You can become a monopoly.

“A monopoly?” you say. “Me, become a monopoly?”

My Webster’s tells me a monopoly is a “commodity controlled by one party.” Applied to our stock photography industry on the web, that means if you have very extensive photo coverage of one subject – you have a mini-monopoly.

When photo buyers are meeting a deadline and are up against a stone wall trying to locate a specific picture, you are the knight on a white horse when you can supply them with that highly specific photo.

Monopolies already exist in stock photography. As an example, my old friend Flip Schulke had a near-monopoly of photos of Martin Luther King Jr. When photo buyers need photos of the civil rights leader, guess whose archive  they turn to? You may already have an emerging monopoly of highly specialized photos: insects, daffodils, table tennis, giraffes, and so on.

Here’s How You Do It

In the world of commerce, marketing people say, “Find a need and fill it.” In the creative world, we say, “Determine what I love to photograph and find buyers who need that.” In other words, if wild horses couldn’t pull you away from your avid interest in some subject area, you have discovered where you can easily become a monopoly.

Why? Because you don’t have to worry about failing at it. Yes, you’ll fail sometimes, but you won’t quit. If you really love what you’re doing, you won’t mind failing until you get it right. Begin now to ask yourself where your interest area(s) is (are). If it’s animals, for example, examine your photos.

Do you lean toward certain animals? Domestic? Wild? North American? European? African? Asian? Be specific, because when photobuyers come calling, they will be looking for a specific animal (Abyssinian cat in snow, pregnant dromedary camel, etc.), not animals in general. When photo buyers can target their search on the Internet, they will avoid large general stock photo agencies that they know are likely not to have a broad selection in their interest area to choose from, or keywording that will direct them to a suitable image. Instead, they’ll come to you, with your highly specific file, up-to-date depth of coverage that gives a variety of choices, and extensive, precise, descriptive keywording, which will save the photo buyer time.

This approach results in you “automatically” developing an in-depth historical collection. Most commercial stock agencies (because of space and storage considerations) throw away outdated pictures. You have the capability to save them, let them mature, and feature them later as historical photos.

And how do you know when you’ve achieved monopoly status? Easy: When they start coming to you instead of you reaching out to them. You may find you have three or four monopolies. That’s when you can profitably build your files in those areas.

How to be Unique

Uniqueness, like beauty, can be in the eye of the beholder. What one photo buyer will consider unique, another will consider commonplace. From a marketing point of view, you can use this truism to your advantage, and position yourself and your photography to be considered unique.

Here’s how. First of all, choose a vertical market to work in. (The Law of Probability is not on your side if you try to be “unique” to the whole world.)

Choose an area you love working in: aviation, medicine, zoology, children, etc. Photograph only in the area(s) you choose. Resist the temptation to photograph in areas outside your specialties. You are now making your photography and yourself unique. You are building a monopoly.

Watch Out for Trite

Caution: Even within a vertical market, don’t fall into the trap of believing that if your photo is “cute” it is therefore unique. Many times a brilliant idea (e.g. a kitten hanging for dear life on a clothesline) will be copied and recopied in various styles, turning what might have been unique into something trite.

In summary, here are the elements:

a.) Choose a vertical market and shoot in that specialized area.

b.) Have a substantial collection of images in that specialty for photo buyers to choose from.

c.) Run, don’t walk. Put your specialty up on the web so that buyers can find you. You’ll be able to link your site to other like-minded areas on the Web. You may have several vertical markets and specializations that you pursue.

Photo buyers, increasingly aware of the search power of the web for their photo-find purposes, are going to be using it to find you. Book and magazine photo editors don’t look for pictures, they look for subject matter. If you have their subject matter, you are going to hook up with that buyer, a relationship that may last a lifetime.

I took this photograph in 1983. At that time I was working as a medical photographer at a Montreal hospital. I was always in the habit of using the staircases to get around instead of the elevators because I needed the exercise and it was quicker.

Naturally, while working, I almost always had a camera with me, and on this occasion, while on my way up to one of the floors to photograph a patient with some obscure feature, which only doctors can find interesting, I encountered Felix. I paused a few moments and took three shots before I continued on my way. But this is not what this story is about. 

Why the Photo Matters

This image was made almost exactly 30 years ago. As I mentioned, I was working as a medical photographer and I was not all that happy about it. When I started the job 12 years earlier, it was far more exciting. I was given this wonderful darkroom, which I could use personally. I was my own boss (sort of), I worked alone and almost all of my duties consisted of either making photographs of patients, photographing surgical operations and making or designing teaching programs for the medical staff.

Somewhere along the way, things changed. Additional staff was hired and I became a boss. The job changed, and now almost half my time was administrative. Technology arrived and everybody wanted video and I personally had little interest in it but I had to learn and provide it to the staff. New levels of administration meant that good bosses were replaced by more mediocre ones. As I said, things changed. They always do.

Being miserable in a job is not unique, and I am sure many readers have encountered the same situation. However, doing something about is something else. A short while after I photographed Felix in the staircase, this job suddenly came to an end, and for one of those brief and rare moments in my life, the fog lifted and I made one of those important decisions which would alter my life forever.

Leaving Time

I gave up being a professional photographer (at least a professional medical photographer) and moved into an area that was new, different and challenging. I decided to become a self-employed graphic designer specializing in medical publications. I had the skills but I had never put them to practice, but this time I seized the opportunity and became quite successful. There was also a side effect in that my photography, which I loved, would continue. My new career allowed me more time to explore my real photographic interest, which was not as a scientific photographer but as an artist.

Fifteen years later things changed again because with the advent of the computer toward the end of the 90s, most of my clients who were publishers began to purchase computers, Photoshop and Pagemaker and bypass me.

For the second time in my life, I had one of those rare moments of clarity and decided to change my life again and this time become involved in the actual medical publishing side. I became the client.

Things Change. They Always Do.

Do you see where I am going with this?

Things change – they always do – and there is little anyone can do about it except adapt. My professional photographic career lasted only 12 years, but since I loved photography that much, I modified my discipline and have been able to continue it for 30 years (and hopefully a bit longer) Not only do I now photograph the things I want to instead of being directed by the “client,” but I think I am still getting better at it, which is a wonderful side effect.

Because of the development of the computer, my 15 years as a graphic artist allowed me to prosper. However, the change in technology led to the inevitable decline in my business.  Adapting to change and becoming involved as a publisher allowed me to continue to prosper and also gave me more time to develop as a photographer.

When I think about, though, nothing really has changed for me. I always enjoyed being a photographer and am still enjoying it today. Also, my background in the medical area has always governed my professional life to this day.

I think where most people run into problems is when they try to hang on to things instead of just changing with them. Instead of adapting to change they fight it and loose their way as a consequence. I suppose one may say the only way to fight change is to adapt to it.

As for the photograph of Felix, it is still one of my favorite portraits, to this day.

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer said something that was insensitive to some and downright insulting to many.

“There’s no such thing as Flickr pro because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there’s no such thing, really, as professional photographers. And then there’s everything that is professional photographers – certainly there’s varying levels of skill – but we didn’t want to have a Flickr pro because we wanted everyone to have professional quality photo space and sharing.”

Obviously, she and her crew feel that if everyone has a “professional-level” camera then everyone is a professional. That’s sort of like saying that because I can afford an expensive, computerized keyboard, then I’m a professional musician. Ridiculous!

What It Means to be Photo Pro

To her credit, she did acknowledge that there are “varying levels of skill.” Let’s examine a couple of those “levels of skill.”

• Make great photos on demand, day in and day out.
• The knowledge, preparedness and willingness to run towards danger and make story-telling images as John Tlumacki did at the Boston Marathon bombing instead of fleeing like the “citizen journalists” armed with “professional” cameras.
• Find the perfect image that captures the human drama in a horrible disaster like Sue Ogrocki did at the Moore, Okla., tornado.
• Do all of this under severe deadline pressure and in unfamiliar territory.

And If you want to see what “varying level of skills” look like side by side, check out the original “God Made A Farmer” video versus the professionally produced one.

Ms. Mayer and her minions made several disingenuous attempts at praising photographers and photography during the press event. For example; “Photos make the world go ‘round” and “We wanted to bring about a photo-centric world!” But, when you compare what they said to what actually happens on their websites, it’s apparent that calling no one – and everyone – a professional photographer is a focused strategy that serves their bottom line.

Yahoo! Wants All Your Images

The most revealing statement came from Ms. Meyer, “We want ALL of your images in full resolution.”

Adam Cahan, SVP, Mobile and Emerging Products, Yahoo!, said, “We’ve actually brought those photographs into so many different experiences at Yahoo!… So throughout, we always are looking for ways to expose the creators who are giving us those images all around Yahoo! in all these different products.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Notice the language. It’s very friendly and beneficent but what they’re really saying is, “Hey, we want you to post these fantastic, full-resolution photos so we can use ‘em free of charge in all of our products! We’ll give you exposure instead of money!”

It’s All Detailed in the User Agreement

So, how can they do that? It’s right there in the Terms of Service/User Agreements.

This links to the complete User Agreement for Tumblr, but here are the pertinent parts:

When you transfer Subscriber Content to Tumblr through the Services, you give Tumblr a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license to use, host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, display (publicly or otherwise), perform (publicly or otherwise), distribute, transmit, modify, adapt (including, without limitation, in order to conform it to the requirements of any networks, devices, services, or media through which the Services are available), and create derivative works of (including, without limitation, by Reblogging, as defined below), such Subscriber Content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating the Services in accordance with their functionality, improving the Services, and allowing Tumblr to develop new Services.

In addition to giving Tumblr the right to do whatever they want with your photos, this also allows them to transfer those rights to the mother ship – Yahoo! – so they can use them however they want in their “Yahoo Services” – which is everything they do – apps, websites, news services, etc.

Below are the pertinent sections of Flickr’s TOS – which also happen to be Yahoo!’s:

…with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:

…With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available…(Emphasis mine)

What About Copyrights and Embedded Info?

So, now you’ve turned over your photos to Yahoo! so they can use them free of charge with any of their products/properties. What happens then? What about your copyright? What about your IPTC information? Do they stay with your photos?

“We obviously respect copyright,” said Mayer. “When you look at the user-generated sites, like Tumblr and like Flickr, part of this is that people are creating on the platform and their copyright needs to be respected.”

Markus Spiering, Head of Product for Flickr, quickly followed Mayer, “…we care a lot about attribution…at Flickr we always think about how to attribute our users (and) how we can make sure that the work they post onto the Internet is always attributed.”

Perhaps, but actions speak louder than words, as you will see.

One-Click Downloads Make Theft Too Easy

One of the “cool” aspects of the new, high-resolution Flickr is the ability to upload your images with a single click. They also have one-click for downloads along with an option to turn off download entirely.

However, a casual look at the Flickr “More Popular Photos” on the front page of Yahoo! shows that a small but significant percentage of those photographers did not disable the “download” option. What happens when someone downloads those images? According to this study, after downloading the image, if you look at the Exif and IPTC info, you’ll find that “…’by’ was (overwritten), (and) all embedded metadata stripped-off from image files”! Definitely not a good way to “make sure that the work they post onto the Internet is always attributed”!

Tumblr is a little better about this. In my quick tests on a student’s blog, the IPTC and Exif info remained when I downloaded an image. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The Logical Conclusion: Your Photos Are Yahoo’s Photos

So, let’s follow this to its logical conclusion; Yahoo! steals one of your images and uses it on one of their products, free of charge – Oh! Excuse me! I mean, “expose(s) the creators who are giving us those images all around Yahoo!, in all these different products.” And if there’s caption/credit info stored in the photo, it will be displayed when you roll over it – and that’s good.

Except for one little thing.

I conducted a test and went through multiple pages on the Yahoo! site. I found that I could easily download any images, including wire services photos. Some images downloaded in web res, some in higher res. But, when I looked for the Exif and IPTC info, poof!, it was gone – even from the wire service photos!

No payment. No info. No attribution. No copyright. Untraceable.

The definition of “professional” in Merriam-Webster reads in part:

“…characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession… participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs…”

So, when you consider the real definition of “professional,” it’s easy to understand why Marissa Mayer would like the public to believe there’s no such thing, really, as professional photographers.  

A reader recently wrote me, asking: “What is the possible editorial worth of my collection of offshore Atlantic ocean fishing; high school sports from the 1950’s – 1980’s; and aerials of the Pittsburgh, PA, skyline?”

My response: “In any marketing endeavor, the successful route to follow is to determine who needs your product.”

Another question you could ask yourself: What will happen to all your photos when you’re gone?

A Library Donation Used to be the Only Answer

Back in the day (the 1970s), I’d give them the only answer I had, to “donate” their images to the local city or state historical library, museum or university photo archives. Over the years, I’ve learned that such donated collections are usually relegated to basement vaults, rarely to be seen by the public because the institution doesn’t have the funds to exhibit, catalog or preserve them.

