Hello,
We are about three weeks in to 2011, and I am already trying to figure out who the "flavor of the year" is going to be. You see, every year in this industry there is only one or two magazines, newspapers or online publications that "have a budget" for original documentary photography; which is what I like to think I specialize in.
These "flavor of the year" publications generally buck the trend of diminishing budgets and layoff's. These publications often have money to burn, indeed some even refer to it as a "burn rate" of original imagery they need to purchase per month. Identifying these publications early, and making good pitches for interesting story ideas, can be the difference between having a great, creative and productive year; or having another year of stale and repetitive work.
Past publications that made a statement by funding original reporting include, but are not exclusive to, Portfolio Magazine, MSNBC.com, Portfolio.com, GlobalPost.com and a host of others. Even the WSJ, after it was bought out by News Corp, was flying me all over China to do some really important and interesting stories. But alas all of that has dried up, and so the trend continues. This leaves photographers, like me, bouncing around looking for the next editor who can actually afford a day rate for a whole week of shooting.
Now sure, many of you may be reading this and think that I'm bitter. I'm not. I'm a happy-go-lucky kind of guy and I've had a lot of great memories and moments being a documentary photographer in China. I will also continue to be a documentary photographer in China no matter how bad the industry gets, because I still strongly believe in what I do and I believe that I have a unique vision of China and how to document it. This is what keeps me motivated. This is what gets me up in in the morning.
My blog today, however, is a REALPOLITIK version of what the photo commissioning landscape looks like at the moment outside of a war zone. As one photographer mentioned a few weeks back in a Facebook posting, "It's like a lottery out there, and I am tired of buying tickets." He was referring to the assignment photography industry, just one job out there for hundreds of photographers who have entered the market in the last five years hoping to earn a living as image makers. Competition is fierce and pay rates are dropping.
So as I sit back and write to editors wishing them all the best for a happy and productive 2011, I wonder which magazines I'll be able to collaborate with best this year. Which magazines have the budgets for the ambitious ideas and strong stories that I want to tell. Sadly, my mind is drawing a blank. Most of friends, who are also editors, have lost their jobs in the last two years; forget about photography budgets most say, there isn't enough money to run the magazine let alone fill the pages with content.
Sure there are lots of problems ahead, and that also means there is a lot of opportunity. Let's put our thinking caps on and pull ourselves out of this industry wide funk.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Showing posts with label Industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Industry. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Friday, April 30, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: The Shrinking Path
Hello,
Well, it appears that being a photographer is actually as bleak as everyone says it is. Even house wives are able to earn an income from Getty Images. Read below. Time to dust off that degree in accounting.
Please follow this LINK to the original story.
The article is also posted below.
Copywrite: New York Times
__________________________________
March 29, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.
But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.
“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.
Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”
Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.
Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.
Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.
“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.
That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”
They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.
Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.
“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.
And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.
“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”
At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.
Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.
That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.
“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”
In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said. That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.
With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.
There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.
Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”
But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.
“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is. Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”
But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care. “I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
__________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Well, it appears that being a photographer is actually as bleak as everyone says it is. Even house wives are able to earn an income from Getty Images. Read below. Time to dust off that degree in accounting.
Please follow this LINK to the original story.
The article is also posted below.
Copywrite: New York Times
__________________________________
March 29, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.
But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.
“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.
Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”
Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.
Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.
Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.
“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.
That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”
They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.
Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.
“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.
And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.
“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”
At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.
Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.
That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.
“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”
In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said. That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.
With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.
There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.
Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”
But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.
“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is. Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”
But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care. “I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
__________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, March 19, 2010
Ryan Pyle Blog: Magazine Revenue 2009
Hello.
It pains me to have to bring this kind of stuff up all the time, but I thought it was important to publish this list. The list in question is the 2009 revenue from the Magazine Publishers of America. And for people like me, who depend on publishers to spend money on images, it makes bleak reading.
A few highlights on the list:
1) The overall average for the difference in revenue between 2008 and 2009 is -18.1%. That means that on average each magazine lost 17% revenue from 2008 to 2009. No small number. Hence the massive layoffs and huge reduction in picture purchasing, especially in assignments to create original imagery.
2) US News and World Report, once a major picture buyer and huge publisher of photojournalism, was down 88% compared to 2008.
3) Portfolio Magazine, one of my clients, went bust.
4) People Magazine was up 3.8%. Maybe I should start up a celebrity photography business in China.
5) National Geographic was down 14%; and NG's other titles like Adventure (which went bust) and Traveler were down at least 30% from 2008.
6) Organic Gardening was up 16% year on year with 2008. Plant photograph anyone?
And the rest makes pretty tough reading. You'll have to follow the link below to see the actual numbers, I couldn't find a format to properly download the statistics and have them cropped in to my blog. Please see below.
LINK: Magazine Publishers of America
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
It pains me to have to bring this kind of stuff up all the time, but I thought it was important to publish this list. The list in question is the 2009 revenue from the Magazine Publishers of America. And for people like me, who depend on publishers to spend money on images, it makes bleak reading.
A few highlights on the list:
1) The overall average for the difference in revenue between 2008 and 2009 is -18.1%. That means that on average each magazine lost 17% revenue from 2008 to 2009. No small number. Hence the massive layoffs and huge reduction in picture purchasing, especially in assignments to create original imagery.
