Stock Answers ®

“Fast Track Photographer: Leverage Your Unique Strengths for a More Successful Photography Business” by Dane Sanders.  Publisher: Amphoto Books (2010).

I have yet to hear anyone – ANYONE – point to photographers as being particularly representative of the best and the brightest when it comes to business skills.  And, while there are a good number of exceptions to that generalization, the simple fact is that self-employed creative individuals, whether they’re illustrators, designers or photographers, often lack the proper training and knowledge that would allow them to excel to the same degree on the business side of their professional lives as they do on the artistic side.

Dane Sanders is one of those previously mentioned exceptions to the rule.  Not that he started out that way, of course: Sanders is disarmingly candid about his own shortcomings as an up-and-coming shooter many years ago.  What separates the smart guys from the others, of course, is that the intelligent ones learn from their mistakes and proactively correct them.  And what was the most significant professional and life lesson that Sanders learned? That you only succeed when you’re true to yourself (“being me at any cost became my mantra”).  And, while this may hardly be a revolutionary conclusion, Sanders builds upon that simple yet often elusive premise to create a highly readable and immensely useful text for every type of photographer from wanna-be’s (for whom it will be especially valuable) to seasoned but disgruntled veterans (or, as Sanders calls them in Fast Track Photographer, the “Grumpies.”).

s Sanders explains right in the Fast Track Photographer Preface, it “is more than a book; it’s a system of thinking.”  Combined with his follow-up book The Fast Track Photographer Business Plan Sanders forgoes just about anything that has to do with the nuts and bolts of how you make photographs (“the real value is the engine that creates those images”) and instead focuses, and in a very engaging style, on how you make yourself into a successful photographer.  He describes the two available options for building a photographer-centric business: “You create either a Freelance Photographer business or a Signature Brand Photographer business.  The difference: The Freelance Photographer does fee-based assignments for employers, while the Signature Brand Photographer functions independently and builds a commercial brand around him/her self.”

Sanders goes on to discuss the current state of the picture industry as well as business in general, including space devoted to the “Grumpies” (resentful, ineffectual individuals who can’t adapt to a changing business environment) and what he calls “the Digi-flat Era” (digital technology meets the flattened world).  This, in turn, leads to Sanders’ most useful tool for helping readers choose between the Freelance Photographer and Signature Brand paths: the Photographer DNA Assessment Tool (pDNA for short).  If you took any sort of vocational guidance tests back in high school, or perhaps an occupational assessment later in life, then you already have a clue what the pDNA is all about.  By asking a series of probing questions about your likes and dislikes, in both photography specifically and the world in general, users of the pDNA will gain a vastly clearer picture of where they might fit into the universe of professional photographers.    

oo often these days it seems that the only ones we hear from in the picture industry are the doom and gloomsters.  Dane Sanders’ Fast Track Photographer is a refreshing departure from the seemingly pervasive negativity that surrounds the photography profession at the moment without being Pollyannaish or spewing out pie-in-the-sky B.S.  His approach to becoming a successful shooter is upbeat and empowering; he doesn’t minimize the importance of strong visual and technical skills, he just shifts the emphasis in the discussion.  In referring to art and photography schools, for example, he says that “many students who graduate from those schools fail to make the distinction between the skill and the person exercising that skill.”  In a world seemingly bursting at the seams with photographers and photographic images, Fast Track Photographer will help you recognize and nurture the single most critical, unique competitive advantage you have that no one else can replicate: you!

“The Fast Track Photographer Business Plan” by Dane Sanders.  Publisher: Amphoto Books (2010).  256 pages.

Just a few years before he died, actor Dennis Hopper shot some compelling television commercials for Ameriprise, a company specializing in financial and retirement tools and advice for baby boomers.  In one of these ads, Hopper stands alone in the middle of an intersection, out in the middle of nowhere, and looks the viewers square in the eye as he tells them that in order to enjoy retirement, “You, my friend…you need a plan.”

He might just as well have been talking about the careers of professional photographers, the vast majority of whom are terrific at the creative stuff but when it comes to the business end of things…well, not so much.  Although Dennis Hopper is no longer on call to remind photographers of the benefits of long-term thinking and creative planning, Dane Sanders is, and he does a darn good job of it.

