Digital Issues in the Editorial Market
A Panel Discussion Sponsored by ASMP and EP at PhotoPlus Expo, Jacob Javits Center, New York
October 22, 2004
The Transition from Film to Digital: Pricing Digital Production vs Film
Moderator Peter Howe opened the session by introducing the panelists: Barbara Alper, Alan Chin, Shawn Henry and Brad Trent. He then opened the discussion by posing the first question to the panel.
Moderator: Why do we need to shoot digital?
Alan: It’s great in terms of meeting deadlines. But they aren’t good enough to make real prints, except maybe if you use a 22-megapixel digital back. I like the control we have to edit our own pictures, and the ease of sending images back to the publisher. But now that I’m back from overseas, I’ve gone back to black-and-white film in my Leica.
Brad: I don’t thing you need to shoot digital; none of my clients are asking for it. For advertising, it makes a lot of sense; my advertising clients love it. I started with a 1DS, and my clients wouldn’t take it; that’s why I switched to the 22-megapixel camera. But for a magazine, any of the cameras out there would do the job just fine. But don’t think that magazines are clamoring for digital. And you’re not going to see everyone shooting digital.
Shawn: I agree that clients aren’t demanding it. I made the transition for myself. I live up north of Boston, and I would sometimes spend an hour driving the film over to the lab for a rush job. Since converting to digital, my life’s a lot easier. I spend more time in front of the computer than I’d like, but by now I’ve gotten that down to a minimum as well.
Shooting for magazines, the quality of digital actually is there. I use a 1DS too, and for what I do, it’s as good as film. It allows me to shoot jobs that two years ago I couldn’t have done.
“It’s what i call ‘chimping,’ because the people look like chimpanzees, huddling over the monitor.”
Brad: But when I did a digital shoot a couple of weeks ago, I spent 25 hours just processing images. My clients can see the difference with big files and they want it. They don’t need it, but they want it. But none of you guys are going to make money with a Valeo 22 shooting for Newsweek; they’re not going to pay for it.
Barbara: I’m a newsie, shooting digital for about three and a half years. Working for the New York Times, they wanted digital and I couldn’t hold out any longer. And when I got used to it, I really liked it. It reminds me of the instant gratification of the old Polaroid SX-70.
There are things I don’t like, too. Now, I’m not just the photographer. I’m also the lab. I’ve turned into a color printer. I enjoy it, but I don’t like spending so much time in front of the computer.
Alan: I know you can show somebody the picture right away, but that’s what I hate the most about digital. It’s what i call “chimping,” because the people look like chimpanzees, huddling over the monitor. That’s time you should be spending shooting.
Barbara: I was at a performance the other night. I shot a couple of tests, got the lighting, and then I knew that the exposure was right for the rest of the night. And when people can see the pictures, it develops a rapport between you and your subject. You don’t show everything, but one or two frames can help.
Brad: But if there are publicists, they want to see every frame. If you turn off the screen, they get pissed and insist you turn it back on. Well, publicists are publicists.
Alan: For me, it affects how I pace myself through the day. I used to shoot film in multiples of four rolls, because that’s how many the tank takes. With digital, you are limited only by how many flash-cards you are carrying, and with today’s cards, that’s a lot.
Brad: You shoot way more when it’s digital, because you don’t have to worry about a budget. If you go digital — and you will, or you wouldn’t bee here — you’re going to chimp, you’re going to spend time looking at the screen to see if the histogram looks good. It takes effort to break away from the urge to continually check, just because it’s there.
Shawn: It’s great for my guys-in-ties work. With Polaroid, that 60-second wait to see if you’ve got the setup can seem like forever. They only want to give you 10 or 15 minutes to get everything. You can do more setups, and be a lot more fluid with the way you light.
“They’ll pay $35 a roll without thinking about it. But they won’t pay a digital processing fee.”
Brad: On the other hand, you shoot so much stuff that it becomes a problem if you’re on a deadline. On a recent shoot, I came back on a Saturday night with 740 images that I had to process, and they wanted it Monday. It takes a minute and a half per image, on a G5-dual. Then I had to set up actions to color correct it; then I had to burn it onto a CD. And they’re not paying for that time.
That’s the thing. Magazines aren’t clamoring for digital, and they won’t pay for it. Every magazine I work for says, “We’ll pay whatever you like for film; go out and shoot 35 or 50 rolls.” And they’ll pay $35 a roll without thinking about it. But they won’t pay a digital processing fee.
Barbara: The New York Times used to supply our film.
Alan: When I was processing film in Bosnia and Kosovo, the publishers would pay $150 a day above our $250 day rate so we could do that. So it meant that you were getting $400 a day — not as good as it could be, but it kept it competitive with Time and Newsweek, which were paying $500 as a base. And because it was a daily newspaper, you could spend months on the assignment, getting your day rate.
After we had gotten used to this rate, beginning in 2002, they said, digital tech is ubiquitous and we aren’t going to pay you more to transmit images digitally. Now does that make sense, when your computer, your camera and flash-cards cost you money. There’s an illusion that you have the initial investment and it’s cheap after that. Flash-cards don’t last forever, and cameras get obsolete every couple of years. That may change in a few years, of course.
