I’ll bet that when you saw the title of this post you were thinking that I was going to talk about professional model fees…right? Well, you would be wrong…half wrong.
I teach an online class with the BPSOP, and I also conduct my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops around our planet. What inspired me to write this post was a photo that was submitted to me yesterday from my part II class.
This week’s lesson is about creating silhouettes and how important they can be in “making good photos”. A woman submitted a photo she took of her daughter along with a disclaimer. The disclaimer was that her daughter, who from the back looked to be about five, didn’t want to pose for her…and let her take just one shot before skipping out of sight.
Here was my reply…in so many words:
I have four children the youngest being twenty-nine, and I have photographed them since they were born. As soon as they understood the value of money (it didn’t take very long) I began paying them for their time…why not???
After all I was asking them to give up whatever they were doing to help me out. I thought it only fair to compensate them for their time; and it worked all the time.
Twenty-Five cents
At first, around the age of five, I would offer them twenty-five cents; back then that was a pretty good rate. As they got a little older it was fifty cents, then seventy-five, then depending on how long I was going to keep them, I would give them a dollar for thirty minutes…a long time for any kid to stay interested.
A dollar to get wet.
After a few days my online student told me that it worked perfectly, and she had never thought of that; most people don’t.
Again, let me say that I do not consider it prostituting my children, or turning them into money hungry kids, or spoiling their innocence. If anything I think it shows them the value of working for an allowance…beside cleaning their room or giving the dog a bath.
Pay them for their time…but I do suggest you pay after the photo session is completed!!!
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime. On July 30th I begin my 29th year at the Maine Media Workshops. I’ve had the same week since the beginning. It’s the week of the Lobster Festival down the road in Rockland. It offers a completely different set of photo ops than one would expect when coming to photograph the coastline, lighthouses, and fishing villages of Maine. Come join me and spend a week completely immersed in your love for photography.
Most of you have heard this expression that’s been around for a long time. Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher for the NY Yankees made it famous; that is if you follow baseball. Yogi said, “It ain’t over til it’s over”. I know I’ve said it myself hundreds of times during my nearly fifty year career as an advertising, editorial, and corporate photographer…Why you ask?
Well it’s all about the weather, and why it’s so important in your coming back with a good photo or not..or a photo at all. I teach an online class with the BPSOP, and I conduct my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops around our planet, and I’m constantly hearing the sad cries and complaints from my fellow photographers that say that the reason they didn’t go out shooting was because the weather was forecasted to be bad; or they went home because it got bad.
Well just think about the mailman’s motto that says, ” Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Actually, this really isn’t their real motto, it’s written on New York’s James Farley Post Office, and has no official status.
If I had a nickel for every time it was raining when we were about to go out and shoot for a client and it cleared just at the right time, I would be writing this post from my private island; a blue and frothy drink with an umbrella hanging on one side in my hand…typing with the other
Don’t listen to any weather reports the night before, or even when you wake up. If you have a destination in mind don’t start worrying until you get there; don’t even look up at the sky!
It wasn’t over until it was dark.
In the above photo for Ford, when we woke up the sky was very dark and very gray. As always, I decided to go and set up anyway just in case. Sure enough just as the sun was about to set it came out behind me and created a look I couldn’t have prayed for; and this is the actual way it looked since it was shot before the days of computers.
In the photo taken by one of my online students, the weather started out gloomy and went downhill from there. Still, because she was using her “Artist Palette”, she walked away with this image; taken late in the afternoon in a snowstorm.
So remember what I say, it’s never over until it’s over…as in the dark.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime. On July 30th I begin my 29th year at the Maine Media Workshops. I’ve had the same week since the beginning. It’s the week of the Lobster Festival down the road in Rockland. It offers a completely different set of photo ops than one would expect when coming to photograph the coastline, lighthouses, and fishing villages of Maine. Come join me and spend a week completely immersed in your love for photography.
Keep sending in photos and questions to: AskJoeB@gmail.com, and I’ll create a video critique for you.
I wrote a post on it almost four years ago and because of it I followed my own advice. I was in an area in the south of France, and when I got out of my rent car to walk along the area surrounding a chateau, I decided to not use my usual go-to lens and put on something I would never think about using for this type of situation…my 100mm Macro.
It was a fortuitous decision as it turned out giving me what I still consider to be a very unusual depiction of swans that were nestled in a small stream next to this incredible well-known chateau. Although (sadly) it looks like I did considerable post processing work to it, it was shot in the camera, one exposure on one 35mm Kodachrome frame with no post work done to it; this is what Kodachrome looked like, and boy do I miss it!!!!
