Here is a link to the video that was produced on my production company’s shoot for the Sanderling resort. As I previously posted on this blog, we shot photography and video at the same time! This resulting video are aerial and b-roll clips that we quickly put together so the client, The Sanderling, could put [...]

It’s a post from February that I just discovered. Great insight:
I’m actually not sure who can afford to shoot generic stock photography now. Getty itself is not shooting now and every good photographer I talk to who ever made decent money shooting stock part-time has _already_ abandoned shooting stock altogether. Why bother investing time/money/energy in [...]

A few months ago, one of my students approached me with an image of his and an advertisement produced in Dubai; he was sure the image was copied for the advertisement. I showed the two images side by side to many people, including reps and a few legal experts in the field and they were [...]

It’s amazing how fast things change or evolve in the photography business. If you aren’t adaptable and cannot change or do not like change, you will be out of this business fast.
Snapshot of my income by percentages and genre.
1999: mid 5 figure gross
30% editorial photography
70% weddings
2002: I probably grossed 6 figures for the first time [...]

It’s a hard thing to do in this economy, but yesterday I turned down $3,000.  This was photography for a cookbook being produced by an author who mainly pitches to restaurants and sells them a vanity book.
The author wanted a lifestyle photographer to take images of customers dining, waitstaff pouring wine at tables, close-ups of [...]

A few days ago, I submitted some images via the Getty Images stock image submission portal. The edit was completed within 24 hours. The images selected were online within a similar amount of time. What an amazing difference from 1 or 2 years ago when it took 2 or 3 months.

I recently had a former student e mail me about how jealous he was of Chase Jarvis’ studio and gear and set up. I wrote him back and said, something like, “If you have a studio, you feel like you have to go to work everyday. If you have a staff, you have to manage [...]

A few years ago, I decided that teaching and shooting stock and shooting commercial jobs was the way to go. Little did I know the economy would completely hit the skids. As I have mentioned previously on this blog, many photographers that I knew in the previous economy have been e mailing me to ask [...]

I was in NYC last week and I thought the interview with Shannon Fagan was so good that I didn’t put up a post… One thing I’ve noticed over the past few months is the change in food photography, led by Bon Appetit.

6 years ago, shooting tethered on advertising shoots was really cool, and new and amazing. Without Adobe raw file processing, checking highlight values and shadow values was very important: if you didn’t nail it, there was no going back and using sliders to correct your over or under exposure. A photographer could also check [...]