The Online Photographer

Calling Card

Thought you might like to see my business card. The domain name and email address are the two things that don't change; for address and telephone number I use a rubber stamp on the back of the card. That way I can use the same card through different house moves (two so far).

The logo or, er, "logo" is the block diagram for the 1902 Zeiss Tessar designed by Paul Rudolph and his assistant Ernst Wandersleb. Pretty sure I couldn't use it as a logo online even though it's in the public domain, because I wouldn't be able to assert copyright, but hidden in the person-to-person relationship of a business card it flies below radar. The higher profile anything is, the more robust it has to be in standing up to scrutiny. In any event I can claim it's a decoration for the card rather than a logo. Because that's true. I grabbed it at the last minute because the printer thought the upper right corner was too empty.

The printing is "raised" and glossy but I can't recall the process. I had it made by a shop in Wisconsin that's been in business since 1948. It's 99% percent certain this is going to remain my business card until, um, organic expiration; I have roughly a 110-year supply.  :-)

Mike, thriving as an organism

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Alan: "Thermographic printing, or simply 'thermo,' is the name of the process you’re after."

Dan Khong: "The 'TOP' is eye-catching. Not using your name right in the centre (like almost 99% of people out there) shows humility. I respect that in a person. The Tessar lens design is also my favourite. It's simple, elegant and can be a conversation starter. Overall, a very well thought out and elegant design for a name card."

Mike replies: Thank you Dan! Note my lack of humility in Featuring your comment.

Word of Mouth and Free-Floating Goodwill

Comments to previous posts were 100% updated as of 11:54 ET this morning

I wanted to add one more thought to yesterday's post. I worked as a professional photographer for about five years (now that I go back and count accurately—I always used to say seven years). And all through that time I honestly believed I had no idea where my next job was coming from, or how to go about getting it. At all times I felt like I was one step away from idle unemployment and maybe a step and a half from the poorhouse—completely exposed to danger, zero job security. Living from hand to mouth and day-by-day. I think I just said the same thing five different ways.

But you want to know what actually happened? I decided to quit working as a photographer for hire in late 1991 or early 1992. And the photography jobs kept coming in anyway. At first, to my surprise, my level of activity didn't even really change all that much. The phone kept ringing. I would explain to people that I wasn't a photographer any more, that I had quit doing that kind of work. Some accepted that at face value, but others tried to talk me into doing just one more job. A number of them offered me more pay. I guess it was because I was a known quantity. I was familiar.

In several cases, former clients offered to pay me double my old day rate! As I recall, a pretty standard day rate in the early '90s was $500—in my circles in D.C. at least. I knew a few people who charged $750, and knew of a few people who charged $1k or more. (I did know one of them—I assisted a studio advertising photographer full time for six months, and his day rate was $1,250.) Of course there were many photographers in New York City who charged $1k and up, and some charged much more—the rumor was that Bruce Weber was turning down offers of as much as $50,000 a day to do jobs on his days off (that was double his day rate), and Avedon got $20,000 for the Vogue cover every month, which he could bash out without breaking a sweat—but the scene in D.C. was not nearly at the same level. I had been charging $350, which wasn't student rates but was on the lower end of things. So double my old day rate was $700 a day, and I couldn't say no to that. (That's $1,567 now, adjusted for inflation.) One client hired me four or five times at that new, higher day rate, and acted like that was just going to be our deal from then on. Each time I would explain that I really did intend to quit, and then, every time they called and dangled that money in front of my eyes again, I would take the job.

This is literally true, and I know what literally means: it was an actual solid year before the phone stopped ringing. That's how long it actually took me to quit.

So I shouldn't have felt so insecure. I had built up a network—a small, modest network, admittedly, but a network all the same—of people who liked my work and liked working with me, or who knew someone else who felt that way who was willing to recommend me. I actually had more job security than I realized.

Wish I had known that.

Then my son was born, and that upended my life for good. Six weeks after he was born in February of '93, I left D.C. for Chicago in a U-Haul truck with everything I owned in it, while my Aunt Mary, bless her heart, took infant Xander to Chicago by air. In Chicago I knew no one, professionally speaking. That's when I learned what it was really like to have no clients, no word of mouth, no contacts, no free-floating goodwill. I never had a clue how to rustle up even one job in that town, and no one there ever called.

Or rather, one person did. Fortunately, I had been writing for magazines for a while by then, and before I had been in Chicago for long I got a phone call out of the blue from the publisher of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine asking me if I would interview for the job of Editor*. The late Joe Saltzer of SaltHill, a small company that made premium darkroom equipment, knew I was in Chicago, and knew I was at loose ends. He had recommended me. (Bless his heart too.) It was a stroke of great good luck—it was the only photography magazine in the Midwest. All the rest were in New York City or Los Angeles, and Shutterbug was in Florida at the time. I got that job, and stayed there for six years, 36 issues.

So I became a magazine editor, and that put an endcap my career as a working photographer, for good.

Mike

*The position should really have been called Editor-in-Chief, but the publisher refused to let me use that title because I didn't have a staff. I wasn't in charge of anyone. I shared marketing, advertising, circulation, production, and graphic arts / typesetting departments with the company's other publications, and I had access to a copyeditor who worked from home, and I had a roster of regular contributors, some of whom acted as informal advisors; but I put the whole magazine together by myself. My second cousin Mark worked for the late, great David E. Davis at Automobile magazine back then, and he told me in idle conversation at the lake that Automobile had a staff of 54. He asked me how big a staff I had, and I said, "you're looking at it." For a moment or two he couldn't believe it.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gary Nylander: "After I left the newspaper as a staff photographer in 2018 I found myself working as a freelance photographer for the first time in my life, a completely different ball game! You mentioned that the standard day rate in the early '90s was $500 a day; I would love to get that today. One of the first freelance gigs I got after leaving the paper was photographing landscape projects for an architectural landscape design company. They did big and small projects. They agreed to hire me for $250 (Canadian) a day. I thought it was a bit low but I needed the money. One day while working on this one particular project site of theirs, I was asked to submit a quote by another landscape business. The owner asked what my day rate was and I thought I would up my price a bit so I asked for $300 a day. The owner said it was too high and he would take his photos with his phone camera. I have had some good-paying jobs. However, I'm poor at self-promotion, so I struggle with freelance work."

Kirk: "I think you were underestimating the advertising rates back in the 1990s. Even in our quiet little backwater town of Austin, Texas, advertising photographers were charging a base rate per day of around $1,800, but that was in addition to usage fees, which were always added to the day rate. A portrait of a CEO for an annual report, with a five year usage agreement, could bring in a middling photographer around $5,000 for a day's work. A bit more nowadays. You kept saying a 'for hire' photographer which I interpreted, maybe incorrectly, to mean a 'work for hire' photographer which means you were giving away all rights for one day rate. Most ASMP members, and other successful photographers, make it a practice to charge a day rate to do the job and also a usage fee for a fixed time of usage and a fixed set of media the images would be used in.

"While the median income numbers for photographers seem to be (currently) around $50,000 per year the average number, when including advertising photographers, is much higher. In a good year here in a secondary market my peers were earning gross revenues of $250,000 to $300,000. My friends in New York were charging much more.

"Certainly, wedding and retail portrait photographers are at the lower end of the scale but still.... It was, and remains, a profitable business if one educates themselves about the business side. In fact, one Austin photographer even wrote a book about it that was made a requisite text for several of the nation's largest college commercial photography programs. It's called Commercial Photography Handbook: Business Techniques for Professional Digital Photographers, and even though it's dated it is still available on Amazon.com.

"It explains usage rights very clearly. And marketing."

Mike replies: I've heard of that guy.

It wouldn't surprise me if I got the numbers wrong, as I tend to have a bad memory for numbers. I'll ask around. But a couple of points: there were a zillion photographers in D.C., but they were mostly press photographers. There was very little commercial, studio, advertising, or especially fashion that was local back then. Art directors and other buyers had a distinct tendency to hire photographers from New York if they had any kind of budget, and that was something the bigger studios in D.C. (there were a few of those, but I've forgotten the names) had to fight against all the time. The guy I assisted for had a whole "canned argument" as to why people should hire him locally rather than going to NYC for their job. New York was cool, D.C. was considered parochial, at least as far as professional photography was concerned. There was a fair amount of commissioned magazine work done by local photographers though.

Also, I was trained as an art photographer and most of my friends and teachers were either art students or teachers at the schools and institutions in the area, so it was a somewhat different subset of people than just a general sampling of mainstream pros. Three of the four principals in the Paul Kennedy studio were Corcoran graduates, and Paul was a teacher at the Corcoran as well as a graduate. I had been mainly a teacher (part time and full time, college, high school, and continuing ed.) before I tried my hand at making a living doing actual photography.

I was using "for hire" as an alternative to "professional" because I'm reluctant to call myself a professional! Feels like hubris on my part. But I was indeed giving away all rights for the day rate, yup. I don't think I ever negotiated usage fees even once. If I had tried, I think most of the people I worked for would have told me to take a hike. And besides, most of the pictures I took were only of interest to the people I took them for, like that demonstration I mentioned where the six protesters showed up. As far as $5k for a CEO portrait...not me. I had a few jobs where I'd make $3k or $4k for a 2–4 day job, but those were few and far between, maybe three or four, no more than five a year, and never for just one photograph.

Karl Francetic (who was billing $1.6m/yr. in the early '90s and who eventually abandoned photography for finance) taught a seminar called "Photography Dollars and Sense," and he had a term he coined: "the $79k schmuck." He meant photographers who grossed $79k/yr. and thought they were making a living. One of his points was that when you bill $79k, you net $39k, and it's the net you have to look at. That was me, more or less, and probably a fair amount of the people I knew. I was actually proud of billing my $79k. My friend from Dartmouth who was a lawyer and who'd had to spend $5,000 on suits when he moved to town so he could look like all the other lawyers was making $80k/yr., and he put in a lot more hours that I did—my hours were limited by the jobs I could hustle, and they never filled up all my time.

UPDATE: I just had a long conversation with Paul, and he corroborated my figures. His day rate was $750 at that time, as I remembered. His hourly rate was $150 to $250 depending on the client. He did say that he was at the lower end of the market—he was also a photography teacher in a full-time degree-granting program, so he didn't do commercial photography full time.

He pointed out that the market for photography in Washington was very different from other places. Because there was no specific industry, it was harder for photographers to specialize—he noted that the work was entertaining,  because it was varied—the subject of my first post on this topic two days ago—but that meant it was also inconsistent. You had to do all sorts of things. Paul also pointed out that different buyers paid very different prices. For instance, editorial work paid much less than advertising. But many photographers did both.

Paul did a lot of editorial at one time. There were (and doubtless still are) many thousands of associations in Washington, and in the '90s most of them put out some sort of publication or newsletter for their members. For years, a significant part of Paul's business was making little illustrations for articles in these association publications. So, for instance, there might be an article about currency exchange, and he'd make a little photograph of piles of currency on a balance scale; that sort of thing. Easy work, and low paying generally, but plentiful and steady. The early '90s was when royalty-free photographs became a "thing," and, abruptly, the bottom dropped out of that part of the business.

Paul also said that he considered perks of the job when he took work. Air Force magazine (now called Air & Space Forces magazine) didn't pay much, but sent him all over the world on a regular basis (he also did a studio still life with historical air force objects for the back cover of every issue), and gave him access to a variety of experiences he wouldn't have access to otherwise. For instance, on one job he sat in the bombardier's seats of both the "Enola Gay" and "Bockscar," the B-29s that dropped the only two atomic bombs yet used in warfare.

Before he retired in 2006, Paul had raised his day rate to $1,250. He's now 80, and wants you to know that he is still looking for ways to get into trouble.

Ted Davis: "That magazine, with you at the helm, David Vestal, Ctein, Bruce Barnbaum, and many others, made me a better photographer, and darkroom technician. I have selected articles from over the years saved in a three-ring binder on my bedside table. Thank you, Mike!!"

JOHN B GILLOOLY (partial comment): "I have seen many photographers who don't seem to really want to work 'full time.' They want to cherry-pick those 'great' assignments where they are being paid really well to shoot something they find rewarding. Those assignments do exist. And they aren't necessarily rare. But if you get intoxicated by them and decide you can bypass the jobs that are 'work,' you will most likely fail as a professional photographer. You need to be out there working. It makes you a better photographer. It makes you better at the business. Being on assignments gives you credibility to other potential clients seeing you work. Being busy allows you to have a true market value that is based on supply and demand—instead of you making up an arbitrary number. If you claim to be worth $10,000 per day but the market doesn't seem to be hiring you at that rate, you're just blowing smoke. If you are on assignment every day at $1,000 per day, the market is telling you to charge more. I'm not interested in hearing 'day rate' unless it's followed by 'annual revenue' and 'net profit.'"

Mike replies: Karl Francetic, in that class I took, put it somewhat differently. He said, what if you have a studio, and you have worked hard to establish an $850 day rate. One day you are sitting around the studio doing nothing, and have nothing scheduled for the day, and a man walks through the door. He has a small widget, and he needs a picture of it on a plain background, but he only has $50 to pay for it. Do you take the $50 and do that job?

The majority of the students in the class said no, but Karl said, of course you do! It's $50 more than you were going to make that day. Have a day rate as a starting point for negotiations, but you have to fit the client, the client's job, and your own situation. The bottom line is, make money when you can.

On the other hand, Paul talked about a situation in which a client to whom he had quoted an hourly rate wanted to buy only 15 minutes! But Paul would still have had to pack his equipment, lug it to the job, and take the film to the lab downtown afterward. Realistically, even that 15-minute job would take up half a day. He told that client no, he charged $150 per hour and had a three-hour minimum and that was that. A different client on one job wanted him to start work at 7 a.m., knock off at 1 p.m., then start up again at 5 p.m. and work till late. The buyer argued that he shouldn't be charged for the down time in the middle of the day. Paul said no, because he couldn't make any other use of a four-hour layover, so he charged the client for the four hours.