Shawn: The economics of the transition to digital is the main reason for having this panel. Right now, there are some really bad examples, like the New York Times. But there are others that will happily pay a reasonable fee for digital. It would be easy to lay all the blame for this on the clients, but some of it is because there’s such a broad range of what photographers are asking now. Some are charging absolutely zero, and never even broach the subject of getting paid for digital processing. On the flip side, there are those who want to turn their 10D and JPEG captures into a cash cow and bill $800 or $1,000 a day — way more than they’d even dream of if they were shooting film.
What photographers have to do, as an industry, is establish reasonable practices, so that we can recoup our investment.
“He’s going to charge the equivalent of a 35 roll, she’s going to charge a flat fee, and the client is going to ask, ‘What exactly am I paying for?’ “
Barbara: we always used to have set rates for processing a roll of film; it was $35 or $40. It would be good to have a comparable rating system for digital.
Alan: I’ve started charging a digital processing fee, based on the equivalent number of frames that the film would have been. I’m more toward the low end, the equivalent of $15 per 36 or 40 images.
Barbara: Some people are charging $1 or $2 per image captured. For the Times, I can’t charge anything. But for other clients, I’m charging a $125 flat fee that includes burning a CD. I haven’t thought about how many images I’ve shot; I deliver as many as I think will be needed to satisfy my clients.
Brad: That’s part of the problem: Every job is going to be different. He’s going to charge the equivalent of a 35 roll, she’s going to charge a flat fee, and the client is going to ask, “What exactly am I paying for? I’m going to use one image, even if you shoot 400.” The client going to worry that you’re jacking up the price by shooting more images.
Now, a photographer who comes back from an executive portrait with 30 rolls of film is probably not going to get another job. But with digital, you do shoot more frames. So there has to be some kind of a standard.
Moderator: But it depends on how many frames you need, and that’s going to be different for every portrait.
“If they pay for film, they will pay for digital. But they are not going to put it on paper.”
Brad: What we sat down to discuss with Business Week was their idea that $150 was good for everything. I told them that, for a cover shoot in the past, I might come back with 20 rolls, and they’d pay for it. If I’m shooting digitally, it doesn’t mean I should make less money.
They were proposing a three-tier system: big pictures, little pictures and the cover. But photo editors don’t think like that; they spend as much time on the little pictures as the big ones. They decide what the picture’s going to be, and they assign a photographer to go out and shoot it. And the photographer comes back with the same amount of film whether it’s a feature or a small portrait for the front of the book.
So the way Business Week, and TIme Inc. too, are looking at it, all the pictures basically have the same value — until you get to the cover; they are always willing to pay more for the cover. So I think there’s going to be a two-tier system, the feature rate and the cover rate. You just have to get them to understand what’s involved with doing it digitally.
If you’re doing a cover and shooting like crazy for two or three days, and you have all this production work at the end, there aren’t too many photo editors who aren’t going to make a deal with you. You just have to tell them, “I’m going to work like a dog for two days, processing the files, color correcting, all the things I have to do.” They understand. They pay for everything else; they’re not going to refuse to pay this just because it’s digital. If they pay for film, they will pay for digital. But they are not going to put it on paper.
Alan: Brad is talking about the top of the market. Photographers starting out are not working with Time or Newsweek, they are working with the real estate agency down the street. A lot of photography is little jobs for the little people, and that’s where we get screwed over a lot. Those people don’t understand the costs and time that digital involves, because they’ve all bought themselves a point-and-shoot digital camera and had a lot of fun taking snapshots of Grandma and the kids. They think you are just doing a more intense version of that, and why should they pay you?
Barbara: In the PR business, they are hiring fewer photographers, because they all have their own digital cameras and capture what they think is a good image. Well, they know it’s not a great image; they can see the difference between a point-and-shoot and what a professional photographer would get. But they are unwilling to pay. And that’s been a downside of digital cameras.
Speaking of charging per image: Do you include the ones you delete?
Alan: It’s hard to come up with any way of charging. You could charge by the hour.
Barbara: But some people are quicker at Photoshop than others.
“The staff are doing quite well; it’s a union job.”
Audience: Could someone please explain how anyone can afford to work for a publication like the New York Times, with the rates they pay?
Shawn: I have no idea. Their rates suck, they’ve cut out all the digital fees. Do they expect people to work for them because they’re the New York Times?
Alan: And that’s why I’ve stopped working for the Times. I started working for them in 1995 in Bosnia, and I’ve done other conflicts for them. But I don’t work for them any more.
Barbara: Would you consider working for them again?
Alan: If I was absolutely flat broke, I might. But that would be more an indication of what a poor businessman I am and how desperate I’d be.
Audience: There are some very big names working for the Times. Are they doing so badly?