Elsewhere on this site I have given Sanders kudos for his first book, “Fast Track Photographer,” in which he promotes the inestimable value of a system of thinking that is centered upon and consistently true to who you are as a person and how this can manifest itself in a highly successful photography business.  “The Fast Track Photographer Business Plan” is the logical corollary to Sanders’ other book: whereas the original text revolved around taking a long, hard look inside yourself in order to figure out how you, as both a person and a creative-type, might fit into the great scheme of all things photographic, “Business Plan” takes those resulting self-assessments and conclusions to the next level by helping you determine how you can translate the strengths and skills that you identified earlier into a long-term profitable enterprise that exploits your skills with a camera.

hile “The Fast Track Photographer Business Plan” incorporates some of the elements related to creating “traditional” business plans (especially in chapters like “Get Real on the Numbers: Can You Afford to Do This?” in which Sanders discusses such nuts-and-bolts issues as expenses, financial goals and pricing), the goal of this book is not to encourage you to prepare a beautifully detailed, 56-page business plan complete with charts, graphs and pro formas for presentation to a banker or investor.  Instead, and in keeping with the “Fast Track” philosophy, the plan that Sanders helps you create is intended for internal rather than external consumption and use, and it will guide you down a path that grows directly out of your own “identity, creativity and vision.”

Sanders starts with a simple premise: you need to assert leadership of your business, rather than letting it lead you.  That leadership derives directly from your vision of who you are, “how your business will embody and leverage that uniqueness,” which markets you’ll pursue and what your specific goals within those markets will be.  And, “the way you frame your vision becomes, in essence, your company’s brand.”

Vision, then, precedes planning, and Sanders leads you through a number of helpful exercise that help you identify and hone that vision (“Strengths & Weaknesses,” “Find The Right Adjectives,” etc.).  Once your vision statement is complete (but not “finished,” since it will always be evolving throughout the life of your company) you’re ready to “marry your vision to the market,” which really boils down to: “Does anyone want what I’m selling?” Again, Sanders provides examples and exercises that lead you to identifying “the sweet spot in which your vision fuses with a willing market.”  Assuming that such a “sweet spot” actually exists (and it may not for all photographers: some may simply have unreal expectations of either what they are capable of producing or the market’s willingness to embrace their creative output), you must build a solid foundation for your enterprise based upon the aforementioned financial planning.  This is where photographers often flounder: because they spend so much time in the abstract, creative world it can be challenging for them to wrap their brains around such mundane concepts as positive cash flow, cost of sales or pricing.  Don’t fret: Sanders explains these ideas and why they’re so critical to your success in language that’s intended for mortals, not MBA candidates.  By following his recommendations, you’ll be able to determine whether your vision of a photographer-centric business makes financial sense in the real world.

f you’ve made it this far (creation of a vision statement and financial forecasting that ends up with a number in black rather than red ink), then Sanders urges you to take the next step: creating the team that will make your vision a reality.  By “team,” of course, he isn’t necessarily talking about employees; in fact, one of his secret weapons of success is to outsource as many tasks as possible to trusted and reliable service providers (or, as he calls them, “partners”) rather than taking on the overhead burden of employees.  An additional key to making your company as streamlined as possible is to create standardized systems for how you do things: “Systematize all tasks/operations except those that require your high-level leadership or creativity.  Make everything as automatic and thought-free as possible except those few identified areas that will flourish from your personal touch.”  Sanders leads by example, of course, naming a number of tasks for which he has established routines in his own highly successful business, as well as giving you exercises that, when completed, should result in your own efficient, smooth-running photography operation.     

While none of this planning is exactly easy, it often involves just as much creativity as envisioning that great still life you’ll be shooting for a client next week.  And, without it you’ll be poorly prepared for tackling the culmination of all this preparation: the three business functions of “the perpetual Fast Track Business Life Cycle - booking jobs, shooting jobs and leveraging jobs.”  Sanders walks you through each of those phases, offering both encouragement and specific techniques for attaining your full potential in each one.   

If reading and truly absorbing the concepts in “The Fast Track Photographer Business Plan,” as well as actually working your way through all of the exercises it contains, strikes you as entailing a lot of work, well…it is! But, Sanders would argue very persuasively that this is what will separate the photographers who’ll succeed in “the Digi-flat Era” (in which digital technology has become both sophisticated and widely available at the same time as we’ve evolved into a flattened world) from those who will just muddle along and eventually fail. 

Look, you aspired to be a photographer because you wanted an outlet for your creativity, right? As Dane Sanders says, “The way to free up your creativity is to spend less time on the routine tasks of running your business, so that these tasks no longer consume and drain you.  That means becoming smarter, more efficient, and more systematized.  Good business supports great creativity.  Great creativity generates more business.” Dennis Hopper said it…”You need a plan”…and, fortunately for photographers, Dane Sanders will help you build one that can actually work.

