Archive for January, 2007

This is just brilliant!

A few days ago Arkansas Morning News photographer Michael Zamora posted some photos from his coverage of the Miss University of Arkansas beauty pageant. Nice photos, I thought, two really good ones and two that were okay. Then today Michael put up his audio slideshow from the event and it's a stunning piece of work. The sample photos didn't do it justice.

Rather than having a commentary for the slideshow, Michael combined background sounds from the event with soundbites and quotes from those involved. There's nothing particularly wrong with commentaries on slideshows, it's just that in my opinion the work of a photo journalist is to tell a story by showing what you saw, so if you're going to include audio then logically it should be what you heard, not just an editorial piece that you read out. Does that make sense? Anyway Michael's idea works perfectly.

Click here to watch the slideshow 

The first audio slideshow I'm intending to do is a piece on fishing in our local community. (In case you don't know, I live in a small coastal village in the north-east of Scotland where many people used to earn a living through fishing, but not so much anymore.) It's still a few months away, when the fishing season starts up again, but I've already got a rough plan worked out and I'm really looking forward to doing it. Hopefully I'll have done a few more jobs for the BBC by then and I'll be able to do the audio slideshow for them, but I'm going to go ahead with it even if it just ends up here on my own site.

It is said that succeeding as a professional photographer is 10% photography and 90% good business sense, and after only six months of doing this full-time it has become patently obvious that that's true.

John Harrington's Photo Business News & Forum is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to make a living by taking pictures. After reading the site for only a couple of minutes the other day (thanks Strobist for the link) I already felt that my business head was screwed on a little tighter, and I was more in touch with the way you need to think to succeed.

The current blog entry about the cull of staff photographers at Time and Sports Illustrated magazines is both depressing and encouraging. On the one hand it shows that even the photographers with the most skill and experience have little in the way of job security. But on the other hand the door is being opened for a new wave of talent to work freelance.

Bad news for the staffers, of course, but for the readers? I'm not so sure.

One specious view is that staff photographers have contracts and unions and they become complacent, so it will be a good thing if they are forced to compete again in the freelance mosh pit. But in my experience that's not true.

Again and again I'm finding that the most dedicated and creative photographers are at opposite ends of the spectrum, those being the staffers and the up-n-coming freelancers. It's the middle guys, the well-established high-income freelancers who are often complacent and lazy in their work ethic. (There are definitely exceptions, but I can think of more people who this does apply to than who it doesn't.)

Maybe the Time/SI cull will produce an exciting new market of competition where the best man wins, and ultimately that will lead to better magazines for the readers. Or they might have spawned a monster! It will be interesting to see how the quality, reputation and esteem of both magazines changes over the coming year.