Facebook Images

MagicMelon, your signature highlights my point about photographers and riders thinking it is acceptable to shoplift images from websites. This is going to sound like I am having at go at you personally, please do not be offended as it is not. But...

Would I be correct in thinking that at least 4 of the six thumbnails in your signature are images shoplifted from photographers websites, presumably without their permission?

Photographers need to make a living. We do not attend equine events as entertainers or equine paparazzi, we are there to run a business and provide a service. At the ODE we covered on Sunday I was actually on the sales stand for a change. I heard a group of riders discussing a fall that I had photographed the previous week in a showjumping competition. The pictures were brilliant apparently and were now being enjoyed by all her mates on Facebook. Proper flying pictures!

Except I know those pictures were never sold either at the event or online since, so I can only assume they have shoplifted images from my site.

Thank you for your contribution. My original post was to try and establish the price point at which riders would happily pay for the image and not make do with the shoplifted,watermarked version. You have indicated a price I could live with as a business model.
 
I don't know how many images you would normally expect to sell at an event, or how much your overheads are....but i would perhaps look at this from a slightly different angle. I would work out what sort of revenue i was hoping to generate per day and then look at ways of reaching that figure. There have been a number of excellent (in my opinon) ideas thrown about in the posts above...the idea of you providing cheap media (memery sticks) onsite is a good one. You could even make a small profit on them. I also subscribe to the view that if you are at a show anyway, you have nothing to lose by selling your photo's cheaply. The time consuming (and therefore money consuming) aspect of your business is the manual editing / touching up of the pictures. You can (and almost certainly do) have an automated means of sorting / resizing / copyrighting / uploading your photo's so that isn't a huge effort....so maybe better to offer a bulk deal on all unedited photo's taken of a competitor on the day at a reasonable resolution (maybe even max resolution as that's what you take the photo at anyway). That way you will get 'something' back for your efforts. You can still offer an enhanced service for doctoring and printing / framing images to those who want it...but i'd bet that a fairly high % of your customers are more than capable (and willing) to do the editing themselves.

Personally i like your photo's....you seem to get a better % of 'good' shots than many of the photograsphers (certainly in our area)...but even then, there are probably still only going to be one or two 'excellent' photo's at best of each competitor. Horses have a great knack of being able to blink / drop a leg / have a pole / put their ears back etc...at the wrong time. I also don't particularly want to buy photo's of 'ordinary' classes or at 'ordinary' shows....most of the time.

I think i mentioned before when you posted that i thought there might be a market to provide a package in conjunction with the show centres whereby for an extra few £££'s on the entry for the day you would get copies of all your pictures included. If the show centres aren't keen on that, then maybe could adapt it to suit your needs without them ?

Personally, i'd pay a fiver for access to all my photo's from the day in digital only form (media provided by me....or for an extra couple of quid you could sell me a memory stick)....but i don't value them any more than that for the average show....sorry.
 
Hi Rambo, I floated the idea with several centres and a number of issues were raised as to practicality, riders opting in or out, schedules being printed well in advance etc. Say for example there was a midweek BSJA meeting at GX with 50 riders and 100 horses. Do I charge per rider or per horse and is the show centre really going to have to spend time explaining that todays entry fees are £17 per round instead of £14 as it includes the photographer levy.

I have not given up on the idea and will continue to work with it to overcome the obstacles. In the meantime I will keep adapting my business model and workflow to make the entire endeavour feasible. There are few photographers who have found BSJA a viable revenue stream unless of course you have the advantage of both a prestigious location and or competition.

Thank you for your comments on our pictures, we get these compliments frequently and it is always good to hear. Your right in your analysis of percentage of shots that might sell. It is gratifying that we often have people telling us we've taken too many good shots.

