Listen up, those of you working intensely on personal projects that have nothing to do with the world of commercial photography: Fotovisura is offering $2000 in cash and the opportunity to present a five -day workshop in Guatemala City at La Fototeca, to the winner for Outstanding Personal Photography Project, while $1000 is available to The Spotlight Grant for Outstanding Student Photography Project, and an invitation to join the Lucie Foundation. Other prizes include certificates at Beth Schiffer Pro Photo Labs, an inviation to publish in Visura Magazine, and a portfolio consultation.
The deadline for both categories has now been extended to November 1 and details on entry requirements and competition details can be found at www.grant.fotovisura.com. Judges include amongst others: legendary New York photographer Larry Fink, and James Estrin, photographer and co-editor of Lens Blog for the New York Times. [click to continue…]
Since 2008, Steve Mayes has been the managing director of VII, whose members include photographers such as James Nachtwey and Ed Kashi. In a career spanning over 25 years, Mayes has held a number of high profile positions including group creative director of Getty Images, CEO of Photonica, COO (Americas) for Image Source, creative director of Eyestorm.com, and director of the Image Archive at Art + Commerce. He is a frequent lecturer, writer, and has been Secretary to the Competition Jury of WordPress Photo since 2004.
Reuel Golden: Could you please tell us a little bit about VII’s mission and how it differs from other photo agencies?
Steve Mayes: VII derives its name from the number of founding photojournalists who, in September 2001, formed this collectively owned agency. Now owned by ten photographers and representing an additional fifteen Network affiliates plus nine developing talents in the Mentor Program, VII has expanded considerably but remains true to its core mission of using photography for positive change.
RG: Describe a typical working day. [click to continue…]
Daryl Lang, blogger, senior copywriter at ShutterStock, and (full disclosure here) a former colleague at PDN Online, was increasingly perturbed by the mounting public hysteria and opposition to the proposed plan for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan. Armed with a Canon PowerShot SD600, he spent a couple of hours one Sunday afternoon photographing the streets and storefronts operating near the supposed hallowed ground and posted them to his blog.
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Steve McCury/Magnum
Of all the different types of subject matter that photographers capture, most of us would probably agree that a compelling photo of a person intrigues us the most. Take Steve McCurry’s photo of the young Afghan girl that he shot in 1984, Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression era portrait of the Migrant Mother, or Oren Jack Turner’s portrait of Albert Einstein. Photographs like these have carried such strong visual impact over the course of decades that they have become some of the most powerful and recognizable images of our time. I’d wager to say that as much as people love the beautiful landscape images of Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, it’s the McCurry and Lange images that we’ll remember most through the course of our lives.
Image of people speak so strongly to us for one main reason. They’re images of ourselves, or rather, us as we could have been if we had lived in the same places and under the same circumstances as the people in these pictures, at the time they were photographed. Since we’re essentially made up of the same ingredients, it’s the geographic and cultural variations that define the differences between someone who lives in Trenton and someone who lives in Kabul. If by mere chance, we had been born in a different corner of the world, it might very well have been one of us in that photo that Steve took.
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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…]
In his post titled First, Get a Million Dollars, photojournalist Kenneth Jareck puts forth the notion that there are more professional NBA players in this country than there are successful professional photographers. He gauges success as those photographers who regularly make more than $50,000 annually.
The point of his well written article is not that that we should all dump our cameras and try out for the NBA. Nor is he trying to say that the potential for success in our industry is simply not there, in fact, he makes the case that there is great potential for photographers to run successful careers, as long we’re smart about how we run our businesses.
What Kenneth is trying to tell us is that if we are going to see any level of sustained success within the photography industry, we can not undercharge for our work. [click to continue…]