My Years As a Working Pro

Comments 100% updated as of 10:35 ET this morning

One of the very best things about being a photographer is that you get to poke around. When I did work for hire in D.C., I was the junior partner in a studio with several older and more established photographers, and most of the work I took were their cast-off jobs—the smaller, easier, cheaper jobs that would cover my lower day rate, or jobs they'd taken that they wanted to push aside to make room for more lucrative ones. I assisted the studio owner on jobs sometimes—even modeled a few times—and I did a lot of custom darkroom printing. I also got my own jobs from a variety of sources—I exhibited portraits at my friend Judy's frame shop in Georgetown to get portrait work, I had an ad in the Yellow Pages, and former clients recommended me to new ones. Sometimes a portrait resulted in a professional assignment for the portrait client's workplace, a corporation or government agency. Sometimes a non-profit would call because I was cheap. The end result was that I got dropped into all sorts of odd situations and I never knew what was coming next. It couldn't have been better.

Some of the photography was pretty basic, and a lot of it was...well, fake, which didn't sit well with me at the time. Like the time I was hired to document a protest for the entity that had organized it, and only six protesters showed up. I had to get creative to make them look like a crowd. At least there were several policemen, one mounted on a crowd-control horse! That helped. But a lot of times the motley of random jobs made for opportunities I never would have gotten otherwise. I got to photograph the jazz and classical trumpet player Wynton Marsalis, who was a sensation at the time. My picture was too loose and "snapshotty" for the newspaper, though. I photographed then-newly-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter buying sweatpants at the Harvard Coop on his way from his home in New England to Washington. A store employee offered to have them altered by their tailor! Custom-tailored sweatpants?! Justice Souter told me he was embarrassed by all the attention, including from me.

One time I had to do a small job at what turned out to be a very interesting company. Sitting on a sofa in the hallway, primly, looking straight ahead, were three middle-aged women dressed beautifully in the traditional garb of India, hands folded identically in their laps, while several small children played quietly nearby. I tried to engage the women in conversation, and was quickly pulled away to have it explained to me that they were not allowed to speak—they were the children's minders; they spoke no English. The owner and his wife both worked there at the office every day, and always brought their small children to work with them. It was the early days of cell phones, and the company built the networks that handled and mapped the handoff of cell signals from one tower to the next. The mapping devices were incredibly complex. I asked a bunch of questions, and the owner himself, who was not particularly busy because he had the whole enterprise humming along very nicely without much need for his minute-to-minute attention, gave me a tour and explained everything about their work to me. (No one is as interested in a company's work as the owner.) Absolutely fascinating. He said it wasn't yet profitable, but his opinion was that it would be, because cell phones were the coming thing and were going to be big one day. (Got that right.) And of course I was well aware that if I had not come in as a photographer, I never, ever would have had the chance to be treated to that guided tour and see up close what that company did and how it operated. Every day was something new, and I loved that about the work.

The only problem was that the photography didn't always satisfy me. And, to be brutally honest, I wasn't always good at it. I was constantly on the lookout to get "real" pictures while I was there doing something else altogether for the client. That divided my attention—which wasn't good, although I didn't understand that at the time. You need to do what you're hired for. People were always complaining about my work, but they complained about the very things that I liked. And I often didn't sufficiently respect the things they liked. I think I mentioned the other day that I once delivered a set of portrait proofs to the mother of a high school student, and in one of the proofs the girl's bra strap was showing. I honestly didn't understand at the time what a blatantly unprofessional faux pas that was—because that frame also happened to be, artistically, the best picture. (I still have it around here somewhere.) Couldn't they see that?

I should have understood that they couldn't see it my way, because I couldn't see it their way.

A few jobs brought my interests and the clients' interests together, but more often than not they were at odds. I'm not saying I didn't have successes—a lot of jobs I was able to do just fine, from band portraits to catalog pictures to some real estate photos I took from a chartered helicopter. That helicopter was fun. I had to pay for half an hour of air time, and I took half of it for myself, which neatly illustrates the divided-attention thing I was just talking about. (I didn't charge the client for the fifteen minutes I used for myself, of course.) I also had some failures, too, and a couple of them were so spectacular I'm embarrassed just to think of them, like the time I exposed critical pictures on a roll of film that had already been exposed. In the end, it's probably a good thing I didn't end up trying to make my living as an actual professional. I wouldn't have been all that good at it. You can't do just nine out of every ten jobs right and stay in business.

But the joy of getting to do something new or different every day, of getting to go odd places and see weird things, of getting to poke around and talk to people I would never have gotten to talk to otherwise—that part of it was fantastic. I was a collector of experiences in those days—something I started because I couldn't afford graduate school. My years as a working professional were just one more experience. But I remember those experiences very fondly, and wouldn't want to have missed any of it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aaron: "As the family photographer I have to keep in mind that the sorts of photos my family likes are usually not the sorts of photos I like. I tend toward the journalistic but they only want posed. They also don't care about composition. They just want to 'look good.' None of this is a complaint by the way. I'm happy to take photographs they like but I often have to remind myself to get a few because I'm looking for something else."

Kenneth Wajda: "I worked for a large daily newspaper in New Jersey for 13 years from 1987 to 2001, and in that time I always thought, 'I have the best job in the world,' meeting people, getting to photograph everything from Little League to U.S. Presidents. News, sports, and features. Every day was different, and we had such a great camaraderie at the newsroom. The photographers would go out every week on Monday nights to the local Irish pub together. It was just a wonderful job. Here is Maureen Dowd’s sweet article about the newsroom."

Rob Spring: "I know of what you speak. As a consulting engineer and technical trainer I found myself in many places I would never had been allowed into: nuclear power plants, a Formula 1 race car manufacturer, automotive assembly lines, all the NASA facilities—but also some very mundane industries such as aluminum can manufacturing (which isn't very mundane as you watch hundreds of thousands of cans fly by). Although my work was always pretty similar, getting the grand tour and an explanation of how everything worked was like being a kid in a candy store."

Bear.: "I learned that 9 out of 10 wasn't good enough in my first job as a lawyer. There was a short induction course for incoming graduates. The managing partner gave a little welcome speech to the following effect: 'You're here because you're very clever people. Many of you will have average university grades of 80% [a 'high distinction']. But you must understand that you are not in law school any more. 80% just doesn't make the cut any more. This firm is being paid to produce legal work that is as close to perfection as is humanly possible. If what you do happens to be perfect, don't expect praise—that's what you are being paid to do. But if your work falls short of perfection, you will be taken to task and guided as to how to improve.' A meaningful pause. 'And here's the secret, your work will never be perfect.'"

Kirk: "I have been a full-time working photographer since 1988. That's 36 years. In all that time I never wanted to do anything else. I've been around the world, in countless boardrooms with industry movers and shakers, and in the most interesting places I could have ever imagined. I've also made a good living, sent a kid to a nice college, bought nice houses and fun cameras. At 68 I tried to retire but I missed the fun, the people, the money and the satisfaction of making photographs that clients loved. And the clients seemed to miss me. Just ending a week filled with new projects and much satisfaction. No better job I know of. And yes, you have to have at least a 99 out of 100 hit rate for your clients. Well, only if you want to keep them as clients...."

The Patron Saint of Photographers

Photo by Richard Byrd, 1972

St. Ansel the Energetic

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Photographer, mountain climber, printmaker, teacher, writer, environmentalist, activist, pianist, partier, [alleged] philanderer, good friend to his friends, and the all-purpose paragon of what an art photographer could be, c. mid-20th-century.

I'm not saying Ansel's a hero or that he should be the subject of veneration. My own "Adams phase" pretty much petered out forty years ago, although it was voracious while it lasted (I read everything, learned the Zone System, and got that ultimate telltale, a spot meter). But I'll say one thing for him: he worked really hard and really smart for most of his life, and accomplished a lot in many areas. Energetic indeed.

Sheri caught fire
The little point I wanted to make here is that it's been my observation that many successful photographers of all types have a surfeit of energy and work uncommonly hard. In fact, for a while I thought that some professional photographers chose the profession specifically because they had an excess of energy and were looking for something to soak it up. More mundane jobs didn't demand enough. Such people will do twice or even three times as much work as a normal schmuck and then look around to see what else they can do on top of that. Since then I've met a few pros—especially art photographers—who are more laid back and chilled out, so maybe my old theory doesn't universally hold water. But St. Ansel did more work in a day at 80 years old than most people do when they're 40, I'll bet.

My wonderful art school graduating class has reunited and is regularly talking, but we're missing two members; one is a woman named Sheri to whom I was particularly close. I miss her whenever the rest of us get together. We don't know where she is, or she's declined to answer overtures, we're not exactly sure which. Sheri was a rich girl—her father was a surgeon, if I recall correctly, and she grew up in a gated community, a sheltered upbringing. When we first met she had a languid, unhurried way of approaching work. She was the nicest person in the world, gentle, sweet, and agreeable, but she took her ever-lovin' time over things; it got done if it got done. I actually used to get a little frustrated with her "okay, maybe later" attitude. Then came the Summer after Second Year. She got a Summer job that she hoped would further her photography. She came back from Summer vacation like a changed person! Suddenly she was working like the building was on fire and she couldn't get out till her work was finished. From being a slow, contemplative worker, she was suddenly fired up to finish everything ten minutes ago and get everything done yesterday. She had spent the Summer working for a studio pro. I don't know if he (she? Could have been a woman) taught her much about photography, but her boss sure lit a fire under her! He taught her how to work. She learned well, and she took off. In Second Year (our first year in the photography program), I worked harder than she did. After that Summer, though, she lapped me. I was the one playing catch-up. I can still hear her saying, "Come on," like, chop chop, dude, get moving! 

Whenever anyone used to come to me and ask if they ought to become a full-time photographer, I'd ask them whether they had the energy, skills, and initiative to be the owner-operator of any other small business, like the owner of a gas station or a dry cleaners. I don't know if that would still be a fair test. Maybe. But energy and the ability to work hard consistently is certainly one of the common keys to full-time success. Most of the successful full-time photographers I've known, whether they were photojournalists, art photographers, studio or advertising pros, or public-facing pros like wedding, portrait, and senior photographers, all shared one thing in common: they relished work, and knew how to get a lot done.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Kirk: "'It's never work if you love what you do.'"

Albert Smith: "In the '80s, my viewing of Adams' actual photos in a museum in San Diego made me realize that no book or magazine could capture the true perfection of his handmade prints. It was also the time that I realized that my darkroom skills were not very good. If the opportunity comes up to see an actual exhibition, don't miss it."

Mike replies: Yes. Absolutely right. See original work if at all possible. But I would recommend not judging by The Museum Set. Rather inferior late prints made when Ansel's eyesight was beginning to dim and he was unsatisfied with the papers he was able to get.

Scott Abbey: "I’ve observed that hard work is necessary for success in most any field. Unfortunately, it is not sufficient."

John Krumm: "You can read Richard's story of that photo at his very out-of-date blog, here."

Mike replies: That's a wonderful personal account. Thanks for the link!

Geoff Wittig: "I've visited every Ansel Adams exhibit within a reasonable travel radius for about 30 years. What has mostly struck me is how much his printing style changed over time (leaning toward darker and higher contrast), and how variable his prints were. His trilogy of technical books implies that he developed a consistent 'best practices' approach to his selenium-toned art prints. That may well have been his intent. But seen in person his prints demonstrate great variation in value key, contrast, and toning. Some of his 'greatest hits' prints spanned quite a range from dead neutral to warm purplish Selenium. Some are even a bit greenish, despite his avowed loathing for such color in gelatin silver prints.

"I have my own theory. As we age, our color vision changes. Cataracts are nearly universal by age 80, and tend to make our color perception lean warmer. It's imperceptible at first, but progresses with time. I have a very noticeable difference, right eye much cooler/bluer than my left. So I have little doubt that my prints have changed a bit."

Last Thoughts About Free Portraits

I just emailed an update about the fate of the blog to my Patreon supporters.

I'll post about the new and exciting GFX 100II, Fuji's brand-new flagship digital camera, on Monday. It's done, but it's awkward to put up a post with all sorts of B&H links in it right as B&H closes for the weekend for Rosh Hashana.

More about the state of portraiture
So for today's post I guess I'd like to follow up on the whole discussion of free portraits. I've done some more thinking about it, and have concluded that the best advice for others might be to go one of two ways:

—>Do street portraits, an honorable genre in which you waylay strangers on die Strasse—you know, la rue—and ask if they can photograph them, turning the encounter into a mini-session but taking only a few shots. Famous practitioners include the bestselling Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York fame; a personal favorite, the later-life discovery Robert Bergman; and newcomers like YouTuber/IG'er David Guerrero, who Kirk mentioned the other day, is right there in the mix too. (Don't forget that photography has a rich history of embracing rebels, outcasts, subversives, counterculturalists, primitivists, and demotic practitioners as well as the groomed, the trained, the tailored, the connected, the credentialed, and the children of the rich. YouTube and Instagram are perfectly good incubators for the former). Lots of other great photographers work in this genre too, including some of our very own readers.

Or, on the other hand:

—>Charge a lot of money for your portraits and deserve it. Well, if you charge a lot of money, you have to deserve it. To charge a lot means you have to be businesslike, and professional; you have to be dependable and reliable; you will have the right and proper attitude toward your clients; and you will have to provide a product that is excellent and that respects the clients' desires. Even if you set up their expectations yourself, which is de facto what famous portraitists have always done. Meaning, if customers hired Karsh, or Elsa Dorfman, or Platon, or Loretta Lux to do a portrait, that meant they wanted a portrait that looked like a Karsh or an Elsa Dorfman or a Platon or a Loretta Lux! One reader mentioned that part of the product can be to put on a bit of a dog-and-pony show, because clients like that, and there's nothing wrong with that, either. I knew a guy in DC who built a huge and almost fanciful studio designed around photographic themes so that art directors would feel comfortable bringing their clients to the studio for their shoot. Treating clients like they're special, and making the people who hire you look good to the people who hired them, never hurts.

