A Man Can’t Live on Image Credit Alone
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
The market isn't being "eroded" by people giving away their work. The market was "eroded" by the fact that there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in the U.S. alone who are now skilled enough to regularly take what were once considered "professional" level photographs. There is simply too much supply.
If you want to blame someone, blame Canon and Nikon and Olympus and Sigma. Blame capitalism for giving us such unprecedented wealth that huge swaths of the population now have free time to study, scout, take, edit, and publish photos. Don't blame the artists.
So the challenge is getting to a higher level of professional skill that you can break off from the pack. That's harder to do now, as you're not making alot of money during the learning process.
I'm what you call a serious amateur photographer. I make images because I love the process of creating and sharing art. Telling me that I shouldn't ever share my work because it erodes the value of others who have an entirely different motive is borderline price-fixing.
If you, as an established professional, can't compete with hobbyists and newcomers trying to break in, then you might need to find a different business model.
Why is that?
1. The amount of money offered for the author's work
2. Imploring others to not take "lowball" offers in order to preserve a certain pricing/business model.
Regarding #1: Everyone is allowed to make any kind of offer, and the author is free to refuse them, just as he did. Photography is a business, and everyone is trying to make a deal to make a buck. If Coke offered $100, that's their prerogative, and it's up to the author to either haggle up higher, or refuse them flatly.
Personally, I see no reason why the author was so offended -- the emails weren't rude, they weren't demanding, and the email person "L" was almost apologetic for having only $100 to spend. Since I don't know what company this is, we cannot make assumption on why the author thinks they will sell the calendars for $12.99 (although, there are religious undertones, and my suspicion and speculation is that they will not sell these at a huge profit as the author believes)
Regarding #2, that's been covered well. If I want to sell my software at $0.99 per app and it undercuts the competition, great. We saw iOS developers complain that the $0.99 games are undercutting their profits, but it turned out to be a sustainable model. It's not my problem if I give my photos (or product) away for free and undercuts his model.
Something similar did happen to me. An ad agency found a photo* I had taken and wanted to use it in a campaign. I usually give things away to non-profits, but this was going to be a large-scale thing for a major drug company. I asked what price the person thought was fair and we settled on a reasonable price. Maybe I was lowballed? I don't know and don't really care. It was more than $100, though.
I didn't set a nonzero price just because I wanted to protect other artists ability to make money off of their work, I set a price because I thought it would be cool to have some extra money to buy some new camera gear.
* The picture in question: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martincron/2208026093/in/set-72...
I wonder how hard it would be to negotiate a deal where the photos are given for free, but with a caption or footnote pointing to the photographer's website. That would make the calendar the best advertisement he has had in years. People are going to be staring at his photos all year long!
The way to succeed in the marketplace is to make something distinctive worth paying for, not to lash out at other people who give stuff away for free.
Also, a simple "image credit: Person X" doesn't have to imply that the work was done for free. A potential client doesn't need to know how much previous portfolio pieces cost.
As would all of the newspaper classified ad salespeople, VHS tape manufacturers, blacksmiths, haberdashers, etc.
I see where you're coming from, and it's a valid perspective, although I don't know how realistic it is. All of the attempts to stabilize skills/wages seem to lead to guilds/cartels which keep prices artificially high and harm innovation.
If anything, this economic reality makes the case for a strong social safety net. If someone's livelihood is profoundly disrupted by technology, they should be given a meaningful opportunity to retrain and/or pivot onto something workable without suffering complete and total financial (or physical, in the case of losing one's health care) ruin.
You see I am pissed that I don't have my flying care and robotic servant already. I want progress and will take whatever stability that is necessary to do that.
That's basically how one of the Creative Commons licenses works. It's a valid choice for photographers, but not the only choice.
And at that time the photographers would properly choose credits over nothing at all.
I just pictured a violent "photographer's guild" gang, riding across the countryside on their penny-farthing bicycles in matching vests and destroying the cameras and/or memory cards of those who would dare try to undercut them.