Alan: There’s a big differentiation between staff and freelance. The staff are doing quite well; it’s a union job. I don’t know of very many freelancers, unless you are talking about the contractor photographers, like James Hill in Russia or Rena Castelnovo in Israel, and they have guaranteed contracts.
Audience: Just to come back to the $35 a roll or $1 a picture when we were shooting film: Why not charge the same for digital?
Shawn: I shoot executives, and there’s a value to that photograph. Just because the guy was only willing to give me five minutes, and I got 32 frames, that shouldn’t mean it’s worth only $32. What I charge for is the essential value of the service I provide, and that’s a lot more than a dollar a frame.
Audience: The dollar a frame is only for the film, not your time.
Shawn: But if I broke it out, I’d have to talk about what time I take. Sometimes it takes longer to edit it than others.
“I make my money shooting advertising.”
Audience (Stan Rowan): Correct me if I’m wrong: We went across the panel, and everybody said we don’t have to shoot digitally, and we’re spending a lot more time processing the captures, and we don’t get paid for it. Meanwhile, when those guys [publishers] get the digital files, they don’t have to scan them.
Brad: They don’t care about that.
Stan: Exactly. Nor do they care about your expenses, nor do they care about your income. You are all saying the same thing. Why are you doing it? Did I miss something? Why are you letting them set your prices?
Brad: I didn’t say I’m not getting paid for it. I said I’m not getting paid what it’s worth.
Shawn: The magazine needed digital, I had it and I took the job. It was my decision. I make my money shooting advertising.
Barbara: I don’t think photographers went into photography thinking this was the way we were going to make a great fortune. [laughter from audience] We have a drive to do it, we have a knack for it, we love it.
Moderator: This has not changed suddenly with digital. Film editors have always told photographers what they were going to pay them.
Brad: We have to change what they are willing to pay. I’ve never billed $150 to Business Week. That’s what they said they were willing to pay, and I said, “Fine. I won’t do it. I’ll shoot film.” The magazines are not clamoring for digital. And if you do it, I hope you won’t just knuckle under and take whatever the magazines say they will pay.
“You’ve got educate your clients that digital isn’t free just because there’s not a physical piece of film.”
Alan: One problem is that a lot of the younger people have never shot anything except digital, and they are not thinking about what this is worth, because they haven’t ever thought about processing film.
Audience: And the 20-year-olds are the ones who are going to give it away.
Moderator: But that’s nothing new either. There have always been 20-year-olds.
Brad: But back then, the 20-year-olds weren’t giving away the film and processing. You didn’t just buy film and processing, then give it away. I’ve been underbid by guys who will shoot digital and not charge a dime for it. Now, there will always be guys who will underbid; they can get away with it because they live somewhere like Philadelphia or Tucson. But you’ve got to get it into your head, and educate your clients, that digital isn’t free just because there’s not a physical piece of film. Whether you call it a digital processing fee or retouching, it’s not free. The black hole of time with digital is huge. Business Week is going to pay me two day-rates of $450, and a $150 setup day, for that digital. It’s not worth it — it still takes me 26 hours to do the shoot — but that’s my decision.
Audience: All of us ing the room have heard what you’ve been saying, but now we need some strategies for dealing with it. A survey of editorial photographers asserts that costs went up 1,000 percent over the last 20 years, but day rates have gone up just 14 percent. Inflation was about 80 percent in that time. So we need to look at our business costs associated with a transition to digital and figure out ways of handling them.
Five years ago, you didn’t need a digital camera, or a dual-processor computer; but your rates haven’t changed in five years. What are your broad strategies for recouping those extra costs?
Brad: You want a simple answer? Shoot ads.
“The growth will be in the online media.”
Audience: But we’re here to talk about the editorial market.
Brad: I understand that. But what I said was, you do not need digital to shoot for magazines.
Alan: Barbara and I, and ASMP, were involved in that bruising fight with the New York Times. And you know what? In terms of making a decent, middle-class living from editorial photography — and especially news photography — forget it! Shoot ads, shoot weddings, shoot other jobs. As long as we don’t have a union, as long as there are people who underbid us, we aren’t going to win this battle.
Moderator: Part of this is the market and the culture. We’ve moved from a information culture to an entertainment culture.
Brad: And the photographers who make out well will be the ones who shoot celebrities. Where will you make any money on documentary photography?
Shawn: The weekly news magazines are going down the tubes. In the “State of American Journalism” survey that was published in the spring, the indication there is that the growth will be in the online media. We haven’t yet established a pricing or cash-flow structure there yet, but that’s our future. The advertising dollars are starting to flow in there now. We’re going to have a billion personal computers by 2010, according to Microsoft’s projection (and they’re pretty good with their numbers). We should be looking at what we can do with multimedia, creating content that can start at the top of the pyramid: the highest form of content, which is something that can go across many media streams. We need to be pulling revenue from a multitude of revenue streams to help support our work.
I’ve put some thought into this issue. Our costs aren’t going up just because of digital cameras. There’s also video cameras, recording equipment, the associated skills we need. We need to distribute those costs by doing something that’s very hard for us to do: sharing.