Now my advice has changed. Why?

Because the internet has made it possible for you to connect your photos with potential buyers – now and long into the future, after you’re gone. You have the opportunity to give mileage to the many images you’ve passionately acquired over the years while at the same time benefiting your family and giving pleasure and/or insight to the public at large.

Keyword-Rich Captions Can Turn Your Collection Into an Asset

Here’s what I tell photographers now: Things have changed, and the savior is the internet.  If you build a database of your photos and write good key phrases (sometimes called long-tail keywords) in the captions, you are in an excellent position to market those images.

We’ve observed that in the editorial field, photo researchers look first for a SOURCE for a highly specialized photo (like a vintage aerial view of Pittsburgh). Once they find the source (the photographer), they start looking at a selection of that photographer’s available pictures.

You can create your own personal database on your website, but the trick then is to generate enough traffic to your site to make the process work and get sales. One way to do that is to index your photos in a place where buyers might go to search for them. Here’s one we created at PhotoSource International. It’s a massive data center where photographers list their own descriptions (keywords). The site is well-known to photo buyers searching for photos and gets more than 14,000 hits per day.

Be Specific in Captions

In writing keyword captions, it’s important to be as specific as you can. List things like actual names of buildings, landscapes, trees, streets, events, animals, boulevards, parade names, etc. Think of what you type in a search engine when you’re looking for something. You don’t type “bridge.” You type “Golden Gate Bridge” or “bridge and San Francisco.”

Use the right keywords and you’ll get hits from all over the world.

So do yourself and your family a favor. When you retire, don’t leave an un-categorized, un-keyworded database of images to a museum or university, where they will likely just collect dust packed away on a shelf, or to a family member, who is unfamiliar with the keywording process, and in any case would not be able to keyword your photos accurately and thoroughly.

Instead, roll up your sleeves and keyword your collection, beginning tomorrow. In this way, you’d be leaving a valuable legacy (even an annuity) to your descendents. Yes, it’s a chore. But it’s a good feeling, too, to know you are leaving a fine legacy to them.

I remember reading a few years back about the largest-known living organism in the world. Located under the Oregon forest, it is a 2,200-year-old fungus whose fruits, otherwise known as mushrooms, peek out here and there. Probably because of their unappealing nature, fungi are poorly known, and it is estimated that millions of yet-unclassified species exist. What has been recently discovered is that they seem to operate as a network inside the forest, communicating information from tree to tree via the moist soil, somewhat informing and organizing the environment they feed upon.

No, we are not turning into botanists here, although it is also a fascinating subject. Rather, it is the first thought that sprung when I discovered Symbiostock, an underground, little-known network of related organisms thriving thanks to symbiosis.

Deadly Simple and Efficient

Symbiostock is an open-source WordPress theme allowing any photographer to create a local stock agency with his or her images. Up to now, nothing really new there. However, it is in its hidden feature that Symbiostock is extremely powerful: Each database is networked to all others so that when an image buyer performs a search on one site, he also gets results from databases he didn’t even know existed. Every time a photographer downloads and installs Symbiostock, his database is automatically added to the network.

For the image buyer, the experience is seamless. He performs a search on a familiar photographer’s website. The result will show him first the result from that database, along with results from every other attached database. If his choice falls on an image from another database, by clicking on the image, he is brought to the website for purchase. He negotiates the fee with the corresponding photographer and is done.

There are no referral fees. Rather, Symbiostock works on the “pay it forward” premise. If you help another photographer make a sale, you will also benefit from another photographer sending you traffic. Thus, no need for complicated financial tracking and agreements. If you turn your database off, unhook it from the network so that only your images are displayed on your site, then your images do not appear on other site searches; Deadly simple and efficient.

Symbiostock is free to download and use. It is open source so that others can contribute to its feature set and expand it furthermore. Users are also evangelists, helping newcomers install, troubleshoot and expand. For the moment, Symbiostock is a small growing network. But here is what makes it so revolutionary.

Why It Works as a Disruptor

• Symbiostock has the potential to disturb the whole photo agency industry by creating a massive, searchable database of images as big – if not bigger – than any existing stock agency.
• Because it is not limited by a single point of entry, or a brand, it can quickly reach millions of potential image buyers worldwide with little or no marketing by using the aggregation of every photographer’s clients.
• Being open source, it can quickly grow in functionality based on user input. (Think Linux.)
• Since there is no sharing of price information, competitive bottom-pricing between users is useless.
• It is simple and supported by highly motivated users.
• It works by cooperation rather than competition.
• It is hugely scalable for minimal cost.
• It is owned, operated and managed by users, who 100 percent control over their images.

Obviously, there are a few obstacles. The most important is noise. Photographers will be tempted to upload any and all images into their database, making the quality of the overall content questionable. If there are too many bad images, buyers will not come. An efficient search algorithm can fix that. Poorly captioned photographs could also make the experience painful. Again, a properly designed search algorithm – one that ignores bad captioning – can fix that, too. The last obstacle is adoption rate: Networks fail if they’re not large and eclectic.

In all, Symbiostock is the most exciting development idea in stock photography in years, offering photographers a cheap and easy way to take control of their sales channel. Without any central command, it allows them to grow as a symbiotic community. And according to what nature has taught us, those can be very successful.

From the moment a Brownie camera was put in my hands, I was hooked on photography.  Fell in love immediately. What child would not want to see the world through an apparatus that an 8-year-old could operate?  Even before the Brownie, I began circumscribing my world with a pencil.  Looking at a blank sheet of paper was not daunting to my young self; it was liberating.  I could create a universe of my own!

The thing about photography/art for many young people is that there is so much to capture, to draw, to photograph.  It was thrilling to create images of my vision. And so I drew, painted, photographed, collaged, inked everything I could: landscape, architecture, people, flowers, still life.  All of what I saw was fascinating to interpret as well as to transcribe.

Courtesy Ellen Fisch

My other great passion was and still is architecture. It is wonderful to look at a structure and contemplate the artistry that went into its realization. Spying a building, I considered (and still do) the architecture, construction, design, materials, ornamentation, its history and possibly its population. Who lived there and what did they do? I began to study architectural components at a very early age.  But I also knew from the beginning of my fascination with architecture that I did not want to build or architect a building.  I simply was and am an admirer.

Eureka!

However, the Eureka moment of turning to architectural photography as a profession did not come to me until it was time to choose a profession.  I laid the foundation for my future as a commercial architectural photographer and architectural art photographer circuitously while exploring the many opportunities in my field.  I worked as an art photographer by photographing paintings and drawings for books while I was a student.  This required a certain skill set.  Concurrently I also photographed for the tourism industry.  Another group of capabilities was acquired.  While I was pursuing freelance photography gigs, I worked by day as a structural draftsman for several years, and retouched other photographers’ photos on weekends.

And also, in my free time, I studied painting and drawing to eventually have a parallel career as a commissioned painter.  The accumulation of all these honed aptitudes came together to provide a knowledge base for my profession as an architectural photographer.

‘What Are You Known For?’

Another impetus to select the professional path I chose was provided early on by my art gallery the owner of which asked me, “What are you known for?  Photographing flowers, paintings, landscape, architecture?  Painting pictures? What do you want people to recognize your art as?”  That gave me pause. What did I want to be associated with as a photographer?  Furthermore, my publisher (of poster art) requested that my photographs be uniquely my photographs depicting my vision.  And so I focused on my passion for architecture. The subject offered me all that I wanted and it captivated my imagination again and again.  Eventually, I divided my architectural photography into two areas: commercial and fine art.

To further carve my own niche as a photographer, I decided to work in color for my commercial clients (unless they requested B&W) and in sepia and black and white to distinguish myself in architectural art photography.  The journey has been a wonderful one, filled with new and productive experiences.  The accumulation of insights on which my photography is based came from many sources that combined to create my niche as a photographer: One that motivates me to grow and improve my craft every day.

If you are Jewish, and you live in Montreal, sooner or later, you will die, and end up at Paperman and Sons Funeral Parlor. Naturally, I had heard of it since I was a kid, but since nobody close to me had ever died, I never went there except to attend other families’ funerals. That means, I never knew what went on upstairs – I knew nothing of the business of death.

That changed in 2001, when my mother died at the age of 92. Suddenly I had to go to Paperman and Sons and “do business.”

I phoned and made an appointment to see Ross Paperman, who of course was one of the elder Paperman’s sons. Of course everybody in Montreal who was Jewish knew where it was, but this time it was a bit different. I went in the entrance and for the first time, I went to the elevator instead of the chapel. The elevator doors opened (just like the gates of heaven) and I entered. I was swiftly transported to the second floor, and when I exited, there was a pretty young lady with dark hair, a dark suit and dark eye makeup. She was deathly thin. She walked up to me, extended her hand, and said very formally, “My extreme sympathies, Mr. Saxe. If you will have a seat, Mr. Ross Paperman will be with you shortly.” I sat down and looked around. The whole place was decorated in Jewish Gothic with dark paneling, black sofas and mahogany desks. Everybody who worked there was dressed in black. I felt I was paying a visit to the Munsters.

Where Was My Camera?

In a few moments a young-40ish man in a dark suit came out and introduced himself as Ross Paperman. “I am deeply sorry about the loss of your late mother,” he said. (Actually, it was not such a tragedy. She had lived a long, healthy life, her cancer was diagnosed three weeks before her death and she suffered no pain. She told me she was ready to go.)

We walked down a dark-paneled corridor, past mahogany doors and an endless bevy of employees – all wearing dark suits. He stopped at a dark-paneled door, opened it and said, “Please go in.” Sharon and I walked into this huge mahogany-paneled office. Instead of being dark like everything else, it was brightly lit by an array of fluorescent ceiling lights. I felt I was about to “beamed” somewhere. Every shelf, tabletop, bookcase was adorned with miniature G.I. Joe figurines. Yes! G.I. Joe figurines! I smiled. Sharon smiled.

“This is such a gloomy place sometimes, I keep my collection here to cheer me up. I hope you don’t mind. If it bothers you, we can move to another room.”  All I could think of was, “Where was my camera?!”

A Second Visit to Paperman

Two years later, my father passed away. Again it was no great tragedy. He was 96, institutionalized, in dementia and passed away peacefully in his sleep. For the second time in my life, I had to go to Paperman’s to “do business.”

Sharon and I walked into the building, past the chapel and entered the elevator. When the doors opened, everything was as it had been before except that this time, I brought my camera.

The woman with the dark hair, black suit and dark eye makeup motioned for us to sit on one of the black sofas in the reception room. As I waited, I thought I was so clever for bringing my camera this time. I eagerly anticipated meeting with Ross and photographing his office with himself surrounded by 10,000 G.I. Joes. After a few moments, he came out, gave his sincerest sympathies and we followed him to his office. We walked in, and I could not believe it. There was no trace of any G.I. Joe except for a small glass case on the wall containing four figurines.

“Where are all your GI Joes,” I asked. He told me that some of the customers had complained and his brothers and sister and father thought it was not “professional”  enough for Montreal’s finest funeral parlor, so he reluctantly removed them.

A Chance Meeting with the Elder Paperman

Saddened, I sat down in one of the black leather chairs and “did business.” I signed some papers, received the death certificate and performed other “pleasantries.” At some point, I had to pee and asked where the bathroom was.  “Use the chapel restroom. It is much more comfortable. It is on your right at the bottom of the stairs.”

I left the office, walked down the dark hallway and entered the staircase. As I was walking down the stairs, I saw this very old man standing at the bottom staring at the wall. “Hello,” he said. “How are you?” I introduced myself and told him I was here to arrange for my father’s funeral.

“I am very saddened by your loss. My name is Herbert Paperman.”

I introduced myself. At that point he noticed my camera around my neck. He said he used to collect them, and at one time he had about 100, including a few Contax cameras. He rambled on and on about cameras, and although he knew his stuff, he was not entirely connecting with me. I asked him if I could take his photograph and he said “of course.” He seemed to be a bit fuzzy on some matters and on others, such as his Leica collection, he was very lucid. He was elderly, and his mental state reminded me of my late father in his final years – dipping in and out of reality, punctuated by strong moments of lucidity.

A Family of Collectors

“Everybody in my family liked to collect things.” he said. My sons like to collect exotic cars. They spent a fortune on their Ferraris and Lamborghinis.” “Really,” I answered, suddenly understanding why the costs of funerals in Montreal were so high. “Oh ya,” he continued, “they were buying and selling so many we had to build a separate garage for them to store them. They take up a lot of space you know. At one time they…”

Suddenly the door to the staircase was flung open and two women with black hair, dark eye shadow wearing black suits rushed in and grabbed him and ushered him away. As they were dragging the old man out the door one of them turned to me and tersely asked if I was lost.

