Dinsdale, and he knew how to treat a female impersonator.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to recordari,
For once John Key has something to learn from the leader of the opposition. When you have nothing worthwhile to say, say nothing.
Let us hope the Leader of the Opposition has actually learned that and isn't just fortuitously out of reach of a microphone...
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Russell Brown,
When will people learn?
Mind you, you still comment on Kiwibog, let alone read it.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yup, that's damned interesting.
Authenticity is the new black ;-)
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I bet Emma has a pair
I believe she has handcuffs too.
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Hard News: Here's one I prepared earlier, in reply to DexterX,
We take a lot for granted with our water, here in "Clean Green NZ", in comparison with many other 'developed' countries. We have much more water available per capita than most of them. I recall a discussion with a former navy officer in the 90's who reckoned that Aussie had little to fear from Indonesia, because Aussie had no water. We, on the other hand, featured in strategic plans...
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Matthew Steindl,
And that, ladies and gents, concludes the case of why people avoid dealing with the ATL unless they have to.