“Doctors all operate as independent contractors. But how many of them own their own x-ray machine?”
There are industries in similar situations that we can use as analogs. One is medicine. Doctors all operate as independent contractors. But how many of them own their own x-ray machine? Not a lot. They’ve formed small-group medical practices to share their accounting, promotion, marketing, staffing and technology issues and to distribute those costs. That’s one model.
Brad: But we all got into this to be artists. No one is hiring me because of my business skills; they want the picture I can take. They don’t care if I shoot it digitally; they want the picture. This talk about cooperatives is fine for the drawing room, but I have to get hired as a photographer.
If I decide to shoot digital, I know how to price it. If the art director wants to pay this much, and I need that much, I have to make the decision: If I want to get that picture in that magazine, for my own reasons, then I’ll take it.
Alan: Which is why you said, “Shoot ads if you want to make a living.” If your costs are this much, and you’re willing to take only that much, you’re going to lose. Doctors have the equivalent of a union; actors have a union; musicians have a union. Photographers do not have anything resembling a union, nor are we allowed to, by law. As long as we’re all in competition with each other, in a shrinking market, this is a problem we will face.
Shawn: I’m not a highly motivated business person; I’m, like, a Type C personality. And I’m not the most talented photographer. But I probably made more money than most people in the country did last year. I like my life. I make money on digital photography because I’m smart enough to charge appropriately for it. There are some clients that I choose to work for ( such as Business Week) that don’t pay as much as I’d like, but they pay a good day rate compared to other publications. There are companies like Time Inc. that pay crap. But there are lots of other magazines. It’s not as glamorous, but when I shoot for Network World, they pay me $1,200. So, you make smart choices and you can live pretty well.
“It was only because of digital technology that we could start a company by raiding our ATMs.”
Moderator: What we’ve been talking about has nothing to do with digital. It’s about the industry we’re in. Is there any way we can use digital technology to get ourselves out of this hole.
I do a lot of work with Seven, which was started by a bunch of photographers. Gary Knight said that “It was only because of digital technology that we could start a company by raiding our ATMs.” It’s a totally digital company; there are two people on staff in Paris. The photographers submit all their work to the agency digitally. Is this not an example of a digital solution?
Alan: I agree. For everything except the actual image capture, digital is great. I hate digital cameras. But the world wide web is great; being able to promote yourself with blogs and email is fine. There’s the famous case of Frenaz, who’s a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, who wrote a private letter to her friends about bad it is being a journalist in Iraq right now. It has circulated around the world. It never appeared in a newspaper, but it has made her famous.
What Seven did was very effective. With two staff members and a big hard drive, you can run a business, distribute, promote yourself. In that sense, the digital age does democratize the process and make it easier for a small group of individuals to get their vision out.
Brad: We will always be the ones who invest in new technology. My clients don’t even run OS X; they use OS 9. They don’t have a decent file browser. I bring them these big files, and they struggle to get them onto their servers so they can look at it. I’ve got the best computers, color-corrected monitors, but my clients are working with equipment that’s three years old. They are not clamoring for you to shoot digitally.
“Everything about this business is a relationship.”
Audience: There’s also a problem of communication. We’re also assuming that our clients are as savvy, technically, as we are. We have got to do a better job at talking to them about what’s involved. Some of that is developing a common language, so that our editor friends will know what we’re talking about. Everyone knows what a roll of film is. But when I talk about digital delivery, I may be talking about a whole different set of parameters than Shawn or Brad. That’s part of the confusion in pricing structures. Some people don’t charge anything, even though they do a lot of stuff; some people charge way too much for just toning and balancing the print. I never used to charge clients for dodging and burning, and clients resent paying for it now. We need a language that lets everyone talk about the same things.
Alan: The technology is still too new. None of us are used to it yet. It’s grown too fast. But you’re absolutely right about dealing with clients. I suspect that a lot of photographers are putting in more hours because they have no faith in the technical departments of the magazines.
Brad: That’s not it at all. I know that the Business Week imaging department could kick my ass in Photoshop. Rather, my photographing style has changed over the last year from shooting digitally, and I think for the better. I’m getting better images because I’ve gotten away from looking at the camera; I’m able to concentrate on shooting. I wish it didn’t cost as much, and I wish I made more money for the back side, but I’m not going to go back to film.
Part of dealing with your clients is not ganging up on them, not charging for the retouching, understanding that they have budget parameters — but not letting them rape you when they say they have only $150 for digital. You know they’ll pay for film, so you work it out. Everything about this business is a relationship. I get hired through relationships, and if I say, “No, you have to pay me $1,000 for digital,” they just won’t call me again. In the end, you’re working for your friends. None of us should be thinking we’ll go to the mattresses over digital fees if that means we’ll lose a client.
“In the 1950s, we had the cult of the photojournalist. We’re never going to live in that world again.”
Moderator: Is the problem that we are in a transitional period? The technology is in transition, and so is how we charge the clients. Maybe in five years, we’ll look back and say “That was the birth pains.”