“I have to pee,” I answered. “I was on my way to the bathroom.”

We are on the footsteps of a new photography landscape that is or will be affecting everyone who intends to draw substantial revenue operating a camera. While we can see and feel the changes, how to adapt is not evident. Mostly because we are trying to apply or adapt old models to new rules and it just doesn’t fit.

We have talked many times about how, for example, the rights managed model is fast becoming obsolete in the majority of photography usage, because of the new way people consume images. However, because it seemingly reaps higher revenues, and by sheer force of habit, it is still offered, and applied to many photography licenses. While it is beneficial for the image creator (or so it seems), it is a painful experience for the buyer and brings little value to the viewers.

There are three facets to the photography market:

• The image rights holder ( mostly photographers or photo owners)
• The licensor ( publications, advertising agencies, websites)
• The viewer (the image consumers)

Each facet needs to extract maximum value out of photography.

How the Cycle Works

Here is how the cycle works:

The photographer creates an image for the purpose of licensing it. Whether it is stock or commissioned work, it really doesn’t matter as the end result is to have a client, the licensor, pay a fee to use the image. To do so, the image rights holder needs to photographically convince the buyer that his image will succeed in getting the viewer to buy into the licensor’s message: For an ad campaign, it is about buying into the brand and for publications it is about buying into credibility. Once the photograph’s buying power is perceived exhausted, the cycle starts again and a new image is purchased.

In this cycle, how is value calculated ? By sheer perception. The licensor, who ultimately sets the price by deciding to pay or not, decides, based on a set of predefined social factors, if an image will do its job as a buying motivator. Those are, in no particular order, the overall power of the photographer as a social influencer, past experience with similar images, common visual trends and gut feelings. Other circumferential influences are the originality of a photograph (nothing similar has existed previously) as well as its faculty to remain unique for a set time limit.

All of these weigh in the decision process at different levels, however none are scientific. For a good reason: Metrics to calculate the buying influence of an image do not exist in an analog world. This has made the pricing of images fluctuate tremendously (and it still does in the fine art world).

Then Images and Licensors Turned Digital

Something happened when images and licensors turned digital. A new breed of licensors stepped into the market who did not care so much about the unique buying influence of one image but rather in many images, of a flow of images. Because of the nature of their medium – online – and the poor concentration habits of their viewers (who are their clients), they quickly realized that trying to convince their viewers with one image was a fruitless experience and rather, they needed to provide a continuous flow. Each individual photograph might have less influence, but with a constant refreshing, the sum of all images would equal any and all unique experience. Thus, they started looking for a flow of images, rather than uniques. So was born royalty-free, later exacerbated by microstock. What matters is to convince the viewers during repeated visits.

Another reason for this switch is that viewers, during the same period, have been exposed to a much larger pool of photography, almost entirely self-fed. The value of one image has been drowned in an incessant tsunami of photographs.

At this stage, more precise metrics began to appear. Image buyers started having tools helping them monitor, if anything, the traffic on their pages as well as overall response (text + photograph). Perception analysis and decision made way for raw analytics.

Experienced photo editors (those with valuable perception) began to disappear, replaced by budget- and number-driven decision-makers. The value of one image doesn’t matter in a universe driven by numbers calculated month by month and in the millions. The flow matters; It is no longer a unique buying conversion but an experience conversion.

Rights Holders Are Flying Blind

Rights holders do not have access to those metrics so they keep on making pricing decisions based on the antiquated perception model. In fact, they are completely shut out of market intelligence beside the occasional reports and “best of” lists on some of the microstock websites.

And so this is where we are today. A market looking for a flow, a continuous experience with proven metrics while photographers continue producing single images. No wonder the winners are rights holders with subscription-based models like Getty, AP, Shutterstock and others. They license a continuous flow where unique images are really not that much valued.

The photo-creating process needs to be rethought to take into consideration this evolution of the market. A photographer today should stop thinking in terms of uniques or even sets of 10/20 images but rather in terms of flow and experience. They should also very aggressively seek out and use image analytic tools so they can not only reseize control of their value, but also be able to conduct an intelligent conversation with their clients. Instead of the antiquated perceived value they should able to show that their images have been directly responsible for x number of purchases or/and a quantifiable increase of traffic. They should understand their marketplace as well as their clients do, if not better, by understanding how the viewers (their clients’ client and thus their ultimate client) engage with their images.

The three-sided photography market is heavily weighted towards the licensor because they are the first and only to understand the new landscape they evolve in. They have a much stronger grasp of their audience, thanks to powerful analytics, which they have used to control almost despotically the image licensing market. This has left the rights holder with only one option: Abandon the perceived value approach, adopt image analytics and shift from an unique images production to a continuous flow of content. Only then will we see a readjustment of the controlling elements of the photography industry.

Sales is a vital part of running a business. In this edition of Ask the Photo Business Coach, we talk about how to be a salesman when you absolutely hate selling.

Anyone interested in a career as a photographer – as well as photographers in mid-career – should carefully examine how the business is changing.

If we look at image use on the Internet, it is undeniable that more images are being made available for viewing. Here are some numbers:

• It has been calculated that from the invention of the camera to the year 2000 a total of 85 billion photos had been produced. Thirteen years later that figure is now 3.5 trillion.
• There are 140 billion photos on Facebook with 250 million daily uploads. Half the Facebook posts today are images.
• There are 40 million daily uploads to Instagram, or 14.4 billion a year. During Hurricane Sandy, 1.3 million photos were posted to Instagram at a rate of 10 photos per second.
• Photobucket has 10 billion photos from 100 million registered members.
• Flickr had 2.98 billion photos available for public viewing at the end of 2012. That figure grows by 518 million a year, or 1.42 million per day.

For professionals, this is not good news. More image use does not mean more demand for professionally produced images. It does not mean that there will be more opportunities for photographers to earn their living taking pictures. In fact, the opportunities to earn a living as a photographer are declining.

Here’s why:

Growth In Digital Delivery of Images

1. Advances in camera technology have made it possible for many former commercial customers to produce the images they need themselves. They no longer need to hire a professional photographer. A significant percentage of the images used for commercial organizations are produced by staffers whose primary job is something other than photography, or by part-time freelancers who support themselves in other careers.

2. The vast majority of the photos taken today are produced by part-timers. For most of them the joy they receive from taking pictures is more important than any money the images might generate. Knowing someone else appreciates their images is more important than money. Many are willing to work for very low, or no, compensation.

3. The Internet has made it possible for amateurs to easily show their images to the world right beside  images produced by professionals. From the customers perspective the “best” image for their purposes is often the one produced by an amateur, not someone who is trying to earn a living taking pictures.

4. There is a tendency among image users to right-click and use something they see something on the Internet. This type of activity is increasing and there is very little that can be done to stop it. Many who try to enforce their copyright find that it is more costly in time and treasure than they are ever able to recover.

5. Of all the images used today, nothing is paid for the vast majority. PicScout searches the Internet for uses of professionally produced photos that are being licensed by many of the largest stock photography companies. Eighty-five percent are used in ways that are have never been authorized by the creator or his/her representatives.

Demise of Print Media

In the past, most of photographers earned the bulk of their revenue by producing images for some type of print use. (Wedding and family portrait photographers excepted.) That’s becoming less possible for a number of reasons.

Newspaper and magazine publishers earn most of their revenue from advertising. Ad revenue in the U.S. in 2011, even including online revenues, was less than half what it was in 2000. And the decline continues.  See here. A couple years ago The New York Times reported that its online ad revenue was one-tenth of what it received for ads in the print edition despite the fact that significantly more people were reading the online stories than were reading the print edition. Based on a 2012 Pew Research study on the State of News Media advertising in the current Internet model is only covering about 3 percent of costs of producing the content.

In the traditional print publishing model advertising covered 80 percent of costs and subscriptions the other 20 percent. Today’s, customers are unwilling to pay enough in increased subscription costs to offset the loss in advertising. Lower revenue has resulted in significant staff cuts and a reduction in the amount of space available for pictures. Increasingly, people get more of the information they need from online sources rather than through print. See here and here.

Adding to the editorial photography problem, the public has less confidence that there is any such thing as accurate and unbiased reporting. A large percentage of the public believes that most of the information the news media delivers supports already established biases. In many cases, the public believes, the photos will be used to support a particular bias, not to illuminate any truth.

The most likely scenario for the future seems to be that people will get more of their information online and for free — or at an unreasonably low cost relative to the real cost of producing it. Most of the information will be socially, not professionally produced. There will be problems with reliability. Biased information will be presented as objective. Wading through the massive amounts of available information will be difficult, since very little of it will have been vetted by trusted editors.

Less Demand for Education Uses

Textbooks used to be a big market for still photography. In some senses it still is. But over the last decade publisher have dramatically cut their total outlay for photos mostly by continually demanding more rights for the same fees they used to pay. In many cases they have simply made more use of the images without obtaining permission for the extra use.

The education market is also moving rapidly from delivering printed products to digital. See here and here. When it comes to digital uses, educational publishers will:

1. Use more images.
2. Use more video instead of still images.
3. Demand unlimited rights to the image they purchase.
4. Pay very little for these uses.

The royalty rates will be based on the actual number of times the image is viewed and will be very low. (See here.) Based on current trends it may be necessary for 300 students to click on a page where a photographer’s image is shown, or on the image itself, for the photographer to earn $1.

Lower Prices For Stock

The main driver of declining prices is huge oversupply. Consider that on PacaSearch customers can find over 170 million images available for licensing and on PicturEngine over 200 million unique images. Most of the images in PacaSearch are also available on PictureEngine. A significant percentage of these images were produced by part-timers. Also consider these numbers compared to the numbers we listed at the top of this story. A very small percentage of all the images we see are licensed usages.

Rise of the Middleman

One of the problems image creators face is that a huge percentage of the revenue generated goes to middlemen not the creators. Twenty years ago image creators received 50 percent of the fees customers paid to use their images. Today, not only have average usage fees dropped, but in most cases creators only receive 20 percent to 30 percent of the fee charged — and sometimes even less.

It seems unlikely that any of the new strategies will produce significant revenue for image creators. It will also be impossible for creators to engage in direct to consumer transactions without the assistance of organizations that consolidate imagery from a broad group of creators and make it easy for consumers to know where to go to find the imagery. These organizations will take the lions share of the revenue collected.

In the past, most freelance photographers developed direct business to business relationships. In those cases they kept 100% of the fee negotiated. This is ideal if the photographer can find enough customer to sustain his business, But, now businesses have more options and the number of such relationships is declining. In addition, there is intense competition for the available jobs that are left.

More Illustrations 

We are also seeing more use of illustration and less use of photography by graphic designers and other users of visual content. In 2005 89 percent of the images Shutterstock licensed were photos. In 2012 that percentage had dropped to 61 percent. That means that almost 30 million of the images Shutterstock licensed in 2012 were illustration or vectors. Graphic images are easier to read on small devices. Illustrations and vectors eliminate the problem of having to find real situations to record. The artist invents what is needed in his head. Illustrations eliminate the problems of building sets, finding the right light, paying models and releases. With illustration whatever the creator can imagine can be created.

In addition, “real” has become less important. Today, it is extremely difficult to tell what is real or manipulated. The rise of Photoshop has caused most viewers to assume everything is manipulated. The use of CGI is growing and it will expand the possibilities of the unreal.

Video
Video may offer some potential for those who want to try to earn a living in the visual arts. Certainly as information delivery moves more to online and mobile devices there will be more demand for video than stills. The video that will be most in demand in the future will be much more dependent on story, rather than just beautiful clips. Many of these stories will be short, from 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length.

Some still photographers are shooting video clips. For the most part these are designed to be a second or two in an ad rather that being the whole ad. It was estimated at the end of 2011 that the worldwide market for such material was about $394 million, but a big part of this is segments pulled from TV productions and major films and often used in other major productions.

In my opinion the individuals who will be successful in this field will be those who learn how to tell short interesting stories, not just shoot video clips. Here are a few sites to look at for ideas:
http://mediastorm.com/
http://thekitchykitchen.blogspot.com/
http://www.ai-ap.com/publications/motion-arts-pro/
http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/aspp-reinvention-weekend-highlights-multimedi

While there will be a huge demand for short videos in the future there will also be a lots of competition. Most good videos will tend to be a team effort rather than one person doing it all. The skills needed are script writing, videographer, narrator, someone to capture sound and editing. It will be rare for one person to be great at every aspect of a production.

