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FAP Brings in Business
Over and over, members tell us that Find A Photographer is a member benefit that has measurable cash value. It lets buyers search by specialty or by location. In addition, the search results include photos to provide convincing visual evidence of the photographer's skills. We've heard photographers say that one referral paid for their membership many times over. But don't take our word for it. Here, in their own words, are what some of our members have to say.
John Bashian
When I received the notice from ASMP National that we (member photographers) could upload our images to accommodate our profile on the Find a Photographer on the ASMP site, I jumped right on it.... I thought: Finally, I’m getting more valuable services from my yearly dues… Since I didn’t have a Web site at that time, this was a great opportunity for me to have some kind of web presence… I could send potential clients to the Find a Photographer site to view some images and I have several times. Fortunately, I’ve had several out of town art directors /designers/book assignments come to me because they were able to see my images on the Find a Photographer ASMP site. I hope more photo buyers see this site and I get more business from this service.
I also see that there are only a small percentage of the ASMP shooters utilizing this service. A lot of shooters have their URL listed but that’s another click away. Art directors/designers needed to see images yesterday, so here are some images now!!!
Thanks again ASMP for this service… I’ll be able to send you my 2005 dues without any hesitations this year…
Carolyn Bates
Find a Photographer has helped me to obtain jobs from several new clients. By being a member of ASMP, my credentials are already established, and the job is mine.
I have been shooting for over 30 years full time, and have been a member of ASMP since 1999. I specialize in architectural and portrait photography. The email forum with architectural photographers has been invaluable. I live in Burlington, Vermont, so I am outside of the normal loop of most of my clients. When ASMP added Find a Photographer on their Web site, my business income increased without expensive marketing tools and has given me some very creative portraits to shoot.
The assignments have been creative and challenging, and generally portraits. One portrait of a man 6’11” had me scrambling to find enough pillows to stack up as high as he was tall (23) (Tall Paul’s Tall Mall.com). Another was in a local cafe: Radio Bean, where the owners had used a mattress spring for a wine rack. Having a digital Hasselblad (H1 with Imacon back), my laptop and 2 assistants, allowed me to turn the job around in 6 hours.
My latest assignment was photographing the business Have Justice Will Travel. The art director was exceptional. The owner of the business polished up her car and posed outside of her business/home in a hot pink shirt and we huddled over a hooded laptop to be sure our photos were perfect.
Wayne Chasan
"My experience with FAP as an overseas ASMP member has been exceptionally positive. I am based in Spain and, as a member since 1986, have found ASMP vital in helping me set up & understand the business, but I often felt unconnected to many of the benefits received by local US members/chapters.
Since the era of Internet, my connection to the ASMP Web site & the specialty architectural forum, the FAP function and its link to my Web site, have all made me feel in touch in an unprecedented and immediate basis with both my peers and clients.
Shortly after linking my web site to FAP, I was contacted by an advertising agency in the US to photograph the campaign to launch the new Warner Bros Amusement Park in Madrid, Spain for the Six Flags group. This was a spectacular coup directly through FAP!
The difference I find is that clients now locate me through the ASMP and link direct to my site—by the time they contact me they already know who I am as a photographer and their approach is " we love your work, we have a potential assignment we would like to discuss with you". In the old days I would get an out-of-country contact who would know little about me, request a portfolio that would be sent at great cost and which would more often than not arrive after they had already selected a more immediate alternative.
The various contacts that we receive through FAP are a welcome benefit and they alone probably have covered my annual dues of themselves!"
Chris Crumley
I became an ASMP member in the ‘80s for a number of reasons, but primarily because I believe a professional of any kind is obligated to support and fund their professional organization. A professional association like ASMP does provide members with support, but that’s the egg. The chicken is the member supporting their profession (trade association).
An unexpected by-product of my ASMP membership is the Find a Photographer program. A growing number of publishers use the Find a Photographer program to locate photographers by specialty or, more frequently, service area (in my case the Norfolk / Virginia Beach area). I routinely invoice ten times or more annually than my ASMP dues for work done from a Find a Photographer contact.
This would vary by area, the number of ASMP members in the area, the skill set of the photographers found and the quality of their Web site.
Caryn B. Davis
I got a call from the Art Director of Today’s Health & Wellness Magazine out in Minnesota who needed a photographer for a shoot in my area. She had found me on the ASMP Find a Photographer site and liked the few images she saw there enough to then take the time to look at my own Web site. After reviewing my work, she called and gave me the assignment. I think the ASMP Find a Photographer has been very helpful. Because we are a well-known and respected organization, it is perfect place for an Art Director to go when looking to hire a photographer for assignment work.
Frank DiMarco
My experience with Find A Photographer has been limited, but I have completed several trade magazine assignments as a result of editors finding me there. What is great about it is that new business relationships can be formed via a new path and people can get to your Web site as well. I am working on a new Web site which should be launched by the end of the year, and I'm hopeful that Find a Photographer will continue to bring me new clients.
