A whopping 5 comments my alltime high-I RULE! Well, I thank you all for noticing, mainly thanks to Andrew. I wanted to post-forward a comment that Olivier Laude offered on an older post:
Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.
Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.
http://www.editorialphoto.com/
Later as Olivier noted anyone who is currently working for BW or Forbes has the SF12 to thank, although they later did renege on the agreement of further increases, but the higher rate has stood. I myself have never worked for BW or Forbes, I think there was a stigma that if you worked for Fortune they did not hire you, but I don’t really know if that is true.
If you look at the history of unionization almost all of the significant action took place at the turn of the century, and it was a pretty bloody affair, but in all those cases you have a group of workers and you have a “workplace” to leave, and get locked out of. Solidarity is enforced bodily at the factory gates, and everyone knows everyone else who works there, you have to work alongside each other which makes scabbing very difficult. Photography knows no such workplace, despite my calling the still life studio the “coal mine.” Enforcing solidarity is practically impossible. Another part is you have two different kinds of workforces, on the one hand a group that was immigrant to this nation, largely poor, used to all kinds of hardship and with few alternatives, the other a privileged mobile group. You can’t herd cats. Read on…
It makes me wonder tho, how do you gain leverage? It seems to me Reps have some leverage, in that they represent a consolidated group, and also a “premium” group, an “elite” group of handpicked individuals. One or two reps with enough highly placed talent could withhold their talent unless a higher rate was offered, or even make it a practice to at least bill at incrementally higher and higher rates each year. The cumulative effect would be to get some motion in rates upward, and also to provide an incentive to hire non-represented photographers who might work for the old rates. When you think about it, it is strange that this is not already the case. You want the best, you should pay for it.
Oh, I’m sorry, that was some massively good weed I was smoking. Back to what I really think…
So I want to get back to this ju-jitsu I was speaking of. Olivier made a good comment that you can use the magazine’s travel office and have them pay for all of it, which should be S.O.P. Usually they want you to cover the consumables like meals, car rental, gas and transportation, but again, if you can estimate well, you can get an advance to cover those expenses too. The goal here is to be cash-flow neutral in all of this, you cannot spend a dime of your own money on this. When you think about a travel job, either a day or a few days, the fees are only going to be 500-2000 dollars, and since you get paid half on travel days the average daily fee goes down. You have to look at the days you are away and cannot cover or double up additional jobs, run your book around, etc. If those dollars are going to be worth it, particularly on the one-day turnaround job, if you got 500+a 250 travel day, 750, you could not spend more than a couple hundred out of your own pocket. Why is this? It goes back to the cash flow idea, take what you are earning and divide it by 2 times the number of months you will have to wait to be reimbursed, in other words, you will have to revolve your credit how many times before you receive payment. Even one month is detrimental and it creates a negative cash flow. If you have to wait 45 to 60 days (total, from the moment you spend the money) that 750 gets reduced by every dollar you put out, for example, assistants-they need to get paid right away, so that takes 200 off the 750, any car rental or transport (150+car service to airport and back, 100..) boom, another 250 gone. You are down to 300 positive cash flow, and suddenly my claim of taking that NY Times freelance gig for 200 dollars in 10 days paid starts to look good, especially since you don’t leave town and there are NO expenses (har, they don’t pay’em!)
So you can inflate the expenses ANY amount you want, it still doesn’t change the basic math of cash flow. It helps to offset it, but month to month it is the same. So you are fine if you are busy, but go even 15 days without work and you have missed one or two cheque runs, and there will be a dip in your inflows two months from now when that mastercard bill for the Bahamas travel job is due, and you can’t pay it off clean, so you begin to revolve debt. Strike two.
Which goes back to my first point, don’t buy equipment-that would be also on that credit card…you see how it goes.
Here is another RULE:
Don’t takee thine own equipmentee on thine jobee!