Architectural photography is a wonderful occupation.  When I am shooting for a client, such as a decorator, developer or architect, I usually have free reign to take my photographs with little interference. If there are intrusions, I can work around them or them around me.  Recently, I photographed a restaurant for a client during lunch service. I tried to be out of the way of staff and customers, and everyone was very accommodating. The wait staff yielded to my efforts to get the best shots in a low light situation and the diners, while some looked curious, did not mind the lens clicking or my occasionally hanging over a booth.  Smooth going for the most part.  And the client was happy with the shots!

By Ellen Fisch

Architectural art photography on the other hand is not as equable. If, for instance, I see a great doorway that would make a wonderful architectural/art photograph and people are standing about, I cannot ask them to move out of the way so I can shoot the marvelous stone carvings. Well, I can, but they are not always cooperative and I shy away from the looooong conversations about photography with people on the street which may ensue after the folks displace themselves for the benefit of my photo shoot.  In situations when people are blocking my shot I am mentally Photoshopping the bystanders out or willing them to move. It becomes difficult when there are time constraints on the photographs, such as an upcoming exhibit of my images or when I’m out for the art photo shoot, the light is fading and I just can’t will the people out of the frame of my architectural focus.

One particular incident motivated me to devise some good strategies for keeping my cool and getting my architectural shots despite people blocking my buildings. A few years ago I did a photo essay about Wall Street, the final images of which were presented in several exhibitions in and around NYC. The photographs were later to be used as promotional materials for the Museum of American Finance which is located on Wall Street. Wall Street is always heavily trafficked in the day and at night there is little light to get the night shots that I could take in say Times Square.  So I tried to think of a time when I could photograph the iconic buildings of Wall Street and the surrounding area in some good light with few people around.  I thought an August (most traders/brokers, etc. on vacation, right?) early Sunday morning (not too many people around since the Exchange and many restaurant/businesses catering to Exchange workers are closed on Sundays) would be perfect.  I awoke in Long Island at 4 a.m. and packed my gear.  I’m a slow starter so I finally got to the centrally located parking lot (taking no chances of train delays, I drove in) which opened at 7 a.m.  I walked three blocks to Wall Street and arrived excited and ready to take photos exactly at the same time as eight huge tourist buses disgorged a few hundred eager tourists, ALL waving cameras. Hmmmm. What to do on an early Sunday morning in August on Wall Street with tourists crawling over every square inch of my photographs? Here are some tips:

1. Go where people are leaving.  In other words, watch the crowds depart a given place and shoot that spot even if it is not your first choice. Surprisingly, it might be a good pick.
2. Shoot above the people.  Take shots of architectural details high up on the buildings if people are blocking the lower stories.
3. Stand resolutely on the spot you wish to shoot from and see if there is an opening in the traffic.  This works in two ways: People get the message and move out of the way (not usually). Or: Your patience might pay off with a few minutes of no foot traffic.
4. Take architectural photos of iconic buildings in poor weather.  This has a downside in that the images may be poor as well. However, snowy or rainy days can offer charm and appeal.
5. Plan to return if the place is too crowded.  This may not be possible when taking photos of far off places, but then again obscure locations may not have heavy concentrations of people getting in the way.
6. Photoshop people out in post-production.
7. Blur the people in post-production.
8. Carry release forms on all shoots, just in case.
9. Make people a part of the photograph as in shooting Grand Central Station and incorporating the commuters.
10. Get a cup of coffee and regroup.  Waiting the people out will pay off eventually!

Not so long ago, search engine optimization (SEO) was concerned only with using the right keywords and getting links to your website from as many other websites as possible. Manage that, and your website was sure to rise to the top of the search engines.

Then along came the Web 2.0 and the rise of social media, and everything changed.

It’s taken more than a few years for the search engines to start using social media signals in their ranking calculations, but they’ve caught up and social media is now as much a part of SEO as keywords and standard website links used to be.

In fact, it’s likely that social media metrics will soon become one of the biggest elements in the ranking algorithms.

How Does Social Media Help With SEO?

Links are still considered as the main currency of SEO, acting as votes of confidence in your website content, but social media links (+1′s, shares, tweets, pins, and comments) might carry even more weight because they offer a more accurate view of how real people feel about what you have to say.

Why Is Social Media Important

Essentially, the more your content is shared in a social environment, the better off you’ll be in the race to claim authority on your topic.

Expect to see a lot more on the concept of authority, by the way, as Google Plus and “author rank” become more important in measuring the social networking impact of our website content. If you’re not making the most of Google Plus at the moment, then it might be time to reconsider your social strategy to include it.

Choosing The Right Social Networks

One of the big questions is “which social networks should I be on?” and it can be tempting to try to use them all, especially when we see lots of other photographers jumping on to the latest newcomers, such as Pinterest.

However, it’s not feasible for us to be active on every social network at once – at least not if we want to get any real work done!

The best answer is to pick the most relevant ones for your target market, and maintain a low-key presence on others that might benefit your SEO.

Google Plus seems to be the main exception here. I would strongly recommend that every photographer has a solid Google Plus presence, and to take full advantage of the local SEO opportunities presented by the “places” features.

Generally speaking, Facebook and Twitter are good places for most photographers to be active.

Pinterest is proving very useful for wedding, portrait and fine art photographers, while LinkedIn is probably better for commercial photographers.

Whichever networks you choose, it’s important not to spread yourself too thinly, and be mindful of how much of your valuable time you spend on there.

Social Media Profiles

All of the social networks provide a profile for their users, so be sure to complete them in as much detail as possible, and keep them consistent across networks. It really helps, for example, to use the same profile photo on all of your social media profiles to help with brand recognition.

Engage Your Audience

To get the best return from social media for SEO purposes, a high level of audience engagement is important.

Make sure you use the appropriate social sharing buttons on all of your content, and give people a reason to share or comment on your website or blog. Don’t forget to ask your readers to share your content with their friends, and you might even come up with creative strategies to make sharing both fun and rewarding.

The key aim here is to get as many shares, “likes”, tweets, +1′s and pins as possible to help spread social links to your content far and wide.

By the way, don’t forget the social part of social media – acknowledge your readers’ comments and respond to any questions in a timely fashion wherever possible to keep the circle of engagement going.

Thoughts Or Questions

If you have any questions on using social media as part of your SEO strategy, do share them in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to answer them for you.

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” The Chinese philosopher Confucius was reported to have said. A lot people tell me that they can’t take pictures in their local environment. “Why?” I ask.

The reply I usually get is something about the lack of visually interesting things happening around them. The same person goes on to tell me that when they go overseas there is always plenty to look at and photograph. I’m not just talking about Australians with this mindset. I hear it from all sorts of nationalities, Swedes, Americans, New Zealanders and the British.

My suggestion is to take your camera out on the streets and not just look but see what is happening around you. Open your eyes to the visual smorgasbord that surrounds us.

Henri Cartier Bresson constantly carried his camera while at home in France and produced many classic images within close proximity of his abode.

‘An Art of Observation’

Elliott Erwitt said, “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place … I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

Erwitt has produced over 20 books highlighting his wry visual observations about life around him. Quite a few of these images were taken within walking distance of where he lives.

In the early 20th century Josef Sudek dragged his 30 x 40 cm camera around the streets of Prague documenting the beauty of the city. Sudek lost an arm in the war after gangrene set in from a wound but it didn’t stop him taking photographs. He would occasionally use his teeth as a substitute for the missing arm to help change the settings on his camera.

Sudek didn’t even leave his studio to produce two of his most famous collections. The series, From the Window of My Atelier, is a beautiful set of images taken through the window of his studio looking onto his garden. Labyrinths is a collection of photographs that document the interior of his studio. The poet Jaroslav Seifert described these images as surreal and subtle.

After a lifetime of pounding the streets shooting reflections, frames and shadows of himself, Lee Friedlander was forced for a time to give up his street photography because of arthritis. While housebound because of a hip replacement, he started photographing stems of flowers, which eventually became a lushly produced book. Like Josef Sudek, Friedlander could see images even when confining himself to shooting only in his home.

As you can see from these photographers their locations didn’t confine them. In fact they chose to look, see and photograph what was happening in their own environment.

Camera at the Ready, Always

Drinking coffee or imbibing in wine with documentary photographer Roger Garwood is quite an experience. He always has a camera with him and can suddenly step away from the conversation to shoot a picture of something that to is seemingly mundane. Frequently Roger manages to turn a situation into a decisive moment. For decades Garwood, who is a legend in Fremantle, walks the streets documenting the life and energy of his local environment. Relaxing or working, Garwood always has his eye on what is going on around him. He said, “Keep your eye on the ordinary everyday events, even if it does mean the rear end of a barmaid.” And “Some of the worlds best pictures are taken on peoples’ doorsteps with a simple 35mm camera.” Roger said the greatest advice he ever received from the legendary London picture agent Tom Blau was, “Your best picture is only a 3 penny (5 cents) bus ride away.”

A photojournalist who has done a lot of his best work in and around his neighbourhood is Andrew Chapman. His topics and assignments have kept him close to home for most of his career. Andrew is a compassionate and passionate photographer of Australian daily life. He is a great example of a photographer who always carries his camera and can see an image in most situations. Chapman said, “Never stop looking, engage in life and photographs will happen. When a photographer engages in their immediate surroundings photos will come to them. I am constantly reacting to visual signage, and light.”

I also like to wander around the area where I live and shoot photographs. In fact, some of my best-selling stock pictures have resulted from photo jaunts across my suburb. The advantage in working this way is that if the light is not right I can back later in the day or even the following day, it’s just a few steps outside my door.

If you can’t find images in your own environment it’s time to slow down, start looking around and begin to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“It is not what you look at, but what you see,” says Henry Thoreau, American author and poet.

A couple of weeks ago, a developer asked me to take photos of some warehouses in Brooklyn.  The buildings were on a street that had a lonely, barren industrial look.  The structures were huge, boxy structures. No ornamentation. No interesting ironwork or mullioned windows. But the warehouses were brick, which always appeals to me.

After the initial feeling that the shoot would be kind of boring, I noticed that the builder or architect who designed the buildings gave each window and door a brick border that contrasted with the exterior walls. While I stood on a cold Brooklyn Street off the highway shooting great big brick rectangles, I began to really notice things that were outstanding about my subject.

Through my lens the bricks took on character. Some were oddly shaped as if they were broken or incorrectly molded. Some of the bricks were deep red; while others ochre or sienna. The textures of the bricks differed as did the mortar between them. I could go on and on: I became inspired!

Interesting Through an Artist’s Eye

Photographing architecture is not always about shooting mansions in the Hamptons or glamorous penthouse apartments. The architectural details that captivate me, such as decorative wrought iron railings and gargoyles carved in stone are not at every shoot. Occasionally I run into what appears to be a plain brick wall. But it never is just that.

Bricks are as interesting as any objects if you look closely. The variation of texture, color, symmetry and the patterns that bricks create when laid together amazes me. Moreover, the images I needed for my client had to amaze his client. That is galvanizing in itself.

Work Must Intrigue, Inspire

As an architectural photographer, my work has to convey the feeling that I am intrigued and inspired by my subject. That I am fascinated by what I see through my lens.  Otherwise why would someone be fascinated when looking at my work?

I have always been passionate about architecture. That’s why I chose to shoot it.  But I also feel the need to make others passionate about architecture, too. It is the creation of humans and, as such, exemplifies civilization. The plain brick warehouse wall or the ornate limestone configurations of Palace of Versailles’ walls are all marvels of architecture if one is inspired to see the art. My inspiration comes from perceiving architecture through my lens and the gratification of capturing its beauty and essence in the shot.

It’s no secret that social media can be leveraged to monetize your reputation as a photography expert. But there is a dark side to this: a whole new generation of photography role models coming up who are unfit to be role models.

The Internet gives people the ability to self-publish and craft an online image. And there is no rule that says in order to be an expert influencing others you have to run an ethical business or have good business practices. So it’s buyer beware.

I’m not suggesting that it is a bad thing to have a photography mentor or role model, but you need to choose wisely. Don’t be afraid to question the advice you get from another photographer. Hear what they have to say, but make your own decision using sound judgment. If something doesn’t add up, then it probably doesn’t.

Bad Advice that No Beginner Should Read

I bring this up because a former wedding photographer / influential figure recently released an online guide giving his 10 steps to starting a wedding photography business. He advocated building a wedding photography brand even if you don’t have the requisite photography skills, because, he said, your brand is more important than your product.

Advice like “spray and pray on P mode” if you are so overwhelmed you forget how to use the camera is so irresponsible that no beginning photographer should ever read such advice.

My own advice if you are too overwhelmed by a photo shoot and forget how to use the camera: Stop shooting weddings (or any other paid assignment) and spend a few years learning how to be a good photographer so you don’t ruin a couple’s special day. Ask yourself: Is this a level of responsibility I am ready to handle? The first rule of customer service is to put the customer first, and sometimes that means turning down a job for which you are not yet qualified.

