Kate Benson

This is geeky. Aren’t photographers supposed to be though? I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t even like the iPhone. But it’s because I LOVE Google Voice (so if you ever call me and are prompted to say your name you are calling my Google Voice number) and the iPhone doesn’t support Google Voice. So I will never buy an iPhone. That’s okay though, because in June Sprint released the HTC EVO and everyday my husband or I find something new and fun that this phone does. But I’m not trying to sell you the phone, I want you to check out this app and whether you like the iPhone, the HTC EVO, or any other smartphone this app is too much fun not to recommend!

http://www.appstorehq.com/retrocamera-android-240837/app it’s a free app that applies filters to your photographs so that they look like different types of Polaroids, a pinhole camera exposure onto film, or other really cool effects. I’m in love with it. My only negative thought is that the images produced are teeny weeny tiny files and my phone has an 8 megapixel camera on it. So while these images will never do anything more than live in cyberspace, I will keep using this app because it is so neat.

Here’s a few to check out, there will be many more Retro Camera App posts… oh yes, this is way too fun.

Retro Camera photograph of I95 somewhere between Orlando and Miami

Retro Camera photography of powerlines at sunset off the highway

Retro Camera photography using the pinhole camera in b&w

Retro Camera photography using the polaroid camera, buildings on I95

I was really excited and lucky to have my sister Jacquelyn Benson (she’s an amazing writer) and her boyfriend Dan visiting this week. Besides hitting the beach and BBQing almost every day we also took a fishing trip, visited Tobacco Road, and had many more adventures. Naturally I was sad to see them go back to their home in Maine but I look forward to heading up north sometime this summer to play with them again.

To start you off, a little love shot from Sam of him and I!

Hope I have been able to temp some of my family and friend in far away lands to come visit too!

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!

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.