Why hire a professional photographer?
It’s no secret that anyone can get hold of camera and take some decent shots these days. But why is it often so important to use a professional photographer instead? If you are considering commissioning a shoot with a professional, then here are just a few points which you may want to bear in mind.
It is worth remembering that almost all images used for advertising or illustration purposes have been taken by a professional photographer. Whether you’re wandering around a shopping centre or playing games of online Binguez, the images which you encounter are more than likely to be of a professional standard, even if they seem relatively simplistic. Customers and clients are used to seeing images which are of this level of quality, and if you want your business, organization or product to be able to match up, then using a professional photographer can be important.
Even if you think you have a good grasp of how to use a camera and achieve top quality images, it is worth bearing in mind that a professional photographer will also have studio experience. This includes a good understanding of how lighting will affect an image – something which can have considerable impact on the finish photograph. For images that are likely to be used as marketing materials, this can be extremely important.
Professional photographers are likely to have worked with other businesses and organizations similar to your own, but this means that they will have a good idea what the latest trends are within that area of photography, and can make creative suggestions on how to make your own images stand out from the crowd. Such advice can often prove invaluable if you are looking to establish a brand image. These are just a few of the reasons why more and more professional businesses and organizations can often benefit from using a professional photographer.
Why you should buy a stamp with your logo on it.
See where we're going with this?
Caution, the ink runs a bit.
Friends are great marketing
Is that a tattoo? No, it’s my logo stamp, but it won’t wash off so, yes, it kinda is a tattoo.
Photography equipment unavailable?
Have you looked into purchasing new photography equipment lately? Your finally ready to buy that Canon 5D mark II? Or perhaps a new lens? Having a little trouble?
Last week I picked up the 100mm Macro 2.8L from B&H, and as with most of my lens and camera purchases I suffered a huge internal debate as to if I really needed to buy this. As I’ve posted before I often rent my equipment from BorrowLenses.com but I’ve already rented this lens before and how many times can I justify renting it before it’s worth buying? So I did it, picked it up. No regrets. Done. If I had heard any of the things last week that have come to light this week I wouldn’t have hesitated as much to buy the lens!
Perhaps it’s because of this recent Canon Lens purchase that my awareness is heightened, or perhaps it’s just because this is a new week, but this week has been the week of where the @#%^! is the photography equipment! Guess I got lucky because I know where all my photo equipment is. But having two of my friend (Matt & Nami) in the market for new cameras I’ve noticed they are having a problem. Come to think of it, everyone is having a problem or will be soon (myself included). And this problem is not getting better or going away, it’s getting worse!
Wednesday night I went to a great talk by Seth Resnick, a Canon Explorer of Light (living the dream Seth…. living the dream.) sponsored by ASMP. He mentions this gear shortage.
Look familiar?
It will only be getting more and more common. Resnick said that after the Earthquake-tsunami-meltdown tragedy Japan’s camera power players Canon and Nikon are both barely running. One of the hardest obstacles for the companies to deal with is frequent power outages at the factories. If you haven’t guessed, this means little to no new production. Resnick was told “if it’s not at B&H, it’s not going to be anywhere” and that delays “could be as long as a year” in getting everything back on track. I would guess that pertains to after the current supplies run out. But it is as bad as it sounds. Already your seeing the only big player selling the 5D Mark 2 is Andorama, and it’s about $200 more than it would be sold for at B&H, if they had it in stock.
Want to play a disturbing game? Go to B&H’s website, search for Canon L series lenses. Looks fine and dandy for the first page, but about 2/3 down the second page the unavailable items start, then continue through the end of the 3rd page. That means about half the L series lens inventory is already gone from B&H till Canon works out the kinks and gets product again. Scary, I know.
PDN has some great reading on it and recommends a VERY useful site is www.nowinstock.net where you can see who still has inventory.
Guess if anyone is sitting on used equipment, the time to sell it for the max amount is just about here. Or if any of my readers are on the fence about purchasing new photography equipment just the rumor of this being true should move you to get it while you can. Good luck everyone. Now all we can do is wait and perhaps be a little more careful with our equipment.
How long does it take to break set?
After photographing 13 pieces of jewelry and 2 designer shoes, the studio takes exactly…
and
to clean up.
Now it’s time to retouch…..
Epic postcard for Kate Benson Portraits
If you a member of Femfessionals Miami you’ll be seeing these next June when I am the guest speaker for the monthly luncheon. These events are so much fun and a great way for women to network with each other. I’ll be speaking about how to pose and not to pose when being photographed.
Kate Benson on Yelp
If your Mondays are a little tough to get through and you need a distraction I just listed Kate Benson on Yelp and would love to get some reviews.
Thanks if you find the time!!
http://www.yelp.com/biz/kate-benson-photography-miami
New Logo
Michael Rossi is amazing, he created this new logo for KateBenson.com. I am so in love with it!! Thank you a hundred times Michael! This should be live on my main website sometime today.
Contracts, ASMP, and Caroll Michels
In the ideal world, there would be no war, everyone would have food to eat, and we would never need contracts. Although I have a few amazing lawyers who have offered to help me whenever the time may come, I try not to bother them with a contract for a new client or selling arrangement. Let’s face it, if we are doing what we are suppose to we should be constantly writing and sending out contracts. I realize that it is a time consuming task. However, if you need help writing an artist to gallery contract, here are a few of the resources I used which may be helpful to you as well.
#1. Anyone interested in being an artist really needs to read Caroll Michels book, How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist, Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul. It’s amazing how glamorous being an artist, a photographer, a singer sounds before you get into what being an independent business owner entails!
#2. Photographers, you need to join www.asmp.com -if you’re not a member yet; you really aren’t doing what you should be. The American Society of Media Photographers is “A trade association which protects and promotes the interests of photographers whose work is for publication”. The resources here are valuable to photographers of all walks of life, not just publication/editorial photographers. Every intern I have, and photographer friend I make I encourage joining. The membership isn’t that much to start and being a member offers you discounts at places like B&H, Livebooks, and more. On the website, photographers post sample estimates, another section has bad contract examples that teach you what words to stay away from! But really, this is the most helpful group I’ve joined. Experts travel around the country giving lectures on the business; the site has a seemly infinite amount of resources!
#3. Use the web wisely! I searched the better part of a day to find and read contracts that were posted on the web to help artist not get screwed. A few that I liked are, http://www.enchantedcreek.com/Art/Contracts/artist-gallery.html -this sample contract is for an artist and gallery consignment agreement. I used this contract, along with http://www.docstoc.com/docs/21100400/ArtistGallery-Consignment-Agreement and www.clackamasartsalliance.org to get what I needed.
For my needs, none of the 3 contracts did the trick just right. So I created a hybrid of the 3, added and changed what I needed to customize it to fit my selling relationship. I suspect most galleries have a contract ready to go. But being ready to help your client who may not have one, but wants to sell your work is always a good idea. Remember, in the world of freelance photography, it’s about giving your clients what they are asking for and keeping their lives as easy as possible while doing it but if it’s not in writing you’ve got no guarantee. It’s not fair to ask your clients just to trust you, a contract gives them piece of mind as much as it give you piece of.
Pricing your work
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!
Flying with Photo Gear
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!
Pruf Reed UR werek.
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.
A little piece of advice about your phone.
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.