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Well the comments here terribly disappoint me. Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional, just like anyone else here.
The author should not have included any monetary figure in the article as doing so brings down the wrath of a thousand pedants with pocket calculators proving he overcharges and overvalues his work. So many people here seem to think they somehow "got him" on some straw-man price-point that clearly does not exist.
Meanwhile, the figure he calculated clearly exists to make the point that creating such an image costs more to him than clicking Save As... did to you and he wants to be appropriately compensated in dollars.
The fact the comments here seem to lack the professional empathy to jump from "How do you make money? Charge for your webapp!" To "How do you make money? Charge for your photos!" really shows how myopic the community can be. Not everyone builds a career around trying to make social network v35.0
tl;dr Pay photographers for their work, like you pay any other professional.
edit: And for a real cherry on top, the blog post itself appears to be taken in whole from http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmueller/6643032477/in/photo... I suppose John Mueller could have agreed to have his content republished but nothing indicates that to be the case and a skimming of the petapixel blog doesn't seem to include many guest contributors.
The author's real blog is at http://johnbmuellerphotography.blogspot.com/
I think the comments are fine, because the entire premise of the blog post is wrong. He should be paid because his skill as a photographer is worth money, not because he paid for a lot of expensive equipment.
> Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional
Then he has to work as a professional. "Professional landscape photographer" is an oxymoron. There is essentially no commercial market for landscape photography. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of sufficiently high-quality images available for free.
The only thing I'm formally qualified to do is sound engineering. The development of Digital Audio Workstation software and cheap microphones meant that by the time I left college, there weren't any recording studios left to hire me. I could say exactly the same thing as the OP about how much my studio equipment costs, about how long I spent learning my craft, but the simple fact is that there are too many studio engineers willing to work for free.
Landscape photography is a hobby, like sport or music. Some people are so exceptionally good at that they can make a living doing it, but everyone else has to suck it up, act like an adult and do something that people will actually pay for. John B. Mueller shoots weddings, I write software. He shoots landscapes for fun, I record music for fun, which is exactly why nobody will pay us to do it - thousands like us will do it for free.
The most interesting bit to me in his total is that he didn't put in any cost for his time, which I'm guessing would ordinarily be the lion's share of a task like this.
I don't know if he was just trying to establish the 'overhead' costs, or that at a minimum, discounting his time, that's what it cost him, but I'd like to see that number be higher, if anything.
This, to me, is the same argument I made recently regarding musicians, in the creation of music, the finished work isn't zero-cost. Ignoring the recording studio costs, media costs, distribution costs, there are other costs like instruments, instrument lessons where applicable, etc.
Even if you believe that you should be able to reproduce an artist's work free of charge (which I admit I often am conflicted on,) you have no right to take the work that it cost them money to produce for free because you aren't depriving them of anything.
> The fact the comments here seem to lack the professional empathy to jump from "How do you make money? Charge for your webapp!" To "How do you make money? Charge for your photos!" really shows how myopic the community can be.
I will point out that there is a reason HN advocates making money by developing web apps over creating binaries that are posted online for all to copy, with a shareware note attached. We have the exact same problem with copying. We just have learned to deal with the problem as best we can. Is there really nothing photographers can do on their own to mitigate the problem?
Adding to that, he's not saying he'll only license it for $6,000+, just not for free or for "credit" or exposure.
As for only charging for your expertise, use of equipment/software, and time are also things businesses legitimately charge for, so it's fair to factor those into your value as well. It may not be the best way to assess the worth of your work, but it is a part of it.
People will come up with cash for things they thing are worth paying for. A picture of a sunset has little commercial value, but custom photography (weddings, etc) do. The customer doesn't care about his overhead, especially if he doesn't know how to calculate it. Why should they? If you want them to pony up, selling something worth buying. Musicians have figured it out, why shouldn't he?
I think you meant "a thousand pedants".
These are the same people who think all digital content should be free - music, movies, games, apps, etc. No matter how technically advanced our society becomes, one axiom will always remain true - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
A webapp is run as a service. You're charging people for a service you provide. That makes it very hard to copy.
A photo isn't a service. It's a collection of bytes that is trivial to copy.
If you want to make money as a photographer, you need to structure it in a way that means it's hard to copy. But these days, anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent. If he's an exceptional photographer, he should be able to charge for his time when taking photos. But that's about it.
With the music industry, artists can move from selling CDs to doing more live tours. Not sure that's something photographers can really do.
The machinery needed to produce a ballpoint pen costs the best part of $10m. A ballpoint pen costs 20 cents.
Cameras are expensive. Photographs are almost worthless. Supply utterly outstrips demand, especially for shots like landscapes that have great appeal for amateur photographers but little commercial utility.
Ten years ago, you could name every paparazzo working in London. They were a small circle of time-served photogs who knew everyone, and whom everyone knew. There was an infrastructure of couriers and darkrooms to get images from film to press in time. They spent years cultivating relationships with celebrities, doormen and nightclub owners. Today, there are countless PJ students and teenagers hurtling around Soho on scooters. With a cheap DSLR and a smartphone, an image can be on the front page of dailymail.com in 20 minutes.
The new breed see their work as a more exciting alternative to working weekends in a shop. Most of them are happy to get a quarter of what images used to sell for. They shoot using the modern equivalent of "f/8 and be there" and need practically no technical skill. Rather than cultivating relationships and building sources, many of them rely on Twitter. Unlike the previous generation, many of them are happy to tip each other off and share information. It's now scarcely possible to make a proper living and most of the old-timers are shooting commercial work or weddings.
