There’s a lot to be said for the Internet as a publishing medium. It has given a lot of people the ability to share their thoughts and vision more easily than previous possible. Interestingly enough every so often a debate as common as “Nikon vs. Canon” surfaces about “Professionals vs Amateurs” in relation to credibility and authority online . The latest by Tony Long on Wired.com “Internet Smackdown: The Amateur vs. the Professional” has some great points particularly in relation to journalism, but ultimately it exudes unavoidable elitism.
Taking his thoughts beyond the written form of journalism and into photography it go me thinking about how easy or difficult it is to pick out an amateur from a professional. I can see where Tony Long is coming from in regard to the written word as it can take some digging to really understand the quality of the source. Photography on the other hand is a bit easier to read. Photographers wear their skills on their sleeves.
Granted what you see online may not be equivalent to what you’d see in a print, but you can infer a lot from viewing a photographers portfolio online. Are the images of quality? Is there consistency in the portfolio? Has the photographer won awards? Has the photographer been published?
Photography by nature is different than writing in that online photographers are in need of differentiating themselves, often putting their best work forward and are quite transparent about themselves… much more than writers. I look at most photographers online and think of their sites and work as visual resumes. Some clearly are amateur, many wearing that on their sleeve with the goal of improvement, others fill the remainder of the spectrum with different goals.
Looking at a photographers web site it’s pretty easy to tell what their goals are. Do they sell or license their work or are they just sharing? Photographers in this day and age HAVE to have a web page. It’s no longer possible to be a photographer and not have one. But just because every photographer under the sun has a web site does that detract from those pursuing it as a profession?
I would say no. A web site alone does not undermine the foundations of professional photography. What does undermine the foundations of professional photography is ignorance about the business of photography. Photographers who think they’re good enough to make income from their work and undermine pricing by giving away work for free or relying on microstock photo agencies absolutely undermine professional photography.
I’ve heard numerous times how photographers need to adapt to the marketplace and I firmly believe in this, but that doesn’t mean blindly accepting the actions of the misguided. Pretend you’re a gas station owner. Just because you see one gas station offering gas for 20 cents a gallon, the current rate is $3 per gallon and your cost is $2 per gallon, it doesn’t mean as a gas station owner than you start selling gas at 20 cents a gallon. If you can’t run a profitable business and sustain it then the “new” ultra-low cost approach isn’t going to last. This holds true for any business including photography.
Journalists and photographers suffer from a lot of noise that can bury the voice of professionals online. Journalists suffer from a fickle audience that drives editors to publish news that often is not news. Unlike journalists, photographers are their own worst enemy. Professional photography is as much about being educated in business as it is about being technically and artistically strong. If you shoot yourself in the foot by undervaluing your work you’re not going to last long and as cruel as it sounds for those who want to last in the business thats OK. The problem lies in how many people are willing to shoot themselves in the foot and how long that trend will last. The longer the trend the greater the impact to the business as a whole.
The common definition of “professional photographer” is one who makes the majority of their income from photo sales. In this day and age if you put your images up for sale you’re attempting to be a professional. In doing so you owe it to yourself and others to learn as much as you can about the business of photography.
Photographers don’t have to use microstock agencies. Sure businesses need cheap photography, but they also need quality photography. When photographers start to educate themselves and leverage their collective power by submitting quality work to agencies that provide realistic sales models, that enable photographers to support themselves, the market will shift. Quality will win out over price in the end. Its just a matter of time, and between now and then there are likely to be a lot of casualties.
[tags]professional, amateur, professional, business, microstock[/tags]
You wrote: “The common definition of “professional photographer†is one who makes the majority of their income from photo sales. In this day and age if you put your images up for sale you’re attempting to be a professional. In doing so you owe it to yourself and others to learn as much as you can about the business of photography.”
From my point of view – as one who is extremely serious about his photography but earns his primary income doing something else – this definition is fine. (Though I do earn _some_ income from photography… where does that leave me?)
Some people confuse the terms professional and amateur with other concepts like “good” and “bad” or “serious” and “dabbler” or “real photographer” and “snapshooter.”
Your definition of professional quite reasonably doesn’t address the quality of work done by the photographer and this context is hard to argue with. In other words, according to your definition, the label “professional” doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of the work done by the photographer. A “professional” could be a poor photographer, and an amateur could be an excellent photographer.
