TIPS60 - What's an NDA?

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:What's an NDA? I'm John Harrington. An NDA is a non-disclosure agreement. It's an agreement between you and a client or you and an assistant to not have things disclosed outside of the scope of the work that you are performing. Non-disclosure agreements are very common when you're working with high profile clients and frankly assistants should be signing non-disclosure agreements with you to not talk about the details of a photo shoot they worked with you on. You should be getting non-disclosure agreements from your assistants and also many times your clients can ask you to not disclose what you learned, any company trade secrets or anything about a new product coming out that you might have just photographed. NDAs are very common. Read it. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not giving legal advice, but I strongly encourage you to understand the importance of an NDA and to respect an NDA. If somebody asks you about a shoot you were on and you can't talk about it because of an NDA, just say, "I can't talk about it because I'm under and NDA."

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TIPS60 - Hobbyists - respect the profession and the livelihood of those you admire

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on the idea that hobbyists can actually do some damage to the livelihoods of photographers they admire. I'm John Harrington. If you're a professional photographer the last thing you want to see, if you're at an event covering something is to see four or five photographers that are hobbyists coming in taking pictures, posting them up online, and ruining your livelihood. If you're a hobbyist who looks up to the photo journalist or the sports photographer, doing it for free, doing it just for the heck of it, and then selling those images or giving them away is really damaging the livelihood of those who are professionally doing photography day-to-day, day in and day out and have bills to pay. So I would strongly encourage you to, even if you don't necessarily need the money, as a hobbyist, to charge appropriately for your work so that you not only get that extra money that lets you upgrade to the next piece of equipment, but you're also not damaging the livelihoods of the photographers that you admire in the community.

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TIPS60 - Product Commentary - X-Rite i1 calibration tools

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:I can't stress enough the importance of having a color calibrated monitor, color calibrated printers, and just generally being color calibrated. We use, to do all of our color calibrations, the i1 system it's made by Gretag MacBeth. There are a number of other solutions out there, but the importance of making certain that your monitor is calibrated is so that when you're judging lightness and darkness, when you're judging whether or not an image has too much red, too much green, or otherwise is just not right, not visually correct. You want to make certain that you have everything in a color managed, calibrated to a known standard system. So that when you're speaking to a client and the client says to you, " Oh gosh, the photo looks too dark too light" or what have you, you can ask them, "Is your system calibrated?" Generally, it's not in many instances. And you can encourage that, you can say something like, "Oh, are you looking at it next to a light window?" or what have you. Ask them what environment they're reviewing the images in. But having a calibrated system means that you're calibrating to a known standard.

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TIPS60 - Staff2Freelance - having a professional URL

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on professional URLs as you transition possibly from staff to freelance. I'm John Harrington. Having a professional URL is one of the many signs and signals that you send to your clients that you are a professional. You don't want to use something that says something like @cox.net or @rcn or @comcast or @gmail or at @aol or @hotmail. Any of those URLs are not professional URLs whether it's in your email address or in the actual website that you have. You want to make certain that you have something like @johnharrington.com or @harringtonproductions.com or some variation that's shows that you are professional, that you're a business and people should be treating you as such. If you use non-professional URLs, free URLS, like gmail or so on and so forth clients, especially clients that have never heard about you before are going to be questioning whether not you're actually a full-time professional doing this and will be taking you seriously.

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TIPS60 - Double the money? Are your low rates actually hurting your business?

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on your rates and whether or not they're too low. I'm John Harrington. Now it may seem counter-intuitive, but the concept of doubling your rates to earn more business actually is a realistic one. It does actually apply, there is actually some credence to that idea. In some instances there are clients who know that the bill or the costs for a particular services is $1,000, $2,000. And when a photographer, even though they think they're doing the right thing, by saying, ""I'll do the job for $300"" they know, ""Gosh, this photographer may well not understand everything that's going into this project."" So they'll actually hire a photographer that's more expensive. So if you're looking at your rates and maybe you want to move up to that next echelon of client, you want to have a higher profile client, doubling your rates could actually generate you more business. In many instances that's why we ask whether or not there's a budget the clients trying to work within. So as silly as and counter-intuitive as it sounds, you might actually consider doubling your rates in order to generate more business.

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