I think the vehement defense of sampling for commercial music without paying for copyright licenses is just an excuse to be lazy from people who aren’t creative or skilled enough to spoof the sounds they want to reference.

Decoration is a craft. Art is an anti-science. The pinnacle height of achievement in a craft is the perfect modification of a material into a vision. The pinnacle height of achievement in an art is the perfect modification of a vision into a metaphor. Some things can be both. Art cannot exist without craft. Craft cannot exist without art. Yet there is a vast difference from the goals of artists and craftspeople. Craft has a finite goal, the production of something tangible. Art has an infinite goal, the induction of something intangible. Craft relaxes. Art excites.

A lot of newer photographers seem at a loss as to how to charge for their services. I know I was. This is an attempt to explain professional billing and licensing practices for photography. It is not a comprehensive explanation, and there are many resources available online that go into much greater detail.

Creative Fee + License Fees + Production Costs = estimate

To pay you a small amount of money and ask for full unrestricted use of your images for all time is unreasonable and unacceptable.

To expect you to have a set rate for a production with as many variable costs as a photo shoot is unreasonable and unacceptable.

You charge them your creative fee, a low license fee for specific things in a limited amount of time, and your production costs.

Your creative fee when you start out should be slightly higher than your CODB (cost of doing business). Google that to find a CODB calculator and figure out your own exact number.

Your creative fee is also an estimate based on how long you think the shoot will take. If they drag their feet and you shoot for 14 hours instead of 6, make sure you’ve put overtime options into the estimate. This is why most pros never use the term “day rate” anymore.

The key to making money in photography is the license fees.

Go look at the pricing for stock agency images to get some numbers.

Say the group you’re going to be working for is just starting out and can’t pay much, so you charge them your costs plus a low license for the first year, but for each additional year you ramp it up. Make them come back to you to get permission to use the images next year. Make them pay to reuse images, and upon renewal they have to select the usage licenses they want, so if they want to put a picture on a bus that’s a separate charge from the license to print fliers and put them on cars at a supermarket. Make the license fee slightly cheaper than what they’ll be charged for another shoot, so they’re more likely to want to simply renew the license than have you do an updated set on the same subject. That way you’re making money for a shoot you already did and can continue to rack up more gigs. Plus, if they don’t renew the license, as long as your creative fees and production cost charges covered your cost of doing business, who cares, you’ve moved on to other work, and continuing this policy with all your clients means eventually you’ll make more from licensing your images than from creating new ones.

Your license fee for the first year should attempt to cover all the uses the client thinks they might want. You show them a breakdown of many possible uses and make them choose what ways they really think for which they’ll use it. Again, see stock agency sites for more info on how to break it down.

So, they buy the licenses they think they need. For example, a small startup surf magazine might want to print it in the magazine once, be able to make posters, and be licensed to use the image on their web site. Make them sign an agreement that outlines those limitations and the term of the license. One year is usually good. Also make them credit you and note your copyright any time the image is printed. If they later want to print an image on a t-shirt, they owe you more money. If they want to make postcards, they owe you more money. If they want to make a slide and project it on the building outside a concert, they owe you more money. They will have seen the breakdown during the estimation process, so it should be clear that they did not pay for license to utilize your images in that way.

Before you start shooting, get the signatures.

Before you hire any crew or rent or buy any supplies, get a deposit for 50% of the total estimate.

Do not be afraid to estimate $15 per person on the shoot to buy lunch.

It’s your art, and you have the only say in what happens to it.

It’s your business and you need to say “no, this is how professional photographers bill for services” when someone is trying to take advantage of you.

Note: This post refers mostly to advertising work. Editorial is handled differently than work for commercial clients. Often you do editorials more for publicity than direct financial gain. Editorial means your ideas make it on the page though. If it is called “editorial” and someone is telling you how to shoot, it isn’t much of an editorial for you, and that isn’t a very good promotion of your work, so you should probably charge regular rates unless the exposure offered is really really good. As with all things, negotiate your way to harmony.

All art, like science, is hypothesis. There is an innate desire in humans to understand the world around them. Art is one attempt at an answer. Just as science seeks to find explanations through observation and experimentation, so does art.

It could be argued that science is an art. It could also be argued that art is a science. Whatever they are, they both involve testing ideas and looking for answers. They both involve curiosity.

Science is an art, in that creative leaps of faith are required to hypothesize. Science is nothing if not creative problem solving and a way of working to understand the universe.

Art is a science, in that when one is creating, one applies rules to carry out an experiment which might produce a result. In the process of the creation of a work, one tests these rules. Each choice is a rule. Are you going to use light blue for the sky? That’s a choice, a rule. You or someone else can later try another color and compare the results. Each work of art one starts is an experiment testing some hypothesis. The outcome is always uncertain. There are always unplanned results in complex rule systems. When the work is complete, both the final product and the memory of the process add to our knowledge of how things work.

Science and art are both linked at fundamental levels.

This question was posted to an online forum:

“What makes High fashion photography?”

My Answer:

The difference I think you’re reaching for is catalog vs. editorial style. In catalog photography you shoot the entire collection. In an editorial style you try to sum up the entire collection in a short series of images.

