On Photo Students Being Taken Seriously

I got an e-mail from a high school photo student I met recently. He was asking how to be taken seriously enough to make money from his good sports photos of his friends.

A few basic business things do help… acting like a business person, being professional, being on time, always delivering on time, tracking orders and payments very well, and guaranteeing that they’ll love your photos or they don’t have to pay. But it’s tricky. And I find that today, people are fine with an average snapshot for free (taken on their cell phone!), compared to an amazing photo for $10… You just have to find the niche’ where people appreciate great shots and you can give them good value.

He was a great kid and I love to see that kind of initiative and entrepreneurship (and he took nice photos to boot!). I wish him well.

Here was our conversation:

i’m the photographer

of monroe high school i dont know if you remember me.

You bet… I enjoyed looking at your photos, and it was impressive that you’ve already had photos published!

i can take any picture but i need more expirience in this jobbecause in this work is easier to find problems that take a picture.I’m taking pictures in the volleyball games in the school and i sell the photos to save money to buy the camera I want
but the people do not take me seriously and do not like pay me

Yes, that’s a big issue. Even when I sold photos to friends, they sometimes thought they should just get them all for free. Tough issue. I totally believe in being nice and giving lots away, but then you spend lots of money on the camera and lots of time taking the photos.
Maybe what you could do is offer to the parents something like this… for $20 (or whatever you think is fair & they’ll pay) you’ll take lots of photos at a few games, really focusing on their child and then you’ll just give them the photos on CD. That way they totally know up front there is a cost, but that you really are working for them, not just taking a lucky snapshot and trying to sell them something… If you have 3 or 4 parents do that per season, it could be worthwhile.

Or maybe even go further and say you’ll get one nice portrait of them in their game clothes after a game, and that’s part of the package… maybe throw in a print or something. I don’t know… but the idea is… what can you do to make it so much more than the parent can do themselves and it’s worth some money to them.
And if you are making money this way, make sure they are getting tons more than they expect, and if you just can’t get good photos of their kid… don’t charge them and give them what you take for free. Maybe that can be your guarantee.
Maybe go to the first game of the season and give away all of those shots, or share them on Facebook in smaller sizes… that’s good free advertising, and people can see you take good photos, and aren’t *just* out for the money, you are willing to share.
So that’s one idea. After you get enough money, you can use online labs like Smugmug.com and sell prints for more than they cost you… but there’s usually a yearly cost to do that. Also check out Printroom.com… see if either of them have smaller yearly plans for free.
Or maybe you could try this… print all the nice shots from a few games… post them for free on facebook, Flickr, etc and tell your friends they can grab them for free… but that you’ll have prints in school for $1 per 4×6 (or whatever)… or you print them up ahead of time, and just have all the 4×6’s. That’s what I did. Had them all with me… sold them pretty cheap per print. At the end of the season you can give the extras to the coach or yearbook.

and I do not like that because nobody in that school can take picture as
which I take. i think – I do not think myself better than anyone thats whay

I need advice about working in this business.

thanks    

It’s good you know you do a good job. Look at lots of photos and what good photographers do and keep improving. But deep inside, knowing you are good will help a lot in tough times.
I’ll post this question to my blog (without your name of course) so other students can learn as well.

Keep it up and shout with any more questions…

Shoots Potpourri

I just redid my main web site…

BTW, check it out HERE.

And that means that I’m moving a bunch of shoots off of the home page to their client page… So here’s the list of them in case you’d like a peek at the events & many have slide shows:

• Harley Commencement 2009. I posted some fun shots on Facebook HERE

• For JPMorgan Chase: 3 views of the wet and wonderful Corporate Challenge 2009. ••Photos from Rochester & Buffalo HERE

• ‘Fences’ @ Geva Theatre. • Slide show HERE • All Photos HERE

• Wilmot Cancer Center’s Discovery Ball. Slideshow of great shots HERE

• The Harley School BLAST   was a blast back to the 50’s with Sky Sands MCing the Auction. •• Coolest shots HERE

• Everyone got the Red Carpet Paparazzi treatment at the Eastman House Oscars Party •• Great slideshow HERE

• Sweeney Todd at Geva is a dark comedy/tragedy and amazinly well crafted. Favorite Images • HERE

• RIT’s Father-Daughter Dance was wonderful. All Photos • HERE

• FIRST Robotics Rochester Regional Rolls on. Gallery HERE or see my FaceBook.

