A good list:

50 Best Websites for Moviemakers 2009

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.

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.”

Some of my best recent pictures came when the model showed up early and I made him go with me to the diner while I ate lunch. As soon as we started shooting there was a connection and it all just flowed. Because we’d been hanging out talking for 20 minutes, we had a sense of each other. Communication is of terrific importance. Sometimes the camera is an obstacle to good work, and you have to just put it down and hang out until you click with the subject.

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?

I am always looking for formulas and keys so good performances can be repeated. Sure you hit a good shot once in a while, but often it’s on a test and not an editorial so I can’t send the images out. Serendipity is great for art, but it has to be repeatable to be profitable. There is less difference between performing on stage before an audience and walking into your own gallery show than one might imagine. In both cases you must attempt to pre-cognize the experience of others. In both cases, getting it right in the shower doesn’t count. Some artists prefer to satisfy only their own needs and leave the viewer on the wind. I have gone to far too many art galleries and left confused to not give a decently explanatory label to the viewers of my own work, even if I make them look around for it a bit first. I feel indebted to the audience for taking the time and energy to view my work, and therefore strive to satisfy both my own needs as an explorer and to communicate my experiences on the journey to viewers as a reward for their own curiosity. Curiosity should always be encouraged.

There exists a requirement in the fashion photography I favor, that the model should exist in the environment of the image and be somewhat connected to that world. Most often when I find myself believing my work on a constructed image to have yielded a failure, it is the result of an apparent lack of connection between the model and the other things in the frame. If that is not the case, the second most common culprit is having failed to control the light. Both can be improved with practice, as my own work has shown. What I refer to as the model being connected to the world, director Richard Donner calls “verisimilitude,” meaning “the truth of the thing” or “self-truth.”

There may be some universal formula for projecting how a model will play off a given prop or costume. I have not yet found it. Perhaps it is too complex and individualized to forecast. Possibly at least some generalizations could be divined, but then would their employment by an artist be detrimental to originality? I think such things are better left to instinct honed by experience, for my own work at least. Yet, still I wonder if there could be a primer written to guide outside of instinct. Can you bracket models and props like they do sports teams in a tournament?

I believe that tension, composition, and detail are the keys to a great image. The viewer must be presented with drama (or the equivalent), context, and a visual focal point in order to relate to most images. Drama is given by any notion of tension within a frame, whether that is interpersonal tension, spatial tension, or implied kinetic tension.

The story of the single frame must have a context, as all stories presented visually do. The context is revealed and highlighted (successfully or poorly) by the composition. In this use of the word “composition,” I mean the juxtaposition of complimentary and contrasting areas of color tone, hue, and saturation (or simply brightness in a black and white image). Void and filling shades and levels between them must be shaped to draw the viewer’s attention to your intended purpose in presenting the image. With multiple frames, a sequence of images, it’s a whole other ballgame.

The visual focal points are also of great importance, and without these details the image will appear totally meaningless. In photographing people, the visual focal points of an image almost always include the eyes. The detail need not be overpowering. It could be as simple as a green dot on two hairlines intersecting. What is important is the presence of an anchor of some sort. An image that is totally unfocused cannot ordinarily hold or even momentarily capture the viewer’s attention.

In most cases, a formulaic approach to fashion photography would be counterproductive. However, if one is conducting some sort of experiment to find the subconscious mechanics of one’s work, looking for patterns in the behavior of subjects would probably be useful. Finding such patterns would be a step in a long path to allowing for a conscious and controlled paradigm shift in production and visualization methods.

Today I went to a seminar about fashion styling, held by celebrity stylist Andre Austin.

He was very knowledgeable and candid.

A couple of notes on things that caught my ear as a photographer:

He said that commercial styling is like wardrobe styling for a movie, as you are creating a person from clothing, which I found interesting.

He also talked about acknowledging the financial investment required of a stylist for testing. For a small shoot, even if all the clothes are free, the stylist could easily spend $100 on cabs picking up and returning outfits.

Apparently, “metalics are in right now,” which I had sort of noticed but was trying not to because I’m not crazy about people wearing metal, it just seems unnatural. I wonder if there is a psychological link between the metal sheen clothing and a need for armor in the post 9/11 environment. Sort of like SUV’s. They aren’t really tanks but they make people feel better.

He spoke briefly about the insecurity level of celebrities, especially artists, and their real need for attention and support on a set. I think probably every artist on a set needs attention and support, but he’s right in that when celebrities don’t get it they can cause trouble that will disrupt the shoot. So be nice and let them work at their own pace as much as possible, I suppose.

I’m feeling less guilty about mixing Canal Street discount clothing with the high end stuff, and I intend to go check out Target and H&M for some test shoot stock items.

This site has a lot of good information for new models: newmodels.com

Topics covered include: the players in the modeling industry, an introduction to professional modeling, should you go to modeling school, about model searches and conventions, height and professional modeling, all about TFP, all about race, sex and age in commercial print, how to apply to a model agency, how professional agency modeling works, how child modeling works, visa requirements for working in the USA, all about “mother agencies,” about “Internet managers” and Internet agencies, the bogus Internet modeling agency scam, the Nigerian scam comes to modeling, and myths and reality about modeling scams.