“Selling Your Photography,” by Richard Weisgrau. Publisher: Allworth Press (2009).

I was about halfway through Richard Weisgrau’s newest book (he’s previously written or co-authored over half a dozen others) when I started to have this nagging thought: “Have I read this somewhere before?” Sure enough, I dug out my copy of his 2004 tome entitled The Real Business of Photography, thumbed through it a bit and realized that Selling Your Photography is really a far more current version of that ’04 book.  However, this is not a case of simply taking the old text and repurposing it with a new title and cover (though there are some specific sections that duplicate his earlier effort).  Selling Your Photography is a truly updated and expanded text that covers the many business aspects of photography that would-be professionals must consider while simultaneously retaining and reinforcing Weisgrau’s hard-edged advice (what do you expect from a guy from Philly?) about business in general (example: “One thing I can tell you with certainty after more than four decades in the business is that unless you at least get to the photographer-businessperson stage, you will fail economically.  That will make you an amateur photographer.”). 

One of the major differences between Selling Your Photography and the older version is that The Real Business of Photography had very few references to the Internet; five years later, Selling Your Photography reflects the fact that the Net is now both a mature and all-pervasive factor in any business, especially for a visual medium like photography.  Related to this, one of the most useful facets of this book for both newbies and established pro shooters is the wealth of information and web addresses Weisgrau has collated on the advertising, corporate, editorial and merchandise segments of the picture buyer universe.  This feature alone is probably worth the price of the book since actually zeroing in on photo buyers can be one of the most time-consuming and difficult tasks in running your own photography business.

here are also some very useful sample documents in Selling Your Photography, including an estimate letter (“Serves the same purpose as an estimate form, but in a friendlier manner.  Remember that prospects would rather buy from a person they like.”), assignment confirmation and both a copyright license and renewal notice.

If you are seeking nuts-and-bolts information on “How to Make Money in New and Traditional Markets” (the book’s subtitle), then Selling Your Photography is a very good place to start.  Although Weisgrau touches on stock photography, this book will really prove most valuable to the individual seriously contemplating either full- or part-time work as an assignment “publication photographer” (the goal is to get paid for getting your images published, in either print or electronic media). Using your photographic talents and the business smarts Weisgrau helps you to learn, you may be able to positively answer the universal question he poses: “Opportunity knocks; are you going to open the door and let it in?”

”The Photographer’s Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion, 4^th Edition” by Maria Piscopo.  Publisher: Allworth Press (2010).

I have good news and I have bad news for photographers.  First, the good news: Maria Piscopo, the ultimate marketing pro’s pro with almost three decades of experience as a photographer’s rep, lecturer and writer has crammed just about every possible marketing technique a shooter could employ into this updated fourth edition of her guide. 

The bad news: if you actually follow all of Piscopo’s advice, I think it’s quite likely you’ll be inundated with clients but won’t have time to shoot their jobs because you’ll be too busy working on…marketing!

Seriously.

I know: you wanted to be a photographer when you grew up, not a marketer.  But the fact is that the vast majority of photographers don’t work for big studios or on the staff of a newspaper or magazine; they’re independent business people, and no matter what kind of business you run, marketing is a necessary component of making that business both viable and profitable.

Well, “The Photographer’s Guide” is the answer to your prayers, Mr. or Ms. Non-Marketer.  In chapters like “Getting Started in Business,” “Marketing on the Internet” and “Steps to Selling” (to name but three of the 23 that comprise the book) Piscopo goes to great length and into explicit detail sharing all of the important stuff they didn’t tell you in photo school about how to attract and keep clients. Whether you shoot weddings & portraits (consumer markets), or freelance for editorial and commercial clients (professional markets), Piscopo’s been there and done that at some point in her career and passes on those valuable lessons learned.

owever, I was only being semi-facetious when I said that you’ll be too busy doing marketing to actually do photography.  For example, Piscopo’s “Sample Marketing Plan” for going after commercial clients employs such tactics as a direct mail campaign, an advertising campaign, a public relations campaign, personal selling and, what the heck, let’s throw in a healthy dose of social networking, too.  Whew! I get a little tired just thinking about all the activities you have to do in order to pull off that admittedly well-rounded marketing campaign.  Which, of course, points out the absolute necessity of being extremely well organized, as well as the likelihood that you will outsource some or even a majority of your marketing tasks to people like graphic designers, card printers, list compilers and others since you really DO want to snap a photo now and again.

