New England based Visual Storyteller

Tag: business

An impromptu course in design of web-sites for photographers

These days, all photographers, from commercial/documentary to portrait/fine-art, live and die by their web sites. That should mean that most websites for photographers would be built with the same goal, showing the photographer’s work to its best advantage. You also would think that an equally important goal would be making those same sites easy to navigate and very user friendly. Based on my recent experience reviewing 13 photographer’s web-sites, those assumptions would be largely wrong. Read More

Stock photography is dead, long live stock photography (Act 3 of 3)

This is the last of three posts exploring my perspective on the business of stock photography. Like so many blog posts, this started as a simple question from a friend, which I answered in part one. It morphed into something bigger because of what was happening in the larger world of stock photography. As I alluded to in the second in this series, the news is not good. In this entry, I explore how that same bad news is hurting me personally and harming our larger cultural collectively. Read More

Stock photography is dead, long live stock photography (Act 2 of 3)

This is the second of three posts explaining on my perspective on the business of stock photography. By way of background, I should say there is a reason I based the title of these entries on that famous quote about transitions within a monarchy when I wrote; “Stock photography is dead, long live stock photography.” The quote alludes to the idea that within a kingdom (and now within stock photography,) the old leadership and structure have ended but at the exact same moment, a new leadership and structure is already in place. Read More

Summer freedom

Summer time is supposed to be about relaxing and freedom from school/work. With that in mind, this post is going to be a bit more relaxed than some recent entries. I will mostly talk about the free things I have been taking advantage of recently. Read More

An aspiring photographer wrote me…

An aspiring photographer wrote me: “What advice might you give me on how to find opportunities (no matter how small), where I might find some interest in my work, or how to best focus my efforts.” Such a question leaves me wary because answering it takes away from what little time I have left between earning a living as a photographer and nurturing this site. As I pondered how to answer him, I realized the answer was really another blog post in the making. Read More

When Jeff Sedlik talks, people (better) listen

I am a dedicated daily reader of the online forums, APAnet and APAdigital. I was following a discussion thread in one of them when it came to an abrupt and final end. That was because, after all the talking around the subject, one person made a few succinct points that got to the heart of the topic and then, everyone finally “got it.” The writer was Jeff Sedlik and when he talks, people (better) listen. Read More

Teaching mastery, ethics and excellence, in business and/or photography.

I was discussing ethics and publication photography with a friend. We were e-mailing back and forth in the wake of the recent news of how the New York Times Magazine photos that were not supposed to be “photoshop-ped” actually were. He was joking that the only thing left was to ban digital cameras and force publication photographers back to using film. After laughing at the thought, we agreed that even that drastic a step would not make a difference. The history of photography is full of folks who exploited film’s perceived documentary nature to their own advantage. Read More

So you want to teach photography workshops?

A peer asked me how she could make money “teaching photography workshops as a business.” After picking myself up off the floor from laughing so hard, I gathered my thoughts and reflected on how I started teaching photography. Tracing the path I took from to aspiring instructor to veteran workshop teacher resulted in this blog entry. Read More