Freelancers and Microstock are killing "real" photographers...

I am a little behind on posting here lately. I was hoping to get into the habit of posting weekly or at the least, once per month. That isn't happening and I have been beating myself up over it. Then I read a friends comments one day and the lack of posting stopped bothering me. He said, and I can't remember his exact words, but they were along the lines of "if I have enough time to blog often, I must not be a very good or a very busy professional photographer. That or I am wasting precious time I could be practicing my craft."

As a freelance photographer, that is still working a full-time job to collect a pay check, while trying to work into a full-time photography career this is something I hear all too often from the elitist "pro" photographers. Either my freelance prices are too low or the fact that I upload to a microstock web site, I am some how taking food off of their plate.

What I often hear is either "you're devaluing photography for the rest of us" or "you're taking from my livelihood". I say hog wash! You need to either get with the (economic) times or work harder to get what you want. Just because I don't work at this full-time yet and I haven't "mastered" the craft (will we really anyway? There is always something new to learn!) doesn't mean I don't work hard and provide a value to the clients I serve.

Let's start with freelancing, I don't give my work away, but I also can't expect to go out there with my minimal portfolio and expect to charge one thousand dollars for a shoot either. I seriously doubt if someone is worried about me stealing "their" clients, from the client list and the budgets I am currently shooting, that you are the pro you think you are any way. We all start somewhere and we all increase our prices over time. So if my shooting local youth baseball leagues, the occasional family portrait session or business headshot worries you, maybe it's you that needs to take a good hard look in the mirror to see what you can do to work harder or continue moving up the rungs of the ladder. Don't blame me for keeping you honest.

Let's move on to Microstock, because in reality this is the one that bothers me. When I hear someone that is charging a day rate of $600, $1,000 or more, what do they really care about someone shooting microstock. Yes, it means a lot of clients can find a photograph, vector image, sound or video clip cheaper than they used to be able to. I still doubt that  large clients will be turning to places like iStockphoto to purchase the images for their unique ads.

What microstock has done is opened up new avenues for the "free" magazines you find at a local grocery store, small businesses, churches and hobby clubs to purchase our photos instead of using Google and stealing them from our web site or Flickr accounts.

A good example of this is the company where I hold my full-time position. They are a small business and they don't have a large marketing budget. They know I am a photographer and they could pay me to set up shots that they need, but they prefer I work on projects for an actual client. Not to mention they only thing they are using photos for are proposals and corporate promo pieces... with no marketing budget, especially in the current economy, I can guarantee they aren't going to be spending $50 or more for one stock photo, let alone more.

An even better example of this is Overflow. Overflow is one of the small, local "free" magazines I mentioned earlier. I found out about Overflow last week when my wife picked up a copy leaving our local Publix grocery store. I picked it up from the counter and started reading it and it is a well done magazine. For a better description of the magazine, I took this comment from their web site "Overflow is Tampa Bay's FREE monthly Christian magazine that offers hope and shares the goodness of God through Jesus Christ."

What caught my eye next was some of the photos within the magazine. I had seen them before, I just couldn't place them. I looked for information on the photos and not surprisingly, photos in this issue had been purchased from twelve different iStock photographers. I contacted the staff of Overflow, first to thank them for using iStockphoto... you didn't think I would bash them did you?, I contribute to iStock. I also wanted to ask them a question I had already guessed the answer to... would it be possible to put this magazine together without the ability to buy photos from a microstock site.

I have been considering writing this blog post for a while, but had been putting it off because it is one we hear too often these days. Now I had a little more fuel and a lot more reasoning behind it.

New Business Cards Have Arrived

I ordered my new business cards from Moo.com the middle of last week. To my surprise, I got a phone call from my wife this afternoon to tell me they had already arrived... seriously? I asked her.

I thought she was kidding because she knew how excited I was to get these new cards. I wasn't expecting delivery of the cards until the end of the week. Needless to say I am very excited and even more pleased with the quality of these new cards.

Here is the info side of the cards, the back of the cards are 50 of my images (4 cards containing each image):

This is actually the design comp. so the grey outline represents the trim line so I knew where the bleed area of the purple would be trimmed.

My Portfolio Reaches 150 Photos

With the many photos being uploaded from the recent Mini Lypse, my iStockphoto portfolio has reached the 150 photo mark.

I'll admit, I am a bit behind on the number I wanted to have uploaded for the end of the year, but I am uploading at a more consistant pace these days.

We Have Models...

The wonderful inspectors over at iStockphoto are moving at lightning speed and my City Beautiful Lypse model photos are being inspected now.

Here is the first from the Lypse to be inspected and it was accepted:

Back from the"City Beautiful Lypse"

We are back from the City Beautiful Lypse, things have calmed down and we are back to life as usual... with 5 and 8 year old daughters, I can assure you, usual not normal is the correct term.

The first batch of processed photos from the mini lypse are now hitting the inspectors and three were accepted this morning. These are the non-model photos I uploaded while waiting on the model releases for the event to come back.

Here is the first image:

iStockphoto - Download #100

This morning I hit the century mark on downloaded photos at iStockphoto. With currently only 127 photos in my portfolio, I'm happy to hit download #100. Now just 150 more to go before I can become exclusive!

And here is lucky #100 - Role Play Dice

Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk

On July 18, 2009 photographers around the workd gathered for the Second Annual photowalk hosted by Scott Kelby, my wife and I included.

The were so many great locations to pick around the area we live in Florida, so I picked one in the city I thought that would be the most fun to photograph - St. Petersburg.

Our group gathered at 9am in Struab Park, directly across the street from the entrance to the Vinoy Resort. One of the problems with this mid-morning time slot became evident right away. Directly across from the park was the Marina... cool, I thought, until walking over to shoot... directly at the sun coming up in the east. :(

As we walked into downtown things picked up a little, but I still wasn't seeing anything too impressive. That is until we rounded a building and in a courtyard type opening was a large grass area and a HUGE waterfall. As you can see in the photo, the waterfall is several stories high, sits in the shade of two tall high rise buildings and even in the middle of the day was a nice cool spot to relax.

Further into downtown we came across the courthouse, which held some public artwork on the property surrounding it. The artwork was titled "Face The Jury" and was twelve red "chairs" decorating the yard of the courthouse.

#100 Accepted

With everything around here as hectic as it has been, I am a couple days behind on posting this, but I have finally had my 100th photo accepted into my iStockphoto portfolio.

Number 100 is this photo taken of my lovely daughter in her cap and gown from graduating her Tiny Tots program. Providing for her and her older sister are the whole reason I am working so hard these days.

In fact, as I post this, I just had four new photos accepted and I am currently sitting at 105 photos in my portfolio.

The BIG 5 - 0

Indeed it has finally happened, I have hit my 50th download on iStockphoto. I couldn't be happier about this image being my 50th, as it was taken as an experiment with the Alien Bees Ring flash to simulate a television that the two young girls were watching.

Thank you Zoe and Savannah for being such wonderful sports all weekend for our shoot together.

iStockphoto Image in Use

When shooting photography for iStockphoto and seeing your images sell, you often wonder where you photos are being used.

I had yet to find out where any of mine were being used, mainly because my portfolio on iStockphoto is still very small (82 photos with 40 downloads) in comparison to those that have been shooting stock longer or on a more full-time basis.

I found my first photograph in use this weekend, thanks to an e-mail from iStockphoto Administration. I had to read it twice to make sure I read it correctly.

My photo of a Bald Eagle sitting on a stump, shown here, was used in a cover design that is being submitted as one of iStock's Designer Spotlight Entries.

Needless to say, I am walking on cloud nine over this at the moment!