Edit: just for those who don't remember, here's the epic Bill Gates incident from the dawn of the software industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
The Bill Gates thing is a bit different. He was explicitly selling copyrighted works and other people were copying and/or re-selling that. He never tried to discourage people from making their own software and giving it away for free.
It makes sense that the best way to get work in certain fields is to have a reputation. Sometimes the best way to get that reputation is to give away a certain portion of your work.
Bill Gates Selling software = great!
Linus Torvalds giving software away = great!
Bill Gates (or anyone) telling Linus Torvalds (or anyone) not to give software away for free = lame!
Just because someone chooses to make a fun activity in to a job does not mean that person deserves to get paid for it. If they are not delivering economic value, they don't get paid. I cannot go in to my office and decide that I would rather sit around talking to people than putting in real work which adds value and expect to make my salary.
There are types of photography that do pay OK, mainly wedding and event photography. The reason they pay more is because the photographer needs to be contracted to capture a specific image at a specific time. If you decide to be a landscape artist you are competing with every image made ever. This is not a good competitive position to be in and why people will give away their work for free.
Photos are Rivalrous and Excludable as long as the photographer protects them by not posting full sized images or using watermarks. (see iStockphoto).
I do associate value with that property, but that property is limited in value, not due to it not being rivalrous and excludable, but rather because of substitutes.
As an artist, you now have to think very carefully about how to price your work. If you believe your work is of exceptional quality, then by all means, price above the market. Likewise, if you believe your work appeals very specifically to a segment that's willing to pay X price, then go with X price and target that niche. If, on the other hand, your work is fairly generic, of average quality, or generally nothing special to any special groups of people, then making a living as an artist is going to be tough for you. Your choices are to price it to market (which may be $0), or differentiate substantially (enough to bear a nonzero price).
Practically speaking, moral arguments on either side are somewhat irrelevant. Instead, what matters is the artist's positioning relative to everyone else. Today, more than ever, you'll have to make yourself special -- or specialized -- if you want to earn a decent living.
The photographer can do the same by either a) take photos amateurs can't or won't take or b) take photos to order.
FOSS is a foot in the door -- how many of us get consulting contracts or even FT jobs implementing or managing that FOSS? FOSS doesn't run itself, unlike a photo that anyone can ship over to snapfish or uprint.
He gets it. The market is saturated, economics 101 says that will drive the price down, in extreme situations the price is close to 0, the mistake many photographers make is to believe that their skill (and they should stop using the word "art" if they are selling, it would be really useful to frame the situation) is still so unique that deserves an imagined level of compensation.
Photographers should understand that if they want to make a living it will be thanks to the value added on top of taking photographs, making good photographs is not enough, lots of people can now do that, and most importantly, the market is global and cruelly efficient.
The article's poster talks like if the digital photography revolution hasn't happened, people that have not managed to sell value added to potential clients should realize that the first thing in the road to charging something is recognition, which is what the guy of the calendars was offering (how many of you can boast to have had they pictures published in 20000 calendars? That would look great on a CV and would help you in the differentiation from the mass of photographers struggling to make a living from their skill).
You are saying below that they can offer compensation, and that is entirely missing the point, as much as I would like to charge $1000 for each picture I take (set your price, the principle is the same) I know there are hundreds, perhaps thousand of chums out there that would like to take half that, one third of that or less.
It is funny that you try to use an example below about restaurants without considering the whole picture: qualified chefs, waiters, etc. working in a fancy restaurant are not a dime a dozen, they also will use ingredients which are demonstrably scarce, that is the reason you can't walk there and set your price.
Photographers are not in that happy position just by the virtue of their photographs: any photo website, trade magazine (of which are many, yet another hint about the vulgarity of taking pictures nowadays) should be teaching a lesson to anybody holding a camera: your skill is now a commodity, and as such the first step to make a living out of it is brand recognition, which is what was in offer...
Once your name is Testino or some other person that is immediately recognizable and iconic, then yeah, feel insulted, before that? Be grateful....
