Do You Ever Wonder?

Do you ever wonder what a photo credit tastes like? How about this: do you ever wonder how many miles per photo credit (MPCs) your car gets? I do. I also wonder if these thoughts ever cross the mind of people whose job description includes asking me for permission to publish my images, promising only a photo credit as compensation. Don't you?

This morning I received an e-mail via Flickr from a woman at the Irish Museum Of Modern Art saying,
I'm contacting you regarding the touring exhibition and monograph publication of the artist Lynda Benglis currently being prepared by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. As a comparative image to one of her pieces, we would like to include your image of the Statue of Liberty torch. Would you allow us permission to copy the image for an edition of 3,000 worldwide English copies? If so, can you send a high res copy? We will credit you as the author, though we might possibly want to crop it to only include the arm and flame. Would you allow that as well?

I'm wondering why she didn't ask to borrow my bicycle, too! Aren't you?

Breaking The Bank

Ken Lewis didn't ascend to the heights of the banking industry by being a pushover. Quite the contrary, Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, has always driven a hard bargain.

One Sunday last September, at the urging of (then) Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy F Geithner; Ken Lewis made the deal of the century... or so he thought... in taking control of Merrill Lynch. Paulson & Geithner, knowing that Lehman Brothers was about to fail and that, despite their lofty titles, they were powerless to stop it, scrambled to find a buyer for the next domino in line before it, too, fell. They set-up a meeting between Ken Lewis and Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. Paulson and Geithner were desperate for Thain to find a buyer for Merrill Lynch that very day, fearing that if Lehman fell and dragged Merrill down with it, the entire economy would collapse like, well, a line of dominoes.

Early that Sunday morning, Thain planned a 1:00 PM meeting in Merrill Lynch's corporate apartment at the Time Warner Center in New York with Ken Lewis. Thain offered Lewis a ten percent stake in Merrill Lynch, generating enough cash to keep Merrill afloat. But twelve hours later, Lewis, not content with a mere ten percent, had acquired all of Merrill Lynch.

Yes, Ken Lewis drives a hard bargain. He made John Thain an offer he couldn't refuse and took all the marbles.

Last week, photographers thought they'd got a glimpse of the competitive Mr. Lewis, up-close and personal. Bank of America had a new deal for photographers, or so it seemed. One of our correspondents wrote...

i cannot remember if it was this forum... that recently had a posting about Bank of America and their new all rights policy..but it seems to be true..although i was previously booked for a shoot for this coming weekend, today they inquired about their new contract which includes all rights for the same money.. i declined, offering alternatives, but this seems to be non-negotiable it saddens me to lose this client, but giving my work away for less than it is worth, is just not an option

This one comment unleashed a wave of criticism aimed at Bank of America... 40+ messages... and it wasn't until the most recent messages had been posted that we finally got to see the actual document.

When I read the text of Bank of America's new deal, the one that everyone's been up in arms about, it seems perfectly reasonable to me provided that the fee is commensurate with such a broad license.

There is one key passage which reads, Photographer agrees to indemnify, hold harmless and defend Bank of America from and against any and all liability, claims, damages, and costs arising from or incurred as a result of Bank of America using the Photograph as described above.

This is the only part I have any objection to, and only because it's exactly the reverse of my standard terms and conditions, which state that the client will, indemnify the Photographer and his Representative against any claims and damages, including reasonable counsel fees, arising from the Client's use of the photographs and the Photographer's or Representative's use of material on instructions of the Client.

Any time you're dealing with a large multinational corporation such as a top-tier bank or pharmaceutical company, you're going to be licensing a very broad rights package that doesn't necessarily enumerate each and every possible use. That's okay, if you price your license accordingly.

I'm a Bank of America customer and I get to see how extensively they use images. Newspaper, trade & consumer magazines, direct mail, POP, billboards, letterhead, web, brochures, annual reports, post-cards, posters, car cards, ATMs, envelopes, etc, etc... you name it. If your picture is central to their campaign it will be everywhere. According to the document I read, Bank of America seems to be willing to limit the length of time for each use and they're only concerned that you don't release the images for use by their competitors (it's not even exclusive, rather industry-specific). It's not an all rights in perpetuity throughout the universe in all media known and unknown, nor is it a Work Made For Hire contract. Bank of America doesn't seek our copyrights. It is, in fact, a limited use contract (a/k/a rights-managed) rather than an egregious rights-grab.

So what's the real problem? The photographer failed to negotiate a fee commensurate with usage. Except for the money, there's nothing wrong here. Oh, except that Bank of America's reputation was unnecessarily trashed.

Mama, Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

Sad news: This morning the Eastman Kodak Company announced that it would discontinue the manufacture of Kodachrome film, citing declining demand. Kodachrome, with its highly saturated colors, especially red, was my film of choice for many, many years; but Kodachrome now accounts for less than 1 percent of Kodak’s still-film sales, the announcement said.

Kodak estimates that the current supply of Kodachrome will last until October, and if the precedent set by the similar announcement of the demise of Kodachrome II is any indication, hoarding of the remaining supply can almost certainly be expected. The announcement also noted that Kodachrome processing is so complex that only one lab in the United States is still certified by Kodak to handle the film, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. Dwayne’s said on its web site that they would likely continue processing Kodachrome through the end of 2010.

When Kodachrome was first developed in the 1920s, it was sold only to the motion picture industry. About fifteen years later, it was made available to the general public as a still picture transparency film, “with five layers of emulsion so thin that the total thickness is no more than ordinary film.” Indeed, the thinness of the emulsion and its additive dye process made it the sharpest, finest-grained transparency film available. Its use was so widespread among professionals that Paul Simon immortalized it in song singing, "Kodachrome, gives us such nice bright colors, gives us the green of summer, makes you think all the world's a sunny day."
Oh yeah!

