PHOTO PRO TIPS

Coming up with a your creative fee for commercial photography can feel a little bit like voodoo magic. But, unlike stuffed dolls or shrimp gumbo which have material and labor costs built in, creativity is a service that’s value goes beyond time and cogs. By learning some things the hard way, I’ve come up with a few techniques that help me figure how much to charge. (more…)

I don’t mean to brag, but Oregon is probably the best place to do a location photo shoot. I would say even better than California, unless you’re shooting models in bikinis and board shorts (the beaches are a little chilly here). I originally moved here for personal reasons; mostly looking a change of pace from the East Coast. But after living here for a couple years, I realized how fortunate I was to find a photographer’s dreamland.

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Step One in becoming a green shooter is to carbon offset your vehicle. Most photographers generally drive small vehicles, lightweight trucks, or vans. Bigger shoots sometimes require bigger vehicles like RVs and grip trucks. If an average shoot consists of an assistant, a client, and a subject; you could easily triple your normal carbon output on every job. Since the average small vehicle puts about 10,000 lbs of carbon dioxide into the air per year, a single day of shooting could cause roughly 750 lbs of pollution.

There are a couple easy and inexpensive things you can do to carbon offset your ride.
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UPDATED: So, as Johnny Danger pointed out in the comments below, I didn’t upsample the 5D to match the native resolution of H3Dii in the original test article. I have added two new slides to illustrate this and it really shows how much better the H3Dii is compared to the Canon 5D. I’m still amazed that this little blog post gets about 100 unique visitors a day and is the #3 link when you do a Google search for h3dii.

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As you may have followed in my Daily Photoblog, I’ve been testing out the new Hasselblad H3Dii 39.1MP Back. The camera is just awesome and really fun to shoot with after being in 35mm format DSLR for the past 4 years. And the files I pulled off it were amazing. The image quality, sharpness, and dynamic range just blew my mind. But is it worth $30,000? Better yet, is it worth a $500/day rental versus a $150/day rental for Canon 5D?
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One of the most challenging parts of being a commercial photographer is the estimate. It such an essential skill that has taken me years to get figured out (and I still make improvements every time I do one). One of my biggest stumbling blocks was the Usage Language. Usage is how you assign your creative fee. The more usage, the more it costs. But there are so many ways to describe the same types of usage. And so many different photographers and reps use different variations of Usage Language that I imagine it’s it’s hard for a buyer/client to compare one estimate from another. I think I’ve lost a couple jobs because of this discrepancy.

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