Kate Benson

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On my birthday (about 2 weeks ago) my husband and I received a phone call from a neighbor asking us if we would like to possibly adopt a dog. Friends of a friend of a friend had found this dog running around in 3 lanes of traffic and quickly put him in their car and saved his life. Once they got him home their dog did not like this new addition and they had been trying to find a home for him since.

Having already started the process of adopting a dog (getting the paperwork together from the landlady to bring to the shelter, etc) we were surprised by the phone call and agreed to meet him. Needless to say, the next day he started his new life in the Benson/Trotter family.

Lots of calls started coming in from our friends and family, everyone wanted to see the dog. So I snapped a few pictures of him using the window as my light source and a high ISO. He’s just had the bad surgery so he is wearing a cone, which cracks me up! The pictures are retouched, lowered the saturation, threw in a curves layer and some channel mixers for fun but I would go back and match the colors and tones better to each other if I were to do anything with these shots. Enjoy!

It is so hard, when you start out there in the world of freelance to price yourself. In 2004, when I graduated from RISD I wanted to jump into working as a full time freelancer. Forget about interning and assisting, why would I want to give away myself like that? Well, a very good reason to do it is there is a lot more to freelance photography than taking pictures. I wish it wasn’t so, I do. But unfortunately it is the way of the world. You need to learn the biz and one piece of advice no photographer is going to give away is how much they charge. But through assisting and interning a photographer will let you inside their secret world of business.

So you get that phone call, someone wants to hire you and wants a quote. It’s a job you are crazy excited to do, and to be honest, you would do it for free just because you are that excited. But that is the #1 mistake you can make! If you don’t put a value on your work, no one else will. So you know better, you know if you offer your services for free and are hoping the client will be excited and think ‘what an amazing person to work with, they’ll do it for free!! I’ll always work with them!’. When really, a serious client is thinking, ‘oops, free? Hmm.. I thought this photographer was really amazing and now I’m not sure. Why would they be doing this for free? What do they know that I don’t’ or ‘oh! I guess this photographer isn’t as experienced as I was hoping. I don’t want to take a risk like that with this shoot.’

Yet even giving a client pricing that is way off market will also leave them thinking your not experienced and can scare them away.

I know how it is in the beginning. Your hungry! You want to have these jobs because it will be building your book and getting you on the right track towards doing this full time. In the words of experience with this, don’t do it! There are many different types of clients out there, and in the same way there are all kinds of levels of photographers. Working with the wrong type of client, especially in the beginning can throw off your whole business plan and mean you end up doing damage control for years!

Friends of mine often get in touch with me because someone wants them to do a HUGE job for them and they are asked to give them a quote. I remind them, it’s not very many times you quote someone and they take it without any problems. A lot of people, especially in 2009 are looking to cut corners but still get everything done. Always, if you hear your client sounding disappointed in the quote see if there is a way to make it work for both of you.

On the flip side of that, there are people who are way off base with the value of photography today. I had one guy want to buy some images from me, license them for 2 years to use in international and domestic adds, make prints of them, etc. He said he was looking for full usage for 2 years, exclusively. It was for quite a few images and I had not been asked for this kind of usage. I looked at stock sites and did a lot of research to find out what the value of these images would be. It was a high number, and I knew he wouldn’t pay it. But that is what the images would make if I sold these rights through those stock sites with that usage. We sat down, had a meeting. I gave him my number and he said he was thinking $100 for the images with those terms. There was no way to negotiate because the prices were so far away from each other. I walked away from that meeting, quickly!

This is a client you don’t want. This is the kind of client that hasn’t made any decisions about what he wants to use the images for/in and just wants to have all options available to him, but also has no idea of the value of an image. You can’t work with a client like this. I never could have given him the images for $100. If I had, it would have been unfair to all of my other clients who are loyal to me and agree to pay fair prices. Other opportunities for those images have come along and they have made me money. Much more than what he was looking to spend. A lot of people intentionally take advantage of younger professionals and despite my age, I look young and have a surprisingly established business for being under 30.

So before you give your quote, look everywhere for rates. Even if it’s the strangers places, like a reputable stock site with the licensing and usage plugged in. But don’t undercut yourself! And be careful how you quote! Again, interning and assisting full time with an established photographer is a great way to hear how they negotiate and handle rates!

Ever tried flying with your camera?

Ever tried flying with your camera, laptop, lighting, modifiers, hard drive, tripod and the rest of your gear?