Brad: Of course. But as to the web being a potential market: It is, but the Internet is not making money for most people today. The magazine sites that you can get pictures on are not any way to make a living.
Shawn: We are at a critical juncture in figuring out the economics. Some photographers will buy a digital camera and think it’s great because they don’t have to buy film and they can charge less. Others think they can charge $1,500 a day because they have a 20D camera. So some of it is communication with the client, to figure out what they want you to do with the files, and some is communication among ourselves to come up with an appropriate fee. My invoices average $350 or $450 for digital fees. The more we talk about this, the better. Every time Business Week gets an invoice with nothing, or $15, for burning a CD, it hurts the rest of us. Every time Forbes gets an invoice for $1,100 for a basic executive portrait that somebody would have shot six rolls of film on, they are much more inclined to cap their fees.
Alan: In a society like Afghanistan or China, where until recently there were only ten cars and ten people who knew how to drive them, if you were one of those ten, you could become rich because everyone would need to hire you. In a society where everybody has a car, that’s not valuable. We have to look at it the same way: How valuable are we, and to whom? In the 1950s, when you didn’t even have light meters that worked, the ability to guesstimate the light was a highly valued skill. That’s why we had the cult of the photojournalist. We’re never going to live in that world again.
“The biggest problem we face in the future is magazines that say, ‘Just give us the raws.’ ”
Barbara: Going back to the people who charge $15 for burning a CD, there are plenty of photographers that will take whatever’s in the camera, burn it onto CD and send it in without doing anything. Those are the ones who charge $15.
Shawn: In fact, that’s what I do for Business Week, because they still only want to pay $150. So I shoot raw and JPEG at the same time and, at the end of the shoot, while my assistant is packing up, I separate the raws and the JPEGs and burn a CD of the JPEGs. The only other thing I do is rename the files and put in caption information. I drop it in FedEx and I’m done with it.
Barbara: There’s apples and there’s oranges. There are people who are shooting raw, processing them and delivering retouched files. Then there are people who just burn the data to a CD.
Brad: The imaging departments at magazines are unhappy because there is no standard. They would love to get raw files. I delivered one job that had lots of adjustment layers and the images looked great, but the imaging department dumped all that and went back to the base scan — and they messed it up. The next job, the photo editor flattened all the files and emailed it to the imaging department, and they were stuck with that. They don’t know what they are doing, a lot of times.
I think that in the next couple of years, there will be a standardized raw file that the magazines will all expect, and they will do all the work themselves. But will that change what I do on the back end? I don’t think so, because I’m not going to deliver raw files. Years ago, magazines said, “Just give us the raw film and we’ll develop it.” I wouldn’t do it then, and I’m not going to do it now. How do they know what I wanted it to look like? You’re hiring me as a photographer, not a monkey with a camera. I make the image my way, and that’s what you’re paying for.
If they have technical issues about the gamut or the histogram, I can deal with that. Maybe I meant it that way. I know what it looks like.
The biggest problem we can face in the future is magazines that say, “Just give us the raws.” If we do that, just to save a few hours of back-end production time, that’s a big mistake. Then your input into the photograph has just been cut in half.
Barbara: That’s also like turning over your negative.
Brad: And I wouldn’t do that, either. That’s not why they hired me; they hired me to take the picture the way I see things. And if they insist? Well, then we just have to go two different directions.
“I like modifying things in Photoshop, just as I used to like making color prints in a darkroom.”
Audience: Another problem is that the clients don’t have calibrated monitors. So you process it on your equipment, but when they get it, it still looks crappy. So there should be ways to charge them based on what you are delivering them.
Shawn: You have to figure out what your clients want, what they can do on their own, and what they are willing to pay you for. Sometimes there’s going to be a compromise position, where you want to have more involvement. (That’s actually one of the great things about digital: It puts you back in the darkroom, and you can make the image your own, rather than just taking whatever the E6 processed out to.) But you have to work that out with the client and come up with an appropriate payment.
Brad: I want to clarify one thing: I actually like working on the back end. I don’t like sitting there for 15 hours watching files process, but I like modifying things in Photoshop, just as I used to like making color prints in a darkroom. I haven’t been in a darkroom in four or five years, but I used to like doing it. Now I do it digitally. Do I charge for it all the time? No. You don’t have to feel you should charge for retouching.
I mean, this guy [nods to Alan] was sitting in a foxhole developing black-and-white film, and that’s just the way the business was. What’s wrong with taking pride in what you do, putting a little more time in and giving them an image that you’re proud of? So I’m not paid for it; shoot me, I’m a bad businessman.
“Working for the Times leads to other things, lots of resales, and there are ways that it is lucrative.”
Barbara: Working for the Times, I have the option of either bringing the disk in and letting them copy the images out, or taking it home, editing and then transmitting. Generally, I want to send them a corrected image that meets my standards, rather than one that isn’t as good as I know it could be. I want to present my work in the best fashion possible. And sometimes I’ll get caught up and spend way too much time, but I enjoy it.
