[by Leslie Burns]
Rediscover the joy in what you do. If you aren’t loving making images, just for the sake of making images, you may need at least a vacation or perhaps a change in career.
Leslie Burns is a creative/marketing consultant and not a lawyer (yet). She is taking the summer off from law school to work on a 2nd ed. of her photo biz book. Follow her at burnsautoparts.com/blog, facebook.com/burnsautoparts, and twitter.com/LeslieBAP.
[by Leslie Burns]
Shooting for yourself is one of the best things you can do for your business. Schedule time each month to work on personal projects.
Leslie Burns is a creative/marketing consultant and not a lawyer (yet). She is taking the summer off from law school to work on a 2nd ed. of her photo biz book. Follow her at burnsautoparts.com/blog, facebook.com/burnsautoparts, and twitter.com/LeslieBAP.
[by Leslie Burns]
I hear photographers complain about amateurs cutting into the market. Here’s my advice: if your business is threatened by the work of amateurs, you need to work on your work.
Technology has lowered the bar of entry in photography just as it has in writing, graphic design, fine art, advertising, product design, even architecture and, well, just about every creative profession you can think of. The tools for creativity are simply easier to use and more affordable. More people can buy them and use them with ok results. Sometimes, they get spectacularly great results. And sometimes someone who never would have been a professional creative in the past gets paid now because of this shift.
But these people are not your competition unless your work isn’t any better than theirs. And if your work isn’t any better than theirs, that is your problem, not theirs for existing.
Your greatest tool is the way your brain works. Your vision, your way of seeing and creating, comes from inside your brain and only you have that tool. But, like everything related to our bodies, if you don’t exercise your brain, it gets soft and doesn’t work as well. A creative’s work can get safe, complacent, and facile when s/he stops pushing it.
But when you make the work that is really inside of you, when you challenge yourself to do something more with your work, you make something that no amateur can touch.
Buyers value individual vision. The better the buyer, the more they value it. They are looking for something that will help them differentiate their message (or their clients’ messages) from the gazillion out there. They don’t want the generic “good enough” work of the amateurs, they want great, creative work. And only a real pro can give ‘em what they want.
So leave the low-end clients who want to play it safe and for whom the amateurs’ work may be good enough. Make your best work, challenge yourself as a professional artist, and go after the targets who are looking for your creative work.
Leslie Burns is a creative/marketing consultant and not a lawyer (yet). She is taking the summer off from law school to work on a 2nd ed. of her photo biz book. Follow her at burnsautoparts.com/blog, facebook.com/burnsautoparts, and twitter.com/LeslieBAP.
[by Leslie Burns]
I hear lots of people say how CC makes “sharing” possible and promotes the “democratization” of creative culture. Really, it is the emperor’s new clothes of IP licensing–false, dangerous, and unneeded.
For centuries (there is specific references to licensing in docs dating as far back as 1474!), traditional licensing has permitted creators and users to work together to develop new innovations, new art, new technologies. As the text book we used in my Licensing class in law school puts it (Licensing Intellectual Property: Law and Application pp. 3-4, emphasis added):
[...] it enables creators of information, technology, and intellectual property to do the sharing and collaboration that lead to the creation of new information products, from the production of an epic motion picture to the development of complex software. In other words, licensing underlies technological and creative innovation. [...] licensing enables parties of all sizes and from all sectors to bring information products to market in a multitude of ways. In other words, licensing also underlies business model innovation.”
Think about all the innovations of the 20th century alone, these were all done under the traditional system of licensing. No creativity or innovation was suppressed. The internet was created and grew, very successfully, under traditional licensing!
Moreover, the ability to share (free) has always been inherent in the traditional licensing system. If someone took IP from a creator and the creator didn’t have a problem with it, the creator simply did not pursue the user. An implied license could be said to exist. No problem.
So, I urge all creative professionals not to get sucked into the rhetoric of “remixing” and “democratization of culture” etc. that is promulgated by CC. Did you know that if you license a work using CC, you can never revoke that license later? And that each user under that license can sublicense your work (same terms)? It’s like a virus-license! You lose all control, forever.
You have all the tools you need under the traditional licensing system. You can give and share on your own terms, but you can protect and monetize efficiently as well. The language of the CC is seductive and sounds ever so good, especially to the creative mind that loves collaboration and working with others, but its a siren’s call to your professional doom.
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Leslie Burns is a creative/marketing consultant and not a lawyer (yet). She is taking the summer off from law school to work on a 2nd ed. of her photo biz book. Follow her at burnsautoparts.com/blog, facebook.com/burnsautoparts, and twitter.com/LeslieBAP.
[by Leslie Burns]
You’ve (hopefully) got an electronic “filing” system in place for your images. How about for your paperwork?
