livebooks blog

An ad campaign for Target shot by Deanne Fitzmaurice, a Pultzer Prize-winning photographer who left the San Francisco Chronicle last year.

As we look around the photojournalism world today, it’s hard not to worry about one trend in particular: Newspapers, magazines, and wire services have been cutting pages, budgets, and staff positions, for years — and they’re not coming back. With fewer staff jobs to go around, more photographers than ever are deciding to work for themselves. Being the innovators that photographers are, they’re exploring new markets, new mediums, and new skill sets, especially those needed to run a business.

Some former staff photojournalists saw the writing on the wall long ago and now run their own thriving businesses. Many more have made strides in the last year or two, but still have a few questions — or they’re planning to make a move soon and have lots of questions.

Next week, August 10-14, RESOLVE will run five days of posts designed to answer these questions. Of course, no one person has the answer to all questions, especially the big ones about where the industry is going and how photography will continue to be profitable. But every photographer and editor and rep out there has the answer to one or two questions. That’s why we’ve asked as many as possible to share their experiences.

We’ve talked to dozens of former staff photographers working in a range of markets and will share their insights with you in daily posts next week. Each day we’ll also explore and explain an alternative market for photojournalists, including commercial assignments, wedding photojournalism, fine-art, and working with NGOs.

On top of that, an “expert of the day” will be available to answer questions in real-time as you ask them. They’re here to help, but we also need people will come together and help each other. We’ve heard about so much of this going on offline, we know you’ll have a lot to share here online as well.

If you are now or have ever been a staff photographer, please check in next week and join the discussion: ask a question, offer advice, and make some new contacts. If you’d like to contribute your thoughts about transitioning from a staff position, please email us this week: resolve [at] livebooks [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you and share your story (and website) with the community!

“Client’s remember these things and they’ll tell their friends.”

With a clear goal and strong business plan, you can get paid to shoot what you love -- like this dream campaign Menuez shot in Dubai for Emirates Airlines. He was commissioned to document the culture and people of Dubai for a month and the creative team pulled the ads from the edit. Dubai for Emirates Airlines, ©2009 Doug Menuez/StocklandMartel

When most photographers set up shop, they focus on becoming better photographers, naturally. Few photographers, however, develop even the most basic skills they need to run their own business. They hope to hang on long enough to be discovered before they sink under their own lack of knowledge. That’s like building an intricate jeweled house atop quicksand. (Look in the mirror, repeat after me: “You want fries with that?”)

The “get discovered” strategy implies that someone else will take responsibility for your own financial well-being. Ideally, we’d all be born independently wealthy, have our spouse deal with the money, or find the perfect business manager or agent who can do this for us. I’m here to tell you — snap out of that lovely fantasy! Not. Gonna. Happen. And even if, by the grace of the angels, it did, you would still need to learn the basics in order to participate in the decisions being made about your money. Even the best business managers need your help to help you succeed. You really don’t want to be one of those poor schmucks who got super successful but are now penniless because you trusted someone else to handle all your business decisions.

In my new column for RESOLVE, “Seeing Money,” I’ll be sharing what I learned the hard way about the business side of photography during nearly 30 years in the industry. I started as a fine-art student, moved into photojournalism, built a multimillion-dollar advertising studio with a staff of 15, then closed that monster and reconfigured with a minimal crew and low overhead. Along the way I made and lost fortunes.

I never understood money; money was not my goal. I was — and am — all about making great images. But I learned to respect and understand that money has the power to support my most important work. I hope to help you realize the same thing by explaining what works, what mistakes to avoid, and how to recognize the ways our creative brains sometimes sabotage our own success — especially whenever it comes to managing money.

I am constantly trying to answer the difficult question, “How do you reconcile the conflict between art and commerce?” I give the long answer in my workshops. The short answer is, “Get paid to shoot what you love to shoot.” To achieve that, you have to build a solid foundation, step by step, to financial security.

Many photographers have a lot of fear around money; they think it will dilute their talent and corrupt their values, or they just can’t handle the math. I’ll provide pain-free financial management tips you can apply right away. OK, that statement was a lie — there is no such thing as pain-free financial management. But rest assured that my lessons will be less painful than if you did not learn these skills at all. Plus, you are benefiting from all the pain I’ve already gone through to get where I am today. Best of all, as you begin to learn and apply fundamental business lessons, you will find that you gain confidence and actually begin to enjoy the business part of your photography business.

