There are thousands of blog posts out there about how to succeed. “(Insert random prime number) Tips to Making Thousands of Yen in Photography”* … but not many on how to fail, very quickly, at being a professional. Paul Burwell, a wildlife shooter, has posted ten simple ways to completely screw-up your business model. Go read it, then don’t do it.
* For those curious, if someone offers you 1,000 Yen for an assignment this Sunday morning, that’s worth about $11.
Sorry, bad pun in the headline … but the New York Times‘ Brian Stetler has taken a look at how online advertising is booming – at least, those that are attached to online video.
He brings up that video is expensive, but doesn’t go into much detail on why, so let me hit a few points here:
- Gear is expensive. It’s not as pricey as pro-level still photo gear, but it’s still up there. You can’t do great video with a point-and-shoot style camcorder. You have to be able to control the audio, exposure and focus at a high level.
- Software and hardware is expensive. iMovie is great, but it won’t work for much more than basic editing. And that $500 laptop you’re tempted to buy your visual staff? Don’t. Unless you’re printing your newspaper on the inkjet printer you got for free with your home computer, you need real hardware. Can you run Final Cut Pro or Avid on an iMac? Yep. Would you want to? I don’t know – waiting two hours for a breaking news video to render so you can then upload it and wait for it to transcode seems, well, like a breaking point.
- Hosting is expensive. Video sucks up a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth costs money – lots of money.
- Time is expensive. Shooting and editing takes a lot of time. More than you’d ever imagine. An expert video editor needs, I am told, a minimum of one hour to edit one minute’s worth of video output. And that assumes the video was shot by an expert – meaning all the pieces are there, sequences are there, matched action was shot correctly and the audio works. Drop the ball on any one of those pieces and that editing time balloons.
Should video be done? Yes. Should it be done on the cheap? No. Can you make money at it? Yep, as long as you understand what it costs.
Boston University’s Daily Free Press is in trouble, trouble similar to what many newspapers are facing. But, as a college daily, it has an entirely different issue – turnover. Every few semesters the staff cycles through and institutional memory vanishes.
I guess I’m bitter to the point of trying to be ironic … but, regardless, here’s another assessment of where journalism is and how it’s, well, expensive to do, this time from Mother Jones magazine.
Because make no mistake: This is a zero-sum equation. Less journalism = less accountability. Corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and propaganda thrive when reporting dies. That’s not a price we’re prepared to pay.
Every now and then, Mindy McAdams, Flash Goddess, writes something that makes me want to go enroll at the University of Florida so I can take her classes.
Of course, then I realize that my University of Georgia colleagues would execute me on Grady College’s front lawn and my alma mater, the really cool (okay, mostly frozen) Syracuse University wouldn’t look kindly on me changing my shade of orange …
Regardless, I’ve been thinking about online or digital portfolios the last few months, how to incorporate their construction into my classes. (And I’ve done it this semester with one class, though they haven’t realized it yet). But reading Mindy’s post about building a personal brand has me really rolling over those scattered ideas of the last few months, trying to link them into something useful. Something I can hand to my students, in some form, and help them make their digital mark on the world.
And it has me wondering what my digital portfolio looks like now, as I write in about eight different places, Twitter over here, photo blog over there … is it time for all of it to come under one roof? Do I blend the academic, automotive and visual sides of my life into one giant smoothie? Can I preach something I haven’t practiced?
A little video that tells us … well, a lot of what we already know. It does reinforce what we should be doing, though, which is handy.
I do wish it listed some ideas on things to try … it’s like you’re doctor telling you to exercise more. Um, okay … but where should I start?
A Case for Innovation from CoPress on Vimeo.
We all know the work – Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub full of milk, Demi Moore naked, painted and pregnant … the big advertising campaigns, the magazine cover shots … and it turns out she may lose the rights to all of those images next month.
We photographers are notorious for being great visualizers and lousy business operators – but to run up $24 million in debt? Eee gads …
So, there’s this whole legal wrangling going on about Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster – the Associated Press claims the illustration is based on one of their photographs. Except now the photojournalist who actually took the photo is claiming it isn’t AP’s – it’s his. This should be fun …
While many of our word colleagues are excited about the public release of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, I wouldn’t expect many to start deviating from the more widely used Associated Press Stylebook.
For us, though, there is a very nice page on what you can and cannot do with photographs. I’m still processing a few bits of it, but it’s a pretty strong general guide and may be something used in future classes.