If only everyone else felt the same way…
I find the article to be quite arrogant and pretentious. He generalizes bloggers as people with agendas and we only write because we want to spin something our way. From the looks of the news nowadays, that actually sounds more like an accurate description for “journalism”. I coudln’t even watch the news in the Bay Area because it is too biased. I have liberal views but I dont need to be bashed in the head with political opinion. that is propaganda. I want facts to decide for myself what to think. So I don’t buy what Mr. Long has to say about internet blogging. In fact, I’d argue that my blog and your blog has more first-hand account journalism than your typical big city newspaper. But make no mistake about it. I consider blogging to a source of entertainment so I don’t get why he feels to need to be condescending.
I think the common perception of a professional is judged by how one promotes their photography. Yeah it doesn’t really speak about quality though. There are some successful stock photographers who are mediocre photographers. That is unfortunate, but at the same time they managed to be smart enough to earn a living somehow so you have to give credit where credit is due. If only photographers would understand that if they like taking pictures, then submit them to somewhere that they can actually get paid in multi-digit dollars rather than cents so they can take more picures. That doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. It takes just as much work to submit images to iStockPhoto as it does to Alamy or whoever. more than anything, microstock seems like a waste of time in my opinion.
Richard: You blog about something because you care about something, not because you get paid for it. Doesn’t that caring make you biased? Isn’t that a natural contradiction to what we expect from the objective press?
Note that I am not commenting on your or anybody else’s blogging quality. Your blog might be superb and I would still hesitate to call you a journalist.
There is a lot of information out there in blogs and especially when it comes to technical discussions it can be incredibly useful. So many people out there trying all sorts of technologies and providing feedback. Loving it! But it ain’t journalism.
Anyway, thanks for the article Jim!
Ernst, that is what I was getting at. Blogging can’t generally be considered journalism, yes there are elements of it but it isn’t pure journalism. What I am saying is that traditional journalism isn’t all that objective either in many cases. Everyone has bias. It is impossible to not have bias. So that is why I found much of the content in that article to be pointless.
I’ve found Tony Long in general to be entertaining. I may not agree with him all the time, but at least the man has his opinions and stands by them. Interestingly enough, I wrote a fairly similar article on my own blog before this was published at Wired, which echoes somewhat what Tony’s saying.
Back to photography, I agree with what you’re saying, Jim. Just this past weekend, I was hired for a photographic gig. I did two and a half hours of work there, and anyone who found out what I charged might have said I made a lot of money for just two hours of shooting. But the truth is, I spent 8 more hours in post-processing, and will probably spend another half hour to forty-five minutes on that same job in the next few days. So that amount I charged for the job is really inexpensive when I factor in the total time I spent working on those photos, whether it was getting them or processing them.
That’s what people just starting out with photography, or those looking for cheap photos, don’t get: there are plenty of hidden costs. If I were doing photography full time (and I’m not currently), I might have had to deal with health insurance costs, equipment insurance costs, travel costs, equipment costs, utility bills, not to mention the ever-present mortgage payments, that I somehow would have had to pay out of the fees I charge for my work.
I tell you, professional photography is hard work and is not fairly compensated unless you’re at the top of your field. People who criticize the per photo costs just don’t get this.
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I think see there being multiple definitions for photographers today. I did a lot of thinking about this last year while conducting research for FocalPower. I essentially came up with the following definitions that I use exclusively now:
-Snapper: owns a digital camera and shares photos with friends and family.
-Hobbyist: Enjoys photography and practices it in spare time.
-Enthusiast: Devotes considerable resources to photography but does not strive to make significant income from it.
-Semi-Professional: Makes additional income from photography and may consider doing it as a full-time occupation (or actively working toward doing it as full-time occupation)
-Professional: Earns entire living from photography. No outside income besides photography.
Notice that these definitions are based on amount of money earned or spent on photography. Both increase as you move up the scale.
As far as image quality goes. In general, quality should increase as you move up the scale. But anyone above a snapper could (or should) consistently create wonderful technical and artistic images (note those are not the same and the later is the more difficult to achieve in my mind). What they do with those images reverts back to the spending/earning ratio aspect. As time is always the limiting factor the closer to professional you become the more time you spend “working on photography” versus “taking pictures”.