Category: Photography Business

Photography Type Influences Gear Choices

long lens photo
Photojournalists and nature photographers are the most likely to invest in big glass

I get a lot of questions every week about what kind of camera to buy and what gear someone new to the business would want to have in their bag. I almost always have to answer those questions with another question of my own: What type of photography interests you the most?

For sure there will be quite a bit of overlap between fields. A photojournalist might find they have a lot of equipment in common with a wedding photographer. In fact, one style of wedding photography is sometimes referred to as “journalistic”. Other than the occasional overlap, most fields of photography will employ specialized equipment unique to that field. So your area of interest will influence how you spend your gear budget.

When it comes to cameras, that will be dictated more by your budget, but these days with modern DSLRs it’s far more likely a single camera can be used across different photography fields.

Portrait Photography

Portrait photographers are going to sink the most money into lighting and lenses. While portrait photographers are probably going to want a camera with a full frame sensor like the Canon 5D MK II or Nikon D700, it’s not a requirement. You can shoot perfectly good portraits with almost any camera, full frame or crop sensor.

For portraits lighting will be key and portrait photographers are more likely to invest big bucks in strobes and floor lighting.

Portrait photographers, along with DSLR video shooters, are also more likely to invest in prime lenses. Even though zoom lens quality is more than adequate for portraits today, shooting portraits is all about consistency, and for that primes are hard to beat.

Wedding Photography

Again, wedding photographers will likely employ a high end DSLR with either a full frame or crop sensor, the biggest differences will be the lenses and lighting.

A wedding photographer will almost certainly be using a high end zoom lens and, instead of floor lighting, will be investing their money in external portable lighting instead of studio lights.

Photojournalists

PJs will need to be light and fast and they’ll favor lenses at both extremes. For working close in a crowd they’ll use the wide end of the scale and for sporting events and event coverage, they’ll have extremely long and very expensive glass.

If PJs carry a flash at all it will be compact, as they’re more likely to favor faster lenses and cameras with bigger sensors for shooting in low light than rely on flash units.

For PJs it’s all about the speed and the weight.

That’s one of the reasons photography questions are so hard to answer. The type of photography you choose will make a big difference in equipment selection.

The Hazards of Photgraphy

rock climbing photo
The best pictures are at the top. Ready? Go! - By Michele Campeotto

There’s a big difference between doing anything as a hobby and doing it as a career. That applies to a lot of activities but particularly to photography.

Not only do you have to take amazing photos, the kind of pictures that make people go, “Wow!” but you have to be good at business, understand contracts and be willing to go to incredible lengths for photos.

Anyone who thinks making a living as a photographer is easy is most likely a hobbyist dreaming of going pro or in another line of work.

Just in my own experience I have been punched, elbowed, tripped, jostled and spit on and those are just the ones I can attribute to other photographers. I’ve been threatened with arrest, more than once, teargassed even though it was aimed in another direction, camped in the pouring rain, had frozen feet from standing in ice cold mountain streams, been lost in the wilderness, pitched around in a helicopter, gotten food poisoning, been air sick and so seasick I had to alternate between throwing up and taking pictures. I could have easily ended up at the bottom of a cliff buried under a backpack full of camera gear on several occasions. Yet, compared to these guys working for National Geographic, I’ve had it easy.

If that isn’t bad enough, you’re also dealing with a business climate of continuously diminishing opportunities and constant pressure from low-price competitors. Very few organizations are hiring photographers and the few that are have a massive amount of talent to choose from.

Many companies that were traditional sources of contracts for photographers are now buying their photography from stock photo and microstock photography agencies. Even those agencies are being challenged by services like TwitPics, which reserves the right to sell images without compensation.

And, through all that, you still have to take pictures, even when you don’t feel like it.

I’m not trying to rain on any dreams of becoming a photographer, just trying to inject some reality into the dream. You’re not going to get there with a Nikon and a kit lens and it’s going to be a constant fight to make ends meet.

On the other hand, when it all does come together and you get one of those photos that changes the world, all the struggle seems worthwhile.

Five Things I Wish I’d Known About Photography

pro photographer
Don't expect to luck into jobs like this - by Starscream

A lot of people dream about being professional golfers. Imagine getting paid millions and traveling around the country doing nothing but play golf! Here’s all you have to do to make that dream come true. Start when you’re 5, so go tell your daddy or mommy that you want to be a pro golfer. Then spend the next 10 years with a parent driving you relentlessly and whenever you’re not doing anything else, be outside hitting balls. Then spend the next 8 years with a series of coaches honing every facet of your golf game, driving you relentlessly and then you stand less than a 50-50 chance of making the cut in the junior tournaments.

Professional golf isn’t something people pick up on a weekend, it’s a lifestyle they started when they were young and it’s a job they work every day towards. Photography is not that different.

To be a professional, photography has to be more than a hobby, more than something you do on the weekend. It’s a competitive business that is a demanding, fast-moving professional field that is getting more and more competition from people walking around with smartphones and low-end digital cameras.

Here are five things I wish someone had told me about the business years ago.

You Have To Know How To Run a Business

Take classes in how to run a small business. You have to understand taxes, billing, cash flow, insurance and contracts. You can’t be a successful photographer without knowing how to be a successful business person.

It Will Take a Long Time To Make Any Money

Wedding photographers can sometimes build up a steady income in a couple years but don’t count on it. Mainly figure on starving the first few years until you have a deep portfolio and build up a client base.

