Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman use both photography and video to tell stories for editorial and commercial clients. 
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Keep this in mind the next time you’re pricing your work.
Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.
“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.
“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.
“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”
To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”
Read more on charging by the project or the hour.
The ASMP Strictly Business Blog will be one worth watching.
If you’re not already scrape those pennies together and become a member. I’m not myself, but plan to jump aboard soon. Word has it a new website and revised find a photographer section is in the works for ASMP too.
I blogged about the idea of making money doing what you love awhile back. If you haven’t yet check out that first post called Making Money Doing What You Love?
I recently came across this post on ArtsHub called It’s the Business: creativity in action that got me thinking about that old post and the idea of making money from photography.
The quote below is from the creativity in action article and sums up what I think every photographer faces at some point in the early stages of their career. It’s that point where photography is no longer a hobby, but a passion. You live it, breathe it and dream it. It’s you, but soon the reality of making a living from it sinks in.
Most of us feel there’s a conflict between doing what we love and being paid. I talk about the two beliefs that most have us have grown up with, 1: to earn money you have to sell your soul to some extent and do something you don’t particularly enjoy, or 2: you can do something you love, something meaningful to you, but you shouldn’t expect to get paid very well for doing that, if at all. That’s the conflict many people face: do I work for love, or do I work for money? And my work is very much about a third way, which is about how to work for love and money.
So what do you do?
The conflict for many people can be that they feel that they’re artists rather than entrepreneurs, and I think you can have both identities – I see myself very much as an artist, a creative person, but I’m also an entrepreneur and my business is a vehicle for my creativity. I don’t see that there needs to be a conflict between being entrepreneurial and being artistic – they often go hand in hand. The business is the vehicle for the creativity. It’s about having different aspects of ourselves, having the artist within us but also having the entrepreneur and the businessperson within us as well. And when we can bring all those parts together we can find the people that want what we do.
If you can serve people with your art, if there are people out there who would love your art and they’re not finding you, or you’re not finding them and you’re not making money, then everybody loses.
Nick brings up the dreaded B word for creatives; business. If there has ever been a time for photographers to think as entrepreneurs now is the time. It’s time to ween ourselves off the old models and become our own vehicles.
Most appealing is Nick’s third option of working for love and money. But how do you do that? If you’re a photojournalist the default answer is usually by shooting weddings. If you don’t enjoy weddings then it’s time to get brainstorming.
Quickly the word “sell out” comes to mind as you brainstorm for ideas to keep your passion alive. Maybe passion should not even be associated with money?
And what if you don’t have an interest in business? David addresses that:
Well, the first question is to decide whether you want to be in business at all. It’s possible to be creative outside the business arena, as a leisure interest, for example. But once you decide that you do want to be in business, then inevitably you will have to deal with issues such as marketing, finance, etc. Initially you won’t have enough money to outsource those things, but I think it’s quite good training to do these things yourself for a while anyway, because it forces you to understand how the business works economically. Even when the business gets big enough to outsource that side of things, you should still keep an overview on it – it’s dangerous to abdicate all of that to someone outside the business.
David moves on to talk about success:
Firstly, define what you mean by success – it could be a mixture of financial success, creative challenges, recognition, job satisfaction, quality of life, etc, and that formula will be different for everyone. Define what you mean by success, don’t let others define it for you, and know where you want to go
What does success mean to you? I’m slowly learning to use my own gauge. A few years ago success would of meant winning in photo contests, being published in big name publications, etc. Today those things mean very little. I won’t say it doesn’t matter some because it does, but it doesn’t weigh on me. I’m still very passionate about being a photographer, but I’m learning to channel that energy in ways that are far more meaningful and productive to me.
The photo bubble we live in can be all consuming at times. Don’t forget to look outside it.
Just remember you grow as a photographer when you grow as a person. Want to become a better photographer? Start by being a better person. It’s something we all can work on myself included.
Taking a break from transcribing video interviews and came across this article on procrastinating.
Thought you might enjoy it too.
How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci
A few quotes:
If Leonardo seemed endlessly distracted by his notebooks and experiments — instead of finishing the details of a painting he had already conceptualized — it was because he understood the fleeting quality of imagination: If you do not get an insight down on paper, and possibly develop it while your excitement lasts, then you are squandering the rarest and most unpredictable of your human capabilities, the very moments when one seems touched by the hand of God.
Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity; mediocrity is completely predictable. It doesn’t make the powerful and self-satisfied feel insecure. It doesn’t require freedom, because it doesn’t do anything unexpected. Mediocrity is the opposite of what we call “genius.” Mediocrity gets perfectly mundane things done on time. But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. You cannot produce a work of genius according to a schedule or an outline
And here’s my favorite quote from the article:
Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.
I think at this point we all could benefit from remembering why we entered this profession. What if you put away the stress of worrying about your job for a day? Or put that to-do list off and just did what you wanted to do? What if you took photos that you actually wanted to take rather than those boring photos the business section expects? It’s easy to fall into the mundane routine of life as you work to make a living. Not sure about you, but I need to spend less time worrying about things out of my control and get back to my roots. Sure everybody needs to eat just don’t forget to feed your soul in the process.
If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.