I know so many of you out there get comfortable with one or two lens that always reward you with good photos. The only problem is that they always look the same, as in the same compression or lack thereof, the same focal length that might be on one of your zooms, or the same dOF because you’re using a lens (like a prime) and rendering the same F/stop to all your compositions.
So my fellow photographers bite the bullet, take a leap of faith and grab a lens you haven’t use in forever, or one you would never use in a situation you’ve been in a hundred times and have been comfortable to the point of being complacent.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come color outside the lines with me sometime.
Keep sending in your photos and questions to: AskJoeB@gmail.com and I’ll create a video critique for you.
Even the biggest of companies try to use your photos without permission.
I’ve been an advertising and corporate photographer for forty-five years, and in that time, I’ve had my share of legal problems over the unauthorized use of my images. For some incredible reason, people think that they can just come and take my photos for their own use and not pay for them. Since I’ve spent the majority of these years in film, it was a constant issue, and one which was very hard to find out about.
I had to see my photo in a magazine, a brochure, on a billboard, or for a second on the television. The only other way was to have someone (usually another photographer) recognize my shot and call me to let me know. I once was sitting at a light and glanced over to a bench next to a bus stop and saw a photo that I knew a friend of mine had taken. I decided to call him and “lo and behold,” he knew nothing about it.
In my online class with the PPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around the planet, I’m always telling my fellow photographers that putting a copyright stamp with the year on your image does not fully protect it. People always think it does, but I have some bad news for you…it doesn’t. Your image has to be registered with the Library of Congress to even be able to sue for infringement. Not only does it have to be registered, but also, if it was not registered before the commencement of the infringement, you will be severely limited in how much you can recover from settlement or suit. Because most infringements of photographs involve an advertising use – and it’s virtually impossible to prove the amount of profits “attributable to the (advertising) infringement” – if the image is not registered prior to the infringement, you can only recover the license fee you could have charged for the use in an “arms-length” transaction. Compare that recovery with what you can get if registered before infringement; statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed plus attorneys’ fees, expert witness fees, court costs and interest.
I was teaching at the Julia Dean Workshop in Hollywood and made a comment on the size one of my students had embedded her name and copyright mark on her submission for review. It was too large and quite distracting. Another of my students asked me if I had ever heard of a company called Digimarc. I said I hadn’t so he proceeded to fill me in on what is proving to be one of the best pieces of advice ever given to me in my long career.
That being said, Digimarc offers a solution to protect your digital photos by allowing you to embed an imperceptible digital watermark into your image; a very simple and subtle way to help identify infringers of your image. The real beauty about using Digimarc is that they will monitor your images by continuously searching the Internet for your unique digital ids, for any infringement of your copyright.
For this post, I’ve called on my attorney to make a statement about his experience on Copyright issues. Dana LeJune is a Houston based lawyer who is one of the foremost authorities on the current issues involving copyright infringement. Here’s what he had to say:
“Copyright infringement in the areas of music, film, photography, and architecture is at an all-time high. Home builders are hiring draftsmen (usually, licensed architects won’t risk it) to redraw house plans, ad agencies are downloading images from Google, or scanning them from magazines, and teens are using file-sharing to pirate popular music every day, in every part of the country. Because litigating such a case can be very expensive for the copyright holder, the contingent fee arrangement may make prosecution affordable for the “little guy.” Here’s what you need to understand: if the work was not registered before the infringement began, the potential recovery is often insufficient for the lawyer to pursue using the contingent fee arrangement. Without the ability to recover statutory damages and attorneys’ fees, and because of the likely inability to prove what profits were attributable to the infringement (in an advertising use), most lawyers will decline to accept the case.
The moral of the story is, REGISTER YOUR WORK REGULARLY. Photographers have a special prerogative to register their works, en masse, so there’s not a huge financial disincentive. Just make sure to list the name of each photo in the registration separately, even if on an attached list. This way the single registration for several hundred images will (probably) permit the recovery of multiple statutory damage awards for a single registration.
If you have any questions that are not answered by my web site, www.copyrightsuit.net, I don’t charge for telephone consultations, so don’t hesitate to ask me a question. You may also email me at dlejune@triallawyers.net. Good luck and wealth in the New Year!”
In closing, I want it to be clear that neither my attorney nor myself will reap any monetary benefits from Digimarc for writing this post. I have not been paid nor will be. I only care about helping other photographers protect themselves from thieves that obviously have no class.
By putting the Digimarc logo on this blog, people interested can use the promotional code “BARABAN for a discount of 20% for an image subscription. Here’s the link: www.digimarc.com/digimarc-for-images.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.comand check out my 2013 workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
