Disc or Not Disc

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy

As a photographer I’ve chosen to build into my portrait session the rights to print and and distribute the photos I make for my customers as they see fit with a few exceptions.  These exceptions are that they must attribute me as the photographer, they cannot sell or license the photos for commercial purposes, and they they shouldn’t print the photos over an 8×10 in size.  I’m quite comfortable with my decision to do this and I’ve found it to be very helpful to my business.  But the other day I ran across post by another photographer which I’ve paraphrased as so obscure the source, but I’ll still put it in quotes.  Actually the whiny tone is very much evident in their post and I’ve done my best to keep it in there.

“People want to know why I don’t offer CDs as part of my session fee:

1. When I have given a disc in the past people take them to be printed to places I don’t recommend.  These places produce bad photos and they make my work look bad.

2.  I only allow them to print up to an 8×10, but they print bigger anyway.  The larger prints is the way all photographers support their families.

3. People give the digital photos to their friends and their friends print them as well, this ins’t right.

4. I spend a lot of time on these photos and print sales is how all photographers make their money.  I have reasonable print prices and I don’t know why people want to print photos any other place.”

I feel that the role of the photographer has changed drastically in the past few years.  Everyone has a camera with them pretty much everyday, all day.  So getting the family together for a picture is easy.  It may not be great, but it captures the moment.  So what can we do as photographers to stand out?  We have to be more customer service oriented and for portrait photography this is how I stand out.

1. I offer an enjoyable hassle free photo session.  The client knows the cost up front and there are no hidden costs beyond that.  That doesn’t matter if I work at an hourly rate or for a fixed session price.

2. You get a disc with all photos from the session sized for up to an 8×10 print and set to the standard sRGB color profile that most printers use.

3. You get a directory on the disk that is what I consider to be the best photos of the session.  I spend a little more time with those photos and may apply some effects to them like conversion to black and white or sepia tone.  If you don’t agree, well you have the other photos in the other directory.

4.  I print a few photos at an 8×10 size, so you don’t have to have to go some place to have them printed, just to get a photo to hold and hang.

5. You have the rights to print and post the photos.  I give the customer a signed form that releases those specific rights.  I do tell them some of the best places to get them printed if they choose to have more printed.  They also understand that the photos have been sharpened and adjusted for a maximum 8×10 print.

6. I also make them aware that if they wish to print a larger photo (which is becoming increasingly rare) that I will rework the original image and send it to a lab that will maintain the color calibration I’ve set.

7. And finally I have a directory of the best photos sized and screen sharpened for Facebook or other similar online photo sharing service.  This is the best way to get new customers and remind your current customers what you do.

I protect my work through the following things: I do give my photos a look they can’t easily achieve without an understanding of photography beyond a casual photographer.  I entertain them during their session.  I teach them some ways to make better photos on their own.  I don’t have to spend a lot of time “selling” prints so I just get paid to go and have some fun and make new friends without having to push that large expensive print to justify all of my time.  All in all I spend about half the time I used to in the film days.  I make about the same amount.  I spend more time behind the camera and less time trying to sell.  I have extremely happy customers that love my work and tell their friends.  I get spontaneous positive reviews on various sites and they don’t try to stretch the boundaries I’ve set, because they get what they want.  They can print that one photo they want to hang on the wall, print the 3-4 smaller photos for their scrapbook, share the session with their friends around the world through an online service.

I know some will say that this is what destroys the industry and others will say that it’s s very astute observation.  Where do you fall on that scale?

What do you do with your old photos?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Philosophy

This question comes up a lot and with my recent backup array issue, it came up again.  In most cases your older photos aren’t the most spectacular photos you ever produced.  I dare say 90-95% of them you could easily label as garbage… but they are your garbage.  A couple of months ago some of Ansel Adams’ early negatives were found at a garage sale and have been reported to be worth over 200 million.  I doubt that’s truly the case since a lot of Ansel’s magic was in the darkroom creating the print.  It’s his early work, and wasn’t worth anything to him while he was alive, but it’s worth something to someone else now.  The same holds true for your photos, they will be worth something to someone in the future.

I know how devastating it is to lose a lot of photos, with a previous girlfriend going psycho on me and selling my camera equipment and burning all my photos and negatives.  So I have little to show from my film days.  This has made me paranoid in the digital age so I have backups of backups.

A little perspective

As a casual photographer in the earlier years of digital.  My Olympus cameras D360 and D40 spanned 7 years of usage.  In that time I produced 12,488 photos for a whopping total of 11GB worth of space with those cameras.  I had gotten a DSLR a while before they were retired, but I still used them for family and fun photos since they were convenient. Now, when I do a day of shooting I often produce 12-20GB of images.  Yes it’s much fewer files that are much larger, but if you look at it from an image mass point of view, 11GB is not a lot.

Organization

A long time ago I decided to store all my photos by date.  So today’s folder would be 20100902.  I do have several folders I put these in, so any work for my business goes in it’s own folder, artistic photography, family, and specialty projects all have their own top level folders so I can easily find them without the need for an image management program. I’ll also append a name or description of the folder so it’s not just a date but a date and a name.  This way if the new image manipulation killer app comes out tomorrow, I can easily add my library with little fear.

I know it’s now time for me to embarrass myself.  Since I posted my first digital photo, I’ll post a photo from my last day of shooting with my Olympus D40.   It happened to be at the circus.

