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• How much Photoshopping is too much? Judges of a Danish photo contest seemed to think that they have the answer. Last month, Danish photojournalist Klavs Bo Christensen was disqualified from the Danish equivalent of Pictures of the Year contest because the photographs that he submitted “went too far” in digital manipulation. The incident, not surprisingly, sparked a lot of discussions in Denmark and eventually among the English-speaking blogosphere. According to NPPA, Jens Tønnesen, the webmaster for the Danish Union of Press Photographers, decided to explain the story to people outside of Demark, and did an English translation of an article he posted on the Pressefotografforbundet website, where you can see the three images in question placed side by side with their RAW files. Check out interesting comments about this story at PDN Pulse and The Online Photographer.

• Robert Adams, who is known for his landscape photography of the American West, has won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and received a $60,000 prize at an official ceremony in San Francisco on April 15, 2009. The Foundations’s citation describes Adams as “one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years.” An exhibition of Adam’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg Art Museum in November, 2009. Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and William Eggleston are some of the previous award winners.

• Paul Melcher, named one of the “50 most influential individuals in American photography” by American Photo, explained in a post on the Black Star Rising blog why the Chris Usher v. Corbis case is important to all photographers. While Usher won the case, he was only compensated for “a lousy $7 per image” for the 12,640 images that Corbis has permanently misplaced. Melcher argues, with great reasoning, that what this ruling means is that agencies or publishers will no longer have to worry about losing photographers images because “it will be cheaper for them to trash them than to return them to you.”

Are you keeping an eye on your bottom line? ©LaCour

Many of my favorite photographers have built successful careers on being excellent observers. Their images are powerful because they watch, anticipate, and press the shutter at the decisive moment.

But being a keen observer of people is not enough. To succeed in the business of photography, you must employ a careful combination of observation skills. You must be an excellent observer of people AND business. To succeed, you must watch your business –- know it inside and out. As John D. Rockefeller said, “Everything that is watched improves.”

Rockefeller knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine, and deliver a barrel of oil. He was fully aware of all his costs. Knowing this information –- and acting on it –- gave him a competitive advantage. He knew how to price a barrel of oil to turn a profit.

As a result, he implemented cost savings measures like manufacturing his own barrels and starting his own transport company. By carefully observing the data that mattered, Rockefeller made Standard Oil wildly successful.

The success of your photography business also depends on your observations. Are you watching each area of revenue and cost? What things are you tracking? What systems do you have in place to help you measure and manage your business’s success? Here are three areas that you should be observing particularly carefully.

1. Calculate Your Profitability

• First, create a price list of all your “items” (individual products and services you offer) and calculate profit margins for each item. By understanding profit margin, you will ensure that you’re making money on everything you sell.
• An item’s profit margin is based on “Cost of Goods Sold” (COGS). In order to calculate the total profit margin on packages/proposals you create for clients, identify a COGS for each item on your price list.
• COGS for an item is calculated as the total direct expenses incurred in the production of a good, including the cost of materials used to make that good and the cost of labor to produce it. COGS does not include indirect expenses, like marketing, accounting, and shipping.
• Knowing the COGS will help you determine which products and packages are turning a profit. Subtract an item’s COGS from its sales revenue to determine the gross profit it earns.
• Net profit is the difference between COGS and indirect expenses from sales revenue.

2. Identify and Track Referrals

• Referrals are the lifeblood of many photography businesses, especially wedding. In a good economy, fostering strong referral sources is the most effective growth strategy. In a bad economy, it’s critical.
• If you don’t know where your profitable referrals are coming from, you’re wasting time and money. For example, let’s say five colleagues in your community are responsible for referring 60 percent of last quarter’s business. Don’t you want to treat those referral sources differently than the florist down the road who hasn’t referred anyone? Tracking your referral sources allows you to invest valuable marketing resources into the right people and groups that will give you new business.
• Tracking referrals is a detailed process — one that requires organization and automation to be effective. You can use simple Excel spreadsheets to track referral sources and leads. There is also more sophisticated studio management software available. The good news is that both options can be cost-effective for even the smallest studio.

3. Create a Marketing Strategy and Track Your Success

• Marketing can seem daunting at times, but even a simple marketing strategy can have a beneficial impact on your business. Here are a few things that most successful businesses strategies have in common.
• First, a contact database. The importance of maintaining an organized contact database can’t be stressed enough. It may sound like a basic tactic, but trying to grow your business without a contact database is like trying to drive a car without an engine. If you want to grow your current relationships and develop new ones, you must keep track of communications with every client, referral source, partner, and prospect with whom you interact.
• Second is email marketing. Email communication is the name of the game these days. And with the help of your growing contact database, you can easily reach thousands of prospective clients with a single key stroke. Keep your contacts up to date on events, new services, awards, specials, and other important information with emails. That way, you will already be on their mind when they are seeking photography services.
• Finally, make sure to track your database efforts. Some automated solutions allow you to track the read and response rate for email blasts through easy-to-read reports. Whichever way you decide, be sure to regularly review your efforts to understand what’s helping you drive revenue and what’s not.

When I started photographing 30 years ago, all the photojournalists in the world, we all had almost the same tools: one Nikon camera. When you went to cover African or Asian countries, they had the same camera. The writers and journalists had only a pen and a notebook. Everyone had the same things. But in the last 30 years, we went through an information revolution. We in the west are the first ones who have access to these new tools. We are the ones getting the best laptops, cameras, and video cameras. In the meantime, considering how expensive it is not only to buy this equipment but to be trained on it, we are leaving the whole other part of the world — non-western countries — behind.

