Hit The Road, Jack

This Week Is "Fleet Week" In NYC

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Above: Nikon F3HP, 300mm/f4.0 Nikkor lens, Kodachrome 64 Professional film

Deja Vu All Over Again Part IV - This Day In History 1980

With a volcano erupting in Iceland and screwing-up air travel all across northern Europe, it's perhaps apropos that I tell a volcano story. It's really hard to resist and this one, this story, well, "It's deja vu all over again," as Yogi Berra used to say. This is an old story.....

It was a beautiful, clear, sunny Sunday 30 years ago today. I was fast asleep in a motel astride Route 20, The North Cascade Pass. I was, at that time, First Assistant to Klaus Lucka (heard of him before, have you? See This Could Be The Start Of Something Big) and we'd been on the road about two weeks as he was shooting an ad campaign for Raleigh Lights cigarettes.

This was a big shoot. We had a large crew including a stylist, two models, another assistant/location scout (Mark Scott out of Los Angeles), a truck driver, a brand new custom painted Kenworth tractor and Freuhoff trailer, three cars, the art director, a couple of account people, a couple of guys from Raleigh, Klaus and myself..... and we were all sleeping in that morning, or so we thought.

I was rudely awakened by a loud knock on my motel room door, sounded urgent. Mark and I woke up (I was sharing a room with Mark) and I went to the door and opened it. I honestly expected to see Klaus there to inform me that 8:00 AM was sleeping in enough but instead I was standing there in the open doorway, in my underwear, looking at a parking lot devoid of life. I went back to bed.

A couple of minutes later we were again awakened by the same knocking. This time we both jumped up and went to the door as the knocking was louder and more urgent sounding. This time Mark and I were both standing in the open doorway in our underwear looking at the parking lot but this time, so was everyone else!

Well, something was obviously happening so we got dressed and went to the restaurant for breakfast (I guess 8:00 AM is late when you're used to waking up at 4:00) and that's when we learned that Mt. St. Helens had blown her top... about 300 miles west of our position. We woke the rest of the crew and had a quick meeting over blueberry pancakes to decide what to do. The plan was to head west but that was certainly out of the question, so we drove east instead as Mark had scouted some good alternate locations near Spokane.

Well, we didn't get very far, only to Grand Coulee where the Washington State Police had closed the highway, it was snowing gray volcanic ash. We found another motel with some vacant rooms and checked-in for an unscheduled stopover (funny, two weeks earlier we got snowed in at the Government Lodge atop Mt. Hood in Oregon).

The game of the day was collecting ash in empty film cans along Route 20. An occasional truck would blow by us as we did our thing in the middle of the road (top picture). It was inconvenient as far as the shoot was concerned but we were collecting the coolest souvenirs to bring back home.

I don't know about Mark, but later on I was giving away little cans of volcanic ash left and right. We spent a few weeks in Los Angeles after the Raleigh shoot to work another cigarette campaign and my cousin Mo and his wife Barb were living in Westwood at the time, so they got the first can. It really was a popular souvenir and I was bummed because I inadvertently misplaced a vial I'd saved for myself. Many years later I was married with a child and I told him about Mt. St. Helens, and also that I had a vial of ash around here somewhere.

Fortunately for me, Mo is better at holding on to things than I am because twenty years later I was in his living room in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (he moved) with my seven year old and three year old boys and finally I could prove that I wasn't daft: I had saved some ash... here, look at Mo's!!

My son, Alex (now twelve), found my vial of ash in a shoebox in my closet on July 8, 2006, the day I first posted this story.

Two Cures For The No Budget Blues

Back in the mid-1980s, when all the established bands were reinventing themselves for the disco scene, The Kinks, seeking to capitalize on the wave released a single called Superman. As that soared to the top of the charts, they released an album which contained a song called Low Budget in which the protagonist sings: Cheap is small and not too steep, But best of all cheap is cheap, Circumstance has forced my hand, To be a cut price person in a low budget land.

Almost thirty years later many of our clients are still singing that song, but they've added one more line (as if cheap is cheap is not enough): "oh, we're a non-profit." The implication, of course, is that they have no money and they want you to do the job for free. Like if you do it for free you'll have money?

I remember the first non-profit I ever worked for: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Yes, that Lincoln Center. They wanted me to shoot the cover of their annual report for free. This was one of my very first jobs, and the designer, Linda Florio, warned me in advance that they were gonna give me the line and not to fall for it, they have money. I charged them, I think, $1500 for that. They loved the image, it won an award, they had me back again the next year.

Not only is this quite popular these days, everyone's writing about it. Earlier in the week it was a topic on the APAnet forum, this morning it surfaced in Blake Discher's blog.

Blake's a very nice guy, and every time he mentions my name my hit counter registers an extra hundred visitors, so I don't mind at all if he quotes me. This morning, he wrote, "I want to give credit where credit is due, but I'm not sure where I picked this up, but it may have been my photo pal Joe Pobereskin or Chicago photographer Marc Hauser."


I want to give credit where credit is due, too: the quote belongs to Marc Hauser.