Maria Piscopo’s many years in “the business” have prepared her well for understanding how picture buyers think, react and go about the business of spending their money.   So, when she says in Chapter 6 that “You always begin with your marketing message.  Only when you know what you are marketing will you be able to identify who buys it,” you pay attention.   Or when, in her discussion of Internet marketing, she points out that your website needs to “give clients options for responding and offer a clear call to action,” your next move had better be to take a critical look at your Web presence to see how it matches up to her directives.  And when she tosses in an observation from her almost 30 years of interacting with client-types like “Poor conversation manners and etiquette have kept more photographers out of the photography business than any lack of talent,” you’d be well advised to take a long, hard look in the mirror and perhaps seek out the nearest Dale Carnegie course.

What you don’t know about marketing won’t kill you, but it may very well kill your business.  By thoroughly absorbing the practical but extensive marketing advice Maria Piscopo shares with you in the 4^th edition of her “Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion” and then actually putting it into practice, professionals working in virtually every sector of photography stand a better-than-even chance of reaching their full potential as both a creative image maker and as a business person.

“The Real Business of Photography,” by Richard Weisgrau. Publisher: Allworth Press (2004).

Make no mistake about it: this book isn’t aimed at stock photographers.  Instead, it’s chock-full of hard-nosed business advice for fulltime assignment shooters.  It’s real world stuff, dispensed by a man who was known for being a pit bull for photographers’ rights during his days as Executive Director of the ASMP trade organization.  Weisgrau’s message here, in a nutshell: the meek may inherit the earth, but they sure aren’t going to be successful professional photographers!

ike several other books reviewed on this website, even though stock photography gets only minimal attention in Weisgrau’s book, it’s still worth at least a skim by either aspiring or established stock shooters.  Just like assignment work, stock is highly competitive, requires above average organizational and business skills, and can often involve negotiations with clients (particularly relevant to those shooters selling their stock directly).  Weisgrau addresses these and other issues head-on with the kind of savvy that too many photographers too often only learn the hard way.

Thus, the book’s recommendation for beginning professional photographers to make an honest self-assessment is just as relevant to stock wanna-bes:

“Making a self assessment requires that the photographer answer the following questions:

1. What type of photography, in particular, am I drawn to?

2. What are the best photographs I have made?

3. What are my unique advantages and disadvantages?”

very stock photographer needs to go through a similar process, as well as looking the advantages and disadvantages of shooting stock squarely in the eye.  As Weisgrau points out:

“To be a successful stock producer you must have good insights into the future needs of the marketplace.  You must produce images in advance of the need, in order to ensure that you have adequate time to have them visible in the marketplace when the actual need for such images arises.  That is risky business.  Very few photographers are successful in stock production businesses.  Those who are successful are so because they understand the imaging needs that drive the market.”

Weisgrau’s book won’t tell you what sorts of stock images to create, or what camera to buy, but it will give you lots of practical information that both assignment AND stock photographers can use, including a particularly helpful section that could have been titled “Financial Management for Dummies.”

“The Photographer’s Survival Guide,” by Suzanne Sease & Amanda Sosa Stone.  Publisher: Amphoto Books (2009).

If ever there was a time when photographers need something called a “Survival Guide” it’s now, right? Assignment work is down, prices for stock images have been squeezed like lemons for lemonade, newspapers and magazines have either closed shop or seen drastic reductions in their pages…in short, no one in the photography industry is going to someday nostalgically look back on the latter part of the first decade of the 21^st century as “the good old days”!

With that in mind, you’d surely have to be a candidate for mental health treatment if you decided that now was a good time to launch a career in professional photography.  Nonetheless, like moths drawn to a flame, we still see a seemingly never-ending flock of fresh-faced photo school grads as well as laid-off accountants and bank executives gravitating toward making photography their vocation, and they could certainly do a lot worse than using this particular tome as their basic manual on what it takes to “make it” as a professional image maker.

hink of Photographer’s Survival Guide as sort of the CliffsNotes version of the business of photography.  The book is only a couple of hundred pages long to begin with, and about half of that is comprised of photos, screen shots and other illustrations, so the text is minimal.  But, my test for the “meat” of any book of this type is, upon completion, to flip back through it and see how much I’ve highlighted in yellow, and I can tell you that you’d be hard-pressed to find a single text page in my copy without something marked as “important.” So, while Sease and Stone certainly won’t be accused of being verbose, that’s to their credit as the result of their collaboration is a “nothing but the facts, m’am” approach that’s both a quick read and a solid overview of what you’re in for if commercial photography is singing your siren song.