Also, we haven’t given up getting higher rates at the Times.
Audience: [inaudible]
Barbara: I’m a freelance. There is no contract. Although everyone who shoots freelance for the Times has to sign a contract, that doesn’t make us “contract photographers.” The only contractors are abroad, and they have certain guarantees. So, we haven’t given up. I don’t know if we’ll get paid for digital transmission fees, but we have hopes that they will raise the day rate in the new budget year.
And, yes, it is possible to make a decent living working for the Times. The ASMP Bulletin just had something about the Knight Ridder contract that’s even worse, making the New York Times contract look quite peachy. Working for the Times leads to other things, lots of resales, and there are ways that it is lucrative.
Audience: You’ve touched on a lot of things. I think it serves photographers well, when you’re going to charge a fee, to list reasons why you’re doing it. I charge clients an image processing fee and it’s based on history. I explain that the rates haven’t gone up, but my expenses have gone up, and they are generally pretty good about it. On the business side of being a photographer, it probably helps if you explain why you charge these fees. And depending on how you shoot, you probably have to charge different ways. I shoot hundreds of images for the stories I do, but I base my fees on making enough money to pay for the equipment.
Barbara: Aside from the New York Times, most clients understand that they used to pay for film, they paid for processing, for contact sheets and for prints. Most of the time, they are pretty open to costs that substitute for those expenses.
“Advertising people have no problem paying for digital.”
Audience: I keep going back to “just don’t do editorial work at all.” If you are doing advertising work, do they want digital files?
Brad: It’s not that they want it, but all my clients eventually came to love it. I made some major, boneheaded mistakes at first. Like, the first time, I delivered a huge job on DVDs — like, 30 DVDs. My client nearly killed me. She was working on Photoshop 6; there wasn’t even have a file browser. I had spent all weekend burning the DVDs, doing what I thought was a fancy-ass job, and two days later I had to bring in a Firewire drive with the images so she could see the files. I also did them all as 16-bit files, and she couldn’t even look at them.
Advertising people are the same as editorial. They’re not clamoring for digital, but they do understand how much better it is for them. They love it on shoots, they love being able to see it on monitor. They love being able to go on the computer on break and start mocking up the layouts. And they’ll pay for it. Advertising people have no problem paying for digital. My basic advertising fee is $1,500 for a day’s capture, and then I’ll charge them a for back-end processing fee as well. But are they insisting on digital? No.
Audience: [inaudible]
Brad: No, it’s based on the amount of time I have to put in. And I learn new things on every job. My workflow changes on every single job I do. Sometimes I have to do 20 files, sometimes I have to do 300. I haven’t had clients insisting on metadata and all that; that’s not what they want. They want a nice RGB file, that’s not locked and that has the right image. My basic workflow issue is just the size of the files, and finding the storage to hold them all. Nobody’s paying for that; it comes out of my pocket.
Audience: I’ve been charging by the frame when I have to burn the CD on site. But for my corporate clients, on a half-day shoot, I usually have about $400 of expenses and I figured out a flat fee for the whole thing. They like that; they know what it will cost and don’t go berserk when they see the bill if I decide to shoot an extra hundred images. My question is, am I hurting myself by doing this?
Brad: I think a flat fee is a much smarter way of doing it. You still have to do the same amount of work. I have a minimum that I’ll work for, and the maximum depends on how much more work I have to do. Corporate clients like to know, up front.
Nothing is carved in stone. You’re not going to find the editorial clients willing to nail down a number. The only rate that Business Week has nailed down is the cover rate; they’ll pay $450. Time Inc. doesn’t say what it is, but they will pay you.
“Magazine photographers will always get trickled down upon.”
Audience (Jason _): The magazines aren’t clamoring for digital today, but they’re going to be. Three to five years from now, nobody’s going to be shooting film. What we do today is going to sow the seeds for what we do in three to five years. I’m wondering if we’re not in real danger of a “trickle up” problem with newspapers like the New York Times establishing a policy. There will always be the top two percent of photographers who can dictate their own fees, but it doesn’t trickle down.
Alan: No, because anyone with $1,000 can go out and buy a decent digital camera and make a decent picture. The competition is that much harder, especially in photojournalism. I’m not talking about Time Magazine, which is at the top, hiring kids with cameras. But Reuters and AP are.
Jason: But the problems at Time and the New York Times are trickling up. They are setting policy for those of us in the middle tier. How do you fix that problem for the future?
Alan: We tried to fix that problem by fighting that contract. I organized a group of about 100 contributing Times photographers to not sign the contract and, in essence, be on strike. Well, it was the reverse of a strike; we were locked out. After seven months, I’m one of five or six people who have not signed that contract. If none of these people had gone back to work for the Times, we would have won this battle.
Jason: What do our professional organizations like ASMP and EP have as a responsibility to help fix this problem?
Alan: They all were very supportive, especially the ASMP, which I’m very grateful for. But the reality is that none of these organizations are unions. We do not have collective bargaining, and without collective bargaining, someone will always underbid us.
