Behind the Scenes at Zach Theatre. A first day's sampling...

I had fun in Houston last week. We got lots and lots of good work done and I was happy with my images as I uploaded 8.4 gigabytes of high res files to Smugmug.com in order to send them to my client. Smugmug now allows it's pro users to upload and transfer big folders full of images and it's very easy to do. Yay! The only downside of my Houston high tech/bio-medical assignment was having to drive home at rush hour in a torrential rain storm --- but I can hardly blame that on a client, right?

Just before I left town to go on that photography spree I started a project for Zach Theatre here in Austin. We (me, the marketing team and the in-house graphic designer) wanted to do an extensive behind the scenes reportage to show all the hard work that goes into a show. We always see the actors, and sometimes the band or orchestra, but there is always a large crew that builds the sets, makes the props, designs the audio and the stage lighting, creates costumes, does make-up and supports the actors. We wanted to be able to share a visual story about that side of the theatre. People seem to be very interested in out of the ordinary careers...

I'm using the Olympus cameras for this project. Why? Because I love photographs that look like the one just above and just below and it seems that the Olympus OMD EM5.2 and I work well together to get images like this. On Tues. I used a hand full of lenses and one body. Everything fit in one small, brown Domke camera bag. I leaned heavily on the Panasonic 42.5 f1.8 and also the Sigma 60mm f2.8 but the Pana/Leica 25mm Summilux and the 12-35mm f2.8 zoom also got some camera time. This kind of project is fun because it is all enterprise. No tight schedule and no big shot list. We discussed what we wanted to see and established a future date for a deadline and, for the most part, the Theatre just lets me roam around and shoot. 

I've given up worrying about ISO and noise for this project. I am happy to shoot at ISO 200 and equally happy to shoot at ISO 3200, if that's what it takes to get an image. I'm shooting raw and am also amazed at what a good job these cameras do in hitting correct white balance without my constant  supervision. It's amazing how far small sensor cameras have come and how close the overall image quality is to my D810 (matching maximum image sizes = native pixels). 

If you can't do good work with the current generation of m4:3 cameras you need to work on your chops, not your camera inventory.

I am happy to be back in Austin and had a marvelous swim in the crystal clear water of the Western Hills Athletic Club's pool this morning. Our masters coach, Kristen, was good at motivating us to crank out some yards while still having a great time. 

I'm heading back to the theater now for a different project. A behind the scenes look at the rehearsal for our upcoming show, EVITA. I was there earlier this afternoon with the principal actors but this evening well have the entire cast together and I think we can get some great ensemble shots. 

But I'm rationing my time. I'm giving them a couple of hours and then Belinda and I are heading over to Cantine for some wonderful food and wine. The reward for the "tough" life of a working photographer. 

The Art and Science of Managing Client Expectations. Learned the hard way.

Clients. You have to love the little dears. Without them it would be much harder for photographers to actually make money. But since most clients aren't deeply immersed in the art and science of image making we sometimes find that clients have unreal expectations of: what can be done in a day, how optics work,  how quickly and easily things can be fixed in PhotoShop, how much your time and expertise costs, what kinds of rights they'll end up with and how quickly everything can be turned around. Side issues include the general blank stare you'll get when you mention things like location permits, lunch breaks, mileage charges, and the fact that you actually OWN the images and you are ONLY licensing a package of usage licenses to them. 

Now, you can wait to the very end to grapple with lots of these issues and I can pretty much guarantee you that your procrastination in tackling the understanding curve will come back and bite you on the ass. Hard. There is a better way and that is to include as much detail as possible in your initial conversations and then follow up those conversations with a concise listing of the discussed points in the body of your estimate or bid (two different animals...).

The first and biggest points are nearly always about money and what the client gets for their money. I think this one is tough for a lot of photographers because artists don't like to talk about money and they don't like to talk about who owns the rights. Can you blame photographers who live in a culture where most transactions look like a slalom race to the bargain basement? You can always find a crappier product cheaper at Walmart but would you really want to own a product that's not fun to use and needs to be replaced over and over again when you could buy a better product elsewhere that may last a lifetime and be a pleasure to use? If quality doesn't matter and price is the only consideration then why aren't we using plastic cameras with single element, plastic lenses? Or Kiev cameras for that matter.  I think the answer is that we want to buy things that are well made. Clients might have the same mindset but sometimes it's up to us to explain the features AND the benefits of buying the better solution.