2) US News and World Report, once a major picture buyer and huge publisher of photojournalism, was down 88% compared to 2008.
3) Portfolio Magazine, one of my clients, went bust.
4) People Magazine was up 3.8%. Maybe I should start up a celebrity photography business in China.
5) National Geographic was down 14%; and NG's other titles like Adventure (which went bust) and Traveler were down at least 30% from 2008.
6) Organic Gardening was up 16% year on year with 2008. Plant photograph anyone?
And the rest makes pretty tough reading. You'll have to follow the link below to see the actual numbers, I couldn't find a format to properly download the statistics and have them cropped in to my blog. Please see below.
LINK: Magazine Publishers of America
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Shanghai Electric Exiting Solar Power
Hello.
It was reported a while back that Shanghai Electric, China's largest power generating equipment maker, is getting out of the solar power business. Shanghai Electric seems almost desperate to sell of its 35% stake in solar equipment maker Shanghai Topsolar Green Energy. The reason for the fire sale, it's just not a profitable business at this stage in the game says the company.
Getting rid of its investment in a solar energy equipment maker made headlines around China, and the reason given by the company was that they just couldn't find a way to incorporate the solar business in to its future development plans. But I thought solar power was the future?
I'm confused.
Even though Beijing is telling everyone that solar and wind are the future, it seems very odd that a state run company, that is this large and influential, would step out of the business so publicly. Is there turmoil brewing in the energy sector?
Shanghai Electric makes its hay (70% of its business) from making coal fire power plants, a business that is said to have peaked in 2004. Since that peak, the company's revenue and market share have fallen. To counterbalance this they have, since 2004, made a strong commitment to wind power and nuclear power, which both generate next to no carbon emissions and are said to be much better business models than solar. In fact, Shanghai Electric has 50% of the nuclear power plant market in China and says that nuclear power plants will replace the coal fired power plant business in the coming years.
So is Shanghai Electric a company that's going green; but couldn't find a way to benefit from solar power? Or are they just a big state run machine that will slowly opt out of more renewable energy initiatives in the future? My guess is that Shanghai Electric is committed to renewable energy, or at least nuclear energy; but just couldn't find a way to make expensive solar panels pay for themselves in a heavily subsidized electricity markets. Maybe if all of us living in China paid the real price for electricity more clean initiatives might be viable. Even with Beijing promoting renewable energy, and dishing out massive amounts of "incentives", I am amazed that such a large player in the industry couldn't make the business work. Will others follow this similar exit strategy? What's the future for solar power in China?
China is actually the world's leading maker of solar panels, but most of this production is exported to countries like Germany that have offered massive subsidies to go green. But the business has yet to show it can be sustainable on its own. Shanghai Electric might just be too big to deal with renewable energy. Nuclear power generates a huge amount of power and costs a massive amount of money to produce. As a company, if you had to choose between making nuclear power plants and laying solar panels in the desert, most would most likely choose nuclear; if at least because it generates about 1000 times more in fee's for the equipment companies involved.
On a side note, I've actually had the chance to photograph a nuclear power plant under construction in Guangdong province, and I can tell you by talking with the people down there - nuclear is the future in China, they just haven't admitted it to everyone, the global press, yet. The nuclear power plants of today are said to be much safer than those in the past and generate massive amounts of electricity which coastal and central China is disparately thirsty for. Can anyone blame Shanghai Electric for following the money? Not really. For once a state owned enterprise is acting like a privately owned company that is responsible for shareholder value. They got out of a business that wasn't making money to focus on businesses that does make money.
But does solar have a future in China if the big players don't buy in? My guess is no. Solar seems to be on the verge of being bypassed for wind (cheaper) and nuclear (more efficient).
ps. Sorry for putting a wind turbine picture up. I don't have a compelling solar panel photo at the moment.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: China's Textile Slowdown
Hello,
I just wanted to make you aware of some new work I've completed on China's battered textile industry. Above is a brief slide show of the work, follow THIS LINK to the NYTimes article by David Barboza.
The textile industry, like most other low end manufacturing in China is in a funk because of lessening demand from North America and Western Europe. David and I visited several factories in China's textile industry hub, the city of Shaoxing, Zhejiang province.
During the boom years it was often very difficult to gain access to factories and speak with industry leaders because no one wanted to talk about how much money they were making or how successful their company's were; for various fears and potential backlash. But during the visits on this recent trip, managers and owners were very candid with us about how orders have dropped and production numbers have fallen; resulting in massive layoffs. I even had someone from the textile industry government regulation agency ask me if I could call him sometime to discuss the distress in the industry even further, a rarity.
Often foreign journalists and photographers in China are not accepted amongst the Chinese business community as being honest and objective; but during this economic downturn I've noticed a real change in the attitudes of the business elite; they actually want to talk to us and share their stories of how the current downturn is affecting them. My hope is that this dialog and exchange continues when the boom years return.
As an outsider, or a non-Chinese person, documenting China it is important to me to be accepted amongst the business (and even political) community as being an honest and objective story teller. I hope this era of openness continues; it's a wonderful feeling being invited to several factories and getting to speak with the decision makers - instead of sneaking around and trying to piece together information by talking with employees on lunch break. Better pictures, and better journalism, better for everyone involved I reckon.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
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