Jon Golden
When you live in Charlottesville, a small town in Virginia, assignments originating in Sweden are hard to come by, unless you have taken advantage of the Find a Photographer portion of the ASMP Web site. I have had numerous editorial assignments this past year that I owe completely to the site, but the one from shipping company Wallenius Wilhemsen Lines (WWL), Routes Magazine, was most enjoyable of all.
I have a background in engineering and previously spent a lot of time at sea on a variety of commercial vessels. My assignment was to meet the 44,000-ton TEXAS (funny name for a Norwegian flagged vessel) at the dockyard and make images of a multimillion-dollar cargo being off-loaded. I was illustrating an article about this special cargo whose client chose WWL. I did some additional research, which told me the TEXAS was a heavy lift roll-on / roll-off ship. She can carry cargo weighing as much as 10 tons per square meter. She can take train locomotives, bulldozers, jets, and mining equipment. Big and cool stuff!!!! I was excited to do the job.
Planning involved security clearances for my assistant and myself, and a willingness to be “on-call” for the timing of the ship’s arrival. (Commercial ships never linger in port) Certain art director and client wishes had to be modified on the fly, since union longshoremen do not wear company uniforms. They also do not tolerate visitors in their work zone very easily, especially those with cameras. But the ship’s officers found it interesting that I could speak Norwegian and did what they could to help me out. The day went well and I was thankful to be shooting digital. Being able to change film speed on the fly and see results along the way was incredibly helpful. The cargo was distributed in 3 huge basketball stadium sized holds, with lighting that could only be described as available darkness. The shapeless cargo, which was wrapped in a mirror-shiny aluminized plastic wrap, was off-loaded into the bright sunshine and whisked into equally dark warehouses.
Although this assignment did not pay a lot - it was an in-house company magazine - I did have time after the cargo was off-loaded to use my access to shoot stock and portfolio images. The cumulative effect of Find a Photographer has paid my dues this year, and has introduced me to some new clients, that I hope will use me in the future. Fittingly the job was delivered to Sweden via FTP. Start with the Web, end with the Web.
Ken Reid
My experience with Find a Photographer has been very positive. I have received dozens of inquiries that have turned into a few jobs. Almost all have been from editorial clients looking for a photographer by location. The clients I did work with were all professional, paid well and on time. This bodes very well for the type of client who is using the service. I believe we all need as many advertising and pr outlets as we can get for our own work. The ASMP Find a Photographer program is definitely adding to the layer cake of outlets we should all have in place.
Liz Roll
The Find a Photographer feature on the ASMP Web site is one of the many great features that come with membership. This site is a must-have for art directors and creatives, and the ASMP brand name means they know if they hire from this site that they will get a quality product. The fact that a member can post samples makes it even more attractive to a buyer; they can see the style of a particular photographer. I personally have had excellent experience with this feature, garnering a number of assignments "sight unseen". Some of these have turned into repeat clients. I usually ask people where they got my name, if someone unknown to me calls for quotes or questions. Invariably, the answer is one of two: another current client, or the ASMP Find a Photographer Web sites. If you are not using this, you are losing business.
Janice Rubin
I have benefited from the ASMP Find a Photographer site since its inception. On average, I receive between two and six assignments a year from photo buyers who find me through the ASMP site. I appreciate the ability to showcase some of my images on the ASMP site to entice potential clients to visit my Web page. Since ASMP is a well-respected organization, photo buyers know that they will find photographers with experience and professionalism.
Barbara Singer
ASMP’s Find a Photographer is a great matchmaker. It introduces clients who are looking for a certain kind of photographer to photographers who are looking for that kind of client, and perhaps there will be a match.
I had the good fortune to be in ASMP’s Find a Photographer database when Peter Tucker, Art Director at Research Magazine/Adams Business Media in San Francisco, was looking for a New York photographer to do portrait work on location the following week. After learning about me in Find a Photographer, Peter went to my Web site, and then called. He asked if I could take individual portraits of seven women and one man for a magazine supplement and two group shots for the cover. “Yes,” I said, “I can and would like to do it.” He liked what he had seen of my work and how I sounded. I directed him to my agent, Consuela Nance of Steelpetal, Inc., to work out the finances and other production issues.
The seven women I was hired to shoot are considered to be America’s finest female financial advisors and industry leaders. All were chosen to be in Women’s Winner’s Circle, a Research Magazine supplement written by R. J. Shook. They came to the shoot from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Missouri, Florida, and California. It had been difficult to coordinate their schedules, and only one week’s notice was possible for the photographer. A celebratory luncheon was scheduled for the shoot day, hosted by the top woman, Sallie Krawcheck, chairman and CEO of Smith Barney. (Since then she has become CFO of Citigroup. Many consider her to be the most powerful woman on Wall Street.)