Further advice advocated spending as little time as possible editing a wedding photo shoot because you have more important things to do. (Like cashing the $6,000 check and not doing work?) He said that you should spend no more than two hours editing a wedding photo shoot and batch process everything. No need to open your images either because it’s a waste of time.

I suppose that strategy makes sense if your business is geared around placing a higher priority on your own image than those in the photos, but that is not the way to go about being a professional photographer. If you take paying jobs, then you need to be able to deliver the goods. This is not the time to be lazy.

Beware of the Hard Sell

Stuffed in the content was the constant reminder to use his products. It turns out that the photographer only had four or five years of actual wedding photography experience before getting out of the business to lecture and hawk products several years ago. There is an old saying that applies here: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” If you are going to seek someone out as a mentor in person or online, make sure that they have legitimate credentials.

The sad part is that he is just one of a bunch. Despite all the great things photographers have done with the Internet, but there are a lot of toxic characters out there who have far too much visibility. And people without the experience to discern right from wrong tend to flock to those who shill the most. Those who shill the most usually do not have your best interests in mind. These “industry leaders” know that and exploit it for all it’s worth.

To these shady photography mentors I say if you got into professional photography merely as a get-rich-quick scheme or to be famous, then do your clients a favor and tell them that first. The let them decide if they still want to hire you.

Take a look at the two photos below. Believe it or not, I shot both of these sunsets on the same day standing in essential the same place (on the shore of Long Island Sound) with the same camera (an Olympus UZ-810) and they were shot only about 10 minutes apart. Yet, the photos look very different from one another, and that’s due largely to three choices that I made for each shot: when I took the picture, the focal length that I chose and, very importantly, where I placed the horizon for each shot.

Two Approaches, Vastly Different Results

The top shot was taken first and was made with a zoom setting (in 35mm equivalent) of 159mm. That’s on the long side of the medium telephoto lens range (typically a medium-telephoto lens is in the 85 to 135mm range, so this is just outside that, but not yet in what I would call the super-telephoto range). You can see in this shot that space has been compressed and that the stone jetty (that dark finger sticking out into the water) is much closer and larger. Also, by aiming the camera down at the foreground the shot emphasizes the foreground, not the sky. And finally, the sun was still a few degrees above the horizon when I took the picture. The thing that I like about the shot is that the color of the sky is reflected nicely in the little tidal area in the foreground. What I don’t like is that the sunset sky seems awkwardly cropped out of the frame. Probably a better choice would have been to widen the zoom setting a bit to take in a bit more sky while still keeping the foreground dominant.

In the second (bottom) shot, I waited until the sun was just touching the horizon – which is my favorite time to shoot sunsets. You have to shoot quickly when the sun gets this low because there is an odd little phenomenon going on: the closer the sun gets to the horizon, the faster it disappears from view. Also, I switched to the widest setting of the zoom lens (around 24mm – and that Olympus has a huge 36x optical zoom – it goes from about 24mm to nearly 900mm!). I also aimed the camera upward because I wanted to emphasize the sky and that beautiful, wispy cloud pattern that was happening. The clouds look to me like an artist had put some dabs of white paint in the sky and then smeared them a bit with a wide brush or a comb – and I guess that’s exactly what happened with Mother Nature being the artist. Whenever you place the horizon low in the frame you emphasize the sky.

‘Point of Tension’

So there you have two very different looks at one sunset based on three simple technical and creative decisions. Both of these shots were made hand-held, by the way, something I almost never do. But the camera has image stabilization and I was out for a ride with a friend and just didn’t want to inflict a tripod on him. Oh, by the way, you’ll notice in the bottom shot that I lined up the sun right over the tip of the jetty. In art terms, that’s known as a “point of tension” and it’s a small compositional trick that really works – your eye naturally goes to that spot because the tight spacing and close alignment create a kind of visual anticipation that something is going to happen there.

A few years ago, I saw a video about the late photographer, Garry Winogrand. The camera would follow him around on his day-to-day street shooting and he would offer comments to the camera as he worked. At one point, he turns to the camera and says, “Taking pictures is easy. All you have to do is decide what goes in the frame, and when you click the shutter.”

Brilliant!

There are many ways to make a photograph and certainly these days in the wonderful world of digital photography, it is a lot easier than it used to be. Twenty years ago, in order to be good as a photographer, you had to know how to properly expose film (especially slide film) and how to process it. There was little room for error. Having mastered those two things, you could then begin to learn to be a photographer.  These days most people with a small camera, a ripped-off copy of Photoshop, and a computer can call themselves a professional photographer.

Same As It Ever Was

I have seen this before. Does anyone remember the introduction of the Mac from 25 years ago? At that time they thought that graphic design was dead and “desktop publishing” was the new thing thanks to this sweet little app called PageMaker that turned everybody with a computer into a graphic designer. It never happened. The fad of desktop publishing lasted only a few years until most people began to discover that there was a flood of amateurish crap suddenly being printed. What they realized was that all the fancy tools were no substitute for experience and a good eye.

It is the same thing today in photography. Of course it is a bit more complicated. You have not only the computer and software to make you look good, you also have the internet to give you universal exposure. But its the same old song—sooner or later people discover that there is no substitute for a good eye, timing and some passion. Without that you are ordinary at best.

So it comes down to this—how do you separate yourself from the herd? Assuming that most people know how to expose a good image and upload it online, what makes you different?

Yup. “All you have to do is decide what goes in the frame, and when you click the shutter.”

How to Take Good Pictures

From my point of view, most good photographs—the ones I really like, are sometimes not that well exposed, or crystal sharp ones. What I am looking at is how the images fill the frame—the movement, the balance, the composition. Secondly, it’s the timing — what was really going on (or what you think was going on) at that precise moment when the shutter was clicked— that’s a photograph! If you are skeptical, just go to a gallery, open a fashion magazine or photography book of current masters to see what really makes a great photograph. One hint—its not necessarily a sharp picture.

All one has to do is look at the photographs that beginners, your neighbors, your relatives show you. Yes, they are finally well-exposed thanks to modern technology (auto-exposure, wide latitude, software, etc.). But are they interesting? Nope! They are still static, lifeless and dull because they have not learned how to properly fill a frame (pictures taken of people from 30 yards away at a 15-degree tilt) or timed correctly (people picking their nose with mouths open and eyes shut).

OK, that might be an extreme example but look at photographs that you like. Why do you like them? Not because they are perfectly sharp or well-exposed—its because there is something in the framing and timing that you like—there is something actually going on.

It does not matter what your photographic discipline actually is. No matter what you photograph, you will need to understand framing and timing. It’s the one thing that separates the good from the ordinary. Interestingly enough, it’s probably the one thing they probably do not spend enough time teaching you in school.

(Second of two parts)

We are drawn into images by the sharpness of eye contact. Eye contact transcends the initial view of the image and allows us to establish that personal connection. Images that draw us in, keep our interest, and give us time to view the entire image are those where the eyes of the portrait subject look into our eyes.

There is a feeling of connection to the subject, as if you are sharing the moment with them. It’s very hard to articulate and explain in words that feeling that connects you to a subject, either in the viewfinder or on the printed page. When that connection is there, its obvious – and doesn’t need words to explain it, we feel it.

Most of us have shot portrait jobs, whether on a professional basis or as an interested relative. We prep our subjects about what clothes to bring, props to pose with, and location backgrounds to deal with. We combine those elements into compositions and shoot away, telling our subjects to move this way, change hand positions or hip angles, chin angles up or down. But when it comes time to shoot the image those eyes had better be sharp.

The moms of the world, those that hire us and fire us, have the sharpest vision on the planet. If her daughter’s eyes aren’t the primary focus point in enough images, Mom will fire you and look for another photographer. That’s how important that connection is to her. Her child’s personality can be brought out the best by that whimsical look, that offhand glance, or a penetrating gaze that is defined by the eyes.

Lazy Focusing Hurts Portraits

That single focusing grid goes on the eyes of your subject. If I am close, or shooting a dedicated portrait lens like an 85mm lens, or at least that end of a zoom’s range, it’s easy to frame the image, move the multi-selector dial to position the focusing grid over the eye, and then focus. The common practice of holding the shutter-release button down in order to maintain focus while recomposing the image is cumbersome and another opportunity to screw up critical focus. If you are shooting on a tripod, which I use in every situation where I can, locking down the composition while still holding the shutter-release down halfway, is nearly impossible. The multiple focusing grids are meant to allow you to compose and focus, without the need for shutter-release manipulation.

If I’m farther back from my subject, or subjects (like a family), or using a wider-angle lens, I’m still placing the focusing grid across the eyes of the subject, even if it covers most of the head. And remember: If you’re shooting a family image, you focus on Mom. You compose the image to benefit mom, you focus on mom, and if you are smart, retouch her face for the digital proofs. Just to repeat, moms are the hiring/firing executives in the world of portraiture.

While this might seem elementary to many of us, I’ve seen examples of what I like to call “group focus,” which in bird photography would be called “flock shooting.” That single point of focus is just left in the middle, and if it’s on a father’s beer belly, so be it. Photographers might think that the depth-of-field of a typical portrait f-stop, like f8, will cover the sharpness issue for a group. But that’s not the point. The point is making the eyes of your subject the critical point-of-focus, which means it is the purest, sharpest, best defined part of the image. Lazy focusing skills won’t help you in portraiture.

Focusing on the eyes can be further enhanced using selective depth-of-field. An extremely shallow dof will draw your attention to the eyes even quicker. Using the program mode options of a camera, selected to portrait mode, will almost always result in the least creative image that can be taken. Critical focus and composition, and creative use of the f-stop, can result in portrait images that really have a power to them.

Level with Your Subject

Another aspect of focusing on the eyes is shooting at eye level. Now there are a lot of caveats to this, especially in portraiture, but my main concern has always been to give the subject the respect it is due. Sounds a little silly maybe, but shooting at eye level is as important to gaining that connection to our subject as is the sharpness of the subject’s eye.

Photographers diminish their subjects when they look down on them, an angle-of-view that can be seen as demeaning. Sometimes when we are new parents, and our toddler is crawling along the carpet, we call to them to look up at the camera instead of lying on our stomach and photographing them at eye level, in their world. In nature photography this is even more important.

A few years ago I was leading a photo safari out to the Toroweap (also known as Tuweep) area on the western edge of Grand Canyon National Park. It was early in May and there was still some snap to the early morning air as we drove the 60-plus dirt-road miles out to the rim. After shooting the sunrise and working the gorgeous, blooming cactus gardens and wildflowers we headed back north to the highway. Along the way I nearly ran over a five-foot gopher snake sunning itself in the road.

We all jumped out and started to photograph it, but no one except me wanted to get down on the road and shoot it at eye level. A snake in the dirt isn’t a wildlife portrait, but a photographer in the dirt shooting at eye level can capture a wild portrait. The image speaks for itself. Now, I know a gopher snake is a constrictor, and not poisonous, but I also know they can leave a good bite mark if disturbed – so I was careful. (In my earlier blog post I might have called this “pushing”.)

Standing and shooting down (when you could kneel or lay down) at small subjects takes something away from the photographer-subject relationship. It could be wildflowers, or butterflies, it could be small children, or snakes – practice shooting at eye level, and when the subject has eyes, focus on the eyes as well. The eyes are our invitation into a subject’s life. Every emotion can be shown in the face and eyes, and that moment tells a story.

The dictionary definition of influences is: “The power of things or individuals to exert force on another.” My influences in photography come in all shapes and sizes.

When I began my journey as an architectural photographer, I was a small child. My influences then were many and varied: Disney films, especially Fantasia; magazine photos and illustrations; museum art including paintings, and actual sights that I wanted to photograph all influenced the way I saw the world.  Allowing a wide variety of images to chart directions for my lens gave me a broader base from which to grow and evolve as a photographer.

Starting With Everything, Then Narrowing Scope

Although I was always drawn to architecture as a subject for my photography, as a young student photographer I wanted to capture everything.  In college, I photographed nudes, landscape, food, cars, art for books: whatever appealed to me or whatever I was commissioned to shoot.  My appreciation for the visuals of my childhood proved to be excellent resources. The magazine photos and drawings in Life, Look, and Vogue; the cartoons and films; great paintings in museums all relied on composition, values, and capturing the viewer’s interest.  I used those influences and principles in my photography to appeal to my audience and to better my craft.

