ahockley

<p>Since you asked the open-ended "any comments?", my comments are:</p>

<ul>

<li>Please learn what copyright is</li>

<li>Please learn what a watermark is</li>

<li>If purchasing the photos is optional, price your services as being for two items: the first for the photo session and the second for the images. Make sure you set your session fee high enough that you're still making money even if the client chooses not to purchase any of the resulting photos.</li>

<li>You note "This way, it will not be a total loss for me if the shots do not meet his expectation" - this is why you'll want to price for the photo session separately. Not only should it "not be a total loss", it should be profitable if you've spent several hours of your time making and editing the images.</li>

<li>Keep in mid that if the actor chooses not to purchase the images, you're not likely to end up benefitting from them in the future.</li>

<li>It should be an element of any shoot, but since you specifically mentioned this is a stage actor, be sure you have a model release.</li>

</ul>

<p>The best solution I've seen is to watermark it with something like "Desktop wallpaper by yourwebsite.com" - should be fairly unobtrusive for the desktop wallpaper use, but makes it darn obvious if someone tries to use it for another purpose.</p>

<p>SmugMug can do this - with a pro account, you can "sell" digital downloads at a couple different resolutions and set your own pricing... zero could be the price. With the pro level account you can do all sorts of customizations (including branding the site to match your existing website) if you don't like their default designs.</p>

<p>I'd recommend the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009XVCZ?ie=UTF8&tag=aaronbhocklsr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00009XVCZ">Canon 50mm f/1.4</a> - same focal length, but higher build quality and slightly wider aperture.</p>

<p>What did your contract specify?</p>

<p>Generally folks seem to find that either Hoya or B+W produce the highest quality filters.</p>

<p>Events. Conferences, weddings, parties, etc.</p>

<p>Bob is right; pressing the Info button repeatedly will cycle through the different information/photo displays.</p>

<p>There shouldn't be any play... yours probably needs repair.</p>

<p>As Aimee noted, for detailed legal answers you'll want to consult a lawyer, but the short easy-to-understand answer to most of your questions is that they'll be answered by the contract that was hopefully signed between the studio and the client, which should've included language about usage and copyright.</p>

<p>I'm a happy SmugMug user, with the Pro account so I have full customization of my gallery and have styled it to match the rest of my website and blog. I've never had a client complain about any of their prints or products.</p>

<p>A lot of the new media business generation is in the intangibles.... for example, I've ended up shooting several events and made headshot sales from leads generated on Twitter, but I can't point to a specific investment or magic bullet that led to those sales.<br>

This is a bit of a self-promotional link, but I recently launched a new website focusing on the combination of photographers (and the photography business) and social/new media: it's called Social Photo Talk and is found at http://www.socialphototalk.com - if you're interested in discussion of how photographers can use new media you'll probably find it of interest.</p>

<p>To contrast with Aimee's opinion advising you to take the work, I'd say that if you don't really want to do the work and don't want to do that type of work, why not refer the work to someone in your area that would love to have it (and could do a great job)? If you reverse the roles, wouldn't you rather the commercial shooter refer a potential wedding client to you as a wedding photographer rather than do the job on their own, reluctantly?</p>

<p>The answer is going to vary by museum. I suspect a few will allow tripods, many more will disallow them (but allow photography) and some are going to ban photography entirely. You'll need to check with the particular museums you plan to visit.</p>

<p>Your chances of publication will be greatest if you actively contact magazines, find out what they are looking for, and submit work in their requested format. As noted, some magazines will go seek what they need; I've had several photos published in some industry-specific magazines because I've had my material online and searchable.</p>

<p>What you can do with the photos depends on what your agreement/contract stated. If you did in fact give away the copyright, then the client will be the one who can dictate what useage rights you may have.<br>

If you signed away the copyright, to answer your three issues:<br>

1. Probably not. Commercial use to promote your business could be considered copyright infringement.<br>

2. Watermarking has nothing to do with copyright.<br>

3. No. If you don't own the copyright, using them without credit is no different than some random person taking your photos without credit.<br>

Hopefully you've learned your lesson that you shouldn't give up the copyright...</p>

<p>Depends on the usage (licensing). For a single file that a small biz wants for their website, I'd charge a much lower rate than a file wanted by a large company for an advertising campaign.<br>

I've sold the same photo to different organizations, for different rates, for different uses.</p>

Nope, although you could.

 

I use it primarily for <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahockley">sharing my work</a>. When I upload to Flickr I resize to 1024x768 for web viewing. I suppose that one could archive larger versions, but I don't know if Flickr can handle RAW.

I don't know that Lightroom has ever put anything into a collection unless I've told it to do so (other than the "all photos" and "latest import" collections). So.... don't use collections. Just import the files from your folder structure. You can move them on disk and then tell Lightroom where you moved them... none of that involves collections.

Which version of Lightroom? I've heard that 1.x had issues once it got into the tens of thousands of images, but that 2.0 should allow for much larger catalogs.

Keep it simple... your name and/or business name as well as contact info. For me that's URL, e-mail, and phone number.

Depends on the the contract/agreement that one has with the agency. I'm not aware of any that actually transfer ownership, usually it's just a licensing agreement. Some have exclusive agreements, which mean that the photographer can't sell the image elsewhere, while many are non-exclusive.

 

In short: it depends.

I own a tablet and also worked for Wacom for about a year. Based on my experiences and talking to others, I'd say that if you use it for a full day you'll be pretty comfortable with most things, and after a few days you'll never want to use a mouse again :)

Work out a contract that explicitly states you'll retain copyright, and explicitly states the licensing terms for the parks department's usage. You'll be fine as a volunteer.

 

Even when I "give" an image to a charity, nonprofit, etc. for no charge, I still get a signed license agreement so that all parties have a clear understanding of the terms.

What is your question?