The value here resides in the first five chapters: “Establishing Your Style,” “Presenting Yourself,” “Marketing,” “Bidding The Job” and “Doing the Job” (the concluding two chapters, “Keep Marketing Yourself” and “Stock Photography and Creative Outlets,” seem a bit cursory and tacked on to fill out the book).  Within those 5 sections the authors really drive home the value of approaching photography as a business and then proceed to impart nugget after nugget that explain how to go about it.  Just one example: one of the keys to getting work is having a killer portfolio.  Here, you find out the differences between customized and off-the shelf portfolios (and their costs), how to make your own (including choices for sealing, binding, hinges and paper), how to ship your portfolio and, of course, what the content should consist of.  Great nuts-and bolts stuff (both literally and figuratively!).

 further invaluable component of the book is the accompanying CD which contains 21 very useful forms and templates in both Word and Excel formats.  There’s some of the usual stuff like model and property releases as well as an estimate/invoice form, but what’s really unusual (and probably worth the book’s price all by itself) is the inclusion of such exotic items as an “Approved Job Check-Off List,” “Estimate Questionnaire,” “Prop Check-In Sheet” and “Wardrobe Disposal Sheet.” Wow, who knew that being a photographer involved shuffling so much paper? Obviously, industry veterans Sease and Stone do, and fortunately they’ve shared their extensive knowledge and thus made The Photographer’s Survival Guide a must-have addition to any would-be professional’s reference library.

“Negotiating Stock Photo Prices,” by Jim Pickerell & Cheryl Pickerell DiFrank.  Published in 2001 by & available directly from the authors: http://www.pickphoto.com/guide.asp ($40 + shipping)

Even though royalty free imagery now accounts for something like half of all of the stock revenue that’s generated in the marketplace, there are still a heck of a lot of rights managed sales to be made every single day of the week.  So…what are you going to charge for those deals?

Part art, part science and part black magic, negotiating prices for rights managed licensing is one of the most daunting challenges any photographer can face.  Am I charging too much? Too little? Will the client hang up if I ask for this amount? Will I make more sales by charging X instead of Y? And how can the same picture be worth $___ today to this customer and $___ tomorrow to another customer?

If you truly want to understand what goes into figuring out the “worth” of a picture in any given situation, then you must have this book…period, and I say that knowing full well that the book is 10 years old! The pricing tables are still invaluable templates for determining specific dollar amounts for picture sales, but to my mind the real value of this book is the extensive discussion of the underlying factors that you must consider in order to come up with rational prices for your pictures.  This is simply the best text I’ve seen on the why’s and wherefore’s of stock image pricing and should be a part of any stock shooter’s reference library (and, you can always look up current going rates for images on any number of stock agency websites).

ne word of caution: any pricing table is a guide, not the Bible.  As you’ll conclude from reading Jim and Cheryl’s book, everything is negotiable in a stock picture sale, and even when the book was originally published, the numbers that they included a) were probably based on data that was a few years old, and b) they probably represented to some degree ideal rather than real-world numbers.  In other words: pricing tables and online fees attached to specific images are always terrific touchstones, but the actual number you’ll end up with may vary…and that’s OK!

“Pricing Photography,” by Michal Heron and David MacTavish.  Third Edition (2002).  Published by Allworth Press.

This book has a broader focus than Jim Pickerell’s fine “Negotiating Stock Photo Prices” [see review elsewhere on this site], as evidenced by the book’s subtitle: “The Complete Guide to Assignment & Stock Prices.”  So, there’s a lot of good information on how to negotiate an assignment fee, the economics of running a photography studio, and so on.   

For stock shooters, what this book has going for it are very useful and relevant chapters on “Negotiating Principles,” “Negotiating Stock Photography” and “Pricing Stock,” plus over 40 pages of stock licensing price charts.  Now, if I was only going to have one stock pricing reference book on my shelf, I’d opt for the good old Pickerell book…but why stop at one? Heron and MacTavish give you a different viewpoint on the art of negotiating, and those stock tables provide yet another reference point and touchstone for you when going about the always challenging task of setting prices for your stock image licenses. 

f course, the weakness of any of these pricing guides is that their data is moldy almost from the time of publication.  In this case, with a publication date of 2002 you have to figure that the actual data that was the basis for their pricing tables was probably actually collected in 2000 or 2001, which makes it a decade old now.  Nonetheless, it’s far better than using a Ouija board or throwing the I Ching to come up with your stock picture prices.

So, get both the Pickerell and the Heron/MacTavish books, add in some of your own thinking, temper all of the above with a good dose of common sense as well as a look at online pricing, and your resulting stock licensing prices (and others!) should be pretty spot-on!