As I began to develop a personal style, I narrowed significantly my scope. I focused on architecture, especially the differences and similarities of buildings and that which makes them unique. Each structure, ornament, detail appealed to and continues to appeal to me as a photographic subject. It also helped me immeasurably that I had spent seven years as a structural draftsman. In photographing buildings, I understood how they were constructed and why certain elements worked with each other

Influences Range From Architects to Construction Workers

In this vein, architects, designers, craftsmen, construction workers, engineers all influenced my photography because they helped me to understand what I was photographing. This information made a shoot more manageable: architectural photography became second nature because I knew my subject well. The angles, joins, building parts, depth of shadow and elevation of highlight on a structure made sense to me. Thus, all I had to concern myself with were exposure, light, depth of field, white balance and the myriad of details that photography entails. The subject was a clear shot so I could limit my worrying to every other thing that can possibly go wrong in photography!

Essentially, no one influence can completely inspire the work of another unless that work is totally derivative or a clone of the original. I always wanted to be recognized for my individual style as a photographer. But, I was not without the various impressions that shaped my photographic art. My influences were many. However, it was up to me to absorb them and incorporate the wealth of insights into my work. Who influences you?

“You have to take the good with the bad, and I’m a songwriter so I stay sensitive. I have to live with my feelings on my sleeve so that means I can’t harden my heart and I get hurt a lot but I’ve learned to take all that.” – Dolly Parton, on Good Morning America

When I was a little tyke, I started my career in sales by making bookmarks and forcing folks at church to buy ‘em. Then I became a makeup artist. Then I sold cosmetics. Somewhere in between, I did a stint as a medical assistant. I fainted and got fired. Now, I’m a photographer, blogger, church leader, charity runner. I’m in the perfect position to get punched in the face every single day. I’ve never, never been in as hard a business as photography.

Or blogging. Or ministry. Or charity.

All these things bring me the greatest joys and the greatest heartaches of my life. Basically, I’m in four different businesses that all invite criticism. A glutton for punishment? Maybe. A rebel with a cause? Absolutely.

Today, though, I’m just talking photography/business but these things can really apply to anyone, no matter why you’re receiving criticism. I agree with Dolly. You have to stay sensitive if you’re going to continue creating. Especially being in the business of beloved photography, I have to stay soft, wear my heart on my sleeve and be ready to make deep connections with people I’ve never met before. I can’t possibly do this if I have walls up. So I’ve been punched over and over and over and I just keep popping back up like one of those punching bags.

The title of this post is, “How to not get hurt by criticism.” It’s impossible, by the way. It hurts. Below, I’m going to lay out the different things I’ve found helpful in dealing with hurtful criticism. But let me give you a little hope: I used to feel like I was getting punched in the face every time I was handed a cold plate of criticism. Now, it’s more like a scratch most of the time and I got there without hardening my heart.

And you know what? Listening to people’s criticism can make you a better person. Here are some things to keep in mind:

They Might Be Right

So, you’ve been told your prices are too high. Are they right? Are you trying to be a luxury brand but netting a lower demographic of client? You’re getting criticized for promising 300 wedding images and giving them 50? Getting raked over the coals for having poor business practices? You really need to listen to people and suss out the issue at hand. They may be right. In the beginning, I’ve been told flat out “I hate these wedding photos.” Why is that? Because I fancied myself an artist but presented myself like a budget option – a hired camera. They didn’t want my “art,” they simply wanted pictures and I failed to communicate. It hurt, but I had to take it and say, “You’re right. What can I do to make you happy?” and then change so it wouldn’t happen again.

Consider the Source

Who’s the criticism coming from? It may be other photographers, clients or even your spouse. I’ve learned to consider the source. Other photographers are usually jealous (if you’re good) or mean (if you’re not.) Did you know there are entire websites, Facebook groups and pages dedicated solely to posting photos and then tearing them apart? It’s utterly disgusting. It’s the worst part of humanity – people shooting each other down to feel bigger.

The criticism may be coming from your clients, and these are the most important people to listen to. But again, consider whether you’ve had a hand in causing the problem. I receive far less criticism now that I’ve nailed down strategies to maintain consistency, manage expectations and communicate efficiently.

My friend Maddy Rogers once said to me, “I don’t care what other photographers think. My clients are happy.” So many photographers are creating their work to “one-up” others. Separate the two. Focus on the ones paying you.

It may be coming from your spouse. I really love my husband; I’m only where I am because of him. But he really doesn’t get my photography. He likes to walk into the room in the middle of the edit and say “eew” or “not sharp” or whatever. He’s not my ideal viewing audience. He’s not my target market, not my ideal client. So it’s annoying, yes, but considering the source, I have to just say, “Yeah, well, after the parents cry tonight at their viewing session and hand me a check, tell me what you think.” I’m not one bit interested in criticism on my style or technique. My clients love me and I really don’t give a flying fart what people who aren’t part of that think.

It’s hilarious to me that people even think they are positioned to give criticism on certain things. Like when I post a photo and people say “too bright” or “washed out” or whatever. There’s no such thing as “too bright” or “too washed out.” Nonsense! My images are exactly as I intended them to be. Heck, maybe they have a crappy monitor. Ever considered that? I feel that the sources of this sort of criticism completely disqualify themselves just by the fact that they’re even saying such things. So although it makes me want to scream, I find it really easy to ignore any and all criticism of this nature.

That said, it’s really important to align yourself with someone who can give you valuable constructive criticism. Because I don’t want you walking around with what I call American Idol Syndrome. A great way to receive this is Chic Critique, where you can locate a photographer you admire and sign up to have them critique your work for a month. I’ve done it a couple times and heard that it was totally game changing for my students. Do it – you won’t regret it!

Have Compassion

This one isn’t really just about photography. It’s about life. Hurt people hurt people. That’s my mantra. I have to say this to myself every day. All of humanity are walking through life with hurt – disappointment, rejection, failure. We carry baggage laden with bricks of pain and when it gets too heavy, we find the nearest person and say, “Hey, carry this with me.” This can come in the form of bullying, inappropriate communication or accusations. If someone has done something to hurt me, I try to look at the cause. If someone rejects me, there’s a good chance that they’ve suffered some pretty bad rejection in their life. Rejected people like to try to control the rejection in their life by rejecting others first. People who have historically been disappointed look for disappointment and often find it in places where it simply isn’t.

What does this have to do with business? Because business is about people. And you will come in contact with hurt people every day and some – a few – will take their hurt out on you. This doesn’t happen often. Have compassion. This makes criticism and accusation hurt a lot less.

You Don’t Have to Respond

Simple: Nothing shuts a bully up like silence.

Manage Your Stress

If you’re doing too much and your business is killing your happiness, you need to find a way to manage your stress. Because when you receive criticism, you’ll respond inappropriately.

Sleep On It

SLEEP. ON. IT. Seriously, things always look different in the morning. The most bullying emails or Facebook posts I’ve ever seen were written around midnight. Get some space between yourself and the situation. It may take serious, SERIOUS self-control – I still fail at times – but you’ll thank yourself in the morning!

Remember: It’s Just One Person

Try to remember that criticism represents only one person’s point of view.

Look at the most influential people. They receive gargantuan heaps of criticism. Some bring it on themselves. For others, it simply comes with the territory.

If you’re trying to make everyone happy, you’ll make no one happy.

On Twitter today, home timelines currently show every single tweet made by those users whom we follow. We enjoy equally unfettered access to our followers—every single tweet we send appears chronologically in their streams. This may soon change, however, according to a recent announcement from Twitter.

On Feb. 13, the company revealed the ability to filter Twitter streams (such as the stream on a mobile app). In short, Twitter’s algorithm grades tweets, and developers set a filter value (e.g. none, low, medium, high) to control the volume and quality of tweets that appear within their applications. While currently intended for third-party developers, Twitter can apply this to our home timelines and other feeds within its platform at any time, affecting them in the manner that EdgeRank filters our Facebook news feeds.

If you’re  not familiar with EdgeRank, its the algorithm that controls who among our Facebook friends sees our posts. EdgeRank ranks all posts connected to a user to understand the importance of that person’s messages to others on Facebook. Posts from users with the highest EdgeRank reach the most people; posts from users with a lower EdgeRank reach fewer people (read this if you want more details on how this works).

Why, Twitter, Why?

Why would Twitter change what to date has been an open platform for all to enjoy? Money.

Twitter isn’t yet a mature company (so says Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo), and there’s compelling evidence that suggests it isn’t yet turning a profit (Twitter is privately and investor-held, so we can’t see their books to know for sure). There’s speculation that it will seek an IPO in 2013, and going public would place greater pressure on the organization to become profitable. In other words, it’s business model is subject to change.

All of this appears remarkably similar to Facebook’s recent history. The company went public in May 2012, and soon thereafter ”tweaked” EdgeRank, a move reported to reduce the number of news feeds a company’s posts reached organically by 40-50%. The result? For a company to ensure that its Facebook posts go beyond the core 12-15% of “friends” who always receive them (best case scenario), it must now pay for advertising.

The ability to filter tweets—already deemed Twitter’s version of EdgeRank—would force a similar result. With an algorithm actively judging each Twitter profile’s quality and automatically applying a filter value based on that assessment, companies would be forced to pay to reach a wider audience, thereby boosting Twitter’s ad revenue. Photographers using Twitter to promote their businesses would suffer a similar fate. The net we currently cast with each tweet, in other words, would become drastically smaller, only to be increased in size again at a cost.

The Implications for Photographers

Twitter hasn’t yet shared details on how its algorithm works, but it almost assuredly considers a weighted aggregate of responses to tweets (i.e. retweets, replies, favorites), the authority of profiles that respond (i.e. are they “influencers”?), total follower count, recency, etc., to calculate the overall value of a user’s profile. For photographers who market on Twitter (and other social media), this should prompt a close examination of how you use it.

I’ve written frequently about a destructive social media behavior I call the photographer’s monologue, most recently on this blog in the post You Should Be a Social Media Ambivert (and also here, here, and here). You’ve probably seen this in action—good photographers making good images who maintain social media profiles, blogs, or both focused mainly (even exclusively) on their photography.

This may sound harmless, but it’s not. From a marketing perspective, the reason this monologue is destructive is simple: people go online in search of solutions to their problems. While it may be the case that a particular photographer’s services, products or prints are the best solution, the monologue doesn’t help people find them, despite thousands of searches that occur daily for photography-related items. In fact, the monologue’s net result is that the perpetrator becomes largely ignored.

Social media is a two-way medium—it’s excellent at facilitating dialog, even in the form of 140-character conversations—but the monologue treats it like a push medium. That’s another way to say “advertising”. It’s a way to say that when we monologue, we treat our photographs as though they’re more important than the needs of our prospective customers.

The disconnect between people and pushers occurs because what many of us are doing online—in web search, on blogs, forums, and social media and company websites—is self-directing our own purchasing process. This is the concept of the customer journey in action, a process of learning that’s fueled by information. Exceptions exist—persistence may pay off here and there. But if the notion is to leverage social media strategically, as part of a broader, efficient, measurable approach to attracting customers online, the monologue must stop.

The real change in behavior that we’ve witness is that before the web, people were constrained to asking questions of salespeople. Today, however, we have the web and its boundless information. This helped popularize content marketing, which at its most basic level is the process of publishing original content—blog posts, videos, podcasts, eBooks, DVDs, etc.—designed to answer the common questions people ask when contemplating a need or problem for which a particular product or service is well-suited.
Six Reasons Photographers Should Embrace Content Marketing
It’s beyond the scope of this post to cover content marketing in detail, but I’ll conclude by proposing that for photographers who believe in business potential of the web, content marketing represents one of your most likely paths to attracting customers online.

This is also been proven, so you don’t have to take my word for it. Here are six more compelling reasons to embrace content marketing:

#1 Interesting content is a top three reason people follow others (people, companies, brands) on social media.

#2 Websites with blogs receive in 55% more traffic than those without.

#3 Companies with blogs get 97% more inbound links than others (search engines reward blogs with inbound links from authoritative, relevant sites with better search rank).

#4 Search engines personalize search results by prioritizing content that people within our social circles have shared. Example: Search Plus Your World.

#5 Search engines don’t like thin content, something many photography websites suffer from. This is what Google’s Panda update was all about.

#6 Organic search already works on the notion of authority. Facebook, using EdgeRank, does, as well, and Twitter is likely to follow suit. Content that gets shared and/or linked to is how these entities judge authority. Content that creates authority is online currency.

Your Turn

What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter is justified in implementing this change? Do you agree with the challenges and opportunities for photographers as explained in this post?

In this edition of Ask the Photo Business Coach, we talk about the common mistakes photographers make when designing their websites.

Editor’s note: This is the last in Susie Hadeed’s five-part series on creating a business structure around your photography. Read the entire series here.

My favorite – shopping! If you’re lucky enough to have figured out the photography business – you’ve got goals, pricing and clientele – you need to be sure that every purchase fits with your goals.