Returning to my core issue with Facebook though, I regularly see Facebook pages with sometimes 30-40 of our copyrighted images on them that have not been paid for. I'm sure Tescos would object if I took a loaf or even a few loaves of bread home without payment each time I visited their stores. There have as you say been some excellent ideas suggested and my thanks go to all contributors for their input.
 
spidge said:
is the show centre really going to have to spend time explaining that todays entry fees are £17 per round instead of £14 as it includes the photographer levy.
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Also bear in mind that some people take their own photographs or videos at events and would object to paying this as they already have photos taken themselves :)
 
Of course and they are sometimes my best customers, because they know both the value of a good photograph and also how hard it can be to get that good photograph.
 
Spidge - I see your point exactly, not that I am a pro tog or the like but I think its a bit of a cheek going out your way to copy and paste off togs sites, they are trying to run a buisness and provide a service afterall. I have a wee piece of software that allows me to do this if I wanted to but I buy the pics I really like - I have bought both the printed and digital verisons and nothing can beat a great photo from a good togg so we should really try and support them.

I would be really up for the memory stick idea. Seems good value for money and means you are less picky - I normally wait until near end of season before I pic the best photos I want to buy where as If I could pay a smaller amount for lower res pics I would do that and then also get a print at end of season. My OH has tried to get good at photo taking and has realised what a skill is it to get a good jumping pic! And alot of the times when he isnt there we are all too busy focusing on horse and getting ready to remember the camera!!
 
spidge said:
Hi Rambo, I floated the idea with several centres and a number of issues were raised as to practicality, riders opting in or out, schedules being printed well in advance etc. Say for example there was a midweek BSJA meeting at GX with 50 riders and 100 horses. Do I charge per rider or per horse and is the show centre really going to have to spend time explaining that todays entry fees are £17 per round instead of £14 as it includes the photographer levy.

I have not given up on the idea and will continue to work with it to overcome the obstacles. In the meantime I will keep adapting my business model and workflow to make the entire endeavour feasible. There are few photographers who have found BSJA a viable revenue stream unless of course you have the advantage of both a prestigious location and or competition.

Thank you for your comments on our pictures, we get these compliments frequently and it is always good to hear. Your right in your analysis of percentage of shots that might sell. It is gratifying that we often have people telling us we've taken too many good shots.

Returning to my core issue with Facebook though, I regularly see Facebook pages with sometimes 30-40 of our copyrighted images on them that have not been paid for. I'm sure Tescos would object if I took a loaf or even a few loaves of bread home without payment each time I visited their stores. There have as you say been some excellent ideas suggested and my thanks go to all contributors for their input.
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My initial idea was the charge the levy 'per rider' in much the same way as the medical levy is currently imposed. That said, you would need to refer to my other point regarding how much revenue you need to generate.

As for the theft of images...well, i fully see your point but can't really offer any solution. As i see it you have two choices...prosecute everyone who you catch stealing your work (very time consuming and potentially expensive for you...not to mention p155ing off many potential customers), or forget about it and concentrate on ways of generating extra revenue in other ways. At sa technical level there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent people copying your images...if they can be viewed on a screen they can be copied (despite what some of the less technical people above have suggested :rolleyes:
 
spidge said:
Of course and they are sometimes my best customers, because they know both the value of a good photograph and also how hard it can be to get that good photograph.
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I think you have a good point there - we have a digital SLR and try to take photos of the Sprog at competitions, but we still often buy from pro photographers. Sometimes you can just be too involved in the competition to be 100% focused on taking good photos, and at XC events it is impossible to get to every jump and sometimes the one you choose to stand at is the one they do a bad jump at!

I have seen some pro photographers actually walk off if they someone else is taking photos, but I think that is quite short-sighted of them as they may be losing out on a sale.
 
Saratoga said:
Now there's a thought......sell your images a lot cheaper, and sell much more of them.
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Agree 100% with that.
I've often liked 2 or 3 pics that have been taken of us, but not enough to pay £12 or £15 per pic. I have lots of pics and they can't all go in frames, so I would be buying just to keep somewhere - on the PC would be just as good to me as a hard copy, I'm happy either way.
If those same pics had been £5 or 3 for £10 I'd have bought them many times. Instead I've bought nothing most of the time and just occasionally buy one if I think it's a particularly good shot.