Don’t do it. Of course if you had been following my advice you wouldn’t HAVE equipment to take. Say for example you are starting out, I know it is the biggest blow to the photographers ego to say, well, no, I don’t have my own gear, so you ‘man-up and go into hock to get a nice shiny Hassy. And those darn APE‘s they gorilla-shame you by sounding SO disapproving, “WHAT, you don’t OWN your own CAMERA?” How can you BE a photographer if you don’t own your own CAMERA.” Since they don’t really know the economics of it, you can understand the dumbfounded-ness of it, I mean, I would expect a photographer to have a camera, like they always say, these are your tools, you should own them. And I agree, in a world where a workman can charge what THEY like in a rational market, of course I expect my plumber to own his own tools, how else could it be? But this is not a rational market anymore, when the basic economics of the work does not support those who do it, it is not rational to expect a photographer to arrive with anything. And you can look at it another way, the cost of being in the industry is only going up as the equipment gets more expensive and the production value of the jobs rises. Why is it going up? Well, the photographer now has taken on the burden of pre-press in the form of digitization if you shoot digital-that is something that has just been “absorbed” not to mention how the pace of image turnaround has changed, editors get their work in a fraction of the time it used to take, without paying anything extra. Additionally, the cost of production has risen as the editorial “look” has been supplanted by the “advertising” look, glossy, lit, high production value for the most part. So to expect a photographer to provide for free anything is crazy.
But the editor says, “you are being paid, that is what the fee is for-” and I just laugh. (quietly, inside, simultaneously crying and pooping my drawers..) Was not the fee for USAGE? Have we forgotten that, just how far do we expect that 500 to go, it has to cover variously, my fee for my brain (me), the usage, my healthcare, taxes, overhead, and there should also be some left over for the business to profit so I can stay in business.
Just for fun-sies I worked out the rental cost of what my last location job (my own, corporate job) in LA would have run, figures are from TREC here in NY, although my guess is that a magazine would have rented locally in LA to save the travel days. This is what I take with me:
Small format digital, couple ultra wide specialty lenses (interior shoot) plus normal lenses, laptop (optional), 6x 2GB cards, tripod, 2x speedlight, extra rechargeable batteries, pocket wizard, meter, chargers-
1600ws pack, two heads, grid spot set, 600w/s monoblock, (thanks Jon!) speedrings for all three, two med chimera, one large chimera, two umbrellas, stands, plus two compact stands for small tungsten spots, 50w x 4 lamps, 2 x 25ft extension cords, power strip, assorted A clamps, gaffer, 2x super clamp, 2 x j-hook-
Assorted gels, frost, clothespins, blackwrap, reflectors etc.
All above fits into two checked bags that are not overweight. If you rented this from New York it would NOT fit like I have it packed, NO way, so you are over your checked allowance unless your assistant comes with.
So what do you figure all that costs? -I did the math, over a 1000$, near 1200$ PER DAY depending on if you get the laptop or not.
This what they are getting for free folks…don’t even want to get into-medium format digital costs.
If magazines were forced to pay for this stuff on FOB or BOB like they do when A-Lister shoots the feature, things would come to a halt in a screeching hurry! Talk about blown budgets! But think about it-you, humble editorial photographer are subsidizing not only Si Newhouse, but Annie/Mario/A-List-whomever so that they can shoot the fabulous work they do that makes advertisers turn out and pay to be in the magazine. Because that is where the real money is going, and as costs continue to rise-TREC is charging 25$ freekin dollars for a compact flashcard folks(!) most of the money that could be available is being siphoned off by these massive budgets. Because while they expect you to have your own gear for the dinky two or three day travel job, they don’t expect A- Lister to come-with anything at all, although after 25 years at the top, you would think they could. (and they used to, back in the day, but we are talking all 80′s and sh** now).
So what can you do? Well, I will allow you to take your own camera as a backup only, and so that you can get up at 5 am and go shoot for yourself while on these jobs. You are doing that aren’t you? I have a nice signed Dan Winters piece that says “Get UP EARLY” best DAN from one of his shows. But you can’t take anything for them. When you do take it is on your own jobs, the stuff that you can negotiate and set the price for, the stuff you can decide, is this good for me? Because you have to repair it, replace it, it can’t take the abuse of or keep pace with editorial. Got it?
To reiterate, have the travel office book all travel, including hotel and car. It is in their interest to negotiate corporate rates for this stuff, which will save them money in the long run. Next, get an advance for the rest of the expenses. You should be very adept at firing off an estimate the moment you get off the phone, the costs are pretty known once you do this enough, you should be able to get into the ballpark for meals, transport, tips, overweight luggage, etc and while you are at it, add the assistant in there too. The Goal is that when you submit your final invoice, it is fees-only. Plus, even if the advance does not arrive in time before you leave, your advance invoice is “on the stack” of invoices to get approved and get paid. The more regularly you get paid the better. What is the best business in the world-a cash business, daily.