It’s so much easier now that we have our goals written down to figure out how to spend. All we have to do is ask ourselves a few questions:

1. Does this purchase help me get to where I want to be?
2. Will this help me in my photo quality?
3. Will this help me be a better marketer?
4. Will this help me be able to give my clients a better experience?
5. Will this help my workflow be faster?

Channel Your Emotions With a Good List of Priorities

If we’re contemplating buying something and we start by asking these questions, it really helps narrow down our emotions when we want something so badly. If I see a new book by a photographer that has come out, and I would love to have it, but I don’t feel like I could answer “yes” to any of those questions above, I know I can’t buy it.

Recently, we needed another camera. We were shooting with a Canon 5D and a 5D Mark III.  It was getting to the point where we were both feeling we needed another Mark III, but didn’t know if we wanted to invest in it right now or not. We started asking ourselves these questions. Yes, it was going to help us get where we wanted to go, because we knew we’d be providing a better client experience. Yes, it was going to improve our photo quality. Yes, it was going to make us better marketers because of the above. And, yes, it was going to speed up our workflow dramatically because we would be working with one camera type during editing instead of two.  When we thought about those reasons, it was a no brainer that we needed to go ahead and purchase it.

But Hold Off on Instant Gratification

Now, just because we purchased it quickly doesn’t mean we hadn’t been thinking about this for a while. In fact, we got through most of our wedding season before we bought it and managed just fine. We provided a great client experience. We just got to the point where we had some money to invest and we were outgrowing the older camera.  And, we started thinking about next year, and we knew in order to work our business like we needed to in 2013, it would be an essential part.

Hopefully, this series has provided some tips that will help you get your goals written down, and your business plan started.  It really can be a fun process. Good luck!

Photographers have a problem when it comes to social media: The hard sell is dead. This is proven true by studies such as like Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, which shows that people now self-direct buying decisions online for everything from cartons of milk to cars and enterprise data storage. The result? More and more, we are listening to salespeople less and less.

Successful salespeople are no longer extroverted, gun-slinging clichés. They’re ambiverts‚ people with personalities balanced between introverted and extroverted. They listen first and then solve customers’ problems from the position of trusted consultant. And, according to Wharton Research cited in the book To Sell Is Human, ambiverts sell 25% more than their colleagues.

Now, let’s turn our attention to photographers who use social media to hard sell, of which there are many. The social media hard sell occurs when we treat our photography like it’s more important than our customers. This is what happens when our photography becomes the substance of our online presence.

First, a couple of Caveats

The result, unfortunately, is that we hinder the goals we go online with in the first place – to attract customers. This is tough to swallow for many photographers, I know, so bear in mind the following caveats:

First, if you’re not interested in selling photographs, photography products or services online, this blog post doesn’t apply.

Second, sharing our work is a way to learn and stay energized. Community is important in this regard, and social media is a great way to connect with peers. This blog post in no way means to discount this element of connection, support,and inspiration.

However, if you seek to attract customers online, this blog post absolutely discounts the bad habit of shot-gunning photographs into social streams day in and day out. To those photographers for which this rings familiar, take note: the hard sell is dead.

We Now Self-Direct Our Buying Decisions

Research like ZMOT shows us that consumers now self-direct purchasing decisions by conducting web searches, reading blog posts and third-party reviews, seeking advice from forums and social circles, downloading product information from websites and comparison shopping. The list goes on.

Perhaps, though, you’re thinking that this doesn’t apply to you.

If so, do this: Search Google for the photography-related wares that you sell (or want to sell). When you do, use a refined, or long tail, search term. For example, don’t search for “wedding photographer.” Instead, search for “journalistic wedding photographer Portland Oregon.”

On your search engine results page (SERP), turn personalized search results off. In the upper right corner of the SERP is a button with a globe icon. Hover your mouse pointer over it to see the text “Hide personal results.” Go ahead and turn personalized results off by clicking this button.

Now, in the listings, see anything that looks like what you sell? Then guess what? People are searching for what you sell.

The Customer Journey

Let’s back up a step. The self-directed buying behavior described above represents a process of learning, fueled by information. The customer journey occurs in stages, each marked by distinct types of information, and begins when we recognize a need. For example, imagine a scenario in which a woman decides to improve her photography. At the outset of her customer journey, she doesn’t know what she needs to accomplish this, only that she wants to improve. She enters the customer journey’s next stage as she begins to understand her need. She finds a few possible solutions: books about technique, an online course on composition, a photography MeetUp, even a handful of local workshops.

Eventually, she’ll make a purchasing decision. She’ll do this by narrowing possible solutions to the one best suited to her needs and budget. She’ll use the information gathered on her customer journey to make this decision.

Now, let’s circle back to a notion put forward earlier: The social media hard sell occurs when we make our photographs the substance of our online presence.

In the scenario where a woman begins a journey to improve her photography, how does a constant stream of photographs uploaded to Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere help her to understand her need?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. The obvious result is that she won’t find the photographer who possesses a solution, but who practices the hard sell online.

How to Become A Social Media Ambivert

To become a social media ambivert – to attract customers online – do the following:

• Learn about your customers. Before selling, successful salespeople listen. You can do this, too. Only when we understand our customer’s needs can we help make them informed buying decisions.
• Create content that helps people make decisions. Successful salespeople provide tailored solutions. You can, too, with awesome, helpful, well-written, informative content you publish online. Inform this content by listening to questions people ask to understand their needs and potential solutions. The benefit to you? The customer journey will lead people to your website.
• Follow social media’s 80/30 rule. 80 percent of the time, talk with people online. Use social media for what it is, a two-way communication tool. Don’t focus on your needs by sharing your photographs. Share information that helps people with their needs. With the other 20%, your time, share your work, a story, a joke … be yourself.

Ah, marketing.  That big black hole where we dump all our money and get nothing in return, right?  That’s what it seems like sometimes.  But, it doesn’t have to be like that!  I’m convinced that in this world, there are lots of ways to market yourself that are not dropping thousands of dollars in a magazine ad or paying hundreds of dollars a month in Yellow Pages ads – and yet are more effective.

Of course, Word of Mouth is your gold.  That’s where you have your most amazing marketing, and other people are doing it for you. I don’t think I need to tell you much more about word-of-mouth marketing because we know its value. I will say that you need to provide every single client with an opportunity to rave about you.  Make sure your clients are happy.  I firmly believe that you should do whatever you can, even if it means you’ll take a small loss in the present, to make your clients happy.  (This does not mean you allow them to run over you and change your contracts, but it does mean treating them like a nugget of gold and doing everything in your power to help them out.)  A great read on this is The Referral Engine by John Jantuch.

What If You’re Starting From Scratch?

But what if you don’t have that word of mouth yet? What else can you do? I actually faced this question when I moved to a new area two years ago. I had to start completely from scratch and I really and truly knew no one. Here are some things that I did, and, no, I’m not where I want to be yet. But I’m getting there, and I know I will get there because I have a plan. Here’s what I have found helpful.

1. Bridal shows.  We did two bridal shows, and booked weddings off them that were, on average, $1,000 higher than people said the market was. We did our research, had a plan going in and had a creative booth. If you’d like more information on what we did, feel free to email me!
2. Networking with other photographers.  I was fortunate enough to move to an area where the photography community is strong, giving and just wonderful to be a part of. I found that helping other photographers and finding a few that I could give referrals to also got me a few referrals in return. The only way this works is if you truly go into it with an attitude of giving instead of getting. I’ve been able to build relationships with photographers by second shooting, going to photographer meet-ups and through facebook groups. If you’re not open and willing to do anything to help someone else, they won’t help you.
3. SEO.  Yes, this is a big one. Before I even moved to the area, I started working on SEO and trying to get my site up on Google. I’m fortunate enough to work with my sister-in-law as my partner. We blog four times a week and have consistently for the past year and a half. I’m convinced this has helped keep our site up on the search engines and we get a lot of our leads through here.
4. Venues. When you get weddings at a venue you like, put together an album and present it to the venue. We did this with one of the first weddings we shot, and they were kind enough to put us on their vendor list. Now we have three or four weddings for next year booked at that venue. Yes, the album cost us some money, but it looks amazing, the venue loves us and they are giving us a lot of promotion. It was completely worth it. If you can, get an album that is unique and different than the other albums that will be there.  Stand out.
5. Friends. If you’re trying to get into a certain type of photography market, find some of your friends and ask if they would model for you. Be clear about what you’re doing, but when you do it, post the session on your blog, post it to Facebook and tag your friends in the posts. This extends your reach by letting people who know you find out you do photography.  This will help bring out that word of mouth advertising.
6. Be nice. And last, but definitely not least, give EVERYONE an experience to talk about! Connect with every client you photograph. Be kind and helpful to the venues. Be nice to the other vendors. Being genuine with people whether they’re a client or a vendor helping at an event, is the best way to guarantee people will start talking. Don’t provide them with an okay experience, provide them with an experience that blows their mind.

Instagram, the iPhone, even point-and-shoot cameras are coming loaded with them: filters to make your digital photos look like they were taken decades ago and stored in a shoebox until the internet came along. As professionals, we recognize digital simulations of color shift, scratches, chemical spots, light leaks, vignetting, lens flare, distorted lenses and edge print. But most people are just looking to invoke the nostalgic feel of decades past that, while not technically perfect, are no less steeped in loving memories of past happy times, family and friends. That cell phone snapshot that you just shot of some friends at a favorite restaurant? You can now make it look like it was shot with a Brownie 50 years ago.

But as these filters and digital techniques become more ubiquitous, I’m beginning to see the same digital effects repeated. Your “old” photo looks just like everyone else’s on Facebook. If I want my photos to look like old film shots, it’s hard to beat the real deal.

Here are some basic tips to get started:

Cameras: Film cameras are practically free nowadays, and we’re not even looking for the top of the line. Chances are you still have one in the back of a closet, or even displayed on a shelf. Film in 35mm and 120 formats are still available either online or even from your local department store. The inexpensive Holga plastic cameras are specifically used by artists for the dreamy effects their cheap lens and light leaks produce. Holga even makes physical clip-on filters for your iPhone.

Film: Bricks of expired film can be purchased on eBay for a song. After all, it’s not just film, it’s expired film. I still see consumer film stocked at Wal-Mart and Costco and even the corner Walgreens. And these stores and others are still developing 35mm C-41. For 120 format, pro labs such as Dwayne’s in Kansas will develop 35mm and 120 C-41 for $3.99 plus shipping.

Chemicals: For black-and-white negatives, I just develop rolls in a dark bathroom using D-76, which like other powdered chemicals can be ordered from online shops. I’m lucky enough to still have a local shop that stocks darkroom chemicals. Plenty of tutorials online can walk you through black-and-white developing if you’ve never done it before. And if it doesn’t come out perfect, in this case, all the better.

The Roulette Wheel of Effects: If your color film is all the same batch, start by assuming it’s all been stored in the same manner and each roll will share similar defects, if any. You can shoot a test roll, have it developed and go from there. Serious color shifts already? Good. But you’d like more of an effect, consider leaving the film in your hot car for a week, or even popping the unexposed film in a skillet over heat (Don’t microwave your film, though.)

Scanning Your Images to Digital: Don’t have a film scanner? Using a macro lens or the macro setting on your camera, simply digitally photograph the negative on a light box and use the “Convert to Negative” setting on your post-processing program. Don’t have a light box? Make a simple one by placing a white sheet of paper on a table, and use spacers of your choice to place a piece of glass (i.e. picture frame or the like) above the paper so the two are parallel. Shine a gooseneck lamp at the paper, being careful not to hit the glass to avoid glare. Place the negative strip on the glass and shoot as you would with the light box. At this time you can add real scratches with a thumbtack or paperclip. Once the image is in the computer, you can further manipulate the color, cropping and whatever else you’d like to do. But the more you do to the actual negative before scanning, the more authentic it will look, and the more unique your image will be. Your Facebook friends will be begging to know which iPhone filter you use.

After dreaming about it for years, I decided a few years ago to turn my photography passion into a profession. I soon learned the difference between sweet dreams and cold reality. Not that I’d do it any differently, but I’ve discovered many of the myths about what it’s like being a pro. Maybe you’ve discovered some of your own.

Now that I have a few years under my belt, here are some of the myths I can dispel. Drumroll, please …

Myth #1: Pro photographers get paid to shoot what they love. While there are times you get to shoot what you love, most often you shoot what the client wants, at least if you want to get paid. I know a few pros who envy hobbyists because they get to shoot what they want for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Myth #2: It’s hard to make money as a professional photographer. Okay, not all my dreams were dashed completely. Making money, it turns out, is not that difficult. Making a living is. In addition to demanding advanced skills, you have to be savvy in business, marketing, bookkeeping, customer relations and negotiating.

Myth #3: The market is oversaturated with photographers. While there are wagonloads of photographers shooting overexposed natural light pics, there are far fewer with the skillset needed to tackle professional work. Master your craft and you will have something to offer that few others do.