All that advice I got from commenters about free portraits being worth what I was charging for them was probably right. Subjects are suspicious about the product, and probably should be. And I feel entitled to some autonomy and control, but I haven't really earned it because I'm not paying them for that. I haven't made sure the transaction works for both parties transparently.

Karsh posing for portraits, RIT, November 1987

In my defense, it used to be different! Back in the years B.C. (before cellphones), people needed headshots, comps, PR shots, Christmas cards (I did a Christmas card for a Senator once), or just presents for grandma on her birthday. And if you were willing to do it for free for the sake of your portfolio or your art, so much the better for them. They were grateful for it. Some still are, but it's no longer the way it once was, generally.

Anyway, that's my take today. I'm still going to hire a few people as artist's models and try that out. It'll be more data, if nothing else.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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September Resolution: Portrait Photography

I wrote the other day that I used to make good money doing portraits, years ago, but that now I actually have a hard time giving them away. This has persisted for a number of years.

There are also problems associated with trying to do portraits for free. Often, misunderstandings arise. A few examples: in one case I scheduled a senior portrait weeks in advance. The day came, I spent two hours at the shoot, I made a web page of the proofs—at which point the mother said she thought her son should have gotten a haircut first. I sort of mumbled politely to the effect of "well, too late now," but she said, "what's the problem? It's free, so I can get you to do it as many times as I want."

My response:

!

She didn't take into consideration that while it didn't cost her anything, it cost me something in time and effort. And that maybe I didn't want to do multiple shoots of her son again and again until she got tired of my generosity. I mean, they'd had a couple of weeks to get him a haircut. (She was a good friend, so I don't mean to be critical. I'm just pointing out the disparity between our goals in that transaction.)

In another case, aware that I was having communication problems doing this, I put in writing exactly what I would provide. The client insisted that he wanted to pay, so I said that $50, the price of a box of inkjet paper, would cover incidentals. He gave me a crisp $100 bill, then proceeded to make all sorts of demands that were not in the agreement. I wasn't blameless in the bad feelings that ensued; I admit I copped a resentment, because...well, for a lousy hundred bucks, I am not your servant boy. If you want to pay a full fee, then you can boss me around.

Ken Bennett, who I believe is or was a professional photographer (although I didn't ask him before writing this), had this to contribute: "The problem with offering 'free portraits' is the lack of takers—people think there's a catch. The portrait is free but I'll sell you the prints at a high markup. Or some other way of separating you from your money. I helped organize a Help Portrait event for first responders a few years ago and we had a hard time getting anyone to show up for this reason, even with our police and emergency response folks promoting it. No, really, it's free and we send you the photos. Really."

That's what happens to me now. I ask people if I could do a portrait of them, they say yes, I give them my card, and then I never hear from them. No resentment this time; it's absolutely up to them, and they're free to not follow through for whatever reason. I'm fine with that. But it is disappointing. And more importantly, it doesn't work.

Outmoded attitude
Trying to see this from a different perspective: maybe I just have the wrong attitude. I came up in a time when portraiture was a valued product and people paid for it. Because that was the way it used to be. Well, perhaps I'm stuck in that mentality. Even offering portraits for free, my conception of the transaction is that I'm giving away something of value, and that people should be grateful. So maybe that was true from the 1840s up until 30 or so years ago; but maybe it's no longer true.

Another reader left a comment suggesting that I should pay the sitters. That is, hire models. Funny thing is, I gradually became convinced of the same thing a while back.  And the truth is, I am getting something out of the exchange; I'm getting to indulge my muse and do what I like, which is make portraits. And I end up with a picture, one that looks the way I want it to look. So why shouldn't I think of it like I'm the one who's getting something out of the transaction? Rather than think of it like I'm doing my sitters a favor. Because that might be an old-fashioned assumption now. One that belongs in the dustbin of history.

Paying people to sit for portraits has one problem, which is that it's out of the ordinary. If people are suspicious, it might strike them as odd. But there's always the trope of models and modeling to fall back on; that's a common part of the culture, and people get it. Making the transaction clean would at least get rid of the problems of working for pay and working for free. I'd be the boss. (Whatever that means.)

I'm going to try it, before the winter's over. In the spirit of experimentation. That's my, er, September resolution. I'll report back to you then.

You can yell at me if I forget, come spring.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Louis McCullagh: "I was in computer sales (very long time ago) and when when I was arranging exhibitions to introduce new product or specialist software, I charged people to come (they got lunch included and coffee etc.). I also rang them the day before to remind them. When people pay it means they are truly interested and will likely turn up. I have seen exhibitions where no one came!

"In photography I gave a 100% free photo shoot and framed 20x16" (image) photo. It was the only time I had to do a reshoot. Basically I was not being paid (it was an auction and the money went to a charity), and the relationship changed. The auction looked as if it was going to end at about $75 (which worried me, as I would have given $75 to avoid the hassle of the shoot), but two people started to bid it up. Normally my rate for the above was $600.

"Another time I offered a free photo session (different circumstances) and stressed that there was no thank-you required, but they got me a $50 voucher anyway. Then I was in the doghouse because I didn't thank them for the voucher. I 100% did not want it. It was like, here is a gift, and then getting a gift back, which in a way reduces the value of the original gift. (That might upset some of you who have no sympathy for my point of view).

"Free is a dangerous concept you need to tiptoe around."

Mike replies: That's a great line, Louis—I will try to remember to steal it.  :-) 

I mentioned in past post about this subject that when I was a teacher I did portraits for school families and yearbook pictures for seniors for only a nominal fee ($100). I did the portraits outdoors or at the school on weekends or during off-hours.

A surprisingly number of people "forgot" and left me hanging, or cancelled at the very last minute—not infrequently leaving me at the school all set, ready, and waiting for them. It got so bad that I began asking for a $20 reservation fee to schedule an appointment. The fee was refundable only if they gave me 24 hours' notice. A few people complained about this, but it was purely self-defensive. I did have to return a few deposits just to avoid further trouble. But the no-shows went way down. Apparently they really didn't want to waste that deposit. And in one case, it was a family who had a summer home in Bermuda. Human nature can be funny.

Also in a past post, I recounted the experience of negotiating with Richard Avedon's studio for the use of one of his pictures in a magazine article. His conditions were interesting—he would not supply a repro print (the equivalent of a file in those days!); we had to copy the picture from one of his published books, which we got from the library system. And we were required to neither pay him nor offer to pay. As I understood it (I was dealing with his third assistant), the concept was that we couldn't afford his fee but we would be insulting him by offering anything less. Tiptoeing around, indeed.

Calvin Amari: "One problem with your proposed plan and 'Free Portraits' sign is a more fundamental communication problem. Here on Planet Earth the sign would need to say something like 'Free Third-Party Outsourced Selfies.'"

Mike Peters: "This is why I don't photograph people for a fee. It's never enough to deal with their egos, body dysmorphic disorders, lack of taste in clothing, bad grooming, poor posture, etc....

"I do photograph people for organizations that are paying my fee, and that makes it a bit easier as a third party is generally doing the judging.

"If you do want to do this, it's better to charge a huge fee for the shoot to cover your time and the costs of an assistant and a makeup and hair person on set, then use a very good retoucher for the final selects. A friend of mine does that, and is quite successful. It helps to have a bit of a dog and pony show to make the people feel special.

"Additionally, a high fee, one that will make you squirm to quote, will also garner you far more respect than a low fee, or, god forbid, giving it away for free. No one takes a freebee seriously. You come across as desperate and pathetic to those with money, as your friend with the unkempt son has illustrated.

"Paying people to photograph is useful in the beginning to give you a very strong body of work to show to prospective clients. However once you do, you really have to treat yourself, your craft, and the time and money you've invested in gaining your experience to create the portfolio with fees that are commensurate with your skills.

"The sad reality is that most portraits for money are all about flattery. And to my eye, flattery isn't very interesting photographically. Pretty photos of good-looking people are generally dull. No one wants to pay for interesting photos of themselves because they don't understand them.

"Think of it this way: Avedon made interesting photos, and Scavullo made pretty people look prettier. Whichever one you think is a genius will tell you more about where you should be going with this."

[Ed. note: Mike is a gifted people photographer.]

David Saxe: "People's reactions to their portraits can be strange sometimes. I don't do them anymore, but when I did, people either loved them or hated them (and me with it) for reasons that were not entirely clear.

"Centuries ago, I was employed as a medical photographer at a large teaching hospital in Montreal. Due to the lack of teaching, the summers were usually very slow, so I passed the time making free portraits of the other employees who I came into contact with in my day-to-day activities. One of those persons was Joe, who was the cashier at the cafeteria. He had immigrated to Montreal from Russia about ten years earlier. The word was that he had been in a labor camp for six years for insulting some official. He had felt that he had been unjustly dealt with by this person and had voiced his dissatisfaction in a way that got him thrown in jail. Upon his release, his family brought him to Canada.

"One day I asked him if I could take his picture. He was delighted, and came to the studio that afternoon after his shift ended. I liked the portrait, and I gave him a print a few days later and he thanked me for it. From that day on, he would never let me pay for my coffee. When I walked by the cash register with my cup, he would reach into his pocket, pull out fifty cents, and put it in the till. 'It's OK,' he would say.

"This went on for a year. One day as I passed through the line he said that he had shown the photograph to one of his sons. 'My son said you made me look like sh*t,' he said. 'Could you do it over again?'

"I said sure, and suggested he drop by the next day.

"No, right now! Today," he replied, quite forcefully.

"I said I had no time to do it today but I would be happy to do it the next day.

"'Who the hell do you think you are,' he said. 'I have bought you coffee every morning for the past year and how do you repay me? By taking a picture of me that makes me look like sh*t. My dog could take a better picture than you can. Fifty cents, please,' he said, as he held out his hand.

"As I paid for the coffee, I wondered what he had said to that official in Russia so many years ago that would have put him in a labor camp for six years.

"We never spoke again."

Mike replies: Wow, that's a better post than the one I wrote.

Bruce Bordner: "Even before phone cameras, I have been irritated by the 'posing reflex' that so many people have. I sneak up on them to get the shot I want, but they snap around and give me that smile and ruin it...I just feel creepy. Professional models are far better at looking natural if you are doing it for the picture. You should try it soon instead of agonizing over the expense. Just once, as a treat to yourself."

Ed Hawco (partial comment): "Importantly, the selfie has changed the aesthetics of portraiture. For most young people today, 'a photo of me' is a selfie, which generally includes a self-assured smirk and a bit of a duck-face (selfie-talk for the pursed lips that were so ubiquitous in the early days of selfies). Whether it’s a smirk, a duck face, a smiling head toss, or some other affectation [and don't forget the too-wide-angle lens distortions —MJ], that is the 'look' of photographic portraits today, and people can achieve that all by their lonesome."

Albert Smith (partial comment): "More than once I have presented my subject with a hard copy print of at least 8x10 inches just as a 'thank you' for allowing me to take their photo, only to have them look at it with a 'what am I supposed to do with this?' look on their face. Several asked if they could scan it to put online or if I could send them the JPEG. Tangible things don't excite people of a certain age."

AlexV: "I shared the contents of your post with my Japanese wife, and she cited the following saying: 'Tada hodo kowai mono wa nai' ('Nothing is more risky than something that is free.')"

Short Story

Professional photographers run into all kinds of issues trying to do their work. Friend of mine was shooting a job for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) at a location in Langley, Virginia, next to another Federal agency thought to be headquartered there. Tried to do the job using a drone...but sharpshooters from "the other agency" shot the drone out of the sky. "True story," he says. So he went back to the drawing board. Had to hire a bucket truck, AKA a cherry picker, to take the picture for the FHWA.

Mike
(Thanks to JT)

P.S. As of 1:00 ET Wednesday I'm all caught up on comments.

FOLLOWUP 4:30 Wednesday: I wrote to CIA Public Affairs:

Dear CIA,
I write a website for photographers that receives ~6,000-8,000 views per post. Recently I repeated a story that alleged that an unauthorized drone being operated near CIA headquarters was "shot down." Many of my readers objected to this in one way or another.

So my questions are, 1.) does CIA control unauthorized drones being operated in its airspace, and 2.) does it have a way of doing so without endangering the public?

Kind regards, and thank you for your service.

The website says they read every inquiry sent to them. I'll let you know if I get a response.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Women Like to Look Good...Can I Say That?

I'm about to get myself in hot water. These days you're not supposed to make gender-specific pronouncements. It's not politically correct. By my experience has been that men and women tend to react differently to having their pictures taken.

As Atlanta, Georgia, photographer Kevin Ames says, "When I used to ask a potential client [if they wanted a makeup artist], women would answer 'No, thanks. I can do my own.' Men would give a look that said having makeup applied was an idea from a far distant planet." I'm male myself, and I have never had makeup on my face, not even when I played Gandalf in a school play in seventh grade, my one and only experience as a thespian. I have a friend (retired now) who was a TV weatherman and news anchor, and he went to makeup every night.

In fact, I could make lots of gender-specific pronouncements about photographing people, marking myself as an outdated troglodyte of an extraneous generation. For instance, with a male executive portrait or graduation portrait, you might have ten or fifteen minutes before your subject starts to look bored, whereas women tend to be comfortable being admired, and being photographed comes under the heading of being admired as long as that person doesn't feel insecure or anxious about her appearance. I encountered women and girls who seemed to have an infinite interest in being photographed, like that bear that was in the news a few weekends ago. (Now I'm making ursine-specific pronouncements. I'm bad.) I'm talking about normal citizens. Professional models—the highest level I ever experienced was one who charged $10k a day in the '80s, when the supermodels were making $25k a day—were amazing in their ability to turn it on and off.