• For the George Eastman House opening of TruthBeauty. • • Event Slideshow HERE

Power of Online Photo Events-RIT Reunion

I was just running the numbers on how wildly popular my web site for the RIT Reunion Photos was this year. We create a custom web site for the event and upload to it live all weekend. Here are some of the numbers.

So you understand… we have two things:
The Reunion Photo Site that people visited first as the home page, then the Photo Galleries themselves (on another site).

(photo by Natalie Best… see web site linked below)

And the photo gallery site stats are pretty impressive:
A total of almost 322,000 photos from the event were viewed.

What was most popular (rounded)?

107,000 President’s Ball Candids
62,600 Ball Couples & Elvis with Couples
52,000 Campus Receptions & PM Candids
48,000 Hockey Event & Receptions
29,000 Athletic Reunions

It’s hard to quantify just how huge this event was… But on just one day the Reunion Photo Site  served 1.22 Gigabytes of material.

This is the main photo site, not including the photo galleries with the big photos… but just the small stuff on the home page of the photo site.

That’s 15 times the volume that people normally see on my entire, main photo site in a day.

The photo galleries served 27.2 Gigs of photos total since they were put up.

Where did they come from?
1700 came from RIT.edu
400 from Facebook: This is the big news.

I can’t promise those were all RIT people… but Facebook didn’t even show up on my incoming links list last month… so I’d guess it’s mostly RIT.
The rest would have been directly coming to the site via the cards we gave out and notes in our slideshow at the Ball, etc.

So I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about the impact of our HuthPhoto Web Event. And the web site stays up for at least a year, continuing to be viewed by visitors. I’ve even see some of our web slide shows from events googling higher than the client’s official web site. What a great way to promote next year’s event, by using the previous year’s photo galleries, web site or slide show.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this happen!
Rob Grow and Kelly Redder @ RIT Alumni have given me free reign over the past 5 years to create this idea.
Peggy Glitch, Rachel Pikus and the other staff work to get it all linked up and promoted to Alumni.

Bob Finnerty at RIT News Services gives us massive play with a prominent link to the photos on the main RIT homepage (this is *critical* by the way, if you do this for your events!)

And my amazing photo team that helped cover over 17 events for 4 days:

Brady Dillsworth
Natalie Best
Richard Baker

Photo Usage Rights

This is a huge topic with clients; here are some thoughts I shared recently:

FYI: I don’t want to argue with lawyers, but I’ll just give you my understanding of it… just my opinion, don’t sue me

They always say that photo rights are on a sliding scale of ‘Location’ and ‘Usage’… the more public the location and the more ‘news’ the usage, the more clear the ability to do what you want with the photo. The more private the location and the more ‘advertising’ the use, the more you need signed permission. You have to decide on how far the balance is tipped in each situation.

This is pretty consistent with what my clients do. At the biggest college I work for, we don’t get photo release permission forms on anything during Reunion. And those photos go up in several online galleries.
We do get them when I photograph in a hospital (no surprise… not ‘public’, very private and with HIPAA rules) and I’m sure the Marketing team gets them for the Billboards and ads (which I don’t take the photos for).

What shots don’t need releases?

There is a point where the group is large enough in a photo, that a release isn’t expected. If it’s a very public event, and a very wide shot of the crowd with no real main subject focus, you would be less apt to be told to get a photo release for fairly ’safe’ uses, like promoting the event next year, etc.

And let’s not forget the classic ‘no faces showing’ option, where people are only seen from behind. When done well, you don’t even think about it.

(in this photo, the only face showing is a staff member)

But the lawyers!

It’s totally possible that lawyers might say that you must have every single photo released before using it in any fashion… but that would be crazy and impossible to do on a large scale event. But a lawyer’s job is to play it super-safe and they may not think through the implications.

