livebooks blog

Terence Koh ©Dietmar Busse

When I started getting hired as a photographer, I really was not very well prepared. I was far from clear about what I wanted. I had not created a vision nor had I developed a clear photographic language. In some instances, everything would fall into place: the right subject, the right stylist, the right creative direction. There were moments of real magic.

Often, however, it was much less perfect. When I did not like what I saw in front of me, I did not know what to do with it, and often other people would take charge because I was not able to. For example, the stylist would impose his or her ideas on me, or the hairdresser, or even the model. Needless to say, I was not very happy with that, and it often showed in the results. All this was a lot of stress and I wasn’t getting rich, so there came a point after a few years when I got really fed up. One day I was trying to make a beautiful photograph of flowers for my mom and send it to her on her birthday. I bought a bouquet of flowers, put it in a vase on a table in my studio, and began photographing it. Because it was for my mom, it had to be super special and gorgeous. Nothing I could come up with met my standards at the time, and I got so frustrated that I just took the entire bouquet and ripped it apart.

What a drama! However, as I sat there ready to put the whole thing into the trash, I started playing with the bits and pieces. On the floor I reassembled the petals and stems and just sort of played around. Then I took the camera and photographed my creations. This looked new and fresh to me, and it reminded me of the drawings I used to make for my mom when I was little.

Out of this incident grew an entire body of work. I would lock myself in my studio at the end of the day and make up flowers that don’t exist. I recreated scenes from my childhood and glued hundreds of flower petals and leaves on my body, then photographed myself. I loved just creating things without anybody around — nobody making any demands or having expectations.

At that time, when my agent sent me to meetings with clients, I showed my commercial portfolio and I either got the job or not. But at the end of the meeting I would show my little flower creations and often people would ask me if I would sell them, so I did. Encouraged by this, and somewhat frustrated by my fashion and commercial work, I decided to take a break. I moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and glued flower petals on myself and on all the walls of my railroad apartment. I think I learned a lot about myself during that time. I had to.

World-renowned conservation and fine art photographer Art Wolfe is in the process of reinventing his business model — upgrading to a liveBooks website and selling his stock images directly through a Photoshelter account that is linked to it. Art will be contributing to RESOLVE regularly, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to record a few words of wisdom while he was visiting last week. We shot the short interview below with Art and Jim Martin, executive director of Art Wolfe Inc. and an accomplished photographer himself, near our San Francisco office.

When Art started to see diminishing returns from stock sales years ago, he reworked his business around selling images himself through his website. Understanding that “fur and feathers” stock photography was not sufficient to keep his business afloat, he also did what many photographers are now learning the value of — he diversified. On top of stock and print sales, Art is also reaching millions of viewers through his TV show Travels to the Edge and is reworking his workshops for more intimate, challenging classes.

In a move that could portend worse to come for advertising photography, Omnicom Group , the world’s largest advertising agency holding company, is tightening its belt. The huge corporation has chosen to enforce its sequential liability language, which states that ad agencies acting as agents for their clients are not liable for production payment unless they’ve been paid by their client. That means the Acme Ad Agency, representing Tropicana Orange Juice does not have to pay me, the photographer, until they receive money from Tropicana. If I don’t agree to those terms, then I can take a hike.

The move is seen as a measure to mitigate debt exposure to advertising clients like GM who are on tenuous financial footing. What this means for photographers is, if you work with an Omnicom agency, you will no longer be getting an advance check to produce the job. Adding insult to injury, Omnicom agencies are going to ask photographers to sign a contract that states they don’t have to pay the photographer for 65 to 70 days after the completion of the shoot, and that’s only if they’ve been paid by the client.

Sequential liability has been part of ad agency contracts for two decades, but it was meant to protect the agency from getting left holding the bill with large media buys if the client went out of business. At the production level, the sequential liability language was formerly removed or ignored.

