Fotoboat...No more

Originally posted by turnturtle When it comes to photography I guess most of us are quite plebish in reality.... after all I'd rather take a happy snap for free, than pay someone for this:

You can't blame the photographer for the poor aestehetics of the subject Jimbo, not when they can't disguise it with some fancy lighting.

It had to happen.  With the number of people owning fancy digital SLRs and pro standard lenses, taking photo for fun and giving the original files away for free; when fotoboat were charging many quids for a single print.  Especially with people wanting a decent shot as a screen saver for a few weeks rather than something to stick in a frame on the wall.

You can't make a career out of what others are doing equally well as a hobby.

I coun't myself as a cheerful giver away and was dead chuffed to provide some photos for the streakers to use at the dinghy show.

It would be nice if they came back .. but they'd need a different business model.  Adapt or die I'm afraid.

The trouble is everyone wants pictures for free these days, they assume because they are digital they are free to produce. Wrong. I'm sure I've made a few enemies along the way pointing this out, I've had a boat manufacturer ask me for some images and when I costed it up for them they replied asking if they could have them for free. I found a boat they sold which equated to a similar price and asked if I could have that for free? They got the point.

The best way for class associations to get images is to pay the photographer to be at the event for a few days, I find that works best for me and them. They get a healthy selection of images to use for promo use and I still get to sell to the competitors. Obviously if the class want to pay more then they can, and the competitors can then have the images on download from my website, I've had this arrangement with quite a few events in the past and it's worked really well.

If I turn up 'on spec' then I will give the class 3 or 4 low res images for the report with my name plastered all over them, but again I'm not doing this as a hobby and can't just be giving stuff away for free.

I doubt it Jim.

People generally want a photo of themselves, not just the fleet rockstars so a calender wouldn't work unless its a 12 boat fleet.

Tom I'm sure can comment, but I imagine its pretty difficult to get a similar number of good shots of every competitor. You'd feel pretty cheesed off knowing your entry fee went towards photos and then found you had a choice of 2 mediocre pics while someone else in the fleet had a choice of 10 stellar images as well as another 5 or 6 mediocre shots! This I guess is why the likes of Tom tend to sell to the individual competitors.

One thing that struck me the other week during a local art trail, was that people seem happy to pay big sums of money for stunning but fairly generic landscapes which are somewhat easier for a photographer to take and I expect significantly cheaper to produce. Sports and action photography is I imagine a much harder sell as you are unlikely to sell and image of someone to many other people, unless the individual is a sporting celeb.

The demise of hard print probably makes life harder given that the magazines just aren't there any more to buy up the pics. I have colleagues who made a good 2nd income selling to the press but its all but dried up in recent years, as magazines look for low-res low cost images from iphones.

Well keep doing so cos the evidence is that you are quite good at it