Wondering why I’m blogging regularly again these days? I have gone from two months solid with photography assignments to two months of none at all. If you want to book a bargain shoot then now is your chance. I took these photos on Saturday at my last gig, a naming ceremony in the Scented Garden round the corner in St Ann’s Well Park.
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Hire me for an afternoon to take photographs of your family for 240 quid plus expenses and I’ll throw in forty 6×4 prints, and a CD of medium-resolution scans of the negatives for free. A man can scarcely afford to eat at this kind of rate. C’mon, people, the light is beautiful at this time of year and—even if I do say so myself—I am on cracking form. Contact me now and you could have a set of warm, soft, natural portraits on film ready in time for Christmas.
Or you could pay rather more for a handful of photoshopped, posed digital McSnapshots that’ll very quickly look as naff as anything taken in the 70s against a velvet backdrop at a traditional high street photographers.
(Don’t forget: if you email me your snailmail address then I’ll post you a set of free postcards.)
I dunno how you’d feel about it, but with the quality of your work I imagine you could easily make some bucks on the side selling shots to companies that deal in stock photography. In some cases you can get a royalty deal, although admittedly most companies prefer to buy complete rights. You might not be cool with that. Still, judging by what my wife’s department shells out for image library CDs, it can’t be a bad racket.
Unfortunately, people in any images submitted usually have to sign release forms, but that isn’t as much of a pain as it sounds.
Hope things pick up.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. The stock photography route has previously been suggested to me by an ex-studio photographer PooterGeeker who still earns a nice income from some of his library shots. Perhaps I should assemble a suitable portfolio.
(Also for some reason people keep asking me to take photographs of food. I don’t have the facilities or even a clue about how to go about this and I have to work hard to keep a straight face whenever it’s suggested to me because I can’t help thinking of Bill Bailey’s “Who is it who takes photographs of kebabs?” routine.)
If you consider the stock photo option, there’s a company called fotolia that might be the sort of thing you need.
As a matter of interest, on what basis do you decide whether to take any given shot in black and white or colour? And to do so, do you carry multiple cameras around with you with different films?
Thanks for the tip. I’ll investigate.
That’s an excellent question because, although I do consciously make the choice, I’m no longer conscious of the criteria I use—so I’m going to have to think about it really hard before I come up with an answer for the Wedding Photography Blog.
When I do formal group shots I always use colour because that’s what the customers want. Otherwise I think I prefer black-and-white when there are elements present that will contrast nicely in the print or if there’s a block of distracting colour present. It’s possible to fix certain colours to contrast strongly in black-and-white in advance with filters, but I have given up using them because they slow me down and they slow down my lenses—they cut the light that gets in so it’s harder to get good candids.
When I’m working with low ambient light I use 1600ASA B&W because colour 800/1600 is unflattering.
Yes. I use three cameras at weddings: one tank-like, metal-bodied Minolta 9 for the group shots that spends most of the day on a tripod, loaded with colour film, and two nimbler Minolta 7s. One of the 7s usually has B&W film in it, the other colour.
These are fancy cameras, but it’s worth remembering that I took all those shots for the free postcards with a Minolta 5 that you can get on eBay for about £60.
The expensive bodies have three main advantages over the cheap one: they are more reliable, they can use faster shutter speeds, and they can store the settings I use for each shot so I can check them back against the results. This means they have LCD screens on the back so I find myself telling lots of people at weddings that no, they can’t look at the photo I’ve just taken, but they can look at the f-number I chose for it.
The cheap body has one main advantage over the expensive ones: it’s one of the smallest serious SLRs out there. If you don’t mind the tiny controls then it’s wonderfully discreet.
(The 9 usually has a 50mm f/1.7 on it and I mainly swap two prime lenses between the 7s as needed: a 50mm f/1.4 and a 100mm macro f/2.8, but I’ve got a cheapo yuppie zoom and a wide-angle I use occasionally.)
I dunno about you, but actually I’m a little worried at the rise of `stock’ sites. Some of them seem designed around the idea of allowing the common mortal to propagate any ol’ junk on the off-chance that someone will want it – and call it a stock photo site.
If you want an alternative idea, think what shops stock photo-frames and how they flog them: SnappySnaps, Jessops, Art etc all have use for photos. (One day I’ll get the courage to find out for myself what it takes to appear in there!)
Oh, and FWIW, I use b&w for all the traditional reasons: when the composition works geometrically or because of texture/form/shape, and/or just when I want to exercise the bottles of developer lurking in the bath^Wdarkroom myself, too. The removal of colour transforms a shot from the realm of the realistic to that of the artistic statement.
WE get more out of it when you blog!!! Where’s the incentive to help you find work?!?!?
Aww. Thank you. Put it this way: If I don’t work I won’t have any money to pay for my Webhosting.
[…] I took all of them with one of my Minolta 7 cameras and a second-hand Sigma 24mm f/2.8 lens that I bought from the visually impaired sales assistant. As usual the images are straight off the scanner. It’s made for shooting humans, but the muted colours of Fuji PRO400H strike me as a refreshing change from the supersaturated slide film colours (or Photoshopped hues) fashionable for taking shots of non-human subjects. […]
[…] It’s special effects time again on PooterGeek. I’ve replaced the code that displays pictures here, the ingenious but awkward Thickbox, with the even more ingenious iBox. Test it out by visiting a recent photography post: dawn over Brighton, Café Intenso, or the humanist naming ceremony. […]