Countless companies run on $0 open-source software. Its responsible for a large amount of the constant innovation happening. And there are still people making a profit on software, quite obviously. It is not destroying a market, it is setting the bar higher for entry.
There's nothing broken with the market, it's the business model that needs to be fixed. And by fixed, I mean scrapped and replaced by models not dependant on selling non-scarce goods.
I am often surprised how little sympathy photographers get in places like HN. Yes, it is way easier to take photographs as the cost of learning has dropped significantly. But that doesn't mean that there aren't photographers who make great pictures and should get paid, especially if the company that wants to use it is a big enough company to have a budget to sell 20,000 calendars.
I disagree with the notion though that anyone can reproduce the photos he took (assuming the header image is one he did take) without investing a significant amount of time and resources into learning about photography. It's not as though he went into the mountains, waited for near sunset and then snapped the photo and went home. It obviously took some degree of planning and effort to do. I like to think I'm at least a decent photographer but I can tell you that even though I have equipment that was probably unimaginable in the 90s, I'm far from being able to take pictures of that kind of quality.
I know most software developers _hate_ it when clients quote them something like $100 to redesign an online store and I hear this argument all the time: "If the programmer in some third world country can do it for $100, why can't you? That's what the market bears."
Because what you're giving them at least (hopefully) is some quality engineering and your previous experiences that is worth more than what the $100 that other developer is charging.
If that company doesn't want to pay $X for the photographer's picture, it's very simple, they don't have to use it.
If a client doesn't want you to pay $Y for an online store, they don't have to hire you.
I don't get why there is always a big backlash against the photographer in these articles who are trying to make some money just like the rest of us. It's not as though he is scamming anyone.
I believe that it is because they often close by exhorting everyone not to give away photos for free, or sell them for third world prices. They assert that hobbyists and part-timers are at fault for destroying the careers of those photography professionals that rely on image sales to put food on the table.
Just as you are free to decline a $100 offer, I should be free to accept it. Similarly, you should be free to attempt to persuade potential clients that your $1000 service or item is ten times as good as my $100 service or item.
What is inappropriate is if you tell me that I shouldn't charge $100 because you're trying to make $1000 out of the deal.
This is what I don't get. The budget for the images— the reason people would buy the calendar in the first place— was so outrageously low.
It sucks that the professional media industry (including film studios, journalists, record labels, broadcasters, photographers, magazine publishers, etc.) no longer have the control and fat margins of yesteryear. It's a new world. Evolve with it, find a niche, or move on.
That's essentially one of the main problems flattr is trying to solve. Shure, for now it works best online but that will change. I didn't find a real timeline of who flattred what, but this is close: <https://flattr.com/explore>. It's basically a list which answers his question, these are all pieces of work of somebody, and they are receiving money from their 'viewers' after the fact, just because they liked it.
Well, I'm not in any business that has much need of the kind of photography you find in a calendar or on a urinal cake. But if I were, then yeah, if I saw a really nice photo in a calendar, I might give the photographer a call.
Also, if I were a photographer building a portfolio, I might be happy to have a calendar with my work in it, alongside proof that it was indeed my work.
That's not to say that people who want free stuff in exchange for publicity aren't going to overstate the value of that publicity, of course. As a general rule, if someone offers to give you X in exchange for Y, they are probably going to try to get you to think X is worth more than it is, that Y is worth less than it is, or both.
[1] http://shop.deviantart.com/?qh=product:gifts/calendars&u...
The biggest issue is that these a Christian theme calenders so they will be purchased by little old ladies who are afraid to use their credit cards on the internet, because the hackers might get it and steal their identity.
Just as journalists, photographers now start to see that what people paid for was actually distribution not for content.
Many people had SLRs in the 70s and 80s, but no access to the market or any exposure or any means to create large prints.
Now that the internet created a new market place and delivery plattform, the distribution part broke down.
At the same time those people are buying cheap stuff from Chinese factories. Perhaps someone tell the Chinese workers that they devalue the value of factory work.
But I'd guess it's only a problem if oneself is harmed.