Myth #4: Professional photography is going away. Not so. Some genres don’t pay what they used to (like wildlife photography), but there will likely always be a market for unique, high-quality photographs.

Myth #5: If you build a nice website, clients will find you. Early on, I built an expensive website and made it SEO-friendly. My clients, though, have nearly all come through networking and personal contact. A website is a necessity, but it’s not a silver bullet.

Myth #6: You can make it as a professional photographer without having to shoot people. I never wanted to photograph people, but I soon realized I’d have to be more open-minded and versatile if I wanted to stay in business.

Myth #7: I need professional camera gear to be a pro photographer. While pro gear gives you more versatility and durability, photography is not all about the gear. Pro photographers usually make better photographs than amateurs (though not always) because their skillset and creative vision have been honed over time.

Myth #8: Professional photographers get to set their own schedule. Not quite. Clients will demand that you work around their schedules (wedding shooters, for example, often book all their weekends). Also, you’ll often have to schedule shoots around the best light, which happens at the margins of the day. You’ll have some flexibility, but doing what you want when you want? Not so much.

Myth #9: Everything can be fixed in Photoshop. Okay, this one’s mostly true. But many fixes require marathon sessions in Photoshop. You don’t want that, and your clients don’t want to pay for it when the photo could’ve been easily fixed in-camera.

Myth #10: Images straight out of the camera are good enough. While there’s much you can (and should) get right in camera, even the best image probably needs some post-processing. This was true even before digital; Ansel Adams spent as much effort in the darkroom as he did on the mountain. Retouching is an essential professional skill.

Professional photography is not everything I’d dreamed it was. But I’d still rather do this than anything!

Selling print rights: it’s a quandary over which many professional photographers agonize. Should you offer them? Should you not? How much should you charge? Is it worth it?

It’s difficult for many photographers to sign over what they regard as their livelihood. Print sales are often how photographers make the bulk of their profits, so each professional must decide for himself or herself whether handing over a disc of edited images with full carte blanche is a wise business decision, but there are a few points to consider before shooting and burning.

First, consider the money you’re making (or lack thereof) with the sale of print rights. Most photographers who simply “shoot and burn,” the practice of photographing a session, editing the images, then throwing the files on a disc for the client, are probably charging a minimal amount, a couple hundred dollars at best. Photographers who sit down with clients, displaying print options, such as canvases and albums, though they may be putting in more time, are bringing in hundreds if not thousands of dollars more from every single client. So if you’re giving a disc away for practically nothing, you’re probably cheating yourself.

What About Quality Control?

Quality control is another thing to contemplate when giving away the print rights to images without providing prints. When the client has control over when and where the photos get printed, there’s a good chance they’re going to the cheapest consumer photo kiosk they can find, which is almost guaranteed to not do your work justice. You might be tempted to shrug your shoulders at that concept, but considering that most new clients probably come through referrals, can you really take that big of a hit on your workload because your clients are displaying sub-par 8x10s in their hall?

But, you may say, your clients want the print rights. Then what? To hold onto the integrity of your work and your business, don’t list the availability of print rights on your price list. If someone asks, tell them it’s not something you offer. Most people won’t care; it’s just something about which they feel they need to inquire.

A Middle Road Solution

If you think you might lose a good client over it, try a different approach. At our studio, we offer only medium-resolution files – meaning they can only print up to an 8×10 – and only after they have purchased a package or spent a certain amount on prints. That way, we guarantee they are getting high-quality products, that they’ll come back to us if they need more large display pieces, and with a pretty high price tag, we’re making money on it too.

The bottom line is that you’re in this game to earn a living and you want your work to reflect your professionalism. So before you sit down with your next client, decide how much you’re worth, what’s going to help your business thrive, and stick with it! You’ll be glad you did.

On March 14, 2012, Temple University photojournalism student Ian Van Kuyk was sitting on the steps outside his home in Philadelphia when police pulled over a vehicle just a few feet away. Spurred to action by the unexpected event, Van Kuyk began to photograph the scene unfolding in front of him in order to complete a course assignment for nighttime photography. The college junior was not using flash and promptly complied with a police officer’s command to stand back.

Van Kuyk, however, did not obey officers’ subsequent command to stop taking photos, asserting his right to use his camera on a public street. The unsuspecting photographer was then forced to the ground and handcuffed; Van Kuyk’s girlfriend also was arrested after she attempted to retrieve the camera before police could confiscate it.

Philadelphia Police Lt. Raymond Evers later said Van Kuyk and his girlfriend were arrested for “other offenses” unrelated to taking photos. The camera was eventually returned to Van Kuyk with all images still intact.

Photographers and the Law

Stories like this are not uncommon in our hyper-vigilant world where, ever since 9/11, even the slightest appearance of some perceived impropriety might propel onlookers to start throwing around the dreaded “t-word.” But it’s an absurdity of monumental proportions to jump to the conclusion that every time you see someone pull out their camera they are in the early phases of a terrorist plot. Nevertheless, this is the reaction — or overreaction — that photographers are likely to encounter at some point.

The good news is that, whether you are a tourist taking snapshots of the local architecture or a professional photojournalist documenting a protest, you have rights that protect you (and your camera) from harassment and other violations.

Before outlining these rights I need to preface this account by stating a couple of things. First, I am not a lawyer; if you are in need of in-depth legal advice you should consult an attorney. Second, I am an American citizen and, as such, consider myself unqualified to speak with any authority on the laws of other nations; while I am aware that photographers’ rights in places such as the U.K., Australia, and Canada are notably similar, I can only address these rights as they apply specifically to the U.S.

The Public Domain

The law concerning what an individual can photograph is actually quite uncomplicated: basically, if you can see it, you can shoot it. This, of course, applies to public spaces; you have the right to photograph anything and anyone in “plain view,” including federal/government buildings, transportation facilities and law enforcement officials. The two exceptions to the plain-view concept are: certain military and energy installations — due to national security concerns —and individuals who have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Thus, photographing someone through a window in their home is strictly off limits as it is understood to be a violation of their rights as a private citizen.

Taking photos on private property is also permitted so long as that property is open to the public. This may seem somewhat counterintuitive at first glance; what kind of private property is freely accessible to the general public? The most common examples of this include shopping malls, restaurants, banks, and office building lobbies. The one caveat in this situation is that the property owner has the right to set and enforce the rules for his or her property. So, if you are asked to stop taking photos and refuse to comply, the property owner can not only insist that you leave, but may also — at their discretion — have you arrested for trespassing.

The Law and the Enforcers

Not only does the law set forth guidelines about where and what one may photograph, but it also addresses how police are expected to conduct themselves when handling incidents that involve photography. Police may not confiscate your camera or memory card or demand access to your photographs without a warrant. Even if you are arrested for trespassing, as in the above example, your photographs are to remain your property.

Under no circumstances are police lawfully permitted to delete the contents of a camera or memory card. The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution regards this act as destruction of evidence and expressly forbids it. Police may command any individual to cease any activity that is legitimately interfering with sanctioned law enforcement procedures. The potential problem here relates to very loose interpretations of what “legitimate interference” is and isn’t. As public officials, police officers are subject to scrutiny; sometimes that scrutiny takes the form of being photographed by citizens. Regardless of how much a police officer might resent being photographed, it is the right of the individual to do so as long as he or she does not break any other laws in the process.

Additional Legal Considerations: Airports and video

While airport photography has taken a more anxiety-inducing turn in post-9/11 America, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has gone on record to convey that photography is indeed allowed in and around security checkpoints as long as you are not interfering with the screening process and are not photographing its security monitors. Furthermore, the TSA advises that local agencies may enforce prohibitions that the TSA itself does not.

Video recordings generally are afforded the same rights and restrictions as still photographs, with one major exception. The visual component of a video recording is fully protected, while the audio portion might or might not be, depending on where the recording was made; some states have attempted to classify the audio component as an illegal wiretap. Obviously, there is an enormous swath of gray area in this regard, further complicated by the constant flux of legal challenges to the statute and the legal tinkering and fine-tuning that occur as a result.

As the photographer, you hold exclusive copyright to any shots you take and may use those shots for virtually any non-commercial purpose.

Self-preservation

How should you respond if you are ever confronted by police officers for taking photos? Stay calm, be polite and don’t do anything to provoke a physical altercation.

Try to get a clear answer as to why you are being stopped. The most important question you can ask at this point is whether you are free to leave. The officer’s reply will help you determine your next course of action. If you are told that you are not allowed to leave, that means you are being officially detained. Detaining a citizen is not lawful without reasonable suspicion that the individual has, is preparing to, or is in the midst of committing a crime. And since photography is not a crime, ask what crime you are, in fact, suspected of committing. If necessary, remind the officer that your photography is protected by the very law he or she is unfairly attempting to enforce.

The case of Ian Van Kuyk is, unfortunately, not an anomaly. A cursory Google search will reveal an inordinate number of hits pertaining to citizens who have had to endure some level of harassment simply for taking photographs. An important factor common to nearly all of these cases is that none of the individuals in question were breaking any other laws; they were not trespassing, interfering with police, or engaging in vandalism.

And in each of these cases photographers have stood their ground. The importance of this cannot be understated. The impact that photography has on society is not limited to the artistic realm, it extends well beyond the preservation of family memories; photography, as a documentary tool, often serves to keep government power in check. Does it always work? Of course not. But an awareness of the ubiquitous state of the camera in our modern world may be enough to keep at least a few public officials honest and forthright in their dealings with the citizens whom they simultaneously serve and wield power over. But when it comes to power, never underestimate the power of the average person with a camera and the impulse to make a difference.

Eds note: This post was published first on the blog Light Stalking.

Do you want to grow your professional client base and social media following this year? Are you looking to polish your photography skills and techniques? Maybe you’re simply looking for something fresh to inspire you?

Personal assignments are a great way to fine-tune your skills, practice new techniques and show prospective clients your personal interests and style. Making compelling photos on your own time can help you stand out. It can also help force you out of the creative rut we all get into from time to time while working to pay the bills.

Here are five personal assignments you can challenge yourself with this year:

1. Document an event. Photograph an experience, from preparation to teardown. It can be a sporting or music event or a public festival. Of course, you want to showcase the main attraction, but also pay attention to the vignettes that take place because of the event. One example: If you like music, consider heading to Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest (SXSW). Photograph the artists performing and the thousands of fans dancing and sweating on each other. Since the festival lasts nine days, you’ll have plenty of time to find vignettes. Who are the local food rock stars? Where are the artists living for the week? What’s the festival’s waste management? Who is the oldest fan in the crowd? The list goes on.

2. Travel to a new location. Take a break from your normal work routine and spend a few days on vacation. You don’t have to go far. Just visit a small town, a state park, or take a ride down a scenic highway (Route 66 or Highway 1) that you have never experienced before. Document the food you eat and the people you meet. Take a look at National Geographic Traveler for inspiration. Do plenty of research on your destination before your trip. Have a game plan by making a list of what you want to see and at what time you want to see it. Once you arrive, engage with the locals and ask what are the best local places to see and activities to do (the pub’s bartender or a waitress at a small diner are both great sources for this information). Adjust your itinerary to compromise their ideas with yours. Experience and repeat.

3. Photograph a different subject matter. Sometimes, the best way to grow is to take a break. If you usually make portraits, then photograph landscapes. The concepts central to making compelling portraits and landscapes are similar, but the creativity and mental tools used are different. Whatever you decide to shoot, be sure it’s something new and have some fun with it. Want to be inspired? Take a look at world and humanitarian photographer David duChemin’s recent Antartica series.

4. A portrait series. Portraits are awesome. Shooting a series of portraits is even better. Nothing allows you to walk into a town, event or situation and meet more people than a portrait series. Keep the portraits simple, similar and honest. Take a look at Faces of Ground Zero: A Tribute to America’s Heroes by Joe McNally and Female Bodybuilders by Martin Schoeller for inspiration and ideas.

5. Uncover a unique story. A photo story is probably the most rewarding type of project in the profession. Nothing beats finding a great story, gaining trust and sub-sequent access with the subjects, photographing the scenario as you experience it and providing the subjects with a public voice. Whether your goal is to generate awareness of a situation, highlight a local hero or to show a unique perspective to a common scene, be sure to photograph your subjects honestly, accurately, and compassionately. The Bite That Heals by Mattias Klum is an interesting scientific study, Heroin in Denver by Joe Amon is breathtaking, and Crowded House by Stan Olszewski (hey, that’s me!) is a surprising situation that can be happening in a neighborhood near you.

Which of these personal assignments sounds most appealing to you? Do you think you can photograph all five this year? I’d love to hear your ideas or talk about your questions in the comments area below.