I might point out that advertising for models is exempted from EEOC laws because discriminating by type is "job-related or necessary to the operation of the business." Saying you want to hire specific types of people isn't discriminatory. Maybe blog posts that are job-related could be exempted from being considered politically incorrect as well?

Anyway, here's what I wanted to say: I had a tendency to want to photograph people as they are. Men were typically okay with that because they didn't care (that was the sense I got, anyway). Women not so much. It's true, I am generalizing here, and people can be very different. But as a general rule, women tend to like to look good, and they don't mind if you take time and effort to make them look better.

But I got into trouble with this a lot. I used to ask high-school girls to come to their session with a hair brush and several different tops, and every now and then I'd have them re-do their hair—just so their hair wouldn't be exactly the same in every frame, just in case there was something about it they didn't like. One girl refused, saying she liked her hair being messy. Except she didn't—she hated her hair in all nine rolls I shot of her, and never bought a print. (That was before Photoshop when even small changes were difficult to make.) Another time, a man in a shirt and tie in a family portrait refused to pay for an expensive and time-consuming portrait session because the tab of his belt was outside of his belt loop instead of tucked underneath it. He ended up paying half. I lost $300, about $800 in today's dollars, for not hiring a stylist for the session. Although I've always wondered whether even a professional stylist would have caught the belt loop thing.

Atlanta photographer Kevin Ames solved this problem by making makeup artists mandatory in his portrait sessions. He was dissatisfied using Photoshop retouching only, so he uses both a hair and makeup stylist and Photoshop retouching. I didn't contact him to ask if I could use his illustration, but see his undated blog post "Makeup Artist Required!" and take a look at the three-frame comparison of Cheryl. I would be fine with the version on the left, "Clean face & hair." But most women, I believe, would be happier with the version on the other end, labeled "Retouched" (meaning hair and makeup done, and also retouched). (It's interesting how identical Cheryl's smile is in all three shots.)

It's been a long time since I did a portrait professionally—the last one was five years ago, and I probably went five years before that without doing one. I miss it. To be honest, though, I very seldomly sprung for stylists because I was working at a lower level than that. I wonder how much hair and makeup stylists cost to hire now?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Paul Judice: "I've worked in fashion and beauty retouching for about 30 years and have always been conflicted by the way we create an unrealistic bar for physical beauty. Perhaps out of guilt, I went to career day at my daughter's school when she was in grade two or three. I showed before and after shots of a very famous supermodel (something that could have gotten me in very deep trouble) and let the kids look for the differences. Once all the changes were found and we discussed the process of creating false perfection, I asked the girls what they had learned from my presentation. The unanimous answer was, 'We want to look good!'"

Geoff Wittig: "In my limited experience, it's really not so much a gender-specific thing as personality-specific. That is, there are certainly women who are particular about their appearance in photographs, but plenty who aren't so concerned. And there are plenty of guys who are in their own way extremely particular about how they look. Plenty of business types really want to project dominance, to radiate being the alpha male. In my neck of the woods, it's most often a desire to project a bit of swagger and sneer. Call it the flannel 'n' mustache aesthetic.

"I get a skewed view of the issue, though. My lovely wife of 42 years photographs wonderfully...except that I have taken perhaps a half dozen good photographs of her in that time. In almost all the others she got her hands in the way or turned her back before I could trip the shutter. She's so attuned to the threat, she can hear the nearly silent focusing sound from my portrait lens and gets her hands in the way before things are sharp. Sigh."

Mike replies: I love that "so attuned to the threat." ROFL!

Seriously, though, you two might be good candidates for my "three-minute portrait" contract. See my New Yorker article under "Difficult Subjects."

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "I always thought a portrait was a success if the subject either saw something authentic about themselves that he or she hadn't seen before, or if they felt it showed them as they thought of themselves, or the best selves. The problem is that none of us sees ourselves the way others see us. My own theory about this, at the most basic physical level, this is because we only tend to see reflections of ourselves, which are left-right reversed, whereas the rest of the world sees us as the eye sees us (right side on the right side). The other stumbling blocks are psychological. I, for instance, think of myself as a 190 lb. 24 year old, when in fact I am a 280 lb. 50-something. Photographic images of me insist on portraying the photons bouncing off the more well-padded current version of me, rather than the svelte version my mind is convinced I present to the world. Photoshop ain't going to do it, if you know what I mean."

Kirk: "I'm not ready to comment much on the basic premise of this blog; that women care more than men about looking good. But I can speak objectively about the costs here in Austin [Texas] of paying for make-up and hair professionals on a photo shoot.

"To keep to current times:

"In the first week of November 2022 I produced a job and photographed for a large medical/technology company which has an international reach. We spent several days on location at the client's Austin offices which included two complete operating suites. They use these to train doctors on cardiac procedures using their products.

"For the shoot we required two male and two female models which we got from a regional talent agency. The cost of the models for one day was $4,500 each. Or $18,000 for all four. Each talent or model was at the location for one day only. The fee included specific, limited usage rights. We hired a skilled make-up person and there was enough time in the schedule for her to also touch up hair. Her fee for each eight hour day was $1,250. She took an equal amount of time preparing the male and female models. I judged her fee to be in the middle-to-higher end of make-up artist's fees in Austin in 2022. You'll probably pay more for the same skills in film and video production....

"I should also mention that I did have one assistant on set. A professional who had worked for several years in NYC and who will probably transition to a full time photographer in 2023. His fee was $500 for an eight hour day.

"I recently (January) photographed both male and female attorneys for a different project. More of a conventional portrait shoot. Shot in their offices as environmental portraits. All came in business attire which meant suits and ties for the men and gender appropriate, corresponding attire for the women. All were impeccably dressed. None required any additional make up. The person most concerned with sartorial appearances was a male who was focused on the fact that his white shirt had 'wrinkles.' I think of a wrinkle as a creased bit of fabric but he was referencing the natural tendency of shirts to have undulating fabric instead of presenting as a fixed, single plane. I assured him that this would be easily fixed in Photoshop. He was relaxed after that conversation.

"I never, ever think of my subjects as 'being admired.' Which I interpret to mean 'judged by their physical beauty.' In my mind, after having done well over 10,000 paid portraits in my careers, my goal is to build a rapport with a sitter. To establish a give-and-take based on equal power. I consider a portrait successful when the sitter and I become comfortable enough with each other to move from 'posing' to the sitter feeling comfortable presenting themself authentically. It takes more time and effort to actually connect, but to my mind it's much more in line with what my clients want.

"Except that unlike your example of the sitter and client being one and the same, in my business the client is the corporate entity, publication or advertising agency that hires me. My hope, always, is that they hire me for both my style and my ability to look past physical appearance enough to establish a human rapport and relationship.

"I should also add that given our busy market, most make-up artists and stylists charge by the day, not by the hour. That means that successful studios that depend directly on individual customers as portrait clients can only cost-effectively use make-up people who are in-house, or the studios must be able to efficiently schedule a full day of portrait shoots to spread the costs across. It's different in advertising, as we can budget for a make-up professional to come in, hang out on set, and spend the day working in a few concentrated spurts. Clients are paying for these services as a line item in a much bigger overall budget.

"Family and friends? They're tough. They don't like to pay. I can't justify hiring a stylist when photographing casual images of B and B. (emoji implied)." [B and B are Kirk's wife and son. —Ed.]

The Fotomat

[Comments have been added.]

-

(Does anyone have a picture I could publish of a Fotomat kiosk back when it was open for business? Something you own the rights to. Apparently that was something almost nobody took a picture of. UPDATE: See this post.)

Only I would start an article with a paragraph in parentheses.

You won't remember Fotomats if you aren't of a certain age. They were small drive-up kiosks in the middle of suburban parking lots where you could drop off exposed film, buy new film (or sometimes get a new roll for free), and pick up your 3R prints 24 hours later—without getting out of your car. Picture a toll booth and you won't be too far off.

The bad old days
It was a good business model, at first: the kiosks took up minimal real estate, required only one on-site employee (apparently called Foto-Mates, although I'm not sure if that was a corporate term or not), and offered a service for which there was consistent demand. Wikipedia tell us the company reached its high-water mark in 1980, when there were 4,000 Fotomats in the USA. Not all that many, considering there are currently 33,295 Starbucks locations.

Fotomat Corporation lasted until 2009, but "One-Hour Photo" minilabs basically killed them off before the 1990s arrived. There was a time, though, when getting your film back in just 24 hours was cutting-edge convenience that beat the competition.

The primary driver of technological progress in consumer photography is largely convenience. I say "largely," because sometimes status/prestige are what drive certain trends. But it's mainly convenience. Fotomat's 24-hour turnaround time was fast when it was new, appropriating business from local drugstores and camera stores where you might have had to wait four days to a week for your prints to be "done." It lasted for a while into the era of the minilab only because one-hour processing was expensive at first. The early minilab machines were extremely costly and owners needed to charge more to make their money back—many of them didn't get it, because the machines quickly became cheaper and competition for the business grew fierce. There was a window of time in there when people got upside-down on their investment in minilab machines and never got right-side-up again. But I digress.

Basically the Fotomat gave way to the one-hour minilab for the same reason that the glass-plate stand cameras of the 1880s ("stand" in that term meaning tripod, mostly) gave way to the box Brownie, and that a perfectly good Canon "digicam" (digital point-and-shoot) of, say, 2005 has lost out to a miniaturized mass-produced module in a smartphone. Convenience conquers.

Not for us
Despite being self-identified as a photographer, I always felt separate and apart from popular trends in consumer photography. I did take six full rolls of 36-exposure color film with me when I went to Europe for four weeks when I was 14, on an inter-school trip (and bought two more rolls while I was there—wow, 288 exposures in only four weeks! That was heavy shooting). I got 4x6 prints back when I came home. And when I was very young I owned a Kodak Instamatic and got back the ubiquitous square prints with the date printed in the border.

But in between the Instamatic and the trip to Europe, most of the work I had done was to get black-and-white prints made from black-and-white film at the Bay Point Pharmacy, where I also eventually worked as a clerk and delivery driver. As with color prints, if a picture didn't "come out" you could request a do-over, for free, and I asked for so many do-overs that eventually the Pharmacy instituted a special rule just for me: only one re-do for B&W. I later learned, to my astonishment, that the Pharmacy's B&W prints were made not in some industrial high-volume facility somewhere (as was the case with the Fotomats), which is what I always assumed, but by a local guy with a darkroom in his basement who was doing a little extra work on the side. I wish they had told me that; I would have just cut out the middleman and gone over to his house so I could tell him what to do in real time. I'm sure he would have loved taking directions from a 12-year-old. On the other hand, I might have learned darkroom work a lot earlier than I did.

Back in those days, my memory is that hobbyist photographers and up—artists, pros, etc.—anyone more involved than family snapshooters—thought of themselves as separate and apart from the normal ordinary consumers. We didn't practice photography like everybody else. I never once had a roll of film developed at a Fotomat. I just didn't think of things like that as being for me.

Wrong envelope
When I was poking around the Web looking for Fotomat pictures, I came across a number of stories. One woman who worked as a Foto-Mate said that whenever anyone asked her where the film was developed, she would tell them that there was an underground photo lab right under the kiosk, under the parking lot, and she claimed most people believed her. (Actually the film was processed and printed offsite.) One person had a startling tale that somehow I can't quite see as funny: apparently a woman dropped off a negative to have an enlargement made (a "big" print in those days would have been 8x10), and she left the order in her husband's name. Apparently, unbeknownst to each other, her husband also dropped off a negative for enlargement at the same Fotomat around the same time, and also used his own name. When the poor woman returned and opened her package fully intending to see a group picture of her happy family, she was confronted instead with a pornographic photo of her husband with another woman. Wrong envelope.

That must have been in the '70s. By the '80s, photo processors were cracking down on dirty pictures and people had to be careful what they turned in for processing.

Left over
Parking lot Fotomat kiosks were later repurposed for a wide range of uses. One I saw a picture of became the tiny storefront for a fortune teller; others sold cigarettes or coffee. I saw a picture of one that became a watch repair shop (sort of doubly anachronistic, right?). I also saw a picture of one painted pink and white with a sign that said "Condom Hut." Is that really a purchase you want to drive up and make right out in plain view? Not if you were the guy in the incriminating 8x10, I would guess.

Here's an old ad for the company on YouTube. Digital is really much—much—more convenient.

Mike

Products of the Week

Which one is best? Panasonic S1R (47.3 MP), Sony A7R IV (61 MP), Canon R5 (45 MP), Nikon Z7 II (45.7 MP), or Leica SL2 (47 MP)? You know the answer.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

craig: "The store I used from to time was lifted up out the parking lot by a tornado."

Mike replies: Ah, but I want to know where it landed, and whether it killed a witch.

Lawrence Plummer: "My one (sad) memory of Fotomat was the day I eagerly picked up a roll of slides that I had wanted in a hurry. Each mounted slide consisted of half of one frame, followed by the half frame of the next shot!"

Nick Reith: "A really great post Mike. Nostalgia, humor and photo history all combined to put a smile on my face. As the British would say, 'Well played!'

"P.S. I wonder if the marriage survived?"

Mike replies: History does not record....

Roger Bradbury: "No Fotomats in England, but I used to get my films done at the local photographer's shop in Buckingham, where I worked. That business had been established in 1863 though it's gone now, and the building still has its North light skylight and window below it for the upstairs studio."

H Bernstein: "This post is The Online Photographer at its most online photographic. Congratulations, Mike, on TOP’s anniversary and for the distinctive blogging voice that you provide the online photographic community. I say community because this blog fosters that feeling of togetherness and conversation. It being too scarce nowadays makes your blog even more appreciated."