In real editorial fashion photography, at a purist level, you look at what is now and what is past and you create a very selective visual essay. It doesn’t always work that way. Most magazines want their advertisers’ products represented in the editorials, so what you see in Vogue etc. is not normally true editorials because the editors are influenced by a need to keep their employers happy.

“High fashion” is a bad translation of the French “Haute Couture,” which is a very specific kind of clothing, and actually translates to “high sewing.” Haute Couture is the very highest level of fashion in terms of craft and quality workmanship. They don’t sell it at Macy’s. They barely sell it at Bergdorf Goodman. It’s one of a kind pieces, usually made for a specific person. It is actually a legal distinction and only a small group of fashion design companies are allowed to call their work “Haute Couture.”

I was wandering around Soho last night with my friend Echo, and we stopped outside an apparently popular nightlife corner (Spring and Renwick Streets) where there are several bars clustered together. I like watching people. How they communicate, interact, represent themselves, it’s all fascinating. I was really surprised how obviously bad most of the clubwear outfits looked. Granted, this seemed to be a college and Wall Street wannabe crowd, but you ought to be at least able to get one piece of an outfit right.

Choice questions for the girls came to mind…

• “Sweetheart, are you color blind?”
• “You’ve got money for cosmopolitans, but not a mirror?”
• “Did you loot that during a blackout?”

A few had put in some effort and they really stood out, especially when they walked to the bar across the street and nearly tripped every other step clomping along in their expensive high heels, looking more like they were wearing ski boots than anything in the range of a Jimmy Choo.

One of my first thoughts as we had approached this corner was “hey, look, cute girls hanging out on the sidewalk” (they were in line for the door), but after hanging around for a few minutes my somewhat jaded fashion photographer sensibilities kicked in full force and all I saw was sad confused people.

Over the years I’ve been influenced by a number of publications.

In the early 90′s it was Wired. Kevin Kelly was driving the content and the world was changing. It was the multimedia revolution and each issue was a first class ticket from my east coast view of a lighthouse to the changing landscape of silicon valley. Every Nicholas Negroponte editorial changed something about the way I thought about the way things work or can work or should work. The first three years of Wired issues were really incredible.

After Wired I became an avid reader of Video Toaster User, which was a technical journal dedicated to the products from a company called NewTek. NewTek made 3D computer graphics affordable with Lightwave 3D. Through most of high school I was obsessed with computer animation and spent a lot of late nights setting up 5 second scenes that would take four or five days to render from small bitmaps and wire frame models to near-photorealistic clips. Video Toaster User was great for helping you figure out how to pull off complex looking effects with simple solutions.

When I was a freshman in college, I started reading 2600: The Hacker Quarterly quite a bit. Most media approaches the subject of hackers as if they’re all one thing or all another thing. In reading 2600, I learned about hacker culture, how complex it is, how diverse the community has become. From the humble beginning when a model railroad club at MIT started referring to modification of their models as “hacking” to the bizarre misconceptions portrayed in films and television to the modest gatherings of offbeat technology enthusiasts around the world every first Friday of the month. The magazine brought be into contact with the hacker community and I have a lot of great friends because of that association, but today the publication seems far less relevant and I now recognize what a small slice of the larger hacker world it represents. Am I a hacker? Yes. Do I know a lot about computers? Not really. All artists are hackers, and all hackers are artists. It’s just another name for explorers.

Then I found ArtByte. I think this was around 1998. Artbyte was about the crossover between art and technology. It talked about circuitry and robotics and multimedia and all those wonderful technological tools, but cross referenced those topics with the legitimate art world. There were reviews of light shows at the Guggenheim, long essays about where cinema was going, and just all sorts of exposes on how technology was being jammed together with culture all over the world. It ceased publication abruptly in late 2001. I don’t know why for sure, but I suspect their offices were near ground zero. That magazine was extremely content rich. The way the writers spoke about ideas was uniquely inspiring. I think of all the magazines I’ve subscribed to in the last decade and a half, it was the one I most looked forward to reading.

For a couple years in between there I subscribed to Weekly Variety, the distilled outside town version of Hollywood’s favorite trade publication, Daily Variety. I learned a lot reading it, but got busy and the back issues started to pile up without being even skimmed. It’s a very dense magazine, and getting it on a weekly basis, when it has to compete with The New Yorker for eyeball time and the subscription price is around $250, it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Like Wired though, since the Indie revolution played out, Variety seems less relevant, at least to me personally. Instead I just watch Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC every week.

Now I get a lot of fashion magazines. Italian Vogue, Exit, and Icon are my favorites. Exit was what I picked up the week I decided to leave grad school to become a fashion photographer. I subscribe to a bunch and pick up others on the newsstand. I like Oyster, which is an Australian fashion magazine. I also subscribe to Surface, which is more of a design magazine, but the articles are pretty good. There are quite a few that I follow. They get expensive when you pile them up, so I’ve taken to flipping through before buying to make sure there are innovative images.

There is a magazine called Make, which is all about personal technology empowerment. The do it yourself bible for the 21st century. My friend Ryan O’Horo has had his creations published in Make a few times.

I don’t really have a favorite magazine right now. I keep waiting for the next early Wired or the next Artbyte to appear. Who couldn’t use a monthly dose of mind blowing inspiration?