Here are some great links for your Thursday!
- You can now apply for the Arts Writers Grant, which is “designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise.” Bloggers, authors, and “short-form” writers are all eligible for the $3K-$50K award (via Zoe Strauss)
- Speaking of Zoe Strauss (one of The Photoletariat’s favorite contemporary photographers), the “Zoe Strauss: 10 Years” retrospective, celebrating her career thus far and her incredible I-95 project, is slated for early 2012 at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Congrats, Zoe!
- A Photo Editor has a great article up this week with tips for young creatives, including, but not limited to “When you meet new people, remember Dale Carnegie.”
by Zoe Strauss
The right picture of a 20x200 tote could net you a $200 gift certificate.
A roundup of relevant photography-related stories from the web for you: [click to continue…]
Maximizing your stock photography shoots with variation helps increase your sales potential
Stock photography is a numbers game. The more images you have with an agency, or in your own files, the more chances you have to sell and make money. Having a diverse collection makes a big difference too, especially when it comes to photos of people, which, after all, is always the most marketable subject in nearly every agency.
Whether you’re a full time stock shooter or a if it’s only a small aspect of your overall photography business model, you’ll want to maximize every shoot so that you can get the most out of your time and monetary investment, which could include model fees, equipment, prop or location rentals and, most importantly, your own time. Your goal should be to produce the greatest number and highest variety of potentially sellable images as possible in your given time frame.
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Portable Photo Drives offer practical photo backup solutions for photographers on the road
As much as I enjoyed shooting film during my travels back in the day, hauling around all those gallon sized Ziploc freezer bags full of film canisters got to be kind of a pain. Especially after 9/11 when airport security procedures went into overdrive.
Shooting digitally while traveling presents different challenges, namely how to back up and store your images during your trip. Chances are, if you’re on a long enough trip, or if you tend to shoot a lot of images, which we all tend to do with digital, sooner or later, you’ll probably fill up all your cards. Then what?
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A number of years ago, I stumbled across a fun little book called A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. The book’s author, Roger von Oech, who runs a consulting firm that helps companies stimulate creativity and innovation in their businesses, defines the four main roles to creativity as follows:
The Explorer: The role that searches for new information.
The Artist: The role that turns information and resources into original ideas.
The Judge: The evaluative and critical role.
The Warrior: The role that puts the creative ideas into action. [click to continue…]
Following up on the post I wrote the other day about educating clients, I had another opportunity to put my words into practice today.
This morning, I found a message in my email inbox that was sent from a photo intern at a national magazine. I had recently submitted some images to fill a specific request that they had sent me a couple of weeks ago, and the intern had let me know that the magazine was considering my images. However, she informed me that they had a small budget and could only pay $100 per photo.
That’s right, $100. And not just for a spot or quarter page use, they were looking to go full page, maybe even a two-page spread in a publication that has circulation of about 40,000 readers. [click to continue…]
With the success of apps like Easy Release and Second Shootr, we continue to look at useful iPhone apps that are geared toward the pro photographer.
Photographer’s Contract Maker, by Canon instructor Michael The Maven, is an app that allows you to create, edit, sign and email single page photography contracts and releases right from your iPhone.
The app is somewhat like Easy Release, but it takes things a bit further by offering Model Releases, as well as Photo shoot contracts, Copyright Releases and Work for Hire contracts. Also, unlike Easy Release, Photographer’s Contract Maker allows you to edit the specific legal language of each contract type. Although the contracts in the app have been checked by lawyers, there might be instances and/or different States that necessitate slightly different wording for your specific needs or geographic regions. [click to continue…]
Let’s face it, as much as we all like to tout community and togetherness, human beings are inherently hard wired to be Us vs Them type creatures. We can’t escape it, our species is naturally predisposed to be wary of the other guy and his way of life. Since the dawn of man, we humans tend to gather in tribes of like minded individuals and look with suspicion on those who have different beliefs and customs, and whenever possible, we like to argue the merits of OUR way vs. THEIR way.
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