When we tackle price we have two line items that are really important. One is our creation fee = what it costs us to produce the image(s) our clients need. Most people base this number on a day rate. It basically covers part of our overhead but not our profits. And it doesn't cover the benefit the client derives from using the final product; photographs.

For the sake of this blog let's say you work in a second tier market and you work pretty consistently. Your basic rate to show up with your gear and do the work (exclusive of travel costs, assistants, props, etc.) might be $2,000 for each day that you are engaged. But the finished work has its own intrinsic value to the client. We bill separately for that. Let's say that your client wants to use a set of images on their website for two years and in their capabilities brochure. They'll print 20,000 brochures. Depending on the size of the company's market and the overall size of the company we might charge a fixed price of $1200 to use six images on the website and another $800 to use the images in the brochure for one print run. The basic fees for doing the work AND licensing the usage of the work = $4,000. All hard costs are added on top of those fees and, depending on your business model, you might add a markup of anywhere from 10-25% of the costs to cover the time and liability it requires for you to arrange and supervise these line items.

Most clients who don't do this on a daily or weekly basis think that they should pay one fee and own all the work ad infinitum so that's the first hurdle of expectation management you'll grapple with.  We carefully explain that this is the way our business works. We try to get them to understand that the time and expertise are both expensive things to accrue and are different from the actual value of the images. Usually they get it but it requires talking through the process and the rationale. Artists own the work they create. It's up to them to decide how they want to monetize it. Not every client will get it or want to work with you this way but it's better to have that discussion before you drive to Terlingua and talk about it the morning of your scheduled shoot... right?

When I bid a job I cover as much as I can. I talk about how we're going to shoot, where we're going to shoot, who will get the models, who will handle to location fees, how many shots we need to get and how we'll schedule that. I talk about how the work will be delivered.

For a recent annual report bid I wrote: "....globally post process all edited (selected) images for color, tonality and perspective corrections and then send, via FTP, large Tiff images."  To make sure they understood that we would NOT be extensively retouching each images I also added: "(more extensive post processing (or retouching) of images for things like the removal of labels, product defects etc. is $45 per image and is additional to the budget above. We will only initiate advanced retouching with your additional approval). I added this language to manage the expectation that every one of the hundreds of files we'd make (bracketing, expressions, variations) would NOT be individually manipulated and/or retouched. Not making that clear up front means you'll have a conflict somewhere down the line... But if you are going to retouch and post process each image individually from something like an annual report project you'd better be well paid for it or the time sink hole with kill your business. 

Clients may also have a way that they like to pay suppliers. Mostly they like to pay them whenever it's convenient or whenever they feel so disposed. We, on the other hand, usually want to be paid on some sort of logical schedule with NOW being the most logical option I can think of....

Here's what we write when we talk about payment: All payment is due on completion and delivery of the images. No license of use is considered valid until balance is paid in full. We rarely get too much push back and we really do expect to get paid for our work on a reasonable schedule. When I sent a variation of the above to a prospective client who was very interested in working with my company he wrote back to say that his parent company in XXXXX, U.S.A had a policy of tendering payment in 45-60 days but that they "were good for it." My response was to see if he could pay for the service and licenses with a credit card but that option wasn't open either. My response? "I appreciate being asked to prepare a bid for your advertising project but our CFO requires payment on completion (which usually means within 10 working days) and would not allow me to accept a contract with such long payment terms."  I added, "please let me know if your company's policy on payment changes in the future as I would enjoy working with you very much." 

I am happy to decline work if it doesn't pay well or in a timely fashion. It's too easy for the time of payment to keep slipping and slipping. You've heard the adage, "Life is uncertain, eat dessert first!" It doesn't take long for even big companies to get into trouble and stop paying their bills altogether. Happens more often than you might expect. 

But let's move on from the boring accounting expectations and get right down to the stuff that happens when we shoot....