Andy Munro: "Wow. Nostalgia. That made me think of Truprint (postal prints UK based so not sure if they were a thing elsewhere). Ah, the anticipation of the prints arriving in the post was a really lovely memory. All gone now. Thanks for that diversion."

Centeredlens: "I grew up near the Fotomat/Condom Hut in Knightsville, Rhode Island. It's no longer there. I remember as a kid the parish priest making a thunderous condemnation of it from the pulpit, saying the Condom Hut was an abomination. (He was later defrocked for abusing his nephew.)"

Thomas Basista: "Back in the day I used Fotohut so much I was on a first name basis with the young woman clerk. She later modeled for me when I tried to do 'serious' portrait work. That kiosk is still there 50 years later, now selling coffee. Now that I think of it, I am surprised that the little building still is standing."

Bob Rosinsky: "There was a Fotomat a couple blocks away from my high school. A popular and pretty blond senior worked there on weekends and after school. As it turned out, she was selling bags of marijuana on the side. She eventually lost her job. I don't remember seeing her at school after that."

Dave: "What a 'blast from the past.' We usually just dropped our film at the drugstore because it was less expensive than Fotomat. Our parents grew up during the Depression, so the extra cost of Fotomat wasn't worth saving a few days."

Jim Palmer: "Today, after having read this yesterday, I noticed that the drive-up coffee shop in town was, in fact, a former Fotomat. I have driven by it for two years and it hadn't occurred to me it's origin. Thank you."

Sean: "A drive-up condom kiosk. Where the road meets the rubber."

Ed. adds: *Rimshot*

Jim Arthur: "I worked at a Fotomat in college but never heard the term Foto-Mate. It was a great gig because my booth was in an odd location in a fairly small town so I rarely saw a customer. I got paid to sit and study. I never had any film developed by Fotomat (which seems crazy now), and looking back I wish I had taken more photos during my college days. I’m sure they would be entertaining today. The haircuts alone would be hilarious. Back then, everyone’s hair made them look like a street punk from an episode of 'Starsky and Hutch.' Here’s Tommy Chong on That 70s Show referring to a picture of a Photo Hut as art. Tommy Chong’s performance here also reminds me of college.  :-) "

Mike replies: I really wish I had taken pictures in college.

Patrick Perez: "I used to work at a Fotomat in the 1900s and it was one of the best jobs I have ever had. In a five-hour shift, I'd interact with people for ~15 minutes. I brought in a stereo receiver and bookshelf speakers and listened to music all day while I read for pleasure. It was a time in my life where I frequently would find myself saying 'I read this really good book yesterday' meaning cover-to-cover."

Energy and Appetite

Tom Burke said yesterday: "Here's another thought to add: is it possible that when you stop feeling that you're learning new skills and gaining new knowledge but are instead just garnering experience, the passion for (whatever it is) just drops? Not just photography, but lots of endeavours? The 'Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life?' moment?"

A few thoughts about that. First, golf, exhibits 1, 2, and 3 (I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me):

1. An old commercial: the professional golfer Tom Kite, then at the top of the game, and another golfer are seen getting massages. The other guy asks Kite if he's going to play in an upcoming tournament in Hawaii. They discuss it, sounding glum. Kite, in a resigned tone of voice, concedes that he's being paid an appearance fee to go and he's getting the trip for free, so he sighs and says something like, "I suppose I have to." The joke, of course, was that most weekend warriors would kill to get a free trip to Hawaii to play golf. To me, however, the advertisers' message backfired and an alternate moral was more clear: if you have to do something too much, even a thing that to most people is a special pleasure can become a chore.

2. Once I was out on a golf course with my brothers, playing 18 holes on a regulation course (as opposed to the adjacent par-three course which was more my speed). As the hands on my watch wore past three hours, I suddenly realized I'd had quite enough of golf: I was thoroughly tired of laboring against my own swing and would have quit for the day right then and there if it were easy and polite to do. Had to grind through two or three more holes after that, though.

3. After Vijay Singh won his Masters, tales were told of his epic appetite for practice. Legend had it that after his win, he went to the range and striped the tee until dark. Wikipedia says, "he is known for his meticulous preparation, often arriving hours before, and staying long after, his tournament rounds to work on his game on the driving range and putting greens."

All these things had a decisive effect on me: I never wanted to be a professional golfer. No, let me re-word that: I wanted to never be a professional golfer! Not that I ever could have been—I have slightly more talent for golf than an armadillo has for hacky-sack. But I never had the slightest desire, even in daydreams. No, thank you: I decided I was perfectly happy to blither my way around a par-three course a handful of times a year. That matched my appetite for the game. (I don't even do that any more, although I miss the camaraderie with my bros.) Sink to your level and embrace it!

It's the same way with pool, if the truth be told. I love pool, and I think it's a fascinating game and I'm better at it than most armadillos. But do I have the discipline and patience to run through my "daily" practice routine every single morning? No, sir, I do not. And I know lots of drills, but an hour spent drilling is fifteen minutes too long for me. Would I have wanted to be a pro pool player? Well, the level of skill of Jayson Shaw or Alexandros Kazakis would be great fun to possess, and it's thrilling to watch. (For me anyway.) But even if I were young I would never have the patience to put in the time it takes to get to that level. And I know it.

Be an amateur
I think I first applied this realization to photography following an after-dinner walk with my son, who was then about six, to get ice cream, back when we lived in the town where Groundhog Day was filmed, Woodstock, Illinois. I had along a Contax Aria camera and a Zeiss Contax 35mm ƒ/2.8 lens (still have the lens) and two rolls of Kodak Tri-X. The evening was beautiful and the light was particularly nice. When I got home I developed the film at the kitchen sink and the next day I proofed the two rolls and in my makeshift basement darkroom and made eight or ten nice prints on 8x10 paper using my amateur-level enlarger*. The handful of prints were a highly competent documentary of that particular walk, but beyond that, nothing particularly special.

I decided at the time that that was about the perfect level of involvement in photographing for me.

I like to photograph—it's an essential part of our medium's culture, and the culture of photography is one of my three or four main interests. But do I have the will and the desire to do it every day, all day? I've always been pretty clear that I don't. Note that there are critics who aren't photographers at all—A.D. Coleman comes to mind—so it's not essential to be a photographer to be immersed in its culture or to write about it.

After that, though, when parents would contact me asking if I thought photography school was a sensible investment for their children, it put me in a quandary. I loved photography school: I feel toward the Corcoran School of Art all the sentimental attachment alums are supposed to feel for their beloved alma mater. It was a great privilege to attend for three years and I enjoyed it intensely. Virtually all my experiences there and all of my many memories are good ones. But no, when viewed without rose-tinted glasses, actually art school is probably a particularly poor allotment of resources if what you're trying to do is equip your progeny to deal with the task of making their way in the world. I felt disloyal to the Corcoran in advising against all it had offered me, and I especially didn't want to pour cold water on any kid's dreams, so I avoided the question when it was possible; but on the other hand I didn't want to lie to parents. A genuine dilemma.

My recommendation to anyone who asks is that one simply should have a thick, tough skin in evaluating and appraising what to do for a living. Photography is more likely to be rewarding—and more pleasurable—if one's practice of it is somewhere in the range between dabbling and a dedicated long-term avocation. We all have to come to terms with where our photography fits in our lives.

Chase the dream
And if someone really wants to do it "all in," full-time, front line, do or die, the first questions to ask, and ask comprehensively, would be about a.) their energy level, and b.) their appetite for work. Those are the two essentials that must be present if you ask me. If both those things are genuinely high, they have a chance. In which case, I tip my hat to them.

Mike

*Which did however have a top-flight lens. I still have not one but two, one for each fist when they bury me I guess!

Book of interest* this week:

A Better Life for their Children by Andrew Feiler, University of Georgia Press, published last month. Read the description at the link—fascinating. It's the story of one of the earliest philanthropic collaborations between Jews and African Americans, one that drove dramatic improvement in black education. The story's told visually. *"Book of Interest" means I haven't seen it, but would like to.

The following image is also a link: 

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Skoonberg: "Mike, thank you for promoting Andrew Feiler's wonderful book, A Better Life for Their Children. The story and images describing the legacy of the Rosenwald Schools are both fascinating and deeply moving. Rosenwald was the CEO of Sears in the early twentieth century. He and Dr. Booker T. Washington created a plan to build schools in the rural South so black school children could attend school in the Jim Crow era. To build the schools, the black community put up a third of the money, the local school board put up a third of the money, and Rosenwald put in the final third. These were often one and two-room schoolhouses with one or two teachers with a K-12 curriculum. These schools helped to create a generation that provided the leaders for the Civil Rights movement. Andrew Feiler's book is the first photographic survey of these schools.

"As a side note, Andrew is a member of our local photo-crit group, so we were able to watch this book project from its inception. Currently, many of the images from the book are one display at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta."

Mike replies: Thanks for sending me the PDF sample pages from the book, Richard (downloadable here). I enjoyed that.

Geoff Wittig: "That's a perfect summary of what's necessary to find a calling in life. Energy and boundless appetite for work are prerequisites, but love of the process is also key. I love photography, everything from playing with the gear to image capture to making an excellent print. But I couldn't summon the constant energy and enthusiasm to make it a career.

"Medicine, on the other hand, continues to captivate me after almost 40 years. I was that annoyingly eager student you wanted to slap for being so perky. I loved working 100 hour weeks as a resident for the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of mastering something difficult. I still find myself reading papers outside my specialty because they're so darned interesting. The challenge of being thoroughly competent and continually improving is just as compelling now as it was when I was a newly minted 26-year-old MD. I still love the work, every day. What I did not expect as a swaggering young doc was the emotional toll of seeing patients I've come to know so well aging, becoming frail, and dying. Which is where photography has been a Godsend for me. A chilly morning spent scouting, setting up, and capturing a perfect sunrise panorama grounds me and keeps me sane. So I can keep loving my calling."

A different Mike: "'And if someone really wants to do it "all in," full-time, front line, do or die, the first questions to ask, and ask comprehensively, would be about a.) their energy level, and b.) their appetite for work. Those are the two essentials that must be present if you ask me. If both those things are genuinely high, they have a chance.' You are correct sir. I've been fortunate to have made my living solely by making useful photographs for other people since 1979. The dedication and amount of energy it takes to be even moderately successful for someone without either a trust fund or a hook of some sort is beyond the ability of most people to comprehend. Over the past seven days I worked seventy-six hours covering twelve very important events for my main client. Each event was about two hours long. Then I had another two hours in which I would have to download, organize, rename, edit down from 3–5,000 images (people make funny faces when they speak, and people also blink, and when photographing an event with a few hundred people, having more of a selection is always easier than submitting photos of funny looking people with their eyes closed) a cull of about 120–180, adjust the raw files in ACR, convert to JPEG, and then upload to a web gallery. That gallery would then be linked to a story on their web site. And then do it again that evening, which would get me home at 9:30–10 p.m. after arriving at 8:30 a.m. that morning. The next day, do it again.

"Very few people can grasp the amount of physical work entailed in schlepping the gear, looking for angles, crouching down, hustling from one end of the field to another to get in position, and the level of concentration required to do this both during the event itself and afterward in the post-processing. Amidst all of this, three of the days were well over 90 degrees and very humid. To paraphrase Yogi Berra—photography is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical. You really have to be willing to put in the work that it takes to become proficient and develop a voice, to continuously stay up with the technical challenges and changes, and to always push yourself to do the very best work that you can on each and every assignment. If you don’t, then you’ll eventually find yourself doing something else down the line."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I do not completely subscribe to the vocational prep. I am one of those (old) people who still believes that the primary objective of getting an education is to learn how to learn. Still, one would be foolish to ignore practical economics. Consider that the annual tuition and fees at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this year top $50,000. (And good luck getting accepted at all!) Now consider how many art jobs are likely to pay anywhere near that amount for an entry position (or even after three years). Now consider that an entry-level programmer at, say, Google will likely easily earn $120,000 or more. Yes, attending a school such as SAIC may enable you to make connections that will propel you after graduation. But not that much. Your best shot is probably to land a faculty job with benefits that offers you summers to pursue being that 'artist' you wanted to be. And some top art school grads do exactly that.

"But I gotta say that Mike's suggestion 'Be an amateur' is perfect advice especially where photography is concerned. Attending art school to learn a trade such as print-making or textile design, might pay-off (in 15–20 years). But it's a lotto-class long shot for photography. 'Photography is more likely to be rewarding—and more pleasurable—if one's practice of it is somewhere in the range between dabbling and a dedicated long-term avocation. We all have to come to terms with where our photography fits in our lives.' Truer words were never writ."

Wisconsin Mystery

Dave Schwarz asks:

Do you know anything about the history of Colony Camera in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin? The Colony Camera at North Ave and 88th St. has been out of business seemingly forever...maybe 20 years now? But up until just a couple of years ago the Colony sign (with the Minolta logo) remained standing at the corner, and from what I could see as I drove past the store still had furnishings inside. In the past couple of years the sign was removed and the interior cleared out, and sometime last year a 'For Rent' sign appeared in the window of the store. But there it sits, unoccupied still. I can't imagine why the owner let the store sit, seemingly untouched, for at least a decade...probably closer to two.

Does anyone know the story?

Something similar happened just down the road from me. A very old building, from the 1880s, sat derelict and decaying on a prime piece of lakefront property. Not long after I moved here, a local landlord who owns a handful of rental houses on the shore started work transforming it into a modern house (and he did a great job—my friend Dave, who you met in these pages, did the chimney). But I've always been curious about the circumstances that allowed the property to sit vacant for what had obviously been decades.