I’d estimate that getting permissions would cut the number of photos by a factor of 10 and add one or two workers to follow me. Imagine getting the form from every subject in groups taken on the run. I’d be holding things up and being a pest. Really, I’d just have to focus at each event on 2 or 3 good shots, and not get the other 20 things I get. And that becomes a decision you’d have to make.

We did releases once for a brochure (so it was marketing use, not news), at a very public event and it was so crazy, I’d think twice before doing it again… or more likely would change what I attempted to do… and for that shoot, I had 2 helpers getting forms signed.

Hope that helps explain the difficulties of a system of having every photo taken having a signed release at every public event.

Web Hall of Fame

Since I was so hard on organizations not using photos quickly on the web, here are some examples of clients doing big things right on the web.

RIT Reunion:

For a number of years now, RIT has let me run with this idea of a ‘Virtual Reunion’. We post photos throughout the weekend to a site I create and this year I tested this new interface where comments can be left, photos can be sent as e-cards, music can be played, etc.

Results: 3061 Unique Visitors (not ‘hits’ or counting people twice, actual different people). More people saw the photos than attended Reunion.281,000 Page views… that’s huge. My normal would be around 6,000 for a week.

For the ImagineRIT event, my Associate Ron Cronk and I did the same thing with big results:Over 3000 viewers on Flickr (over 20,000 image views of any sort on Flickr… not counting people just seeing the slide show on the RIT site
To my web site’s ImagineRIT Gallery:Over 1100 unique visitors in 3 daysOver 13,000 page views
OK, less chatter from me and more examples to inspire you…

Harley School:

They have a system built into their new web site design and can easily upload my photos. Under the ‘News & Events’ Menu, click Media Gallery.

UofR:

I do online slideshows like this for my top clients (that I know will share them), and the UofR does a great job of promoting what I’ve done. The Wilmott Cancer Center and the UR School of Nursing particularly promote when I create online photo content for them. I see people visiting these shows for months after an event.

One very telling thing is that I see that many people will Google the name of a major event, or the organization and will find my site with these shows… so if your attendees are looking that hard for the photos, you know eventually all client web sites will be set up to show off things like this.

RIT (Again!):

Innovation must be in the water at RIT, because they let me try so many things and they really run with new ideas.

RIT hosted a cool conference for kids in elite science and tech high schools. I covered the event and they wanted my photos right away for a dinner slide show and they paid me to create this online component. I even did this wild 3-D gallery as part of it, figuring tech kids would enjoy the fun interface.

Thanks so much to all of my clients that have been so supportive of these projects… this kind of display of my best work really gets me excited and I think is a ‘Wow’ for event attendees.

Homework: How can you use these ideas with your photos at your next event? What IT person can you befriend to get support to put photos up right after an event, rather that weeks later when no one is looking any more? What can you change with your next web redux to make a space for simple (but elegant ala Harley School) galleries.

Life in a Post-Newspaper PR World

I had a really amazing discussion with a client last week. It started with the fact that the local paper is cutting back in a million ways and that to get out their message, even on great stories is nearly impossible… but how to get out the message in our current world, which is arguably post-newspaper.

Obviously we discussed the web and he said they post press releases online constantly, but how do you become a web site that people want to go to, and then how do you make them want to see your message??

He told me a story about a really exciting blog one expert started on his own, and it was getting tons of hits, until the top people saw it and thought it presented the organization’s message ‘in too light of a manner’… and so they killed it.

This is the challenge today— Promote your organization well and have something people want to see…but it has to start with the vision to be trusting, interesting, valuable and different.

Check out what these guys are doing… different, fun, educational… bet they get lots of hits and I bet their organization’s reputation as a cool place is growing. The main site is here and this is a fun out-takes reel:

Your homework Ms. PR Guru… would your organization run with an idea like this, or run from it?!
I have maybe 10% of my clients that do really interesting things on the web with my photos… but many just don’t have the ability (Web site is created by IT and can’t be easily updated), or vision (don’t realize how many visitors cool, current photos on the site). It’s basically free to do and I know over the next few years it’s going to be a huge growth area… and now with the media doing less coverage of exciting things my clients do, we’ll be helping them get out the message online.