So, how does Marc deal with non-profits? "I'm glad you called me because I do indeed have a special fee set up for charities such as yours. I shoot for half price, and here's how it works. We'll work together for your next six photo projects. The first time, I'm going to charge you 100-percent of my customary fee. The next time, 80-percent. The next time 60-percent. Next 40-percent. The next, 20-percent. And the sixth time, I'm not going to bill you a penny." That's a pretty good plan, over time it works out to half-price.

I, needless to say, have my own plan and here's how mine works.....

If I work for a charity it must be one that I fully support and I charge a fee plus production charges (digital capture and post-production, assistants, taxis, strobe rentals, whatever). We work out an arrangement whereby I donate a large portion of my fee after I've been paid... after I've been paid.

Why? Let's say you shoot for four days for a charitable org. Your fees amount to, I don't know, let's say $6000 and the production charges are another $1200. You send an invoice/license for $7200 and they pay you $7200. You then send your check for $3500 as a donation.

You get invited to dinners with other large donors, make connections, work for your new friends for full fee, you get a tax deduction for your $3500 donation and the charity gets a 75% discount on your fees. You've made money, made some friends who can afford your services for their businesses, enjoy the status of being a big donor which advances your standing in the community and you've actually made some money.

When you work for free the only one who benefits is the charity. They get your work for free. You don't get a tax deduction, don't get the black tie invite, don't get to hobnob (I mean Network) with the glitterati, and most of the time you don't even get a decent tear-sheet, as they haven't a decent printing budget.

So there's two solutions to the same problem. Mine works best when there's one project on the table, but I like Marc's, too. I'm gonna use it next time to see if I can stretch the new relationship a bit.

As Blake said later on, "I want to be seen more than once at the charity's events. Charity fund-raisers almost always yield more clients if you work the room... Introduce yourself, be personable, look professional, and hand out business cards... so far, two charities have taken me up on the offer. The jobs were simple, and actually the benefits were very much worth it. I've managed to get new clients (one major!) and that's resulted in more billings for the studio. Think of the "discount" as part of your advertising budget."
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Top YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago Annual Report 2009
Bottom Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Annual Report 1991

Copyright, Metadata & What Are You Going To Do About It?

It occurs to me that in an era where digital publishing is now the norm (more so since Apple introduced the iPad), many photographers are somewhat in the dark as to how they can protect their work as their images are splayed across an increasingly large array of electronic media. The answer is metadata.

The addition of metadata to a digital file is sometimes automatic, sometimes manual, and it's typically a combination of the two, but that all depends on how you structure your workflow. A great guide to get you started can be found at the dpBestflow.org web site. dpBestflow.org (digital photography best practices and workflow) is an ASMP initiative funded by the Library of Congress.

What is metadata? According to the dpBestflow.org glossary..... Commonly defined as “data about data,” metadata is embedded or associated information describing a file’s contents, both technically and conceptually. There are several metadata container formats such as EXIF, IIM, IPTC Core, Dublin Core, DICOM, and XMP. The way metadata is structured is referred to as a schema, an example being IPTC Core which is an standardized structure to hold information about a digital image file, such as authorship details, description, keywords, copyright status, usage, etc. Parametric image editing (PIE) instructions saved in the XMP format are another type of metadata, which is comprised of the image processing parameters from a PIEware application.

How do you use it? In my workflow, images are imported from my cameras' flash memory via Aperture, and it's there that my basic metadata is added (some photographers use a competing software, Lightroom). The most basic data is embedded by my camera and contains information such as the exposure, ISO value, lens used, date and time, etc; then I add copyright, credit, caption, basic keywording and source information to the files as they're imported onto my hard drive. Later on, I add finishing touches to the metadata via various stored templates in Photoshop's File Info (see illustration, above).

Okay, so you already know this? Now, what are you going to do about it? Well, the first thing you ought to do is register your images with the copyright office, but that's not the end of it. Somewhere in the terms & conditions of your delivery or invoice should be a notice that you require the integrity of your metadata to be maintained.

"I often advise my photographer clients to put a notice provision right in their contracts and license agreements," says John Grant, a Seattle attorney. "Something to the effect of: it is both a breach of contract and a violation of 17 USC 1202 to remove metadata without my prior written consent. That way," Grant continues, "if they do remove your data, you potentially have a couple of ways to try to remedy it."

Realizing the implications of a possible Orphan Works amendment to the Copyright Act, I've been doing something similar on my licenses for a couple of years now, hopefully lessening the prospects of my own images becoming orphaned in the vastness of the Internet (see above). You should be doing it, too.

Luck, Vigilance & Ineptitude

Had it not been for the awareness of a tee-shirt vendor, had the would-be bomber not been inept, New Yorkers (all of us!) might not have been so lucky Saturday evening.

Watching news reports of the attempted bombing of Times Square from the comfortable remoteness of my Chicagoland living room it occurred to me that I've stood on the spot where the Nissan Pathfinder was parked. Had it been a couple of days ago rather than a couple of years ago, had the guy actually known how to make a bomb, I might have been standing right there and been blown to bits while making this picture.

Timing is everything.
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Canon EOS-1N, 20~35/2.8 Canon Zoom Lens EF L Ultrasonic, Fujichrome Provia 100