It may sound like I just want everyone to “stick it to the man” as Jack Black says, but I have only copped that attitude because it is fun, but that is not my point here. I am not Bitter Photographer. The point is to make this rational, your conversation with the editor should be grounded in this: I am not going to engage in any of that old-school shell game markup shite, I only expect you to pay what it costs, in the end, it should be to their economic advantage to operate this way, and really, there is no other way it can operate. So that old way, where I bought film and marked it up, (which is how inventory works in any other business, or where I paid for a service and charged a carrying cost as in any other business) they don’t want it that way, so lets forget it. Lets do it their way. But really do it.
The goal is be cash flow positive in all of this. Don’t think of earning money with editorial, but for gosh sakes, think of being cash flow positive. If you want to spend money to get work, take out Workbook pages, or print your own book or actually invest in your promotion. But don’t invest it into the ego-torial. Your attitude should be this: you really want to do the WORK, you want to make the picture. That is your investment, to make the best possible picture. And that is what they want. Crackerjack stuff. The money part of it has to be taken out of it, it is an absolute side-track. This is not a job to earn money, but it is a business. If you get pulled under by the money-suck you will not be able to make those pictures for them, and they will lose you, which I don’t believe they want either, assuming you are making good work.
I still think doing this work can be a privilege, you get access to people and places that can be transformative.
And you know, I think as freelancers we forget just how impersonal business can be. No one person decides that the budget is X and the pay is Y, it is the result of a long chain of optimized decisions that get implemented by well meaning folks who don’t want to get fired. There is no incentive to alter this course, there is no agenda, there is only business. We have to respond with sane business decisions, not maneuvering, negotiation, subterfuge, etc. I think photographers organizations have tried it all before, they have tried to stand toe to toe with the monster and it fails because the magazines are the result of a collective, and we are the result of an individual-”YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!” “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!” Well, it is true that everything I have ever learned I learned from Star Trek. Picard gets assimilated by the Borg and we fear humanity is lost, our greatest tactician is now our enemy. Little do we know that Picard will use the Borg’s own rigid structure against them, their own internal logic is their weakness. So the magazines won’t pay us what we are worth to them, fine. But they should pay what it actually costs, even as those numbers escalate. So practice the ju-jitsu, your goal is to show up at the shoot carrying nothing but a smile, and leave without a trace. It is on them. ENGAGE.
I posted this on jackanory but I thought I would put it up here as well: I really enjoyed reading these bits about the reallity of being a working photographer. I find it a bit disconcerting for myself who would like to make money in the business of photography, but not discouraged. This insight makes me feel like I have an edge as I slowly try to work in. Let me back track, I have a slightly more realistic approach to working in this industry, I just want a basic assitant job. I honestly dont feel I have what it takes yet to do anything with my own photography but I feel I know enought that I would make a good assistant. Although I still have alot to learn. Please feel free to send any comments directly to me about what I am trying to get myself into. Thanks, Gregg
My point is not to be discouraging but to be practical, of course we are all going to take everything we can get our hands on when we start out, this is just how it goes, but the ‘rules’ I am floating are designed to keep ones head above water. I am a great fan of borrowing gear, get some friends and share your stuff, cameras, lighting, so if you absolutely have to do something and there is no budget to rent, at least you can show up with something. But don’t offer unless you have already tried to get rental budget. There is just no reason we should be paying for this.
And for assistants especially, there is no reason for you to be buying anything but your own personal camera. Leave the lighting until much later, or as i said, get some friends to spread it around. Two or three can amass enough to shoot most things, and assist each other to boot on portfolio pieces. And everyone learns.
Any suggestions for us here in the UK where, if magazines are paying anything at all then its an all inclusive fee. That’s if you’re lucky.. many are honest enough about it all to pay zero, not even expenses. At least you know where you are with them.
All this because it gets you exposure and leads to paid jobs. Only when the paid jobs come along the budgets are falling out of those too.
I think the US photo market is headed where the UK photo market already is. As Paddy relates above, shooting for free is often the norm. I don’t see any reason why it won’t go that way here.
I don’t own anything but two cameras and six lenses. That’s it. I rent, and/or, borrow for every shoot, editorial or otherwise.
I just never saw how I could possibly buy all of this stuff and actually stay afloat. Now that I could buy more stuff, I don’t see any reason too. When an industry is in great shape, it makes sense to invest heavily in the company (you), but in an industry that is in such a transition (to who knows what) it makes sense only to put as much money away as possible to ensure you can stay in business.
The all-inclusive can be a good thing, at least it respects the photographer and gives them the money to decide how to spend. I will say more about this in the next post.