I like to have a conversation with clients about how we operate on the shoot. If the client has hired me on the strength of highly stylized portraits they've seen on my website I want to make sure they know making these portraits can't be done by just leaning in someone's office door and snapping a "quick one." We talk about how long it takes to set up the lights and how long it takes to build an effective rapport with each sitter. You won't get what you want from a "cattle call" shoot but clients don't always know what it takes and it's your job to paint the picture. You also need to let them know that you need breaks and lunch and a good, quiet environment in which to work. How much time will you need to drag in your gear and get it set up and tested? That needs to be part of the conversation. Don't assume they've ever done anything like this before. 

Portrait clients love to point to highly produced magazine cover shots and express that this kind of work is their "target." At that point it's time to talk about make-up people and clothing stylists and why they are so important for a style like the one the client has become attached to. You will either change their budget or their expectations. But it's better than delivering a product they'll never be happy with...

On a recent shoot I came to understand how the total market capitulation to cellphone photography has, in a half a generation, eviscerated the general public's knowledge about photo techniques. I worked with a very young marketing director who wanted stuff that the laws of physics disallow. The first was a request that we shoot "wide" shots but at the same time she would like the background to be "totally out of focus." We were in a fairly small room. I had to explain to the client that the effect she was looking for (and showing examples of) is always best done with longer lenses and a lot of distance between the thing you would like in focus and the thing you would like to have out of focus. 

She modified her next request. She would like Bob, in the foreground, to be in "very sharp focus" and she would like Raymond who was standing six feet behind Bob to also be in "very sharp focus" but we would like Rachel who was standing two feet behind Raymond and eight feet from Bob to be "totally out of focus." We had to have a discussion about how focus falls off over distance but I'm still not sure she really got it. 

The next issue that always throws me for a loop is the idea that the camera can do discriminatory cropping. "You know, I want the picture to have the same top and bottom but I want the stuff on the left side to be zoomed out." Do you mean "cropped out"? Clients want things to be cropped in the camera but they want to see everything else exactly the way it is composed in the initial image. Hmmmm. I generally use live view and show them how zooming changes everything. Once they get that we move on to the laptop where I show them how different cropping is... Of course, the next discussion is about how they don't want the aspect ratio to change....

Many times clients won't understand that some things need to be lit. "Do we have to take time to set up lights? Can't we just shoot with the available (fluorescent ceiling fixtures) lights?" That's an interesting discussion and also one that should be handled in the preliminary negotiations. If your client has been working under the presumption that nothing need be lit they'll expect the shoot to go like rocket and will likely have over promised their bosses about the number of shots they'll get... wildly. Guess who gets the blame? 

You might also want to manage your client's expectations when it comes to making promises they can't (or perhaps shouldn't) fulfill. My favorite two are, "We'll get the photographer to send you a print. You can share it with your mother----or use it on LinkedIn." And, "I promised our sister company that they could use the images too. They're splitting your invoice with us. Just a warning, they're really slow pay...."

The client expects that it would be no big deal for you to make a batch of prints and send them over for distribution but that's not reflected in your bid, job description, etc. and is something you would never agree to. Rather than stay mute and take up the discussion after the job is done you need to speak up at the very first moment the "free prints for everyone" speech starts. Unless you bid a fortune and the client agreed to it you don't have time to fulfill requests like this and you sure don't want the files you've worked hard to create in the hands of everyone in the client's company, trying their hands at image manipulation and plastering the work all over Facebook. 

The second issue above generally requires a full stop. "This was not in our agreement. We don't split jobs without additional compensation (remember, the images have intrinsic values to clients) and we don't vary the payment schedules in our agreements." If it's a "make it or break it" issue I am a proponent of turning to my assistant and saying, "Pack it up. We're out of here." It's better not to do the work than to have your value endlessly diluted. Negotiate if you can but if you can't you'll need to do what's right for your business first. 

My final two points on managing client expectations have to do with working conditions and then on delivery. 

I absolutely hate to have a client stand over my shoulder shouting encouragement to a shy and socially phobic sitter; or anyone else. I can't stand the frat party atmosphere of yelling "funny" stuff to sitters while we are trying to work and I'm not willing to put up with it. When we do portrait shoots on location I talk about MY EXPECTATIONS for a happy working environment. I ask clients not to chime in or co-direct when I am working. If they have a concern or issue I ask that they wait until I get to a stopping point and then we can pull ourselves aside and discuss. Nothing breaks the mood worse for most sitters than having two directors each trying to give directions that may cancel each other out. My expectation is that the client will stand back and let me do my job.