So many stories lie shrouded and obscured, from family secrets to corporate ones.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave)

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Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Idle properties are nearly always the result of title/ownership or tax issues. Perhaps the owner has died and the property gets tied up, perhaps the owner has fled back taxes and title reverts to a lender, perhaps it’s discovered to be atop a toxic landfill (OK, unlikely here). Etc. There’s a former rather ritzy Italian restaurant space a block from my home that’s been inexplicably vacant for 20 years. It must be worth millions. Anyway, back to the camera store, I found this in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal from 2016."

Do Pros Use Pro Gear?

Tim Bradshaw commented: "You are right about the 'professional' thing: everyone wants to be a professional, or perhaps to be able to pretend that they once were a professional. This is why you can buy 'road-worn' guitars and why brassed Leicas are so desirable.

"I'm a non-professional (non-gigging) guitarist and I occasionally find myself hunting for flight cases for my amps and pedalboards (a pedalboard is a thing to which you can attach a set of FX pedals and a PSU for them and it means you can drop the whole lot onto a stage in one go, which is vital for a gigging guitarist but pretty much irrelevant for anyone else). I have to catch myself each time.

"But there's an interesting thing. I've known some people who were professional guitarists and, while they would probably own a pedalboard, they very often would work with much less up-to-date and 'professional' kit than amateurs would. There seem to be two reasons for this. Firstly, if your gear is an expense which reduces your income from playing, then you tend to be a bit chary of just buying the latest thing, however 'professional' it is. Secondly, if you are playing every night then you want two things from your gear: you want it to work, every night, and you want it to do the same thing, every night. And that means that you tend to stick with the battle-tested gear you've had for quite a long time. And every time you get a new bit of kit, you have to spend time exploring it, during which time you are not getting paid.

"I wonder if that is true for photographers? I bet it is, especially in the digital era: how long, really, does it take someone to become really familiar with a digital camera? They have hundreds of parameters so the configuration space is just huge. And all the time you spend exploring that configuration space is time you are not getting paid (or time you are getting complaints because your pictures are bad). So my guess is that professionals either really do not explore the configuration space of their cameras and use them mostly on out-of-the-box settings, or they don't change cameras very often, and probably a combination of both. Compare this with a film camera from the heyday of film, where there are almost no configurable parameters.

"Except, of course there are: the combination of film, developer, processing practice, paper, paper developer, printing and paper processing practice also has a huge configuration space. And I bet people didn't change film/paper/dev/process very often (I know I don't)."

 

A few additional thoughts from Mike: When I did darkroom work professionally as a custom exhibition printer, I standardized on two photo papers. The only reason I didn't standardize on one was that I needed a fallback I was deeply familiar with in case one of them was discontinued or one of the manufacturers changed the formula on me.

Both of those things had happened numerous times—the most notorious example of the former was when Oriental Seagull suddenly stopped being imported into the United States, and the most notorious example of of the latter was when Agfa made a radical but unannounced change in the formulation of Portriga for environmental reasons.

I figured if I had two papers I knew well I was probably safe, although Agfa was, at the time, making a slow-motion change in the formulation of Multicontrast Classic—over the life of that paper, the paper base went from a rich warm cream color to a much whiter eggshell white that was barely warm at all. But that was for the most part a gradual change.

Another thing in support of your points: I worked for a studio pro in the early '80s who probably ~$200,000 worth of equipment in a studio that probably cost $10,000 a month to rent and run and staff. He naturally owned and shot with all formats, and his main cameras were all motorized Hasselblad 500 EL/M's, but his 35mm cameras were Nikkormats, not the pro F cameras. He was very scornful of the idea of paying for Nikon F cameras—that would have been when the F3 was current, I think—because the Nikkormats did the job just fine.

The only thing of substance I'd add to your comment Tim: you said "you want two things from your gear: you want it to work, every night, and you want it to do the same thing, every night." To that I'd add, you want to be working with (or playing) something very familiar to you, so you know its ins and outs and you're comfortable with it. I'm sure you were assuming this, but it bears saying "out loud."

On that heading, cut to the early 2010s for a third case in support of your arguments—I once found myself sitting at a sushi bar next to a professional photographer. Not an accident—the owner of the restaurant introduced us. He told me that he had recently bought the then-latest highest-end pro Nikon DSLR, a D4, which had only recently come out. But, four months after purchasing it, his D4 was still sitting in its box, back at his studio, unopened and untouched, because he hadn't yet been able to budget the time required to learn it. He figured it was going to take him three days to go through the manual and shoot his tests and get comfortable handling the camera. But that would have been three days of concentrated work, and no suitable three-day stretch had opened up. I was struck by the fact that he hadn't even unwrapped it to take a look at it, which I doubt is something that many amateurs would do with the latest hot new camera that cost thousands of dollars. But the "toy factor" was nonexistent for him.

Final thought: in the art-photography world I came up in, it was said by some that changing cameras would set you back a year—that is, it was a year before the new camera fully became second nature and you knew it inside out.

I don't know how long it takes to get "the feel of the wheel" with a digital camera, but I'm betting it's a year or two longer than people typically keep them. Just kidding.  :-)

UPDATE Tim Bradshaw adds: "You are right about the 'being familiar' thing, and I have a nice example of that. I've got several guitar amps (amplifiers), including a really beautiful made-for-me Supro-inspired one (shameless plug: if you want one of these, the 'Dirty Girl' amps person is who you want to talk to: he's very good). And I also have an early 1970s Marshall 'Artiste.' People despise these: it's often regarded as one of Marshall's failures (including, I believe, by Jim Marshall). There are articles on how you can gut one and convert it into a Plexi, because that's an amp you might actually want.

"But if I had to rescue one amp in a fire it would be that one, because I've had it for a long time and I know how it works: I know where the good sounds are, I like those sounds (perhaps I did not always...), and I know how it talks to guitars I own. If someone offered me a vintage Plexi in exchange for it I'd turn them down without a thought. In fact I live in mild terror that it's going to go wrong in some really expensive way, because if it does I will need to get it fixed, even if it costs more than its worth. Because I don't really know whether I could just buy another one (they're pretty cheap) or whether it's that specific amp I like."

(Posted by) Mike
(Thanks to Tim)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Harsh reality

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michael Perini: "My experience agrees with this completely. Musician or photographer, at the professional level you don't change things lightly. You have to know that your learned inputs will produce the same outputs. They are results-oriented rather than process-oriented. Process needs to bee refined to the point where it disappears. Nice."

Edward Taylor: "I am not sure how much of this is really about photojournalism or street photography or sports photography or decisive moment type work, but for an awful lot of professional photography, these issues are not really that big a factor. I use new cameras out of the box frequently and have rarely missed a shot as a result. After all, if we are taking a portrait or doing a landscape, or doing macro photography or fashion photography, or anything repeatable, being totally familiar with all the controls on a camera and all its idiosyncrasies is really not necessary, and it is perfectly reasonable to learn that stuff on the go. After all, we get to see each picture after we take it. If you think your new camera is somehow preventing you from getting what you want, just pull out your trusted and familiar backup camera. We are not limited to one camera or one shot the way a musician is limited to one set up while live on stage."

cecelia (partial comment): "Well put! I have been using my OM-D E-M1 Mark II for about a year now and have finally gotten to the point where the camera has gotten out of the way. Even though there are many tempting new cameras, I am thinking that a backup OM-D E-M1 Mark II is probably the smartest investment."

c.d.embrey: "I learned photography while working in Hollywood. Everything, camera, lighting, grip and editing equipment, is so expensive that most gear is rented by the job. The producer's budget is the deciding factor on what you use. Regional commercials were shot in 16mm, national commercials in Super35 (DX). Feature films ran the gamut from 16mm to anamorphic 65mm. The first thing a tyro has to learn is the names of things, and the argot of the craft. A person doesn't have three months or even three weeks to learn the mechanics of a craft.

"If you are not a quick learner, you will be replaced by someone who is. Remember that one 'dumb-sh*t' will nullify three 'attaboys.' Journeymen need to master everything if they want to do to move to the top of the list. I've never met a concert violinists who couldn't play 'Orange Blossom.' The best people are problem solvers. Many times I've walked onto a set to find that the Director/Creative Director/Whoever has changed their mind about what they want to do. You have to think on your feet, and tell them 'no problem' without breaking stride. Many cameras have a C1/C2 etc. dial. You need to have them set in advance. Different scenarios that have been tested by you. Never ever experiment in front of the client. But it is OK to recycle something you learned 20 years ago—the client will think that you are an inventive genius  8-)  C1 and C2 are like a bassist having multiple basses with different tunings (for different songs) within arm's reach."

Jeron: "Oh, I bought a D7100 a few years ago, after shooting with a Nikon 1 V1 for four years almost daily. I know the V1 inside out. It 'just works' for me. I don't have to focus on the camera. The D7100 however seems to work against me. I did set aside time to go through the manual, but for some reason it doesn't stick, and every time I grab that camera, it's on some weird mode or setting and I need to fight it to change it back to normal. If my life depended on getting the photo, I'd take the V1. To be honest, that's the first time this happened. I use my cameras for several years, but they all became second nature quickly, film cameras and digital cameras. But that D7100, however, it's like we're not meant to be together. Needless to say, I haven't shot many keepers with the 7100...."

Eric Rose: "One of my last pro jobs was a contract I had with a local hospital to create images for an annual report highlighting the neurology department. I photographed brain surgeries, testing equipment, doctors using the equipment, and of course the usual head and shoulders shots. To a tee, each doctor as he or she came in said the same thing; 'hey, why are you using that old camera? I have the latest digi pro DSLR and the best glass money can buy; my camera is way better than yours. Maybe I should have been hired to do this gig ha ha ha.' Yeah, really funny. Most of my peers use cameras that are not the latest and greatest unless there is a compelling business reason to spend the money. For non pros it's about ego, for pros it's about ROI.

Mike replies: A nice comeback: 'You have a bigger stick, I just swing mine harder.' Or in that situation you might have said, 'if I had a better scalpel, would I be a better surgeon?' But sometimes with clients it's more politic to just think it.  :-)

Andrew: "For living proof among the highest levels of photography, one need only look at the annual 'Wildlife Photographer of the Year' competition. You've never seen so many 10-year-old DSLRs in your life. Good ones, no doubt (Canon 1DXs and 7Ds, Nikon D3s and D300s). But the serious folks at the local photography club wouldn't be caught dead with the gear these guys use. Not to mention, the number of amazing, winning wildlife shots stopped all the way down to ƒ/11. It's really an amazing contrast to the rhetoric you get on the photographic Internet these days. Truly a breath of fresh air."

Upshot

I had to laugh at JohnMFlores's comment to the last post, which was, in its entirety,

Yes

...But, overall, I think the point is made, in my mind at least: cameras don't actually cost all that much. I'm thinking that perhaps I should stop boxing myself in to one stratum of the pricing tiers by conceiving of things as "inexpensive" and "expensive." It's really just all relative.

Personally, at this moment, I can tell you what seems reasonable to me: I balked at paying $1,649 for an X-H1 body (before the big price drop) and did in fact spend $1,213 for a Panasonic G9 body (when it reached its cheapest price during the holidays). So there's my own price sensitivity in a nutshell.

But that's just me. (And I'm still not sure I made the correct decision. I'm having opportunity-cost remorse over the X-H1, and half of me even thinks I should stick to B&W with the X-T1. I like color but I love B&W.)

I do continue to believe, and assert, that expenditures make much more sense if you get one of two things out of whatever you buy: One is "use," and the other is "joy," not that the two are mutually exclusive. I guess really the only truly wasteful way to spend money is to get neither use nor joy out of your purchase. Buy it and stick it in the closet and never touch it, and feel nothing but a pang of regret and guilt whenever you happen to accidentally lay eyes on it—that's how something really becomes expensive. Please don't ask how I know. And please don't tease me.

For pros AND...
I do have to object in part to the refrain common in our comments that the E-M1X is "for professionals" and if you need it for calculated business reasons then you'll make the buying decision purely on that basis. Yes and no. I've been in this game a while, and I can tell you that "professional" equipment is made for two categories of consumer, not one. One is, yes, pros who need it and people who will do a hardheaded cost/benefit analysis before investing; the other is well-heeled amateurs who want to use what the pros use...or who just want the thing, full stop. There's no telling what the percentage of each might be, as I'm sure it varies for each individual product, and by region, and based on what ideas are popular at any given moment in time, and even possibly by the state of the economy. And sometimes the two things are different facets of one and the same supernice Texan dude (cough cough Kirk LOL). But a little story along these lines: long ago, in Virginia, there was a professional camera store that catered to professionals. It was a very slick shop, stylish, and stuffed with exotic, expensive gear. It sold mainly studio lighting equipment, in the days when the average studio pro might invest $30,000 to $100,000 in strobe-and-head systems, light stands, clamps, cables, light shaping equipment (gobos, skrims, reflectors, softboxes, grids, etc.), flash meters, camera stands (the average hobbyist today has no idea what a camera stand is), backdrops, and so on. (A pro I assisted for claimed he had $30,000 worth of Matthews C [Century] stands, which in some circles used to be called "Hollywood stands.") Of course the store strongly emphasized the professional portion of its clientele. But the manager of the store, in an unguarded moment, confided to me that only 50% of its sales were to working pros; the other 50% were to wealthy people, some of them women, who had artistic inclinations and time on their hands and the intention to become fashion or studio photographers, and the wherewithal to outfit themselves to do so. The store downplayed this segment of its clientele, but, to paraphrase the manager (who was a woman), "without wealthy lawyers' wives I'd be out of business."

(This is an aside, but the same woman lectured on the use of the Minolta Flashmeter IV, which until the advent of digital cameras was the most complex device intended for photography I ever encountered, at least if you bothered to understand all of its functions. She also confided to me that if more than three weeks went by between these Flashmeter IV lectures, she had to brush up on its features and operation by rereading parts of the manual before her talk. Made me laugh...if the person who taught it couldn't even remember how to use it....)