As for working for free, you are “free” to do it or not. But you should value the play you are going to get vs. your own paid advertising for yourself, which we all are doing, right??
Thanks Robert. I just can’t help thinking that you guys are so lucky to be getting given £500 to work with. Imagine how many of the shoots you do would still happen if you had to completely finance them yourselves as we often do in the UK. Yes, it’s your “advertising” but it adds up fairly quickly to be quite expensive. I often think many of the people doing editorial in the UK are either temporary (soon to be bankrupt) photographers or rich / trust fund kids who’ll keep going until they’re bored. There are some exceptions to the rule of course.
Robert-What are you doing up at 5AM? You freak, tad bit anxious you is?
Great stuff! I’ll have to read most of part deux tomorrow because I have a frigging massive headache from reading white text on black…HINT!!!!! Great stuff though, great stuff.
dan
@ Eric- The only reason it will go that way is because people (photographers) agree to it. Next time I want a cake I’m gonna walk in and ask for it for free but promise tell all my friends how great it was. It really is simple, walk away from crappy deals.
—The all-inclusive can be a good thing, at least it respects the photographer and gives them the money to decide how to spend.—
Also encourages low production values and cost / corner cutting to try and retain as much of the budget as a fee as possible. I’m sure that can’t be a good idea can it? In the long run this just leads to lower quality content. This leads to lower quality magazines. I could name a few in the UK where this has become obvious obvious to the point where it looks like they’re going out of business.
I’m not sure there is a strong correlation between money spent and quality, it would depend on the type of editorial and a lot of factors. The only reason I liked the all inclusive fee when I got it was that it put me in control of my cash flow, if I decided to spend money then that was my decision. Or I could advocate for more money if I had a specific idea that needed it.
Sounds like the UK market is very bad, but it makes me wonder, the Canadian market was awful, and I think they hid behind the big brother/little brother argument, we so much smaller than our American counterparts, we don’t have their money. I think it was a shell game. But it would depend on the title you are talking about.
Definitely there are magazines that are operated on contribution mostly, but the best ones are where they are doing something different trying to get noticed, usually they give you total freedom to do what you want since they aren’t paying, and I believe those kinds of situations are rational, it is a clear case of mutual interest amongst similar sized players. Subsidizing big media doesn’t make sense to me, except in certain cases. I have tried to articulate an approach that might at least make it rational to accept the work that could be beneficial. You really really should not be losing money on a shoot for a big American magazine. Fashion would be the only category where I see no correlation between anything, it is whatever goes. But that market has changed in the last 10 years also.
Speaking as one of the founders of EP–although I believe Richard Morgenstein is THE founder–I find the discussion about editorial depressingly similar to the reality of the situation back then. When magazines do their budgets they quickly figure out how much money is available for photography. Realistically they could run fewer photos for more money per assignment, or they could assign more shoots for less. It matters not because all they care about–and all any business should care about–it whether they can make a better return for the dollars spent on pictures. Fortunately for them there are more than enough people willing to work for whatever they offer. Verbal pressure from photographers means nothing. Only when they are unable to get the pictures they need to make a sellable product will magazines free up space in their budget. EP began by boycotting Business Week in Silicon Valley during the internet bubble years. Even that wasn’t a compelling enough argument for change. Supply and demand is king.
With respect to my forbearers in EP, I think that while the situation is similar, there are differences that have exacerbated the issue. I am not at all convinced it is a supply-demand issue. If you read what I am writing, and I apologize for the length of the posts and the nasty white on black, I believe it is the result of cost-control on the part of magazines, which is a natural business practice, colliding with the continual exploitations of loopholes by photographers that has built an irrational system of pricing and allowed vendors to step in providing third party services at rates that do increase, this is what is starving the industry. And this has occurred against a backdrop of various photographers organizations campaigning for years about “rights” when it was costs we should have been focusing on. While I agree usage is part of the equation, I don’t think photographers in editorial at least are well served by a business model that requires a buyer to acknowledge intrinsic value, it is too much a commodity item for that. In advertising yes, it is all about the usage. As I said, I think magazines were happy to bargain on rights because it was easy to hoover those up with contracts, agreed, that no-one should sign, but this would be an acceptable trade off if at least my invoice was my invoice. Now we have a system where huge amounts are being paid to third party vendors because that is what is “allowed.” I believe that I can offer a more competitive deal but magazines balk at the idea of paying photographers directly for anything without these phantom receipts. Which is why I suggested this weird cost-control ju-jitsu, if they won’t pay me, don’t undertake the cost, ever. Play the game their way. I think it makes it obvious that they’d be better paying my fees than paying for rentals.