In the same vein we need to shoot in a designated area that ensures the subjects a bit of privacy and keeps out the passersby who seem to truly believe that their tired joke about "Joe being so ugly his face will break your camera!!!" Or, to the 300 pound woman from accounting, "Sheila! Get sexy with the camera!!!" This doesn't help anyone. I think we should position an H.R. person right outside the door of the makeshift studio for the day to deal with this kind of witless humor.

Finally, delivery. I can't tell you how many times I've put a delivery schedule into the agreement only to have the client mention on our way out of their building that, "I just found out that our CEO is doing a big pitch tomorrow morning! Can you get me the best shots from every set up we shot today and deliver them to my mailbox this evening? I know you said a week but YOU KNOW IT IS IN CORPORATE...." 

We used to try and figure something out. We don't anymore. We just say "no." Why? Because most times it's unnecessary. The client is just looking for someone to tell them "no" so they can go back to the CEO's admin with some ammunition. And secondly, we just don't want to compromise the integrity of the product. The client will never remember that they asked you to rush they will only remember that the images didn't turn out quite as well as they expected......

To recap: I insist on being paid. I need to let you know how many photographs to expect from our collaboration. I need you to understand that you don't OWN the photographs and don't have the right to distribute them everywhere like popcorn. I need you to understand that there are certain things cameras can't do and we need to work within the constraints of the laws of physics. Good work takes time. Good post production takes more time. I insist on being paid on time. Available light indoors sucks more often than you might think. I don't need a "cheering section" at the portrait shoot. I won't be making prints for everyone's mom. These people are employees, they are getting paid to be here. And by the way, I insist on being paid for the work  in a timely fashion. 

It's fun to think that all of what we do is somehow just "art" and that the universe takes care of monetizing artists but I'm here to tell you that this is a business and the important part is managing client's expectations. 

You want the transaction to work for everyone. That means it has to work for you too.

We're taking a couple of days off to go to Houston and produce an assignment for an international client. Back in writing trim Friday.

Jacob in the set shop with paint. 25mm f1.4 Leica lens.

I spent some time at Zach Theatre today. Rona Ebert and I are working on images to be used to show off all the work that goes on behind the scenes to put on great plays. I shot this image this afternoon in the set shop. I shot about a thousand frames today but it's not really that much. Maybe 60 different images set ups with variations. I shot mostly available light with fast lenses on an Olympus OMD EM5.2. I am consistently impressed with how well that camera nails WB and overall flesh tones. The project will continue on Saturday as well document a rehearsal from out behind the scenes perspective.

For some of the shots I needed a bit more fill or a bit more direction to the light and I brought along a small LED panel just for these instances. It was a Fotodiox 312AS. It was just the right amount of fill for just about every shot. Most useful lenses of the day? Those would be the Panasonic 42.5mm f1.8 and the Panasonic/Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux.

I will be out of the office for the next two to two and a half days. I'm booked pretty tightly so I'm pretty sure I won't be producing any blog entries. Drink more coffee and search out some of the older blogs we've written just for fun.

The season of work is upon us. Also, will have our hands on an A7R2 for testing next Monday. We'll see if the new camera really lives up to its hype...

Too much fun.

All the best, Kirk (19,969,007 and counting....)

No title. Nothing to say but here's another image of Noellia.

I love that thing that fast medium telephotos do to the background when you aim them at people and photograph nearly wide open.

Noellia and the 85mm lens.

My back yard has endless possibilities. But it needs a new barbecue pit. That would make for endless possibilities+1. 

Walking the streets. Looking for gold.

I needed to go for a walk to get some exercise and clear my head. Too much detail stuff at the office. Too many chores at home. It was a hot one today so I wore my dorky Panama hat because it covers my ears and gives me the most shade. I was also breaking in a pair of lightweight hiking boots because it always hurts less finding problems close to home.

The important thing for me is to go out without having expectations of what I'll find. I walked a new way and went by the state capitol building. I hiked down Congress Ave. and over to the convention center. I tried to let the camera drift on my shoulder while I looked and walked. My latest addition to the exercise (and I think this is something I've learned by osmosis from Studio Dog) is to take time to stop and really smell the environment as well as just looking at it. A hot and toasty day downtown has it's own smell. It's different than a cool day and much different from a rainy or windy day.