Audience: I just want to correct one thing that Jason said. Magazine photographers will always get trickled down upon.
“Just tell them you’re going to shoot film.”
Shawn: Short of a union, the biggest thing that organizations and individual photographers can do is more openly communicate. Living in fear that the Justice Department will swoop down and arrest me for calling up Jason and asking, “What do you charge for digital,” is stupid and outdated. We have to get past that and be a bit braver. If Brad’s making this much money, call him up and ask how he does it.
Brad: People do. I’ve had calls from out of town, where people I’ve never heard of say, “I’m doing a job for this magazine and they told me $150.” I tell them, “Balls.” I’ve never charged $150, though that’s the first number they throw out. I do tell them, “Just tell them you’re going to shoot film.” And if they say they need it the next day, well? They’re going to pay $350, absolutely.
Audience: If you buy a digital camera, it’s only going to last two years before it’s obsolete. I think we should be charging rental fees on our cameras, like we do with other equipment.
“CIO Insight will pay $1,000 for the same job that Fortune will pay $500, and they take less rights from you.”
Brad: Here’s the reality of this business. Most magazines claim they don’t have any money. So, if you start charging rental fees for equipment you own, you aren’t going to work for them again. One of my assistants was doing a shoot for the Spanish Cosmo. The American Cosmo was being shot that day; the Spanish one would be tomorrow. They’d bring in Spanish models and all. Now, the photographer for American Cosmo was probably getting a lot, but for the Spanish one, they were offering $1,000, all in. It was 14 or 15 shots, and they wanted makeup, assistants and everything for $1,000. The reason he was calling was to borrow my digital camera. Because the only way he could do the job was digitally; film and processing would have cost too much. I said, “Just don’t shoot the job.” He shot the job, but he didn’t get the camera from me; I wouldn’t give it to him; it’s just not right. I tried to explain it to him, but he was so into doing the job that he’d do it for whatever they paid.
If Hearst is going to do that, imagine what the smaller magazines are going to do. They’ll say, “Take it or leave it,” and they’ll go to the next guy. There’s always going to be some guy who’s going to pick up the job. And you know they’ve got the money: It’s a fashion magazine, they’ll have 15 people show up and order cappuccinos from the bar. When they say they’ve got a flat fee, it doesn’t matter what you call it, a rental or whatever.
Barbara: Continuing what Alan was saying about our struggle with the Times, we started with a fairly large group. But within a week, there were freelancers who signed the contract and declared how thrilled and proud they were to work for the Times under any conditions. There were more dropouts in the following weeks. Within four months, when the majority had already signed, we wondered what was the point of holding out. How do you hold a group of photographers and keep them from signing a lousy contract? People are sheep and won’t stand up for their rights, and at a certain point, you can’t fight on your own any more.
Audience: In my own case, when I started being successful financially was when I started saying no. I worked for Business Week for the first time a couple of months ago, and one editor said, “This is what we pay, but I don’t want any extra charges besides your postage.” Well, it was more than I’d ever made. It sounded fine to me.
“I’ve had to spend $5,000 or $10,000 on equipment. I can no longer be a hippie.”
Shawn: We can all gripe about how Time hasn’t raised its rates in forever, but you can go to any newsstand and see a wealth of magazines that didn’t exist 25 years ago. An example is CIO Insight, and they pay $1,000 for the same job that Fortune will pay $500, and they take less rights from you. And they’ll pay your expenses better, because they don’t have the silly Fortune mentality of $21 a roll of film. There’s a lot of magazines you can look at to make your money.
Having said that, I think it’s wrong to pick on people who need the work. Instead of ragging on people who do work for the Times, you’d be far better spending that energy picking up the phone and calling around to see who the good clients are. Or sharing an experience where a client initially said they would pay one amount, and ended up paying more.
I had an experience recently where a magazine called up and wanted me to shoot three of their editors for use on the Editors page. They said their standard rate was $1500. I said, “That’s each, right?” and they said no, it was their rate for the whole day and I’d shoot whoever showed up. So even though there were only three, they were going to be generous and pay for the whole day. And I said no, but I’d consider doing it for $2,500 as a reasonable compromise. Later in the day, I told the story to a buddy who works in the same area. So, when the magazine called him the next morning, he knew enough to say, “Sure, I’ll do it for $2500.” I guarantee, no one wants to make less money than you. So if you tell someone, I charge $600, the next time they get a call they will ask $600. So if we communicate better, we’ll all be better off.
Alan: I’m heartened to hear that story. On the news side, that has not been the case. AP, for instance, in the days of film would pay you $50 or $75 a picture and keep the negative. That picture would appear in two thousand newspapers around the world.
Moderator: When I first went to Salvador, in the ’80s, UPI would pay John Hoagland $15 a day, and they kept the film. None of this is because of digital technology.
Alan: But in the days before digital, I was content to live like a student. My camera cost $300; it was 30 years old. I would bulk-load my film. I went to eastern Europe with $100 in my pocket. It didn’t matter. Now, I have to compete; I’ve had to spend $5,000 or $10,000 on equipment. I can no longer just be a hippie.