I’ve been impressed lately with how liveBooks is sharing their knowledge and resources with the photo community. They’re doing a wonderful job of advancing the knowledge of this craft for photographers young and old.
It’s a brilliant move from a marketing point. They establish themselves as experts in their niche and in the process create a loyal following. I know if I was in the market for website I’d give liveBooks some serious thought based simply on how proactive they are in reaching out to and helping photographers.
Check out the new liveBooks blog called RESOLVE There’s some great content there already and I’m sure it’ll only get better.
On their main website they also have an archive of of webinars that cover a slew of photo related topics.
Here is a small sampling of what they offer:
What if Everything Your Have Been Taught About the Marketing of Creativity is Wrong? Part 1
Host: Ian Summers
Estimating Those Jobs: How to Properly Bid
Hosts: Amanda Sosa Stone & Suzanne Seaze
The Importance of Building an Enviable Brand
Hosts: J Sandifer and Emile Sommer
You may have already read this article on the nytimes from APhotoEditor, but I think it’s worth repeating. It rings home with the same tone of this old post One day we’ll all just be amateur photographers?
Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.
It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.
The quote below is what we all need to be thinking of. Now is the perfect time to play to and fail. Will you make money from it? Maybe not, but that’s what the day job is for right?
At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.
I was reading Erik Lunsford’s blog tonight called Uncommons (great blog) and he pointed to the World Press Magazine ENTER.
There I found this article by Simon Norfolk that addressed the question of how photographers will market their work over the next five to ten years and ultimately make a living from photography.
It was probably one of the more poignant reads on the idea of making money with photography that I’ve read in awhile.
Everyone keeps reassuring me there’s a place for photography in the future, which I don’t doubt. My only question is what business model(s) will surface that will pay for that photography?
Here’s a few choice quotes from the article:
So my predictions for the future? More “name” photographers will be cashing in their reputations to teach “masterclasses” to wealthy orthodontists.
None of us will be saying “no” to wedding photography or lucrative teaching posts which sell to young students the rarely-realized dream that they’ll one day have jobs as photographers.
Soon we’ll all be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that we don’t tell our colleagues about. We need to get over the snobbery attached to that.
And we have to be tougher in our demands. Magazines online will be built by re-skilled photography lovers around business plans that don’t include paying wages to the photographers they ask to write.
They pay salaries to each other, they pay the man who comes to fix the photocopier, but the “name” photographers they ask to contribute six hundred words get nothing. With business models like that, how can we survive?”
I’ve been spending a little time flipping through the PDFs of the ASMP Bulletins. It’s published quarterly and you can download issues dating all the way back to 1997. Pretty sweet.
Each issue is worth peaking at since everyone has little nuggets sprinkled throughout especially for those of us dealing with freelance photography.
As someone about to embark on his first email campaign I found the E-Mail Promos: Do They Work? article a nice read that you can find in the Spring 08 issue.
Also of interest to the photojournalists out there is the article in the Winter 08 issue about Marketing for Photojournalism. Nothing you probably don’t know or haven’t already read, but it’s still worth noting.
The article does end with a quote from Scott McKiernan that’s worth repeating now that the photo contest season is upon us:
The only competition any photographer has is him or herself.
As more and more of us enter the realm of freelance photography you’ll undoubtedly come across people who absolutely love your work. All is good until they introduce the catch. They can’t afford to pay for it.
A credit line doesn’t pay the rent.
This post entitled When to Work for Nothing on the Shifting Careers blog on the NY Times sums it up nicely:
It doesn’t matter if you’re a dog walker, a Web designer or a tax preparer. When you agree to work free, you reinforce people’s misguided ideas that the self-employed are independently wealthy hobbyists. Don’t degrade your profession by letting a cheap client take advantage of you.
This recent article in the NY Times called Transforming Art Into a More Lucrative Career Choice made for a nice read on being an artist, but not a starving artist.
Some artists have begun to figure out ways to make money and make art — aiming to end the notion that “starving” and “artist” are necessarily linked.
The photo community has gotten into the mix too including Jen Beckman with her 20×200 project. Fellow OU alum Susana Raab also took matters into her own hands and is selling a catalog/zine of her images for 20 bucks to further fund her projects. Alec Soth’s latest adventure is a self-published newspaper called The Last Days of W. Those are just three examples that come to mind. I’m sure there are plenty more. If you know of others please do share.
In many ways this all reminds me of the notion of having 1000 true fans. (That article is a nice read to get yourself thinking outside the box when it comes to funding your work.)
The concept goes like this:
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
1000 fans might be a stretch for this guy. Only if I could adopt another 999 moms and I’d be on my way.
As the editorial and newspaper market continues to dwindle we as photographers need to be thinking of alternative ways to fund our projects and make a living. In many ways it’s a great way for photographers to take total control of their work and make a meaningful connection with those who enjoy their photographs. It also becomes even more incentive to be working on a personal project for yourself.
Clear your head. Breathe slowly. Dream. Create.
In many ways I feel like I’m just starting out with photography again. Everything feels fresh. I have no idea where I’m going beyond I know I love the process; the journey. Find that love again and you just might find yourself with 1000 fans in the process.
I’m sure like me you didn’t get into this because you loved newspapers or magazines. If you’re like me you got into this because you love people and that will never die.
Something for our minds to think about as we work off the pie and turkey.