I knew it was hot because I was sweating in the very first hour of the walk. The sun felt like it had its own gravity and it was working to push down on me and slow me down a little bit at a time. Walking by bars with their doors open, spewing air conditioning made the effect of little oasis sprinkled down the ribbon of sidewalk on Sixth St.

I hate being weighed down so I was carrying only one camera and one lens. The camera was the Nikon D750, which is the most assured feeling of all the digital cameras I've owned. Not the best. Just very assured. You know the battery isn't tumbling toward inconvenience and you suspect that the exposure will be just as you thought it should be.

The last time I went out I had fun working the wide end of an old, manual focus, 25 to 50mm f4.0 Nikon lens so today I went wider with a Tamron 20-40mm f2.7 to f3.5 lens. Both times I put circular polarizing filters over the front.

I saw the turquoise patterns of the mural (above) out of the corner of my eye. They were painted on an interior wall of a parking garage at the intersection of Guadalupe St. and Third St. I walked into the garage and messed around with my exposure while a shaved headed young man in a white t-shirt revved a noisy motorcycle and adjusted the music on his mobile stereo. He gave me the "hey dude" head nod and rode off in a cloud of noise and exhaust.

But I liked the mural very much and I'm glad I walked around and found it. It's nice that people are making big art in the middle of the city. I love the gold fish on the woman's head. It's a nice touch.

The Packing Ritual. A Holiday Tradition. First comes the rite of selecting the system...

Shot for Primary Packaging in NYC. 

I have two assignments this week. One takes place tomorrow and it's not very gear intensive. I'm going to go around the Zach Theatre and photograph as many people as I can while they are engrossed in their work. A "behind the scenes" of what goes on behind the scenes. The gear selection there is simple: A nice camera that does great high ISO stuff --- because the request is that this shoot be all "available light." I'll take the D750 and the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art and a few other fast lenses. The 85mm for sure. Maybe the 24-120mm Nikon for the wide stuff. Everything will fit in one shoulder bag.

But as soon as I finish up at Zach it's home to pack the car, pet the Studio Dog and slide into the Tuesday evening traffic heading to Houston, Texas. I'll be working there Wednesday, Thursday and maybe also a half day on Friday. The client is an international company that's involved in biochemistry and other arcane stuff and our assignment is to create a library of lab images and facilities images that the parent company can use on websites and in collateral to market and promote their products and services. I know I'll be working indoors and I know that there will most likely be clean room scenarios but other than that the project is a bit opaque to me right now.

If past work in the industry is any predictor of the upcoming assignment I'm pretty certain that most of the images will be made in lab spaces that are uniformly lit with high quality, fluorescent fixtures and that there will be a mix of measuring instruments, process machines with interesting GUIs, and people who are interacting with the first two subjects. My goal in these situations is never to overpower the existing light with powerful strobes but rather to augment the existing light with other constant light sources. To the point, I am looking at constant light sources that are somewhat controllable and quickly portable so that leaves out my collection of big, fluorescent Pro-Lights. They are too bulky for a fast moving, single operator pace.

I'm taking mostly LED lights. I'm bringing along four of the Fotodiox 312AS bi-color panels because they are superb accent lights and wonderful at creating small pools of fill light. We're charging two sets of batteries per unit right now. I'll also take along the bigger Fotodiox 508AS for those times when I want a quickly positionable, but stronger, fill light or a fast main light for portraits. Used with a layer of diffusion it's strong enough to overpower existing light by just enough to add direction to a subject. The batteries are charging for that one but it also comes packed with its own A/C power converter.

The lights that I hope will get the most use are the two new RPS CooLEDs; the 50 and the 100. They each are a much smaller point source of light and can give me a sharper illumination which may be very useful when we are lighting for a little more drama and more control of spill and spread. Since they both have polished reflectors and much more power they are perfect for stylized portrait work when pushed through pop-up diffusion material. We have an assortment of the pop-up, circular 5-in-1 reflector/diffuser units and I have them in a range of opacities from 1/2 stop to 2 stops. I'm also bringing black cine foil to control spill.