Once a phtographer took a really really good sequence of us having a near fall but recovering. It was brilliant - at the water too. His pics were so expensive I got in touch and asked if he could do anything on price if I bought a load of them (it was around 10 images). He did come back to me to say that yes he would, but he gave me prices ranging from £80 to £120. Just too much money for me, much as I'd like to have had them.

I felt that was a bit short sighted. Surely better to get some cash for the pics, given that they've already been taken, than nothing at all.

Now had they been the £3 we've been discussing on here, I'd have had the lot!
 
TGM said:
I think you have a good point there - we have a digital SLR and try to take photos of the Sprog at competitions, but we still often buy from pro photographers. Sometimes you can just be too involved in the competition to be 100% focused on taking good photos, and at XC events it is impossible to get to every jump and sometimes the one you choose to stand at is the one they do a bad jump at!

I have seen some pro photographers actually walk off if they someone else is taking photos, but I think that is quite short-sighted of them as they may be losing out on a sale.
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Although I would never dare suggest that my personal paparazzi takes a bad shot :p I have to say I still look at the pro ones and if there was a fantastic shot at a fence Mr FJ wasn't at that they had taken I would buy it.

Mr FJ has been told by one of the regular official 'togs that he now doesn't bother taking/uploading my pictures anymore as he knows Mr FJ is with me. This is a little short sighted (see my point above) and what about the times Mr FJ isn't there with me?!

I think a few quid for a low res, FB suitable piccie is fair and realistically would generate quite a few additional sales. Although Mr FJ has to do this type of thing on an ad hoc basis as the website/company he sells his prints through doesn't offer this as an option, so any digi requests are manual and much more time consuming for him than the straight through process of ordering a print off his gallery.

PS- I get a bit upset/annoyed on Mr FJ's behalf when I see folk nicking his pics and posting them on FB, without even crediting and giving him a plug too! :( If they were to email him and ask, he'd sell them little .jpg images for a small amount.
 
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I offer low re jpgs, high res jpgs with multiples of same horse & rider combo on the same CD at 1/2 price, licence free jpgs plus prints. I am looking into automating the low re jpgs as its more work actually than a hi res. We don't do downloadable hi res jpgs any more as too many people had problems plus by sending a CD we can pop in a nice message about personal use and copyright. Its not just punters that do it, magazines and newspapers do it as well-I enjoy sending them the invoice! I do run special offers for events that run over 2 or more days.

its tricky-we have just spent a fortune on new mac and printer, selling pics at £3 a shot? I would rather give up, after all if I wanted to persue a highly expensive hobby I'd go and ride my own horse at weekends instead of taking pictures of others riding theirs...

If you steal my pictures you are stealing my income.
 
peteralfred said:
I offer low re jpgs, high res jpgs with multiples of same horse & rider combo on the same CD at 1/2 price, licence free jpgs plus prints. I am looking into automating the low re jpgs as its more work actually than a hi res. We don't do downloadable hi res jpgs any more as too many people had problems plus by sending a CD we can pop in a nice message about personal use and copyright. Its not just punters that do it, magazines and newspapers do it as well-I enjoy sending them the invoice! I do run special offers for events that run over 2 or more days.

its tricky-we have just spent a fortune on new mac and printer, selling pics at £3 a shot? I would rather give up, after all if I wanted to persue a highly expensive hobby I'd go and ride my own horse at weekends instead of taking pictures of others riding theirs...

If you steal my pictures you are stealing my income.
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Perhaps you could look at the Tesco model and understand that selling things cheaply doesn't necessarily mean bad business.....
 