So the E-M1X isn't just for working pros who need its capabilities and advantages, and you shouldn't believe otherwise. It's half* for pros who need it and half* for people who want to be like the pros who need it, or who want to be outfitted to try the things it's made to be good at. Those people are a very important part of any "pro" product's market, too.

That's my 2¢ about $3k. More mañana.

Mike

*Actual percentages may vary

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Harsh reality

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mike Plews: "As enthusiasts this discussion revolves around what we want versus what we need. Reality sometimes settles the issue for us. My way of dealing with this is to call things based not on what they are but rather on what they were supposed to be. For example, I have a Toro two stage snow thrower that can shoot a frozen dog turd into outer space. I call it my Epson 3880. If you look out over our back yard you can see my D850. It has a 750 gallon tank, a distribution box and three 80 foot laterals. Right now Mrs. Plews is waiting for the local septic service to come and pump out our Nikon. For much of the '90s we had a dog named Deardorff. Nobody in our family is named Deardorff but I asked for a Deardorff for Christmas and I got a beagle. It's all good."

Mike replies: Mike, I am going to have to come meet you and Mrs. Plews someday. It won't be to see your Nikon, though.

Øyvind Hansen: "If you can afford it it is very reassuring to own the 'flagship,' at least until the next version comes out. It keeps the upgraditis at bay. There´s still horizontal GAS to contend with though...."

John Camp: "I read all of Kirk's blog entries, and would comment there more often if I could only figure out how to do it. (Something to do with Facebook, or maybe Google, or maybe both.) In any case, he's down at his local camera store so often he ought to sublease a space in the back room and move in a bed and a microwave. Then he could try out cameras in the middle of the night, at his leisure. He also ought to give the occasional workshop on portraiture. I'd sign up in one minute."

kirk Tuck: "I'd love to reply to the mention of my buying habits, vis-à-vis camera gear, but I'm heading out the door just now on my way to the bricks and mortar camera store in order to buy a new Fujifilm 90mm ƒ/2 lens. Perhaps, finally, it will be the magic lens that makes my career mildly successful. If not, it may be another month in which we boil the leather camera straps to make soup...(sigh)."

Mike replies: Should we take up a collection for you?

Of camera straps, I mean.

I assume well-used, grimy, sweat-stained ones make better soup?

(Actually, I'd better watch myself here...best not provoke karma under this heading!  :-)  Or I'll be eating camera-strap soup myself.) 

What If You Hate Marketing and Sales?

Commenting on the Not-OT post, Robert Roaldi writes, "All these books are great, I suppose, but what if you really hate doing marketing and sales?" (I had passed along JH's recommendation of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout and added How to Succeed in Commercial Photography by Selina Maitreya, and Stephen S. added Photography: Focus on Profit by Tom Zimberoff and Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington.)

In answer, I'd say, well, you probably shouldn't be a professional photographer. Unless possibly you're a Mom 'n' Pop operation and your spouse or partner enjoys marketing and sales. Or you can afford to hire a rep.

Marketing and sales is one of a few things necessary to be a successful professional photographer:

• A level of constant and consistent personal energy and appetite for hard work that is well above average.
• Approximately the sociability, gregariousness, extroversion, and people skills of politician who has to campaign to be elected.
• A knack for problem-solving.
• Enough entrepreneurial spirit that you could run a dry cleaners, a gas station, or a fast-food franchise. Or two or three of one or the other.
• A chameleonlike ability to adapt your visual style according to the circumstances, and a cheerful willingness to let clients dictate your subject matter.
• A relatively high level of technical knowledge but with no particular attachment to specific skills, equipment, or techniques.
• Excellent organizing ability.
• A high comfort level with deadlines, strain, and pressure.

Oh, and...

• An interest and enthusiasm for marketing and sales.

In other words, nothing to it!* Simple, right?

Mike

*I have chronic, low-level intermittent unipolar depression, which tends to make my energy come and go, and, moreover, be deeply undependable; I'm introverted and shy and sometimes socially awkward; I enjoy open-endedness, adventitiousness, and serendipity; I'm an "Idealist" type and have little interest in monetary success for its own sake, so entrepreneurship often feels beside the point; what most appeals to me would be to develop a consistent, authentic personal visual style and stick to it; my tech interest is mainly result-based and need-to-know; I am inefficient and have a poor (though not the worst possible) level of organizing ability; I hate pressure and have almost a psychological block against meeting deadlines (really, if you want me to not do something, give me a deadline for it)—I can't even keep a calendar; and I have an abstract interest in marketing because I enjoy the inventiveness of it intellectually, but I'm not motivated by the challenge of closing sales.

Except for that the bit about marketing, it's possible that I might be reasonably close to the opposite of the personality type most suited to be a professional photographer. Although, mostly, I get along with those folks just fine.

Anybody can succeed—at something or other—but it's always essential to "know thyself."

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "Right then, I'll be stroking 'professional photographer' off the list!"

Mike replies: I don't discourage people from turning pro, but I do tend to discourage people from turning pro if they don't have the proper aptitudes for it. But then, I believe that knowing what you're good at and whether a profession matches up well with your abilities is important for anyone contemplating any career.

Jim Richardson: "When predicting success of a photographer going pro it’s generally good to bet on superior marketing combined with adequate creative skills. Especially if you are trying to predict long-term success. But both sides of the business can be learned, so to me doggedness is the prime ingredient. The underlying saving grace is that many editors and art directors cannot tell bluster from talent. (Goes double in the art world.) So if you are going to be good at only one thing, be good at BS."

Mike replies: Re doggedness, I have this taped to my computer: "A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it." Boswell, quoting Dr. Johnson. Re BS, no comment.  :-)

Stephen Scharf: "In addition to being able to be an effective and efficient marketer, your point #1: 'A level of constant and consistent personal energy and appetite for hard work that is well above average' is really key to success. Many of the professional photographers I know who are successful and make a decent living as professionals work their frickin' tails off, frequently putting in 16-hour days, 5–7 days a week. And after years of doing this, many end up unhappy and burned out. One of the leading motorcycle racing editorial photographers I know, Brian J. Nelson, works incredibly hard covering all the motorcycle road racing test sessions, team shoots, practice sessions, and races throughout the year. He's typically only home for about 30 days out of the year, the rest of the time he's criss-crossing the U.S., and living and working out of his Mercedes Sprinter van. Another, Darren Miles, who lives in South Florida, has large portion of his business doing real estate photography. Darren photographed ~1,000 homes in the last year(!). These guys' capacity for hard work is off the charts."

Jeff Mellody: "I graduated with a degree in photography and I panicked at the time because I only had two business classes. After graduation I studied everything I could get my hands on about marketing. Photography is a totally different animal when done as a business. When the product is you, you have to sell yourself. It is a skill that can be learned if you put your heart into it. But it is crucial that it be mastered."

Counterpoint (and Some Casteneda)

After yesterday's post I got this wonderful response from my friend Kirk Tuck of VSL, which really provides the best sort of counterpoint:

I must be especially dumb. I've been doing this photography thing as a full-time professional since 1988. I worked in advertising and academia before that. I am so dense that I just ignored all the articles and talk about how hard it was to be a photographer and spent the time...being a photographer. While I'm not going to see my work in any museums, and no-one is rushing to make a monograph about my career, I never missed a mortgage payment, never missed a car payment, never missed a month of putting in a percentage of my income for retirement, and never went hungry. I've been to exciting places and seen exciting stuff. I've been offered a glass of wine by one President and photographed two others besides. I watched the birth of high tech from up close. I've watched nearly 500 live theater performances, either for free or while being paid to do so. Some of them were really good. I've had the opportunity to play with the most fun cameras and teach fun classes. I got to write, and get paid for, five books about photography. I've just finished paying for my kid to go out of state to a prestigious private college for four years, and did so without incurring any debt. I've put enough money in the bank to retire, but why would I want to when this is so much more fun?

Maybe everyone else is just doing it wrong...

If I had embarked on what I thought would be my first career, electrical engineering, I have no doubt that I would have not done nearly as well, would not have a flexible schedule that routinely allows for a mid-morning swim, would weigh five hundred pounds and would have consumed tons of bad take-out pizza at the tawdry desk in my shag-carpeted cubicle. And worse.

Not everything is about the money. You only get one go at life and if you aren't doing what you love you are only cheating yourself.

Retirement is only for people who didn't like their careers.

—Kirk Tuck

I also got this the other day from Dave Reichert, which seems especially apropos of Kirk's comments:

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

—Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998), from
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

-

Mike
(Thanks to Kirk and Dave)

P.S. The Wikipedia page on Castaneda is very interesting if you've never heard of him. The conundrum of the validity of received or "authentic" vs. invented wisdom is present in many religions and seems to be encapsulated in Castaneda.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Gordon Cahill: "I'm with Kirk. 100% I've been as busy as I wanted to be for much of the last 25 years. Photography as a career has evolved. If you also evolved then you'll be OK. Being a photojournalist is a shrinking pool and Nat Geo don't want to give me a year to photograph sea slugs in Patagonia, but I do OK. By a small margin of skill and a bit of luck I've done my favourite thing as a job for so long I don't think I could do anything else. And I've loved almost every day of it."

How To Become a Professional Photographer

I heard a great joke the other day:

"I got a Ph.D. in philosophy. Which means I'm really smart. And also that I'm really not very smart."

I wonder if you could say something similar about pro photography these days. Being a professional photographer means you're really skilled and smart...and, also, it may not be a very smart thing to be.

It's a tough profession, one that requires a multitude of competencies, wide-ranging expertise, and more energy than most ordinary people possess. Also very good work habits, very good basic organizational skills, and, almost always, great people skills. It's challenging. It requires many aptitudes and mastery of many things. You really have to be well above average (no Lake Woebegone joke) to even make it as a pro photographer. And yet one could argue that it's also kind of a questionable choice of profession for anyone with that many skills and assets.

At this somewhat advanced point in my life I know a lot of people who were professional photographers for five or ten years and then quit and went on to something that made a little more sense as a career. This includes the hot-shot, high-dollar pro from whom I took an intensive, expensive seminar back in the '90s. (He billed $1.6 million [gross] in '93, "and that was a lot of money back then," rimshot.) He's been in high finance for the last twenty years. That is, unless he retired already, I don't know. I finally tracked him down a few years ago, and he wasn't very chatty.

The subject of the seminar? How to become a professional photographer!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Josh Hawkins: "You need to be smart enough to be a photographer and dumb enough to not realize you should do something/anything else. It's a very narrow range to fit in."

Dave Polaschek: "Perhaps the good business to be in is selling seminars on how to be a professional photographer!"

Ken Bennett: "I've been doing this for a living for 31 years next month. For the last 21 I've been the staffer at a university. I often get students asking me how they can 'travel the world and take pictures.' (I swear that every single one of them has used that exact phrase.) I laugh and ask them how large is their trust fund.  :-)  Then I stop laughing and ask them the same question again.

"I have a pretty good idea how to become a professional photojournalist—in 1985 or so. Start at a small newspaper, work up to a midsized daily, then win some awards and move up to a wire service or a major daily. Easy—except that the pipeline is now in tatters. Heck, the most recent Pulitzer prize winner for spot news shot it on his last day at the paper—before leaving to work at a brewery.

"I know that a handful of my students have gone onto successful photo careers (we did an entire issue of the alumni magazine dedicated to them.) but it's not something I can recommend to anyone in good conscience. For those who are trying, good luck and I hope you make it."

Gordon Lewis: "I agree. It seems almost as questionable a choice as being a photo blogger. (Heh, heh....)"

Funny Photo Rant

[Ed. note: Our friend JG, he of the Frankencamera, sent me this little rant the other day. Does what happens to him happen to you?]

Words and valuable photo by JG

You know what is really annoying about being a hobbyist photographer these days?

Having friends who sincerely believe that every halfway decent photo is saleable and that I must be a lazy ass because I'm not interested in even trying to sell my recent bobcat photo.

They don't have a clue about what's involved in actually selling a photo, how stock and micro-stock sales work, how much money any given photo is actually worth in today's market, or the minimum technical requirements for the file behind the photo (which my bobcat photo doesn't even remotely meet, because it was so heavily cropped.)

Yet four of them persist in encouraging me to get off my "lazy ass and start promoting it" because they're convinced I can make thousands of dollars for doing next to no work selling it.

And when I attempt to explain to them the reality of the situation—i.e., that a single, cute photo that is passable in quality only as an email attachment is commercially worthless—they simply scoff at me.

When did photography become so focused on making money from sales instead of spending it on gear...? LOL.

And why are so many otherwise smart people ignoring the effects of practically unlimited supply and very limited demand?

Apparently, "every photo is valuable" is the logical, perhaps even inevitable corollary to "everybody is a photographer"? [Rolls eyes.]

JG

[Ed. note no. 2: Do you remember l'affair de Harlan Ellison? Just for fun, I took $25 from the soft money account and sent it to JG. The note with the payment said "One-time First North American e-publishing rights to The Valuable Bobcat photo." I just thought it would be funny if he could tell his friends that he sold the photo. He doesn't have to tell them how much he got for it....]

JG adds: "Actually, my 'rant' wasn't a rant at all, but a very clever marketing plan I devised that targeted one particular potential buyer...and it worked! Of course, now I have to come up with a new plan so I can sell my next photo to somebody else. Surely, there must be an easier way than this to make thousands by selling my photos? Otherwise, it's going to require far more work and take a lot longer than I initially thought...sheesh."

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Featured Comments from:

MikeK: "It's even worse you're a very average hobbyist photographer. When people tell me I should sell my photos, my stock answer is 'To whom?' People seem to think that there is a massive marketplace for selling prints, and if I just had a website I'd be raking in the cash. It doesn't seem to occur to these people that none of them have ever bought a photograph in their life, and most of the people they know haven't either.