Whatever happened to those cameras?  My Son and daughter got ahold of them and continued to use them for about 2 more years before they go so inoperable the became the subject of “I wonder what’s inside of one of these things” dismantling experiments.  Now my 4-year-old son uses my first DSLR.

Bottom line

There’s no real reason not to keep old photos.  I dare say in a couple of years you’ll be able to easily carry around your entire photo library, much like I can easily carry around my 7 years of using those two Olympus point and shot camera photos on 16GB flash drive with room to spare.

The Photography Tip of the Week #076

Posted by Philip in General, Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Why Watermark?

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy

I’ve been asked on multiple occasions and quite often several times a week, why don’t I watermark my images.  The images I put on this website are licensed with the Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution licenses.  Which basically says you can take it, use it, reuse it as long as you don’t make money with it but give me some credit as the original artist.  But some of my  photography does get a watermark and that is generally hosted on my Zenfolio site.  These are photos I want to sell as artwork to help pay for the bills and a watermark is justified, I just wish I had a little more control on how and where the watermarks are placed.

Reasons to not watermark:

1. Watermarks are annoying and distracting to the image.
2. If someone wants to “steal” the image, they can likely remove the watermark anyway.
3. Automatic watermarking is often not well placed on the image, so you have to spend time to manually watermark.
4. The image may not hold specific value and you just want to share it.

Reasons to add watermarks:

1. A watermark is a notification that the image is protected under a copyright.
2. Watermarking is part of showing your brand.  (Actually thats were the term came from, branding your property.)
3. If someone does take the image and forward it to someone else, they will see it and go to your site based on your watermark.
4. There is also a notion that adding a watermark makes you appear professional.  I don’t know if I agree with this or not.

Some people may think that those that don’t watermark are saying that they don’t care about their photography and their art.  Other may think that those who watermark are snobs and control freaks.  Both of these may be true.  But I prefer to look at it this way, when I don’t watermark I’m being generous and wanting to share what I do freely but when I do watermark I’m asking for a bit of respect and consideration.

Which camp do you fall in, do you or do not watermark and why?

The Photography Tip of the Week #075

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Technique, Podcast

That’s a Sweet Brick Wall

075 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

There are many things in life that have a sweet spot and photography is no exception.  For this tip I’m interested in the sweet spot of your lens, specifically which aperture is the sharpest all around. It’s a very simple test and only requires a few minutes with each lens you want to test.  I call this the brick wall test.  You don’t have to use a brick wall, as long as you use something that has lots of detail.  Some people will put a newspaper on the wall, but I prefer to do this outside and newspaper blows around very easily.  So here’s my setup:

1. Use a tripod about 10 feet or 3 meters away from the wall, because you want all of your images to be almost exactly the same.
2. Set ISO to 100 or 200 and shoot during a sunny day.
3. Aperture priority mode.  Shutter speed doesn’t affect your sweet spot.  You will start with either your largest or smallest aperture and photograph the exact same image on each aperture setting.
4. Autofocus.  It shouldn’t matter how the focus is set since you aren’t moving the camera, but if you must set it, just center focus will be fine.
5. Using a cable release would be nice, but not overly necessary.

Once you’ve made all your images, load them up in a program where you can look at the centers of each image at 100%.  This becomes a value judgment on your part.  Cycle through the images until you determine which one is the sharpest.  Since you have locked down most all the variables and the only variation is the aperture you should be able to determine which f-stop is the sweet spot.

Here’s the images of various apertures side by side from my test.  As you can see they could all be the same image.  There is very little difference in coloring and overall look.  You can be fairly certain that the only measurable difference now is just the aperture.

Now let’s look at a section of the images at 100%.  You can see that f8.0 is noticeably sharper than either f4.5 or f22.  I’ve scrutinized over all my aperture settings for this lens and know that f8.0 is the sharpest or the sweet spot.

With this knowledge you now know that if you want to get sharper images, you will want to get that aperture as close to your sweet spot as possible and adjust your other settings to match.

The Photography Tip of the Week #074

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Keep it firm

074 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

It’s time to check your camera, even though it’s working just fine.  Your lenses are clean, there is no dust on the body and your strap is secure.  But there is another thing you may need to check… the firmware.  Firmware is the software that runs inside your digital camera.  From time to time the camera manufacturer will post updated software (or firmware) for your camera.  These updates often include speed enhancements, new features and sometimes fixes to the way the images are processed.  In short there is generally no reason to not upgrade the firmware.

No image with this tip

So take a moment to go to your camera manufacturer’s website and see if there’s a firmware update for your camera model.  If you don’t know where to go just search on “firmware update cameramodel” where the cameramodel is the model of your camera.  They will have detailed instructions on how to check what version you have so you can see if your camera needs updating or not as well as how to perform the update.  In most cases the update is as simple as putting a file on a newly formatted memory card.  You put it in your camera with a fully charged battery and it does it’s magic.  Having a fully charged battery is very important.  You don’t want the camera to lose power part way through the update cycle.  In some cases you can just connect the camera to your computer and update directly without transferring to a memory card.  It really is that simple.

One thing you may have to do after the update is to change the date and time and any other user specified information like your copyright info or special settings. So don’t update your firmware right as you are heading out the door for your next photo session.  Pick a nice afternoon when you have plenty of time.  It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to perform the update, but I find that I like to use the time afterwards to look through the menus and see what new functions and abilities are buried within.