Audience: Can you talk about the whole Zinio thing? There are some magazines that won’t pay more, but you have to sign their Zinio agreement.
Brad: Zinio is an electronic magazine. It lets you download the magazine direct to your computer exactly as it appears in print; you get all the ads, everything from the cover to the back page. It’s subscription-based; the only difference is, instead of a paper magazine, you get a digital copy.
I don’t have a problem with the way they’re doing it, if they pay you for it. The problem I have is, I don’t think Zinio is going to work. It’s a pain to read on the computer. You have to zoom in, and it’s hard.
“I can’t pay the $225 for your assistant, but bill me a rental on something.”
As to Time Inc., I think it would be great if they offered you, say, an extra hundred bucks [for electronic rights]. But although Time Inc. has one policy that is wrong, every magazine has its own quirks.
At the corporate level (and I shoot all their annual reports every year, and I’ve talked to them), the top people all think that digital is free. Anne Moore, the head of Time Magazine, truly thinks that digital is one way they are going to save money. Everyone in this room needs to wonder how they’re going to make any money shooting for Time.
Audience: There are Time Inc. magazines that will ship you cards. You shoot the job, send back the cards and they send you the pictures on DVD.
Brad: The only one that you will really lose a lot of control is S.I. — but, that’s S.I. At Fortune, Business Week, or Entertainment Weekly, they know you are doing all this work, but they have a corporate policy that they won’t pay a high rate for digital fees. McGraw Hill is another one —- all the way to the top, they think that this “new paradigm” is a way to cut costs. They have this point-and-shoot mentality, and they think it’s free. All of my photo editors say the same thing: They know the photographer should get more money, but they all say, “My hands are tied.”
Audience: [inaudible]
Brad: That’s the backhanded deal. Time will say, “I can’t give you more than $300 for digital, but I’ll give you an extra half-day for production.” It’s the way they have to work within their own system. I used to hate that. Magazines would say, “I can’t pay the $225 for your assistant, but bill me a rental on something. Make up an invoice.” I used to hate that. It shouldn’t be up to me to fake it so they can work within their system. Now, I’ll just do whatever they want. I’ll make up all the fake invoices or whatever I have to do. I’ve long since put down my sword; I just want to get paid.
But other clients don’t care. I do a lot of cover stuff for USA Weekend. It’s all celebrities, it’s pretty simple stuff, but they pay well. They pay my fee and they don’t argue about it. Oh, they complain about my expenses, but they still pay. And they are actually happy, because my digital fee is much less than I used to charge for film.
So, if they tell you to take an extra half day for production, don’t complain; take the money. They are willing to work with you to get the job done. So, for the magazines that won’t pay a digital fee and they stick to it, try to get them for something else. Try to work in a rental fee or an extra assistant.
“Whether they are professionals or not is irrelevant, because it will affect the careers of professionals.”
Moderator: Some of the most compelling pictures of the Arab war came out of Abu Ghraib. They were digital photos taken with a little camera, and they went all over the Internet. When everyone’s got a digital camera, when you can buy high-resolution phone cameras, the quality of news photography is mainly who is on the scene, who gets there first.
Alan: That’s always the case. At the Oklahoma City bombing, the man on the scene had a point-and-shoot camera. But what’s astonishing about the Abu Ghraib pictures is how they were distributed. Because of email, they could be instantly distributed. They went to a brother-in-law, and then within a matter of days, they were in millions of computers. That’s a good thing for the world, but it’s a bad thing for my job.
We’re entering a world where everyone has a drivers license and a car. Maybe not at the elite level, but certainly at the AP level. Anyone who has the picture will win.
Moderator: Whether they are professionals or not is irrelevant, because it will affect the careers of professionals.
Alan: When everyone has a phone camera that’s good enough for newspaper reproduction, how can I beat that? In terms of getting on the front page, there’s no way I can compete with that.
“The organizations can build relationships and foster open communication, even if they can’t post a set of price lists.”
Audience: It’s been a great discussion. But is there a way we can use technology to our advantage, with a discussion group?
Brad: There are already some groups on Yahoo, and the professional societies do them. ASMP has their membership web site. There’s Digital Journalists, Rob Galbraith.
Audience: Do they do business issues, or are they just about cameras and photography techniques?
Brad: When EP got started, the whole point was to get photographers together online to talk about the clients they were doing business with. Now it’s a general clearinghouse for whatever problems photographers have. It’s a great resource. And a lot of the stuff does have to do with digital. If more people were on EP and listening to what others were charging, we wouldn’t have people burning a CD for $10.
Shawn: Despite my best hopes, you won’t find Brian Smith, the president of EP, or Gene Mopsik from ASMP, stand up in front of us and say, “Hey bozo, everyone out there should charge X amount.” That would require substantial organizational change. But the organizations can build relationships and foster open communication, even if they can’t post a set of price lists.
Moderator: We’re out of time. I want to thank the panel for a pertinent discussion.