"Self-satisfaction is not enough it seems."

John Camp: "Along with mine, that's two bobcat photos in a month. You're becoming a cat photo site, which I somehow find pleasing. Anyway, my shot looks like a standard wildlife photo, though it was taken at the end of a neighbor's driveway with an iPhone. JG's is far better, and suggests to me that perhaps wildlife photographers aren't getting the most for their talent by shooting only in wild-looking scenes. Wildlife in the city sounds like a pretty interesting book...."

Mike replies: That's a fascinating idea for a book. Wildlife, only not idealized. The possibilities for photos would come tumbling along so fast they'd pile on top of each other. Of course I can think of historical and already-existing photos that would fit, like the photo on the cover of Fay Godwin's Bison at Chalk Farm.

jim: "I have a bobcat picture as well but I'd have to go through thousands of files to find it so I just had my wife take this one of me and my tomcat. He could probably beat a bobcat anyway!"

Mike replies: I hope I have not given people the idea that I am going to pay $25 for any picture with any sort of cat in it. LOL!

You guys look like friends, though.

Dan Gorman: "Re 'Does what happens to him happen to you?' Only about every other day or so. I have a dozen or so of my better shots on display in my home and in my office, so I get this same piece of friendly 'advice' fairly often. I know they mean well, but I've long since given up on trying to explain the commercial realities JG outlines so concisely. I just smile and say 'Thank you! I'm glad you like it.'"

Craig A. Lee: "Yes. It happens to me too. Sometimes it even works out to a sale. Last week I showed my composite image for the recent total eclipse progression to someone visiting my day job's office. A couple of questions led to a couple of links, and he bought a print then and there. It will at least cover part of the expense for the website. Shameless link."

mike plews: "I have a lovely shot taken from our back deck of the yard just after a bobcat ran through. I wonder what that might be worth?"

Mike replies: Priceless?

Jeffrey MacMillan: "I have a cat named Robert. Bob for short. I'll send a photo but I expect payment upfront."

Mike replies: Wait by your mailbox. Be very patient.

Ed Hawco: "Not necessarily (or as we say here in Montreal, 'Oui, mais non.' ['Yes, but no.' —Ed.])

"As someone who worked for several years in a stock photo agency that specialized in wildlife, I can say that yes, this photo of a bobcat is pretty unsalable. The drawers in all such agencies are packed with beautifully composed and perfectly exposed bobcat photos in all imaginable lighting conditions, compositions, etc. So it's worthless...until that day when an editor calls and says 'we need a photo of a bobcat peeking around a corner in a built environment, preferably with a window or two behind it. Oh, and we really need to see a plastic garbage bin.' You laugh, but I took calls like that, and it explained why so many of the photos in our collections were very lame—but they had some characteristic that someone somewhere might be looking for.

"That said, the odds of getting exactly that call are so slim that you're better off spending the time at a casino, or buying lottery tickets."

Roger Moore: "I've had some success getting people who want me to sell pictures to shut up by saying that I see photography as an enjoyable hobby, and that if I tried selling my photos, that would turn it into a business, which would sap all the fun out of it. They seem to be willing to buy that argument even if they won't accept the basic economics of the situation."

How I Practiced Portraiture

I love portraits, and used to do them, both for pay and for art. I got a nice "blast from the past" last week when when I did a senior portrait for the daughter of a friend of a friend. (Or at least I think I did—they have the proofs now and so far so good.)

I can't remember now how I learned about what constituted conventional practice. But what I did was to work with the subject or subjects in several different scenes or situations, almost always using natural light and "found" backgrounds. I would take several hundred shots. From these I would edit my selections and give the client/subject small proof-prints of six or eight choices. They would then pick their favorite, and I would make the final print. (This was when I was working with B&W film and making fiber-base silver gelatin prints.)

Sounds simple, but I experienced innumerable problems.

The most basic one was "who owns the picture." Of course, you know that the photographer owns the rights to his or her work, and retains them until specifically relinquishing them. Technically, legally, the client only owns the print or prints—the physical object—and doesn't have the right to reuse or re-purpose the image in whatever way they see fit. This is difficult for clients to understand, and if they do understand they often don't respect it because it seems unreasonable to them—they paid for the picture, it's a picture of them, and they think that means they own it. ("A dog with a pullet in his mouth owns the pullet," said the redoubtable Scotsman David Hume.)

You do not own images of yourself, however. The person who made the image owns the rights to it. This seems counterintuitive to many people hearing it for the first time. That doesn't mean the owner of the rights can do anything he or she wants to without the subject's permission; but neither can the client do anything he or she wants to with the images without the photographer's permission.

I never had "big" problems where this is concerned, just little ones, although I've certainly heard of big problems. My little problems included people refusing to return the proofs, framing the proofs (which were usually 5x7 or 4x6 RC prints), or having the proofs copied and enlarged as an alternative to paying me for a finished print. I solved the framing-of-proofs problem by having a mask made that put my name and logo on the bottom of each proof. This didn't work in one case, because the client framed the proof logo and all.) Because of that last, I finally resorted to including two finished prints in the sitting price (my last sitting price was $675 in the early '90s—and I photographed some prominent people, including a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a U.S. Senator, a television star of the era, several members of recognizable political dynasty families, and a number of prominent citizens in and around Washington D.C.). Once, I sent a small JPEG of a portrait to a friend (of his mother) asking him if he wanted a print. I heard nothing back. Some time later, visiting his house, I found a framed inkjet print of the JPEG (which looked terrible, of course) on display! He had printed out the JPEG on his all-in-one dye inkjet printer, on bond paper. Yikes.

Framing was another headache. I was a custom printer and a recognized darkroom expert, and I put a lot of effort into making excellent fine finished prints. I included detailed framing instructions with the prints. I have no idea how many people took the next step and had them framed, but I know it wasn't everyone. For a while I would drymount the trimmed prints to heavy Rives BKF paper*; once, I visited a friend/client's house, and found my carefully-made, selenium toned, archivally washed fine print attached to their refrigerator with a magnet, among all the color snapshots and cute sayings. Yikes again!

But offering only framed prints is not an ideal solution, because peoples' homes are furnished in different styles and to different tastes, and there's no reliable one-size-fits-all framing option. People will prefer different kinds of frames.

I handled this problem in a neat way. I simply dropped off the finished prints at a framing shop (owned by a friend). Then I called the clients and told them their prints were ready and they could pick them up at their convenience at the shop. Most of them got the point and ordered framing for the prints they picked up.

Another problem, of course, which many of you (including wedding photographers) will be all too familiar with: they want to see all the shots. Editing photos is one of the hardest things about photography, even for experienced photographers. I've heard of wedding clients who complained that they "only" got 500 proofs when they "knew there were thousands of shots." Like the photographer is holding back all the good ones?

This problem probably gets down to who controls the image. The photographer thinks he or she gets to say what the best/final image is; the client thinks that's their right. The way I look at it, providing an edited selection of proofs is a compromise between these competing interests. If it were up to me, I'd just pick the best shot and the client would never see any of the others. If it were up to the client, they'd get everything (never suspecting how difficult it is to edit and choose for the simple reason that most people don't edit and choose: they just pick everything that strikes their fancy. That's why you see dozens of similar shots posted on photo sharing sites—the person who posted them "liked them all").

My experience was, the more proofs, the longer it took to get a print order. You can offer to help, but then you find you're teaching "Editing 101" to every new client.

The last problem is that most people are very picky about images of themselves, and quirky about what they want to see. Some people are sensitive to a certain perceived defect in their appearance, and they will pick a photograph of themselves that doesn't show that defect even if it's far from the best picture overall. Or they will pick a straight-on frontal picture simply because that's what they're used to seeing in the mirror.

Once, a few years ago, I will admit to making fun of an unknown woman for the picture of herself she posted on Match.com. There was only one single picture, and it showed her sitting on a porch, holding a beer, dressed in an impressively filthy T-shirt. It made her look like she had just come from spending a long period of time underneath a car. I made a joke of this to my brother, privately, but the thing is, my years as a portraitist gave me the insight to understand why she had posted that particular picture. Most likely it was that it either showed some little idiosyncratic feature of her face that she liked, or concealed some such feature that she disliked. And never mind the dirty T-shirt.

Anyway, for whatever reason, people often pick the wrong proof. You might say it's just a matter of taste, but I say no—it's my work, and I'm a better editor, and I know best. Anyway, I often made two finished final prints: one of their choice, for them, and one of the correct choice, for me.  :-)

Anyway, I always used to tell portrait clients to let their friends and families decide which one the best picture of them was, rather than doing it themselves. I'm sure that worked.

I've never worked as a portraitist in the digital age. I'm sure things are different now. I also suspect a lot of things are the same.

My portrait clients this past week were lovely people—friendly, gregarious and warm—and their confident and nice-looking daughter had the self-assurance of a well-raised child. She did a splendid job posing, and her mother acted as a stylist and did a very nice job of that! They were great to work with and I had fun doing the portrait. I do hope it suits their needs. I charged the price of a box of printing paper, and the gentleman kindly gave me a generous tip. So far I've send them un-watermarked small JPEGs as proofs with full permission to post them anywhere they want to. If/when they make a final choice, I'll send them a prepared full file for printing, and the name of a recommended printer.

The next thing I want to try is to hire a model for a portrait. I want to experiment with what it's like when I'm completely in control and the subject doesn't have any say at all. Should be an interesting experiment, and add to my lifelong learning about this kind of work.

The payoff in portraiture is when you happen to make a picture that the subject really likes. My '90s portrait of photographer Sally Mann that I showed in this post in 2015 (it's one of the few of my portraits I have in digitized form) was one of those—Sally really liked it, so much that she asked for the negative so she could print some promo pictures for her own use.

And she never returned the negative, of course. Sigh.

Mike

*This was self-defensive, mainly: it prevented framers from dry-mounting the print using too hot a temperature, which could impart the texture of the release paper to part of the surface of the print.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Camp: "Most people don't understand this, but they are brilliant judges of faces—most people have a forehead, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin, etc., yet we are able to instantly pick out acquaintances from the thousands of possibilities we see passing us every day. That expertise is exercised with portraits: a good photographer gives us a professional example of a subject we're interested in from birth, and because it's a portrait, rather than an actual living face, we have no inhibitions about studying it closely, every pore and freckle. And we make judgments about them too: is it possible that the woman on Match.com did just crawl out from under a car, and was perhaps interested in attracting, say, a Harley owner? The beer and t-shirt would hint at that...."

The Ultimate Nightmare Clients

This is a pretty involved story, but if you've ever been a professional photographer you will be sucked into it with a mixture of horror and fascination. And probably some level of familiarity.

The vindictive wedding clients deliberately ruined the reputation of wedding photographer Andrea Polito of Dallas, Texas, with an Internet and social media campaign that advanced an easy but false narrative. Andrea's prospering business withered and she was forced to close her studio.

But Andrea got the last word when a jury awarded her more than a million dollars in judgement, finding that the couple, Andrew and Neely Moldovan, were guilty of malicious defamation.

As with many such judgements, Andrea might never collect, but at least the truth is out now, and known to the world. 

The article is called "They trashed their wedding photographer over a $125 fee, so a jury told them to pay her $1 million." Reading it is like watching a train wreck. (You'll find more articles if you Google "Andrea Polito.")

Let's all be careful out there.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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toto: "Some bloggers will try and ruin other people just to attract readers. (TOP not included, of course) Here's another case."

Mike replies: Great link, but it seems like that's a case of a blogger/photowriter (Gary Fong) coming to the aid of a persecuted photographer (Nelson Tang). The villain in that case was a lawyer/client.

Client ≠ Subject

Photographer Rob Strong (of the School Street School School of School Photography*) came by for breakfast the other day, on his way through the area on a Christmas journey. He said something very interesting. Something I don't think I've ever heard before quite the way he put it.

It sounded like things are going well for him and his business. Here's his current website; it's about to be replaced by a new one. Naturally he has a lot of work to sort through in deciding what to present on the new site. We were talking about how you should put in your portfolio or on your website the kind of work you want, not necessarily the kind you've done. You want to encourage clients to think of you for the kind of work you'd like to do more of in the future.

Rob said it wasn't so simple in some ways. For example, he does about five weddings a year and really enjoys doing those, but doesn't want to do a whole lot more than that.

The thing he most wants to do more of in the future? Editorial portraits.

For those who don't know exactly what that means, it's when a client assigns you, and pays you, to go take a portrait of somebody else. Usually it's for some sort of media—newspapers, magazines, or for a book jacket or website or perhaps an annual report or institutional publication—hence the name. (Rob does a lot of work for the Tuck School and the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.)

Talking about editorial portraits, what Rob said was, "I've noticed I enjoy portraiture more when the client and the subject aren't the same person."

I've never heard it put quite like that, but yeah. I used to do portraits in Washington D.C., but my clients were often the subjects—or closely related to them. It removes a certain amount of control from the photographer, and dictates, to varying (and unpredictable!) degrees how you have to work and the kind of results you have to create. Rob's right—when the subject is paying you, then the subject is your boss. The work will go better if you're the boss on the set or at the location.

Speaking of portraits, I remembered to have Rob sign the mighty TOP Guest Book but for some unaccountable reason it didn't occur to me to make a quick portrait of him, which I usually do when guests visit TOP. My apologies, to he and thee.

(I know that last phrase is not grammatical, but it rhymes, and that wins.)

Mike

*The first time we met he described settling into his new studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, which is located in a former school. The presence of the school caused the street it's on to be called School Street, and the influence then turned around the other way and caused the school to be known as the School Street School, because, of course, it was the school that was on School Street. Rob then realized that if he gave some photography classes at his studio he could call it the School Street School School of Photography, at which point he realized that to complete the name he would naturally have to include school photography in the curriculum; hence the name. There is, however, no actual School of School Photography in the School Street School.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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