All of the LED lights and an extension cord, along with some sheets of Rosco diffusion, fit nicely into a large, wheeled Pelican case and this case will represent the bulk of my lighting inventory. But I'm always on the look out for situations that bite me on the ass when I get in to "all or nothing" scenarios with gear. (All flash, all LED, all available light, etc....).  To cover other contingencies I am packing three Cactus and Yongnuo flashes along with a full set of Cactus V6 triggers. This is for that one shot I don't (but have) anticipate where the art director says, "Oh, by the way, we need to get a shot of the CEO in his office. We go there to find the office flooded by sunlight from floor to ceiling windows on two sides....." That's why these lights are coming along for the ride. That and the every once in a while request to "freeze motion" on some equipment shot. I hope they don't come out of the case in the way that lifeguards hope they never have to throw the life preserver. But we like to be prepared.

I'll have a little stash of batteries for the flashes and a couple of collapsible, Westcott umbrellas just to round out the flash capability. As I am driving over to the big city some of this extraneous gear could be left in the car and fetched if needed.

The stands and tripods are self explanatory, we'll take along as many as we think we'll need and, invariably, there will be one shot where we need "just one more." Hello gaffer's tape...

That brings me to cameras. We always end up at the cameras. If this were a steady client I'd probably bring along the Olympus cameras and do all the stationary shots in the hi-res mode, the rest of the stuff as raw files. But this is a first time client, flying in from another state and is the client of a photographer from a different state who recommended me (thank you!).  It's more important to me to make the client happy with the work and with her steady photographer's recommendation than it is for me to go off on some sort of Zen gear path of discovery.

I'm presuming that my counterpart is using either a Canon or Nikon full frame system and I want to use what is client is comfortable with. My primary camera will be the D810 and I'll use the D750 as a back up. I'm taking a wide range of lenses including the 24-120mm, the 14mm, the fast 50mm, a 55 micro Nikon, the 85mm and the 80-200mm f2.8. Tons of extra batteries and connector cords for tethered shooting with either a laptop or the Marshall monitor (via HDMI out).

I'll be shooting 36 megapixels raw files and making custom white balances as I go along. My goal is to make every image sing before I even get it into the raw converter.

Why do I write stuff like this? It makes for a good rationalizing exercise and keeps Belinda out of the forest of, "should I take this or that." It creates a good equipment list that jogs my brain so I don't forget that one set of clothespins that might be the linchpin for a shot that requires a set of filter. I look back on these posts after the jobs to see just how well I hit the targets. Sometimes I'm right on the money but other times I'm just whistling in the wind. When I have a good rationale it also informs my shooting and helps me get ready to be productive and focused from the very start. Less trial and error. Less stop and start.

And occasionally a reader will see something I overlooked or didn't consider and help me move in a different direction. It's interested because our readers all seem to be good photographer but a large percentage are also active professionals. There are a thousand ways to describe subjects with light; mine are not always the best ways. I'm never to old to learn...


The Craftsy Learning Promotion Continues....

Click here to take advantage of the sale prices on classes from now until Weds. 

Sept. 9th. Lots of photo classes are half price!

 I've been a Craftsy.com instructor now for several years and I think their courses are well done and a good deal. Once you buy a class at Craftsy.com you can go back and review it over and over again. You can pause it, watch parts of it again, and even send the actual instructors direct questions on a course forum. You'll get real answers from the people who are teaching the courses, generally in a day.

When I first started watching the Craftsy.com courses I only watched photography programs. Since then I've branched out into the cooking programs and I had a great time learning how to make chocolate croissants. And then sauces. And then bread.....

There are lots of craft courses that other people in your house might like. They include subjects like: Painting, gardening and even course on making better pizzas. I think the courses also make great gifts for people who are really into their hobbies.

Clicking on the Craftsy link here takes you to the site and also gives me a small commission which has no effect on the price of your classes. But it does help support my coffee habit and keeps me writing new stuff. And by the way, we've just crested the 2500 article milestone for the Visual Science Lab. I'll celebrate over the weekend.....

Check out Craftsy.com. Every class has an intro video you can watch before you decide whether you want to buy it. Wouldn't hurt to take a look....

The croissant link...

Hey! Go watch my Cantine Video. Shot with Olympus OMD EM5.2 cameras. You'll like it.

