Photography

Photo agency Getty has sent a new contract to its editorial contributors that specifies a flat 35 percent royalty for all sales, reports PDN.

Under the current arrangement, photographers could get as much as 50 percent revenue per image sale. But photographers who don’t sign the new contract will be terminated, PDN says.

Getty’s plan is to lower the prices it asks for photos, in order to better compete with low-priced competitors. But when PDN asked about this, a spokesperson said: “[W]e are developing new ways for customers to use more of our content and as a result, new ways to pay contributors must be created in these situations.”

But, Getty says, there are a few upsides: Getty is “‘making changes and improvements around how we share and license our content, which will benefit our photographers,’ by providing more exposure and more potential for sales of their images,” the spokesperson told PDN. Hmm.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Photographer Kirk Tuck has been writing a blog since 2007 on gear, the industry, and inspiration.

He’s got over 700 entries and sees 12,000 pageviews a day, which is pretty darn good for a one-man shop.

But he’s calling it quits. He says:

I should have been on the phone continuing to make calls to prospective clients. I should have been working on the two book projects I have in front of me. I should have been swimming or running. But instead I was writing a piece about a $499 camera that will be obsolete in a few months and lost to nearly everyone’s memory in a year.

Sure, there’s an ego reward that goes along with putting out a blog…My name recognition among photographers is currently strong. If I liked doing workshops that would be a good thing. If I had products to sell to other photographers that would be a good thing. But the time spent here is time stolen from things that are more important for me….I’m done spending time creating content for free.

If Tuck’s viewpoint spreads, this has troubling implications for the Huffington Posts of the world. Here’s a guy who was doing everything right according to the laws of the new media economy: give something away for free in order to build a brand, then sell your work. If it wasn’t working to Tuck’s satisfaction—if blogging doesn’t help you sell photos—then there are suddenly a lot fewer reasons to do it.

The Dayton Daily News’s photo editor, a two-time Pulitzer winner, was told he needed to cut two to four positions, or half his photography staff.

So Larry Price resigned instead, the Dayton Business Journal says.

“I do not believe the layoffs are fair to you as individuals or that they are in the best interest of the Dayton Daily news and our readers. If these cuts are enacted, it will be impossible to meet the Cox initiatives for covering breaking news, sharing content with our media partners and growing our online presence,” he said in a letter to his staff.

This might have been a long time coming, anyway. In a separate Dayton Business Journal article Price explained to reporter Ginger Christ how he felt his employer’s approach to photography change over the years:

Price saw the DDN’s approach to photography continue to change; photographs became less of a focus and graphics were used in their place whenever possible.
The seminal moment for him occurred earlier this year after he had to defend a photograph of a girl with tears in her eyes at a candlelight vigil in west Dayton. The photo, he was told, was too emotional.
“The new prerogative, as it was explained to me, was to dumb down the photo report, to pull back and show crowd photographs,” Price said.
At that point, Price said he realized there was a mandate to stop producing sophisticated visual content.

What now?

“I’m going to take pictures. I’m going to take fine photographs. I’m in a position, I’m not in mid-career, I’m not trying to start out. I’m luckier than some,” Price told Christ.

The silos are breaking down, says Arik C. Hanson, principal of ACH Communications in Minnesota. When before you could be just a writer or just a photographer, tomorrow’s PR pro is going to need to know more than one technology. (We’ve already seen this happen in journalism.)

“Many companies cannot afford to specialize any longer when it comes to content. Sure, they need quality, but not at a severe cost (and not for every project)….companies will be looking more and more for a professional with storytelling skills. And photography skills. And video producing and editing skills. These people exist–just not in big numbers quite yet.”

A PR ‘media producer’ would know the basics of photography, writing, SEO, social media, video, and podcasting, just to name a few.

Hanson says he’s already seen some employers looking for such a candidate.

And if you think this is nigh impossible, look what one producer (who, to be fair, specializes in video) for the National Science Foundation did recently. Total budget: $0. That’s right, $0. So writers, that excuse about how it costs too much to learn video just went out the window.

(story via)

It’s always nice to hear a tale of a freelancer and a magazine coming to a fair agreement.*

This may be why we love these Real World Estimates features from A Photo Editor which detail exactly how a photographer goes about setting up a contract with a client.

In the latest instance we read about Bill Cramer, who did a shoot for Fast Company magazine. The mag, it turns out, pays a flat fee per shoot which seems reasonable to us (though we don’t know what the going rate is); Cramer’d prefer to “structure editorial fees on the basis of a day rate vs. space” but he went with it.

The magazine paid his expenses, showed some leeway on contract terminology (Cramer struck out some lines relating to FC’s rights to resell his photos, and they accepted it), and had a generally reasonable (according to Cramer) contract.

Sounds like a good place to shoot for if your work’s up to the challenge. Photo Director Leslie de la Vega is in charge. Read the whole shoot debriefing at A Photo Editor.
*This could be putting words in the photog’s mouth, but he certainly gave the impression that it seemed fair to him.

So over at A Photo Editor there’s a small note about two photographers who posted job ads for interns one day apart.

The first: “Afghan girl” photographer Steve McCurry (we’d embed an image here, but apparently he’s oldschool enough to actually get paid big bucks whenever anyone uses his photos, and we’d rather not be the one paying). The second: Vincent LaForet, Pulitzer winner and three-time winner at the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

“Oldschooler” McCurry “goes for the craigslist classified ad seeking an intern who is ‘highly motivated’ with a ‘proven track record of excellence.’” The position is full-time and unpaid.