Flag Day 2009

An Entire Career In One JPEG

Now Showing on flickr.com

Sunrise at Highwood, Illinois

Another Night At The Brickyard

At The Intersection Of Pickens & Gore

I'm as interested in the environment as most people, maybe a bit more but that's arguable, and I recognize that global warming is a man-made phenomenon and I'm doing my part to care for our planet. If you've been watching television lately you've probably noticed that environmental consciousness is really catching on. It's one thing when the hippies (that includes me) and Al Gore are talking it up, but when T Boone Pickens gets into the act you know there's something to it... not to mention it's profitable.

I can usually get up and get a snack during a TV commercial, or skip by them altogether if I've DVRed a program, but when the Repower America campaign (Gore's spots) or the Pickens Plan ads (Pickens' spots) air, I keep my seat and watch anyway.

And they're all pushing alternative energy with a fervor that suggests it's almost too late (it may be!), and they're telling us to build solar panels and wind farms. The part that I really didn't understand was that if we need to build these new power grids from the ground up, if it doesn't yet exist, where'd they get the footage? Well... I'm not as naive as I look, and I want to make pictures for the green revolution but, where are all these things? I know that the area around Palm Springs, California is studded with wind turbines, but I'm not going to Palm Springs. Aren't there any around here?

You bet there are. I did a little research using Google Earth and found the local wind farm. Yesterday morning I rolled out of bed at 3:15 AM, checked the sky and decided that it was clear enough to be worth driving two and a half hours to photograph a wind farm, so I hit the road and I was in the wind.

While at the wind farm I met a guy who was kind enough to explain the economics of the deal for the farmers who've allowed the turbines to be put on their land. Then he said, and it's clean... not like that!... and he pointed to the horizon north-west of where we were standing.

What are we looking at, I asked?

Byron, he answered.

Byron? He was pointing to a minuscule puff of smoke on the horizon. It looked insignificant to me, but that's because it was forty miles away (I said it was clear, remember?). According to my new friend, there's a nuclear power station at Byron and it's mucking-up the landscape. All he wanted to know was, would you rather live here with these clean, quiet, pretty windmills in your back yard, or there, with a reactor and cooling towers in your back yard?

Kind of a no-brainer, isn't it?

Sunrise at Montgomery, Illinois

--
Canon EOS-5D, 300/4.0 Canon Lens EF L Ultrasonic & EF2X, ISO 1000

Oil Change, Any Car: $19.95

Every so often something happens that makes me wonder why I work so hard to adapt to new technologies. I work so hard at it that, at least in one case... Internet web sites, I was first to market. Well not 100% first, but clearly one of the very first photographers to establish an Internet site. I was so first that when The New York Times did a story on photographers' web sites, they profiled my site in their story.

This morning I received an e-mail which began, "Hello, we are in search for a professional photographer that can take photos of....." When the e-mail starts with such a generic greeting as Hello and not a mention of my name... not Hello Mr. Pobereskin or Hello Joe it's immediately suspect. There were clues that this e-mail was legitimate. It was addressed to an e-mail address that can only have come from my web site rather than to Undisclosed Recipients or some other indicator of bulk mail, the headers revealed that it was indeed from the company the writer claimed to represent, so I called the person to ask a few questions and she told me she'd been to my site and seen my work.

It was comfort-inspiring and after a brief conversation I sat down and made an estimate, almost certain I wasn't necessarily wasting my time. Having said that, and having spent a few hours on an estimate for this new prospect; I was still not surprised to read in a response to the e-mail I sent with the PDF estimate, "Is the total quote for $8,110? We don't need anything creative, we just need photos taken. I can express that this is more than what we expected to pay."

I called back and asked, well, what did you expect to pay? My prospective client told me that the other quote they'd received was for $5000 less, so roughly $3000. We spoke about comparing apples to apples, etc, etc and I was referred to another in her company for clarification of the parameters so I could prepare a second, more realistic (competitive), quote based on real world expectations rather than what she initially thought we could do.

Later on, I had an e-mail from my friend Rob Rathe containing a funny video about clients and their expectations and we commiserated on our similar experiences but then I had to just check.... did my correspondent really visit my web site? Does she really know what I'd do for $8000? The answer is yes... and no.

A check on the logs shows that she did search on google.com for need a building photographer in New York city and the search did point her to my site, but the Access Log reveals.....

193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:27 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:26 -0400] "GET /gifs/pober.gif HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:27 -0400] "GET /jpeg/Picture4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:28 -0400] "GET /gifs/eat.gif HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:29 -0400] "GET /gifs/asmp.gif HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:29 -0400] "GET /gifs/c3.png HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:29 -0400] "GET /gifs/celogo.gif HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:29 -0400] "GET /gifs/SAA-logo.gif HTTP/1.1" 200
193.138.113.23 - - [01/Jun/2009:11:49:30 -0400] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404

.....that all she saw was the splash page. She never looked at the web site, she never saw the quality, never learned of the value I bring to a project, never read my bio. I cannot believe (sorry if I'm sounding like John McEnroe), I cannot believe she didn't look at the web site!! She searched alright, but she failed to learn anything about me or my work. All she wanted was a number.

Is this what 23 years of hard work has come down to? Forget the expertise, forget the value, forget the eye, we don't want anything creative just tell us how much you charge for a picture? We don't want to see your pictures, we don't even care if you're any good at it, just come to the bottom line?

Okay, that's it, I've had it!! I'll change your freakin' oil, any car: $19.95!