The recurring themes of being a freelance photographer. "It's too busy." "It's not busy enough." "I have way too much in accounts receivables and way too little in cash." "I just bought a new camera bit I wish I'd waited for the one they just announced."

The market for commercial photography, at least as it relates to me, is crazy and constantly changing but on the other hand it feels constant and unchanging. Let me explain.

Austin is growing at the speed of light. People are moving here from all over the country and most of the people moving here have higher incomes than the people who were here to begin with. That means residential property in the prime neighborhoods has been appreciating like Apple stock. If you bought a good house in the Eanes School District (rated #1 in Texas) in 1995 for a little less than $200k you might just find that the land under your cute little house is now worth close to a million dollars; maybe more. Nobody wants your house, they want to buy your lot, knock the house down, scrape it off the lot and build their new dream home. But what this means in a bigger picture way is that the city is becoming prohibitively expensive to live in or invest in for normal, middle class people. Say, freelance photographers making less than $100,000 per year. 

If you are moving into the market you are either coming with money or you are doing the old fashion, California living accommodation by renting or buying something  miles and miles outside the magic ring of the actual city of Austin where all the value is and all the cool stuff happens. It would, I guess, be a workable strategy if not for Austin have the "honor" of currently having the 4th worst traffic congestion in the country. A drive in from Pflugerville or Cedar Park during any of the ample and assorted rush hours might have one driving for several hours in order to make it into the real city and back out again. Much worse if someone rolls a big truck on one of the major freeways.

But consider your plight even if you were lucky enough to buy at the right time (twenty years ago?) and you live within three miles of downtown. You might now have a property worth a cool million, which is also highly liquid right now,  but if you sold it where would you move? Everything else in the desirable zones is equally inflated and rising quickly. So maybe you just decide to keep sitting on all that equity and have fun in place. Good plan in most states but in Texas, where there is no personal income tax, the state fills the coffers mostly with property taxes. And ours in Austin are some of the highest in the country. That million dollar property looks good when you consider the "sell side" but the "stay put" side is scary because every year your property taxes are likely to go up by about 10%. We are just about to the point where our property taxes will "jump the shark" and cost more each year than our mortgage.

The popularity of the city and the increase in population don't necessarily translate into higher rates for freelancers; in fact the popularity of the city among the nation's educated young attracts lots and lots of newly minted photographers who shift the supply and demand curves in the wrong direction. Add to that the increased time cost of doing business in a crowded and thriving metropolis. What used to be a leisurely twenty minute drive up Mopac to a job site in the "tech central" part of town is now an hour or more in the rush hour parts of the day. The time of the day when businesses get started and expect photographers to start as well. Once you hit your destination you'll find that the ample, free parking we used to enjoy outside of the downtown area is shrinking faster that the water supply in Lake Travis. After your slow and plodding commute you'll be circling the periphery of most locales looking for that rare parking place. Wanna park in the shade? Good luck.

Of course, you have to do it all in reverse to get back home. One Summer in Austin the ambient temperatures were so high and the commutes so slow and plodding that a record number of car batteries just "gave up the ghost" that season and died off. Part of the cost of popularity and an excessively mobile culture.

You'd think with the sheer momentum of grooviness and hipster culture in town that photography rates are sky-rocketing but, perversely, we still see our city as a "second tier" creative city and rates have stagnated for years. Big clients still head out of town for "name" photographers for many of the big and juicy advertising projects. The local agencies are being beaten up by clients taking creative and marketing totally in-house and are passing the fear and budget cutting along to their freelance collaborators.

And then there are individual concerns. I've always thought it was smart to market to the tech companies and various start-ups. The problem with concentrating on one industry or niche is that everything happens for every client at the same time and in the same season. If you have five good clients and they are all attending the same trade shows and need video and still photography content for booths, collateral and website refreshes you'll be swamped to the breaking point but mostly in concentrated clumps of days and weeks. Once the wave subsides things can go unnaturally quiet for weeks or even months. You start to feel as though you'll never work again...