Meanwhile, “New schooler LaForet goes for the blog post (natch) where his legions of followers can quickly spread the word and apply for 3 (yes 3!) open slots on his team. Applicants must be “proficient in Premiere or Final Cut Pro” and “obsessed with gear” and have the ability to “grade footage.”" The positions are paid and part-time.

Very interesting: normally, the blogger would be hiring the unpaid interns, yes?

If you go to the Photo Editor post you can see an application for McCurry’s internship that is absolutely hilarious, but was clearly written by someone who would much rather be getting paid.

Lynsey Addario spent seven days in captivity in Libya, and her story, along with three other New York Times journalists, was published in a March 22 NYT piece.

Reading through the comments on that article, though, Addario says she noticed a pattern.

“Some comments said: ‘How dare a woman go to a war zone?’ and ‘How could The New York Times let a woman go to the war zone?’

“To me, that’s grossly offensive. This is my life, and I make my own decisions. If a woman wants to be a war photographer, she should.”

Yes, it’s different being a woman on the front lines: she might not be able to jump across a 3-foot-wide canal and she admits she’s not as strong as her male colleagues, despite daily exercise (“Because if you do a lot of military embeds, people are not going to wait for you”). And she was groped a dozen times in Libya. “I do find that a woman who is alone is more prone to being mistreated than a woman who is with a man,” she says.

But she can enter private Muslim homes and spend time with even the most conservative Muslim families. That’s something men can’t do.

And despite the physical and emotional toll, she plans to stay in the business. “I will cover another war. I’m sure I will. It’s what I do. It’s important to show people what’s happening,” she writes.

Brava Lynsey.

A Canadian copywriting firm has gotten into trouble for using copyrighted images.

In fact, until a vigilant photographer noticed his photo had appeared on one of WebCopyPlus’s client’s sites, WebCopyPlus was just sucking photos off Google willy-nilly.

The photographer, speaking through a lawyer to the client, requested the image be removed immediately and a payment of $4,000 be remitted to his account. (The photographer was based in the U.S., and under the DMCA, apparently you can seek up to $30,000 in damages per infringement.)

The company says:

“While we considered the lawyer’s demands abusive, the fact remained that our client was trapped in the ordeal, and it was costing him time and causing him grief. Plus, he’d be the one to get subpoenaed. So we opted to settle for $4,000….It’s an expensive lesson on copyright laws that we wish to share with other marketers, so you don’t make the same mistake.”

The mistake, WebCopyPlus says, was this:

“Our web copywriters were under the impression that images on the Web without any copyright notices were “public domain” and therefore free to use. Naive? Yes. A notion limited to our copywriting firm? Definitely not. It likely has to do with the fact that works no longer need a copyright notice to have copyright protection.” That’s because of the Berne Convention, which the U.S. adopted in 1988. But Canada….adopted the Berne Convention in the 1920s.

Fail.

An anonymous photog asked A Photo Editor laments the state of the industry in a whine cleverly disguised as a question.

The question:

Can you write an article about the true reality of the photo industry across the board in LA, NYC, Dallas, and Chicago, or wherever? It seems most ad agencies don’t view books in person, only online. Art Buyers are looking for work, photography jobs are being over run by secretaries, moms, dads, facebook friends, interns, and college kids out of school who just decide one day to pick up a camera.

A Photo Editor, who is actually Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside Magazine, got a number of photogs and other industry pros to weigh in. Almost unanimously, they all said the industry is not dead.

A print producer:
“I know that photography as content will always be needed, regardless of the the constantly changing medium to which it is applied. ”

An agent:
“We can freeze up, get pissed about all this or we can jump in and look towards the wonderful new possibilities.”

A designer:
“No matter how much people complain, I have a lot of busy clients, they are just really good photographers. Yes, hustling a little more due to the economy, but still working and doing great work.”

A photog:
“I’ve personally chosen to embrace these changes and focus on what is rather than what once was. To be honest I only see opportunity.”

There’s ever ever so much more at the original post but meanwhile we wonder how much of this would still ring true if you replaced “photographer” with “journalist” or “PR pro” or “copywriter” or any of our titles? Probably a lot.

Alan Taylor, who founded The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog two and a half years ago, is moving to The Atlantic.

There, he will start a new photo blog called In Focus.

The Globe will keep The Big Picture and find someone else to run it.

“Simply stated, I want to do more with the format,” Taylor wrote on his own blog. “I see many opportunities ahead, and have wanted to do more with the blog for a long time, but have often been constrained by time. As anyone who knows me can tell you, working on the blog was always a passion, but was never my fulltime job. I was hired by the Globe over five years ago as a Web Developer, and part of the agreement to let me run the Big Picture was that I kept doing the other web development that needed to be done. I agreed to that arrangement, and tried my best to make it work, but in the end, it was often unworkable – one or the other job would suffer when there were crunch times.

“I wanted the opportunity to do this – telling news photo stories – as a fulltime job, and the Atlantic has offered that to me, for which I am grateful.”

Kottke.org comments: “Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transistion from print to online/app media. As for The Globe, well, I don’t think they quite knew what they had there. Eight million page views per month out of nothing with a less-than-maximal effort…that’s the kind of thing you want to encourage if you’re in the media business.”