Their journalists and artists and poets don’t even have money to buy a pen and a notebook while we have access to the top technological materials. So how can they connect to us, or their own nation, if they don’t have tools? So I thought, each country needs just a few hundred people to be trained and to get those tools. If we can help them, train them, and give them access to tools, we have connected the whole humanity of the world together again.

My other observation was that one of our main tasks is to say that democracy is the best way of having a government. We are trying to spread democracy. The only way to achieve that is to let the people themselves make democracy. You cannot force people to be democratic. And the best tool for democracy is freedom of speech, which needs free media. If there is no free media, there is no democracy.

With those three observations in my head, and running from one conflict to another, I started thinking, “What will be the 21st century’s new organization that could bring all these elements together and effectively help solve those problems?”

I had started training local photographers when I was going on assignments, in ’86 in the Philippines, and then the former Soviet Union. Then I went to Bangladesh to help Shahidul [Alam] start his own school, and I was the first teacher in that school. Afterwards I went to Beijing for three years to teach in the university and train professional photographers. This was how I began to realize the answer to my question: Create an independent media and culture center in each country, where a couple hundred local journalists and talented young people would be trained to have access to new technology. We would train local people, not as a school, but as a job training center. The idea was to start media projects immediately, like independent magazines, children’s magazines, women’s magazines, a radio station for women. Then in the meantime you have people who are trained launching their projects.

When I wrote all those ideas down, I was looking for one country that would be the pilot country, which I would use as a laboratory for the whole thing. It was 2000 and the obvious place for me was Afghanistan. First, because it was the darkest place of humanity: the Taliban were there, Russians had been there, there was civil war, and Al Qaeda fighting them. Plus, the world had totally forgotten them for 10 years. So I thought Afghanistan would be best place for a pilot project. And this was the whole start of AINA.

The official launch was in July 2001 in the north part of Afghanistan, in a rebel region, when the whole country was under Taliban. Then suddenly 9/11 happened. Everything changed. The Taliban fled and we entered Kabul and started a center there immediately. We were the first NGO that started a project there after the fall of the Taliban.

In Afghanistan during the pilot project, I realized that the people who would have an especially big impact would be the women journalist. During the conflict, my hatred of the war made me think that if women could take more control of the media and government, we could grow toward a more peaceful world in a century or two. So this was how we started saying, let’s start having much more women in the training, especially in Afghanistan.

That’s how we launched Voice of Afghan Women, which is a radio station. By doing this, I realized how important this tool is, and how it reaches millions of Afghan women in their remote homes. They cannot read. They cannot even go out. They cannot have access to magazines or books, but radio can be brought to them in their homes. So we launched this women’s station and started distributing small transistor radios to remote places, 5,000 of them. Now from just one radio, information is going to the whole village.

Covenant House headquarters in Manhattan during a candlelight vigil for homeless teens. ©Nina Berman/Do1Thing.org

Miki Johnson: Tell me how you’re working with other non-profit organizations.

Najlah Hicks: We’re working with two major non-profits. The first and the biggest is the Covenant House International. Covenant House is the largest provider of services to homeless teens. Our second partner is StandUp For Kids, which is an all-volunteer group that helps teenagers on the ground. We believe that in order to produce good work, we have to partner with a non-profit that is on the ground every day and has a long history of working with this population.

Again, we’re not experts on homelessness. For us, it’s very important to figure out who the expert on homelessness is and then partner with them. Working with those organizations gave us access to kids that we would never have access to otherwise. We ended up partnering with over a dozen non-profits. But the biggest is Covenant House, and we drove all donations to them.

All of the photographers or editors we work with, even Pim Van Hemmen and I, the co-founders, we’re all volunteers. We raised –- we’re still calculating what’s coming in –- but we know so far about $30,000 in cash donations, and tens of thousands of items were donated nationwide. And we didn’t charge Covenant House a penny.

Our idea for long-term is to pick a cause each year. It could be AIDS, it could be cancer, it could be famine, but always something that affects youth and children. Then we find who’s doing the best work in the non-profit world and we partner with them.

MJ: I was blown away to see the big names on your list. Why were photographers and editors so eager to collaborate with you?

NH: A lot of people thought we would have to give them a hard sell. I didn’t have to give them any sell at all. We asked somebody and boom, they’re already on top of it. That’s how we ended up with 32 Pulitzer Prize winners and 75 editors, photographers, and designers.

Leandra Hollaway and Michael Cunningham check out their new room at a friend of a friend's. ©Judy DeHaas/Do1Thing

We started off with photographers we had worked with at the Heart Gallery. Nina Berman, Mark Peterson, Ron Haviv, many of the VII photographers, Martin Schoeller, Bob Sacha. Those guys knew first-hand the power of what they’re doing. The kids that they photographed at the gallery are getting adopted. So when I told them, look, this is what we want to do, it was an immediate yes. Then they contacted their friends, who contact their friends, who contacted their friends. It took literally less than two weeks to get a phenomenal team to come together and do it all for free. If you were to quantify what this would cost, it would be a million-dollar project.

And now these photographers want to go back. They want to do more. They want to follow these kids. Want to know if they can stay long-term. This photographer Mark Peterson was shooting for three months, documenting this one teenager, and will continue to document her. He’s looking to do a two- or three-year project on her. Again, all for free.

I think what happens is, when you get to the point when you’re in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, you realize you’ve covered everything that you can cover: famine, wars, floods, fires. You get to the point where you ask, When I leave this life, what do I want to be able to say about my work? Yes, I documented history. That’s great. But how much greater is it to be able to say that I changed the history of a life?