If there is an unlimited supply of qualified 3rd party vendors getting an ever increasing share of the pie then you’re correct. But there isn’t an unlimited amount of money that magazines have to dispense, and photographers are in the unenviable situation where they can be played against each other.
well, just arrived in my inbox:
Introducing f/ocus Rental, NYC’s Newest Equipment Rental House and Shooting Environment.
Featuring:
Brand New Digital Capture, Lighting and Grip.
For More Info Please Visit:
http://www.focusrental.com
Seems like a growth industry to me. It seems to me that photo budgets must be shrinking at all magazines, coupled with increasing vendor costs. Solution, eliminate the vendors, or lower your overhead sufficiently by taking no expenses at all as I have said. Competition between photographers being played against each other is a factor, but I don’t think it is as large as we think. Even if you play one off against the other, the magazine is still left paying higher and higher amounts to vendors. They are not shooting fewer stories, although that is definitely category specific, in Travel for example, I get lots of emails looking for images of wherever. Getting ahold of expenses seems to be the only proactive thing we can do, apart from leaving the segment, which I am glad to say I have done for the most part.
“the magazines won’t pay us what we are worth to them, fine. But they should pay what it actually costs, even as those numbers escalate.” Robert, why can’t you rent your own gear to them ? — here’s the RW price OR use your vendors who would likely to be significantly more $$. They rent from you and and then you get the extra…
@christopher-there was/is a double standard where many clients were reluctant, even upset if you tried to sell them your own gear, you got the “carpenter’s hammer” story over and over. As we move into digital it is changing bc the equipment is so much more expensive. My point was they can’t have it both ways, and using bogus receipts to make it look like you “rented” your own gear was the loophole the shows you the reality of the situation, the vendors were making out like bandits. Plus, renting your own out I think many people have never done the math to see what the client would have paid had they gone third party. It can be shocking.
“In advertising yes, it is all about the usage”
Just wait. If you are not a big name photographer and have been shooting commercially for any length of time, you know by now that there is tremendous pressure on photographers to give more usage for less money. It was even stated by several art buyers in a PDN issue last year.
As long as art buyers have the upper hand, and they currently do, the rates will continue to go down. Getting some kind of “star” status helps, but only as long as the creative art buyers have any control over how much is spent.
When those who control costs really get involved, they won’t care who shoots what. After all, other than people in this industry, nobody Knows the names, nor cares about, any photographers. Go ahead, ask your neighbors and family members. Would any know the name of any living photographer? Some might say, “there’s that guy who photographs dog” or something to that affect, but chances are they won’t be able to name anyone (other than yourself).
I think those with some kind of “star power” are pretty safe, but the rest will have to fight this downward trend for a while. It’s going to take a while for photographers to figure out new ways of monetizing their work.
@kevin
not sure what you mean, my point was usage in editorial was a game over long ago. In advertising usage is still the benchmark of negotiations. And at least there is some negotiation/bid/estimate process. In editorial there is none. Which is why I am focusing on cost control, or rationalizing and invoicing for real costs.
With the growth of reps there is at least some counter pressure on rates in advertising.
Robert, I enjoyed the articles (so far I’ve read the above as well as part 1). How often have you been able to get your editorial clients to do this–pay rental fees for all your gear? Anyone else out there getting this to work?
I never adopted the phony receipts game with respect to rentals, although I did submit “studio receipts” for film and polaroid. Even with a 100% markup on film and polaroid, it was really not worth the expense of doing it that way especially if travel was involved. For example, marking up film and polaroid might net you another 250-300 on top of a 500 rate, but you needed to spend 250 to get that so it is a wash, add in paying any sort of travel expense and you are cutting into the rate itself from a cash flow perspective.
To make it viable you would need to bill the entire cost of rentals which might be close to 1500/job, and if you are shooting fob or bob stories, there is no way they will take that added cost on a 500 dollar page (or less). You can fudge the numbers all you like but what I am really talking about is a kind of spending discipline where it is all inflows and no outflows. This is mainly due to payment turnaround time. If the magazines could pay on delivery the game would be substantially changed. Or the other way to see it is if you can get all of YOUR creditors to accept payment in 60 days then it makes sense. See what I mean?
Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I’m glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.