I guess if they are normal where you live, you get used to icebergs like anything else, but it is picturesque.
My guess is, though, that the photographer has used a long telephoto lens (which compresses perspective), and the iceberg is a lot further away than it looks on the picture. The reason being that nine/tenths are under water, so the water must be very deep where it is.
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By the way, it's excellent that the web gives an outlet for all the great pictures which were limited before by shelf space.Admittedly, it also makes obvious why being a photographer is not exactly the most financially promising career these days: digital technology has made it possible for anybody can carry a Elph or a Coolpix camera to call himself a photographer, and to sell the pictures for whatever price he likes. For example I hear that Time paid $30 for the use of this cover picture illustrating the "new frugality"... if that is not illustrative...
By the way, it's a highly interesting article. One of my friends who runs a huge porn site told me that years ago they paid $25 per picture, now the price is more like $1 per picture (which is typical). It's supply and demand. Just because the site could pay a lot more, and some photographers are finding it hard to make ends meet, does that mean that the site should still pay the old prices when lots of photographers are willing to sell much cheaper?)
One of my friends who runs a huge porn site told me that years ago they paid $25 per picture, now the price is more like $1 per picture (which is typical). It's supply and demand. Just because the site could pay a lot more, and some photographers are finding it hard to make ends meet, does that mean that the site should still pay the old prices when lots of photographers are willing to sell much cheaper?)
ReplyDeleteIf the economic slowdown is hurting your friend's business, it's reasonable for him to ask his suppliers to take a little less to help him stay in business, but this is ridiculous.
How should a decent human being behave in hard times? If you see that someone is struggling and desperate, do you take advantage of their weakness to grab a little more for yourself? Or do you try to help?
In this case, squeezing the photographer and model might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Your friend's business is dependent on photographers and models. If he starves them out, he's finished. If he shrugs and says, "there's plenty more where they came from," he's not the kind of person with whom I would want to do business, either as a customer or a supplier, because it would seem to me he'd cut my throat if he could.
Paying a fair price for quality would allow him to provide higher quality, and I think that's likely to be more profitable in the long run.
The fact that some people don't approve of your business doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be a decent person. "Whatever the market will bear" has never been a good standard for decent behavior.
Another fair point.
ReplyDeleteI'll let market forces direct things to a certain degree myself.
ReplyDeleteBut also: when Domai was young, a pro Danish photographer let me use several sets of his for free. At the time it was some of the best I could find.
Recently I found out he's in trouble, and I decided to retrospectively pay him $3,000 for the sets I got back in the nineties.
That seems right... he helped you, now you help him, and it's not charity.
ReplyDeleteIf your friend's website is the one I'm thinking it is, I notice that the marketplace has changed over the years -- a photo set that might have been 15 - 30 photos in the old days is now likely to be about 250 photos. (If it's the site I'm thinking of, I've also noticed a dreary sameness to a lot of the more recent sets. The changing price per picture would certainly help explain that.)
If I were in his position, and the economics would support it, I think I'd want to offer something like this: $25 each for the first 25 photos in a set; $20 each for #26 to #50, $15 each for #51 to #100, and $10 each after that. I would edit the sets, tossing out photos that weren't good enough. If I accepted more than, say, 250 shots, I would either split it into two sets, each of which would be paid separately, or I would restart the counter for photo rates. This kind of scheme would pay for hiring a model, sets, costumes, and travel at the beginning of a set, so you could get some good sets that might not have as many photos. And if $1 is the going rate, you would have all the best photographers beating a path to your door.
Of course, maybe the customers don't care about quality, and value only quantity. Even then, I can't imagine it would hurt business, and some things are worth doing well for for their own sake.
"Of course, maybe the customers don't care about quality, and value only quantity."
ReplyDeleteThere's the rub. It seems to be true for a majority.
I compromise in that I'm a bulk site like pay sites have to be, but I keep the quantity reasonable so I can keep the quality about the highest in the business.
My friend has a "premium" site alongside. I don't know how that is going.
... But then the "premium" aspect seems to be more about yet more quantity...
ReplyDeletehttp://tr.im/w7DS
Not the site I was thinking of, so my comments about their "more recent sets" should be discounted, as they are not based on actual knowledge.
ReplyDelete