I can almost feel the pulse of industries by the way, and on the schedules, they devise for paying their bills. In times of rising industry fortunes there's no need for bids and the checks arrive sometimes before we can even get a bill out the door. Last year we had a couple of clients who wanted to "pre-pay" for a series of projects just to get the paperwork out of the way. This year you can tell that everyone is a bit nervous and hesitant. Checks seem to take more circuitous routes to the mail box and the stories are being reprised about accounting departments being sidetracked by: "the audit, the payables software change, and my new favorite: "We use an outside service to generate payments --- let me check on that and get back to you." My least favorite new response is: "We're splitting the cost of your invoice with two partners and one of them is part of holding company in the U.K. It always takes longer for us to get checks from them......" I didn't even know that secondary companies were part of our contract. Silly me.

So, taxes, expenses, time costs and competition are all up while rates are static; and so what's really new?

Well, even as recently as a couple of years ago there was at least the certainty that we knew how to make and deliver our core product. Even though we might love buying new cameras and stuff there was always the underlying and comforting reality that our clients didn't really drive equipment acquisition and we probably could get another season or two out of this or that camera system. If economic push came to shove.

Funny how it's changed.  To maintain income and keep traditional clients we've been doing more and more video projects. That necessitated buying new cameras that could crank out good video footage and were agile enough to use for multiple roles. It also required investments in microphones, faster computers, new software, and new ancillary gear. But it's changing quicker than is comfortable. A year or two ago we downplayed the idea of 4K in our video inventory but now clients want it for reasons other than showcasing their programming on 4K monitors.

They are now asking for things like "vertical edits" which are better handled with 4K. A recent client wanted video that would go 2560 pixels wide in a super narrow aspect ratio (that's a blow up from 1080p) which also is going to look a lot better from a 4K original. Clients are learning that by shooting wide in 4K we can do a lot of very smooth movements in post instead of riskier movements during shooting with sliders, dollies and hand held rigs. There's much more "after the shot" flexibllity in the final edit with a lot of extra space around the live areas. Heck you can zoom in by a factor of 4 and not run out of pixels if you are aiming at delivering a 2K final product.

I learned the interesting way just how nice it is to start with a widely composed 4K video file if you are planning to make extensive use of software stabilization in your editing. The programs analyze your clips and map the range of motion. They then crop to the maximum range of motion for the entire clip. You lose tons of top and bottom space when stabilizing a jumpy (handheld?) clip. If you start with 4K, then stabilize and then crop to your wacky aspect ratio, with good pre-planning, you may lose nothing you wanted included.

So during a time of escalating costs in nearly every part of the business we add on the ramp up of a video market that's also diffusing quickly into the general market.

I'm happy when I'm in the vacuum of working with my Nikon D750 and D810 and I'm not nosing into websites about new gear. But then I get distracted by something like the Sony A7R2. I don't particularly like that camera but I do like that it shoots really, really nice 4K video internally. Will my clients need this? Sure. Are there other options? Absolutely. But how do you make the right choices and how long do you wait to buy and start servicing the market with new technologies?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you were privy to the plans of your camera maker? If I knew that Nikon was launching a new camera with 4K video at the Photo Expo in October then the whole issue could be sidelined (and the savings started) until I got my hands on the new product. All of which is predicated on getting checks from those folks who are "being audited, learning new software and waiting on slow boats from merry old England." 

The biggest issue facing me in the business right now is in marketing. Not just what to say but where to say it and to whom. The flux in the industries we work for has accelerated to a speed that's faster than I've ever seen it. People seem to be moving between companies on an almost monthly rotation.
No one has a real phone and very few people respond to e-mail. So how do you reach them now? Oh, yes, social media. I almost forgot. Right...

I think about all this today from my position of "man sitting in chair waiting to be paid" but by the middle of the coming week, and for the rest of the month, I'll be ruminating from the position of "man in transit from project to other relentless projects."

I have two weeks of broken and inefficient travel coming up and I'm as much of a curmudgeon about that these days than I am at dealing with sociological change.

To keep from going nuts I'm distilling it all down to this: Change is inevitable/stay flexible/play to your strengths but develop new strengths/everything you do is marketing/Nikon will come out with 4K just in time/all marketing works if it's targeted correctly/Don't sell a house if you don't want to move/pay your bills and your taxes and be grateful/keep swimming & keep shooting. = that's the good stuff.

And in the end we always looking for that evasive "extra". For me it's to have the time and energy left over from making a living to play with photography and video for fun. I think it's still working.



http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2009/11/combatting-oppressive-sense-of.html