In this “Seeing Money” column, I will discuss the steps you need to take right now to start (or save) your business. Check back soon if you wish you knew more (or didn’t realize you needed to know more) about:

• basic bookkeeping
• writing a business plan
• getting an SBA loan and line of credit
• working with an accountant
• managing cash flow through accounts receivable/payable reports
• insurance
• legal issues
• important business tools

One of Becker's signature images. ©The Becker

Q: What social networking tools do you use? Do you immediately adopt new ones or do you assess how useful they’ll be before you dedicate your time to them?

A: Right now I use Facebook, Twitter, and of course… the [ b ] School.com. And no, I wouldn’t say I am an early adopter. I kind of check things out and I may not even sign up the first time I see something. I never had a MySpace account (seemed like it was mostly for 13-year-old girls). A lot of my friends joined Facebook a good 6 months or so before I finally gave in. Same thing with Twitter. But now that I’m on there, I use Twitter and Facebook every day, and I am stoked about what we’re building at the [ b ] School, a social network designed specifically for wedding and portrait photographers.

Q: How should photographers think about tools like Twitter and Facebook in relation to their photography business? Are they like advertising? An extended bio page? Ways to grow a contact list?

A: They are just new ways to connect with people: friends, clients, colleagues. Just like with blogs, sites like Facebook and Twitter give people a glimpse at your real life and personality, but in a more organic and real way. My status updates on FB and Twitter drive a considerable amount of traffic to my blog, my website, or to wherever else I choose.

I also figure since I’ve done the work prepping an image in Photoshop for my blog, why not also post it on Facebook where I can tag any friends or clients who are in the image, which then prompts them to check out my work. And of course every image I post online includes a watermark of my [ b ] logo and website url — that way if the images gets reposted anywhere else on the web, at least people will know where it came from…www.beckersblog.com.

Q: You have 4,500+ followers on Twitter. How did you make that happen and how do you utilize those connections?

A: I assume a lot of people followed me when I posted a link to my Twitter page on my blog. I also have an embedded widget on my blog that shows my latest tweet as well as a link to www.twitter.com/thebecker. I usually get well over 5,000 blog hits per day, so as people join Twitter, the ones who frequent my blog usually follow me too. I don’t tweet every blog post, just the ones I find most interesting, and then it is also automatically uploaded to my Facebook status. So whether you are one of my 4,500+ followers on Twitter, or one of my 4,800 Facebook friends, my updates will show up on your page with an easy-to-click link that will take you straight to the content that I want to share with you. They say “your network is your net worth,” so I am constantly trying to grow my network.

Q: How do you use your blog and what do you post there?

A: My blog is actually about my entire life, not just photography. When I first started blogging back in 2005, it was just a way for my folks and a few close friends to see what I’ve been up to and check out my latest work. Then in 2006, as blogging got popular and more and more people were blogging, it did prove to be quite a useful tool to sharing information and driving traffic to my sites. My blog gets about nine times as much traffic as my actual website, www.thebecker.com. Blogs are very search engine friendly, and I’ve got quite a few bookings out of some rather random searches that drove someone to my blog.

While I do try to post a few images from every single shoot that I do, I also just post about things that are going on in my life — whether it’s about my niece and nephew, something fun I did with friends, a movie review, a poker story, or just anything I find interesting and feel like sharing. It’s kinda like reality TV. I think people in America are very voyeuristic and like to see what other people are doing… it’s human nature… kinda like a soap opera.

Q: If I were a skeptical photographer who just didn’t see how a blog, Facebook, or Twitter could be worth my time, how would you convince me?

A: Well, it’s not really my job to convince you. There are lots of people who just give me blank stares when I try to explain what Twitter is and why it is useful. Not everyone gets it and that’s okay. In the last 6-9 months, I know of at least a half-dozen bookings I got as a direct result of social networking.

A couple came from tagging images in Facebook, having it show up on the bride’s friend’s news feeds and them seeing my work and finding my blog. And I am talking about old high school friends…not even someone who is still close to the bride or was at the wedding, just someone who used to know one of my brides. Facebook keeps them connected, my work gets out there, and I book jobs. Every once in a while I’ll, tweet about dates that I am still available and ask for photographers to send me referrals. I don’t do it too often as I don’t want to wear out my welcome, but I have gotten jobs that way, and likewise given out solid leads through Twitter.