It sucks. We all, even if have never had the opportunity, can agree that although sounding glamours, traveling with all that stuff is just a headache. We can always rent the gear when we get there, if of course we’re going somewhere that is an option. Even then though, is it really worth giving up the comfort of using your equipment to have the discomfort of traveling with it? Forget about the international issues. Making sure you have paperwork for any equipment that looks new so you won’t be accused of buying it over sea’s and required to pay taxes on it, again. Trying to debate how much you can get away with bringing on board with you verses (shutter) checking in your gear cases. The homework of just figuring this out takes an insane amount of time. So luckily there are some other options! The one that I am most excited about is Southwest Cargo. I’m a big Southwest Air fan to start, so their cargo shipping really gets me excited. Of course it’s really not an option for international travel but totally worth looking into for domestic shoots. www.swacargo.com there are photographers who swear by this. You can ship it before you go, it’s a whole lot faster than UPS and cheaper than regular mail.

I highly recommend looking into it!

Remember junior high? How you had to hit spell check after you wrote an essay? How about when you were doing your math homework and gave it that little once over to catch any mistakes? Although we would all LOVE to repress those memories a little longer there is an important lesson in them: proof read your work. Just because we graduated junior high, high school and some of us even college doesn’t get us off the hook for double checking what we do.

Sometimes it’s a little easier. For example if your sending out your resume of COURSE you’ll check your spelling. But do you take it any further than that? Do you actually read it out loud to hear how it is going to sound to someone reading it? If you recognize the importance of sounding intelligent in a resume than wouldn’t you also recognize that any email there after to that client is equally important. Take the time, read your email out loud. Most email hosts have a check spelling option but if you hit the wrong key and managed to still spell an actual work (although not the word you wanted) spell check is not going to catch it. Reading it back to yourself is.

Then there are harder places to double check, like your images. If you are creating a series of pictures you need to make sure any retouching you’ve done stays consistent throughout all of them. Don’t saturate the crap out of you sky in one shot and then leave it be in the next if they are part of the same story. If it’s personal work for yourself or work for a client, this is a very good habit to develop. If possible, use a program that let’s you open all the images in one window and see how they flow together. I love using Bridge for this. You can hold down the command key and select multiple images to be viewed at once. I do this for all my editorials. This also creates an amazing editing tool. Often I take a photograph out and replace it with another to see if the story is stronger that way. I’ve even gotten into the habit of taking screen shots of the edit and sending it to the editor I’m working with. It’s fairly normal to have 6 or 7 different takes on the story before we settle on the strongest layout.

Yet, if the images weren’t edited to look like they fit together this process wouldn’t work. Of course an image that doesn’t match the others in color and tone is going to create a stumble in the story. All the shots we consider putting into the fashion spread are given a quick retouch so we can edit fairly. See this example,

When you haven't retouched both images.

When you have retouched both images.

If your deadline/due date for an assignment isn’t due right away, finish it early and come back to it a few days later. Check to see if you still like the edits you made in post production. There are a lot of times I will get excited about something and then realize two days later it just doesn’t work.

Even when you have a client and you’ve shots 500 images for their website, go back and check. Although at the end of shooting, loading, and retouching 500 photo’s the last thing you want to do is see any more of it, force yourself to do it. You don’t want your clients thinking you are sloppy and there’s the chance that someone else isn’t going to catch your mistake either (if they are doing anything with your images odds are they are sick of them too). Worse case scenario, your careless mistake ends up published somewhere for the world to see.

So take a few extra minutes, a half an hour late without any mistakes is going to save your client more time in the end and will help you build a better reputation as a professional.

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The sun is disappearing on Bell Rock.

How often does it rain in the desert? Well, in my case almost exactly the whole trip! I was trying to get something totally different than Miami landscapes in my portfolio and I went to Sedona to visit friends and take some great images. Crisp shots of desert sun with blue skies were my hope but mother nature had something else in mind. But I have to admit that although it wasn’t what I was expecting to shoot, there were a few beautiful pictures that I did walk away with. I’d still love to go back and hike and shoot some more.

Turn off your cell phones when you finish speaking with a client! Then lock your phone, yes lock it, before you put it in your pocket.

Actually, it’s probably not a bad idea to do this after speaking with anyone. As we’ve all had to learn the hard way once before, either through being on the receiving end of that phone call or on the sending end, no one likes pocket dials. If you keep your clients information anywhere in your phone, those tight jeans may just end that relationship. I’m not saying you talk trash about people, of course you don’t! No one does It’s just that it is highly unprofessional to call a client and not have something to tell them relevant and important, so a pocket dial of you singing to “Don’t Stop Believing” at the stoplight is really bad. Equally bad is the assumption that your client hung up their phone so you don’t have to hit end on yours. Odds are if you were going to say something about a client it would be right after you finished the conversation where they wanted you to shot what!?! and for how much!?!?!?!! So if you were nice to them on the phone about it, suck it up and be nice about it after, at least until you make absolute sure your phone is hung up.

It’s not about taking trash, this is business people and everyone needs to vent once in a while. No one is going to blame you for it, unless you make a stupid mistake and get busted.

PS. watch out for cheek dialing, many a private phone call has been interrupted with a cheek dialed conference call.