Saratoga said:
Now there's a thought......sell your images a lot cheaper, and sell much more of them. I certainly would be buying all mine at £1 each!
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Couldn't agree more. There's a photographer up here who sells them at £3-4 each and I always buy them all as I appreciate him keeping his costs down. Another recently wanted £20 for a jpeg which, no matter how much I wanted it, I simply wouldn't pay.
 
spidge said:
Returning to my core issue with Facebook though, I regularly see Facebook pages with sometimes 30-40 of our copyrighted images on them that have not been paid for. I'm sure Tescos would object if I took a loaf or even a few loaves of bread home without payment each time I visited their stores. There have as you say been some excellent ideas suggested and my thanks go to all contributors for their input.
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Have you considered contacting any fb user that you find who is using your pictures illegally and offering them an attractive rate per picture to become legal, or requesting that they remove their pictures and hinting that you will take legal action if they don't.

I suspect many of them would be embarrassed into removing/paying if they got a personal message from you.
 
I would suggest that any photographer selling their work for £1 - £3 is NOT a full time professional who derives all his income from the profession. and pay taxes on his takings, have the correct insurance etc etc.

I have been selling images as my only source of income for 8 years, and my price has been the same since 2005. yet in that time fuel has trippled, media doubled, wages to sales and additional staff doubled, insurance costs doubled, and the cameras upgraded 3 times (at £3500 a pop, plus the fees charged by the venues to attend doubled (you did all realise that we PAY to be there) and from jan4th VAT will increase. to 20% which is levied on turnover. Back in 2005 I wasnt VAT registered, yet now I have to give the govenment 20% just for being sucessful. I cant put the prices up by 20% because apparently £10 an image is too much and people are happy to steal images.

Add in the fact that the season for decent sales runs march - Oct and there are only so many weekends, and I have a very small window to earn my living

But I wouldn't do anything else as i love making people smile when they see their images, but please dont steal
 
On the contrary, I think based on the comments on this thread, a photographer selling photos for £1 - £3 might well be a savvy buisness man/woman.

We are not taking about high res printable images here - they quite rightly should be more - but we are really talking about the little extras - ones that would not other wise be sold. Dead stock to you. If you can sell them, at low res, only suitable for facebook/email/forum signatures/etc, at £1 to £3 a go, then that is a few quid you wouldnt have othwise got.

People like to have a record of the shows they have been to - and to share that by posting pictures. Most don't have the money to pay for all the high quailty images. They dont want or need the high quality images.

The amount of theft that goes on shows there is a demand for the low quality images, and if you can get some of those to actually pay a few pounds to have them legally, then you are onto a winner. You could even look at getting ecommerce software so anyone who wants to buy online can get the images paid for and downloaded straight away - saving you the hassle of emailing them. And I bet it wouldn't cost that much.
 
_Katy_ said:
On the contrary, I think based on the comments on this thread, a photographer selling photos for £1 - £3 might well be a savvy buisness man/woman.

We are not taking about high res printable images here - they quite rightly should be more - but we are really talking about the little extras - ones that would not other wise be sold. Dead stock to you. If you can sell them, at low res, only suitable for facebook/email/forum signatures/etc, at £1 to £3 a go, then that is a few quid you wouldnt have othwise got.

People like to have a record of the shows they have been to - and to share that by posting pictures. Most don't have the money to pay for all the high quailty images. They dont want or need the high quality images.

The amount of theft that goes on shows there is a demand for the low quality images, and if you can get some of those to actually pay a few pounds to have them legally, then you are onto a winner. You could even look at getting ecommerce software so anyone who wants to buy online can get the images paid for and downloaded straight away - saving you the hassle of emailing them. And I bet it wouldn't cost that much.
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Like every thing in life it's a balancing act. If there's only one sellable shot and the customer buys a low res jpeg for their facebook the photographer loses.

On the other hand if there are a few adequate shots and the customer buys them all via down load the photographer may win. I'm not sure what the answer is but I know I've got shots all over facebook :p

I would have to say that because of the time involved in getting prints arranged I'm seriously thinking of only providing a digital option, possibly one at about 300px, one at about 1000 px and another full size.
 
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