Dangerous Photographer "Nailed" By Amtrak

Another dangerous photographer has been arrested while doing his thing, this time by Amtrak. According to the New York Times, Duane Kerzic, a semi-professional photographer and NPPA member was arrested by the Amtrak police while making pictures of trains at New York's Penn Station. His sinister purpose: attempting to win Amtrak's Picture Our Train photo contest. The arrest, which occurred in 2009, resulted in a law suit that has finally been settled for a five figure sum and the removal of Kerzic's web page criticizing Amtrak for the arrest.

I've written about the harassment and arrests of photographers across the UK and the USA many times, most recently about a local wire-tapping statute that has been used against photographers in Chicago as well as the arrest and trial of a photographer in Los Angeles who was photographing a personal project story on vandals spray-painting graffiti.

Photography is not a crime!

Political satirist Stephen Colbert skewered Amtrak for the Kerzic arrest (watch the video) saying that Amtrak has historically, "protected riders from their destinations," and, "this photography contest is Amtrak’s cleverest ruse since their so-called timetable."

Seeing Beyond The RAW Capture

Every time I hear somebody say, Just give us raw files, we'll take care of the digital processing, I want to cringe. I never deliver RAW files to my clients, and it's not because I want to charge them for digital post-production, it's because their guy can't possibly know what I saw when I made the image, nor can he interpret my files to match my vision... and my vision is why my clients commission me to begin with.

Yesterday morning at five o'clock I was standing on the shore of Lake Michigan contemplating the skyline of Chicago's Gold Coast. It was about 70°F and the sky was clear, and though it's a relatively low temperature considering our recent weather, the 90% humidity and the hike from where my car was parked to the location where I was standing, with a 40 pound pack, had me slightly sweaty.

The sky was already starting to brighten and I'd hoped to be shooting by then but I was delayed trying to make sense of Chicago's Byzantine parking regulations (reading those signs at 5:00 AM can make you want to turn around and go back home!), so I hustled through my set-up and started shooting right away. By 5:20 AM I'd made my best picture already but I hung around for sunrise and made some more. By 6:05 AM, sixty seven frames later, I was on my way to the office to start processing my take.



Sunrise was gorgeous by the way, but I wasn't feeling all that good about the shoot, especially as the images started displaying on my monitor as they were imported from the camera. They looked kind of dull and grey, not at all what I'd seen. It took a little color correction and enhancement in Aperture, and then some perspective correction, distortion correction (all zoom lenses exhibit pin-cushion distortion) and cloning in Photoshop, before the image would match my vision... what I saw in my head was more attractive than what I saw with my eyes, and that takes a little work that only I can do.

I think you can tell which is the before and which is the after.
--
Both above: Canon EOS-5D Mark II, 28~105/3.5~4.5 Canon EF Ultrasonic lens, ISO 100

The Greatest Art Director Ever?

We can have a very long debate over who is the greatest art director to ever live. There are any number of legends who've been recognized as being pivotal to advertising, magazine, annual report, book, even web design. I'm not going to make any pronouncements, but an art director I'd worked with a few years ago, Akira Mabuchi, is so astute that he's right at the top of my list

It was just about this time a few summers ago that I'd gone out to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to photograph a story on the Steelcase corporate headquarters. It was a four day shoot and I made a lot of pictures. Mabuchi didn't speak English very well and he didn't have too much to say to me. Most of my conversation was with his colleague, Osamu Kubota, the magazine's editor (Kubota spoke English just fine). Anyway, there wasn't much direction except to discuss what I'd shoot, not how I'd shoot it.

Mabuchi mostly hung around in the background observing, taking notes, and I wasn't paying too much attention as I was busy, busy, busy. On the morning of the last shoot-day, he handed me a sheet of paper on which he'd made some sketches of what I'd shot and what he'd like to see that I hadn't shot. For a guy who never looked through the camera, he was remarkably accurate in sketching my pictures. I was so blown away that I kept the page with his sketches (sbove) and have it hanging on the wall, framed, in my office. I continue to be inspired by it.

I'm Speechless!

On Sept. 24, 2009, I announced... "after three months of talking to myself and three days of mind-numbing, eye-straining, blindness-inducing, brain-busting html coding..... voilà: pobereskin.com v3.0 It's about time!" Who'd have thought that after less than a year I'd undertake the same project again?

Now announcing the launch of pobereskin.com v4.0

As last time, the major change was to make the portfolio images much, much larger; maintain constant navigation; maintain quick as a flash image loading; etc..... except this time Bob Greenberg, photographers.com CEO, made this so easy I'm speechless... and that's saying something!

Copyright Keepers Earn 33% More Than Those Who Give It Away

A recent report on the EP/UK web site quotes a new survey by the British Photographic Council which, among other things, shows that, "photographers who follow industry best practice on (retaining) copyright earn on average 33% more a year than those who routinely give their copyright to their clients."

I think I've probably mentioned this before. If not here, on a photography forum or two (or maybe three), that photographers who cede their copyright interests... give all rights to the client... leave a lot of money on the table. Clients who require all rights in your images ought to be charged a lot more. Add zeroes is typically my advice.

The request for outright ownership is becoming more and more common. Theoretically it's not a problem, but in reality that request is usually made for all rights at the same price as limited rights, a big problem, because the client can usually find a short-sighted photographer who will acquiesce to their demand.

So... add zeroes. Practically, if you would charge, say $1,200 to shoot a job with limited rights then you should charge $120,000 for (lack of a better term) a buyout.

My experience over 24 years in business as a photographer has shown me the earning power of a great image. Consider that an image in a stock collection, long-term, can be used by a variety of clients in a variety of industries in a variety of geographic areas and languages in a variety of media, etc, etc... it all adds up to what one client might do with a given image over the same period of time.


Look at the pictures shown here. Do they look like blockbuster images to you? I made these for the Tokyo Electric Power Company corporate magazine, Illume, in July, 1989. It was a four day shoot on location. I charged TEPCo $750/day plus two travel days (plus production charges) to do the shoot. They could use as many of the images from the take as they wanted in one issue of their magazine, one-time rights.

While on-location, a representative from the subject company asked the magazine's editor, who owns these pictures? He was inquiring about using the images after the magazine was published. I jumped right into that conversation saying, I own the images.

From that shoot, the two images here became best-sellers, each earning me a substantial six figure sum over the past 21 years... hence, add zeroes!

Remember Chuck O'Rear? He made what he thought was a good but not necessarily spectacular image of a grassy knoll with a cloud overhead in a clear blue sky. It was eventually sold (all rights) to Microsoft to promote their Windows software product for a very hefty sum of money, if my memory is correct about $135,000. That's what all rights is worth, maybe even more. Add zeroes!

Take a lesson from our colleagues from across the pond: keep your copyright, it's worth big money.

Independence Day 2010

Happy Independence Day