I’ve known a few people who managed to claw their way to a living shooting commercial stock photography, but it took them a few years to build up that kind success. The advantage to specializing in stock photography is that once you build up your income, it’s recurring revenue.

Once you have a base of income, you can use that to branch out and experiment.

There Is New Competition Every Year

Just when you claw and starve your way to some kind of a living, you’ll find one day that clients start telling you about someone offering the services you’ve been providing for less than half of what you’re charging. While that happens in almost any business, in photography it tends to be particularly devastating.

You have to spend a lot of time monitoring your market, checking on your competition and staying one step ahead.

You Trade Regular Hours For Working All The Time

Being a photographer means trading the security of a regular paycheck for being an independent businessperson. In other words, you trade regular hours for working all the time. And some assignments take the concept of working hours to new and bizarre extremes.

I don’t know any professional photographer who doesn’t work all the time, nights and weekends included.

You Will Need a Emergency Fund

At some point it’s going to happen: You will get sick, hurt, sued or, in the case of PJ, arrested. When that happens you’ll need an emergency fund to get through it. Even if you prevail in court, you can still end up being out of business.

If you’re injured and can’t work, you have to have enough cash in the bank to keep the doors open and pay the bills.

Photography as a business is a job and you have to approach it that way. If it’s not a job you eat, sleep and breath, you’re going to have  a hard time makeing it.

When Does Photo Manipulation Go Too Far?

image manipulation
These retouches are considered minor by today's standards

It all started innocently enough; editing out a pimple here, a blemish there, maybe a chipped tooth. It was easy, it made the client feel better, and it was, for the most part, harmless.

Fast forward to today and digital manipulation has gotten totally out of hand. It’s not just blemishes and pimples anymore. Today we shave years off a face and pounds off a body, lengthen necks and make eyes bigger, lips pouty, and change hair color on a whim. Clickity, clickity done.

Color and lighting are now skills that can be mastered in post. With Photoshop plugins like Color Efex Pro 4 you can change the color scheme, lighting and almost anything else you desire.

All that taken together is bad enough, now comes along a product like LayerCake Elements and now the manipulations to the subject are just the beginning. Now you can add trees, grass and flowers. Don’t like the sky? How about nice sunset sky instead? Add a few clouds for dramatic effect. Put the moon over there, add a few stars because we have to pay attention to details. Need a horse? No problem, drag and drop, resize to fit the scene. Done and done.

Time, date, and place are now meaningless. It reminds me of the sunset scene in the John Wayne movie Green Berets (1968), supposedly set in Vietnam but featuring the sun setting behind the ocean. Those with a 5th grade understanding of geography know that Vietnam doesn’t have a westward facing ocean view. But that didn’t stop the filmmakers and it doesn’t stop the photographer with LayerCake. You can have a sunset anywhere.

So where does all this stop? Or does it? It’s easy to smirk and wonder if grandpa is having trouble adjusting to the new digital reality but keep in mind I was digitally manipulating images when most of you still had training wheels on your bike. At some point do we in the photography community have to say enough and start asserting ourselves in favor of reality? How will we know when we’ve gone too far?

In some fields that question has already been answered. Like photojournalism, where retouching, even adding a little smoke is a non-starter. You’ll not only get fired, you’ll be vilified and humiliated as a value added bonus. Your career will be over.

But what about the rest of us? Do we owe reality a nod, or is reality merely a canvas for us to paint our vision? Are master photo manipulators actual photographers, or something less?

Where it all ends is with H&M’s new lingerie catalog where the faces of the models are real, but the bodies are computer generated.  What do you think is “too far” in digital manipulation?

The Essence of Great Portraits

sample portrait
A very decent head and shoulders portrait that may be the most unimaginative work I've ever produced

You all probably remember the series we did on studio lighting a while ago. While we were focused on the technical aspects of lighting a good portrait, it completely overlooks the art. Sure, what we came away with was a completely decent head and shoulders portrait.  Looking at it now I realize it lacks any imagination and creativity.

Okay, that’s not totally fair. I shot those photos to demonstrate how changes in lighting change the look of a portrait, not as a demonstration in portrait photography. And yet it still bothers me. The reason it bothers me is that many photographers would think that’s a perfectly fine portrait.

You can have the camera, the lens, and the lighting and take fantastically lit portraits that are technically near perfect,  and still produce average work lacking in imagination and creativity.

The Essence Of a Great Portrait

The essence of a great portrait doesn’t come from the lighting or the camera, it comes from getting to know the person and capturing the essential qualities that make them unique. I don’t think the best portraits always come in a studio setting, they come taking the shots at home, in the shop, or where they work. Maybe that’s my background as a photojournalist talking, but those are the places people are most relaxed and most likely to be themselves.

If you are going to work in a studio, which does offer a lot of advantages, have the person bring something unique to them. For someone like my sister in law, I’d have her bring her knitting bag. I have a friend in Seattle, for her it would be one of her bikes and one of her cats. How you work such bizarrely different props into a single picture, that’s what you get the big bucks to figure out.

The bottom line is anyone who thinks they can capture a person just by having them sit on a stool or stand in front of a background is doing them a disservice. Spend some time getting to know your subjects and figure out what makes them unique.

Good portraits show people on the outside, great portraits show people on the inside.