Publish Your Own Photo Book
Blurb.com is a website that lets you produce your own photo books in quantities as few as one. I’ve always wanted to publish a coffee table book and Blurb lets you do that without suffering the multiple indignities of receiving enough rejection slips from publishers to wallpaper your bathroom. The Blurb website lets you create many different sizes in hard cover with a dust jacket or softbound versions. The most important thing to...
Protecting Photography as Free Speech
Along with many other, including my friend Jack Neubart, I’ve written about encounters with law enforcement over making photographs in public places. It seemed like photography was being treated as a crime and photographers as terrorists and it also seemed that wee didn’t have any friends that could help until now. On January 2, 2015 Steve Stockman (R Texas) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives includes...
Change is the Name of the Game
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts—Albert Einstein (1879-1955) One of the advantages of being a small studio or a single entrepreneur is that you’re small enough to make a quick U-turn. One look at the bloated bureaucracy of a company like GM (“let’s kill Pontiac”) is that it takes too long to make changes in the way the company operates. Photographers can make a complete circle in less time and space than a Mini...
Which Form to Use and When?
Guest Post by Jason Anderson of Canon Blogger When starting a photography business, there is so much to consider that’s completely unrelated to photography and actually taking pictures. Topics range from financials to marketing, advertising, demographics, and the legalities of the business. If you don’t take measures to protect yourself and your business, things can get dangerous fast! It helps to have the help of an attorney...
Eliminating The Negative
Special Guest Post by Rohn Engh Through the years I’ve observed several marketing mistakes that emerging stock photographers make. Here’s a checklist of them, so that you can see what to avoid: Create First Then Find A Market. This is a recipe for disaster. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams is strewn with bodies of creative people who never learned: “Find the market first and then create for that market.”...
Business Friday: What They Don’t Teach You In School
“Life is too important to be taken seriously.”— Oscar Wilde Around the turn of the century, a piece of modern business mythology was born. The idea goes something like this: “The customer is always right.” Many small business owners, including photographers, adopted this principle as if it were the golden rule. And it worked—their customers, it was said, loved them. But some photographers did not make enough money to remain in...
The Social Media Dilemma
Guest Post by Rohn Engh The current buzz on social networks is whether we’re losing rights to our pictures by joining them? A quick answer is, no you won’t lose your copyright but will lose control over where you wanted your photos to appear before clicking the site’s “I AGREE” button. Google is the big dog so the other social networks follow their “fine print.” in what Google asked you to agree to. What does Google announce to us...