Shoot day arrived on Wednesday, February 4, 2004. I was lucky to have two excellent photographers assisting me, Frank Rocco and Edgar Mata—very lucky, because we had more than one obstacle to overcome.
When we arrived with our gear at Smith Barney headquarters downtown, we discovered that the location in the building which we had scouted out and planned for very carefully—a fabulous room especially designed for photography with dark curtains that blocked out unwanted light, special furniture, plants, etc.—had been cancelled. We had to improvise. With the help of Smith Barney’s coordinator, Katrina Clay, we found a space between cubicles on one of the floors where we could set up a little studio with my portable background stand, specially chosen gray set paper, Dynalites, softbox, reflector, tripod, my Contax 645 with a portrait lens, and a revolving stool for “the talent”. I couldn’t help as much as I would have liked with moving equipment because during a snowstorm two weeks earlier my left arm had been broken and it was still in a cast. We also had to arrange another set-up nearby for the group shots in front of windows, with two sets of chairs, to be shot with me on a ladder near the tripod with my Contax and a wide-angle lens.
My agent, Consuela, arrived with the make-up person, and by 9:30 AM we were ready for our first subject, Sheila Keator of Wachovia in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. My motto is, “I look for the best in you to show with beauty and power”, and this was my purpose with Sheila. I wanted to be truly affected by her and by each woman I photographed. I wanted her particular individuality to get across to others through my images. And this had to do with how her face looked to me, her clothes, her posture, and the angles and light I chose to show them with. I had the same purpose with R. J. Shook, author of the article, who also sat for a portrait.
I shot just one roll of film for each subject, but the time seemed leisurely, even though things were made difficult by one woman’s temper, the lack of a hair dryer, plane departures to adjust to, and the luncheon being so long that we had less than ten minutes to shoot the important group shots for the cover photo. Thank God Frank, Edgar and I had taken Polaroids in front of the windows during the lunch break and were ready when the women returned!
Everything considered, the shoot was a success. The film was good. All of the women were pleased. R. J. Shook was pleased. Bob Tyndall, publisher of Research Magazine, who had dropped in for a while during the shoot, was pleased. Peter Tucker was pleased, and all of us were pleased. I was thrilled and touched to get an e-mail from lovely Mary Deatherage, Senior Vice President of Investments at Smith Barney in Little Falls, NJ. She wrote: “I wanted to tell you how special you made the day yesterday. I know it’s your job, but it’s clear that it’s ‘more than a job’ to you. It was an honor to watch you work!”
I am grateful for this job—the contacts, the experience, and of course the financial rewards it brought my team and me. I am grateful to ASMP and its Find a Photographer feature which made all of this possible. I never expected my ASMP membership to pay off like this! Now I know that it can.
Eric Swanson
I have had my Web site linked to Find a Photographer since shortly after its inception (both my site and the ASMP link are of similar age). I have had better results from this link than just about any promo work I have done. Since having this link I get calls from people who have already seen my work and are calling with assignments. I seem to average 1-2 assignments a month from this link. 90% are editorial and are from magazines I have never heard of. They all pay very fairly, have reasonable contracts and have been nice to work for. I think the price of my ASMP dues is worth this link alone, not to mention the other ASMP benefits. If this sounds like a glowing review from me, it is.
Roger J. Wyan
I am an ASMP member and live about two hours outside San Francisco in the rural Central Valley community of Merced. While peaceful, Merced is not exactly a bastion of photography or professional opportunities for photographers. Before joining ASMP five or so years ago, I would receive occasional calls from East Coast or Midwest editors to shoot for their magazine. Mostly I relied on teaching photography part time at Merced Community College and shooting local jobs to make a living. Since joining ASMP, I have received a steady increase in calls each year from photo editors and art directors alike wanting me to shoot for their respective national magazines and other publications. Forbes, Time, Inc., Wells Fargo, Cigna Healthcare, Chicago, National Assoc. of Realtors and Sam's Club are among my clients, all of which found me through the ASMP Web site. Membership in ASMP adds a certain validity - a kind of letter of recommendation, if you will, that at the very least gets editors looking at my web site (www.RogerWyan.com).
Ultimately it’s my work, my style, my ability to deliver the product and my pricing that secures the job. But how does a photographer first draw attention to his or her work? Generating awareness is, of course, of great importance – the initial portal to attracting more clients and jobs. ASMP’s Find a Photographer feature certainly facilitates that part of the puzzle. When I ask clients how they found me, more often that not they respond "the ASMP Web site." Self-promotion combined with attention generated from ASMP’s Find a Photographer feature are helping me move toward my professional goals. Equally important to me is the wealth of information available from ASMP, particularly through the "Members Forum." This forum is my connection to the global community of photographers.