Swiftest to respond to this action were the commercial production houses. Project budgets to produce a television spot run into the millions of dollars. Without the ability get a 50% advance on the budget, the production houses would have to secure massive credit lines that just aren’t available in the current economic climate. Photographers are going to have an even more difficult time because their financial resources are not as extensive as a commercial production company.

Yet all may not be lost. Last week, in the United Kingdom an industry backlash about the practice resulted in Omnicom UK suspending the sequential liability rules after engaging in talks with the Advertising Producers Association.

The question is, what’s going to happen here? Will photographers protest and force Omnicom to reconsider? Could you operate without getting an advance check? What are photographers’ options?

*UPDATE*
I spoke to Pat Sloan from Omnicom who said “There has been no policy change, we have reminded agencies of what the policy is.”  As I mentioned previously this policy is to protect Omnicom from being exposed to debt liability should a company that one of their agencies is representing not pay their bill.  Amy Rivera from DDB LA wrote me saying that “We have great clients that pay the advance every time and it is still our practice to secure advances.”

Communication is the best policy here. Ask, if there is going to be an advance available.  Read up on the financial solvency of the client.  Have a very clear understanding about how much production debt you can carry and for how long.  As Tricia Scott pointed out “There aren’t too many photographers who can upfront this type of money (and shouldn’t!). Imagine 3 jobs happening at the same time, upfronting it all.”

Check out the rest of this series from Chris Linder, who went from writing grants as an oceanographer to getting NSF grants to visually document scientists. His insights range from grant writing to this post about packing for the extreme conditions of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Also, you can register now for Chris’s upcoming webinar live from the Bering Sea.

As Chris explains, this is why he uses hard cases for his gear. Photo by Chris Linder, WHOI

The simple answer to the question, “How much gear do you take?” is, “As much as I am allowed.” Each expedition has presented a different sort of logistical challenge. For a ship-based expedition, like the trip aboard the Swedish icebreaking ship Oden, there was really no limitation to what I could bring. A 400-foot-long icebreaker is like a small floating city, and typically you can walk your gear right onto the ship.

For other trips, like shooting in remote Antarctic field camps, I was severely weight-limited. Everyone traveling to McMurdo Station (the largest U.S. base on Antarctica) is allowed only 85 pounds of personal luggage on the C-5 flight from Christchurch to McMurdo (not including carry-on). When you factor in the heavy weight of parkas, cold-weather gear, and boots, there isn’t much room left for photography equipment. So for that trip I loaded my heaviest gear into a small carry-on backpack and packed the rest of the lenses, tripod, and accessories into socks, long underwear, and parkas, and stuffed them into a combination of hard and soft cases.

Generally, while traveling I carry a small backpack with essential camera gear plus two hard-plastic Pelican cases—one for laptops, chargers, and hard drives, and the other for extra photography and communications equipment. Often the cases will be sitting out in the rain or snow for hours at a time in transit, so waterproof hard cases are essential. On a typical expedition, I will bring:

• MacBook Pro for photo editing
• Dell laptop for Iridium satellite data communication (if necessary)
• two 320GB Lacie rugged hard drives for photo storage
• assortment of cables and chargers
• two Nikon camera bodies (D2Xs and D300)
• assortment of lenses (10.5mm, 12-24mm, 17-55mm, 70-200mm, 105mm macro, 300mm)
• accessories (1.4x teleconverter, strobe, gels)
• communications equipment (Iridium satellite phone or BGAN Inmarsat, data modem, chargers)
• carbon-fiber tripod and heavy-duty ballhead
• small collapsible reflector/diffuser

On location, I prefer to work out of a waist-belt system made by ThinkTank. I carry one body with two lenses in a Digi Holster 50 and the rest in lens cases strapped to a heavy-duty waist belt. This system allows me to quickly swap lenses without slowing down, while also preserving my spine. Since 99% of my photographs are not posed, being ready to grab a shot at a moment’s notice is critical.

Be Part of the RESOLUTION: What’s was the hardest lesson you ever learned about packing or traveling with gear?