What utter nonsense.
> * As someone mentioned, THIS single photo didn’t cost me $6,612, but if you wanted to create it, from scratch, that is what is involved. So I consider it the replacement value if it’s stolen, or how much my lawyer will send you a bill for if it’s found being used without my permission.*
I hope he's never pirated a film or he could owe the studio millions and millions of dollars.
He should be arguing that it is expensive to take photos, and that any sales of them need to add up to cover initial and future costs. He should also be arguing that they are paying not just for the expense of taking it, but for his skill and time.
By arguing that one photo is worth that much, he is doing neither and looks like a moron.
The photographer, John Mueller, is absolutely amazing and deserves to be paid for the art he produces. See his work here: http://www.johnbmueller.com
Regarding the value of the photo, I highly doubt he believes a single photo is worth $6,612. He is merely trying to explain that he should be paid for his work, and he has. Arguing that it is expensive to take photos wouldn't have gotten your attention. This got your attention. He won.
Edit: I have absolutely no affiliation with Mueller nor have I heard of him prior to this article, but was bothered by the negative and deliberately ignorant comments posted here. Very unlike Hacker News...
The photographer has gone about this the wrong way - the cost is actually his experience and time.
It's like the 'Picasso Principle' where a woman approached Picasso for a sketch, he did something in 5 minutes and quoted her $10,000.
She said 'it only took you 5 minutes' and his response was 'no, it took me a lifetime'.
Full read here: http://bit.ly/A8ABL4
The replacement value is actually much more than that. You could take that same equipment and shoot your entire lifetime and never get a shot like that.
The internet is not about content. It's about distribution. It costs a LOT of money to use a human -- the artist -- to "distribute" that image from nature onto his digital camera. From there it costs zero to distribute it to the rest of the world.
The answer is to tie the initial "distribution" of the data with the end consumer. So share the small image for free with whomever wants to see it, then charge a small fortune for a steganographically watermarked 10MB one. If you "sign" your images with a tamper-proof record of whom the recipient is, who you are, and perhaps a personalized message, not only can you track the image, you increase its value for the buyer. It's a good thing for both patron and artist.
ADD: As a real-world example of how this works, take my funny picture collection. (http://caption-of-the-day.com) I have a hobby of collecting funny pictures. Finally decided to put them all on a blog.
Now many of these pictures are actually web comics, or demotivators, or whatever. I want to credit each artist, but I'm just some schmuck collecting funny pictures. I don't have time to research each and every one.
But with watermarking I don't have to. Most of the times whoever made the image also put a watermark on it pointing back to their website. So instead of "lifting" the pictures, I'm actually providing free advertising for the artist. Artists compete to have their work distributed for free. Consumers become big fans of certain brands and help the artists advertise. Think of how worse this system would be if the artists controlled everything. DRM is a menace. The business models might be different, but The technology community has solved the exact problem this photographer is concerned about.
Is he paying Frou Frou royalties for streaming their song on his professional [1] for-profit website?
I think I understand the point that the photographer is trying to make, but phrasing it as “It cost me $6,612 to take this photo” is leading to a bunch of tangential arguments over that specific number.
The photographer’s beef is with people who want to take his work, use it in their own publications without paying him anything, and then tell him that he should be happy with such a deal because he’s getting free publicity out of it. But this photographer did not get his camera, lenses, computer, etc. for free, and the people who want to use his work are doing it for an enterprise where they expect to be paid, so why should the photographer be the only one holding the bag?
The “$6,612” number is beside the point. A publisher who says “I will pay you one dollar for the right to use that picture” is in a whole different league from one who says “let me use it and I’ll give you credit”, because the “one dollar” fellow is at least respecting the photographer as a fellow businessman.
If you really go ahead and try to recreate that photo ... you must first invent the universe. And that's going to cost a lot !
I'm also a photographer, and I don't really buy into this particular philosophical argument.
The problem with photography is that you're never dealing with ORIGINAL ART. When John or I give a JPEG to a magazine or website, we're not _losing_ anything. This is the same argument that the RIAA and MPAA have tried to spin for over a decade.
I sell prints of my photos, and as long as no one else sets up shop and starts selling cheaper copies, I don't see a problem with sites and magazines using my photos.
The basic gist is: You have spent $6k. You can either have your photo in some magazine, or not. You can have that free publicity, or not. The only way you are 'losing' money is if the magazine would've paid you in the first place -- but again, for a non-original piece of art that they're (almost certainly) not getting an exclusive license on... the going rate isn't very much anyway.
The author talks about sunken costs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
These are costs that can't be added in a discussion on the cost of producing the products on an on-going basis. Otherwise you need to take those 6000 bucks mentioned and divide it by the thousands of photos you're going to make with that equipment.
Which will bring the cost of a photo to something much more real (excluding on-going time and gasoline investments): less than $1
Also, in capitalism the price doesn't necessarily reflect the cost of producing something. It is rather an equation of value, supply and demand. So a much better technique is to convince me why I should like that photo. Educating readers on recognizing quality is better than analyzing the costs involved.
The very existence of an intellectual property market is absurd. In my opinion, the scenarios in which person should expect to make a profit doing something creative are:
A. The person is hired to create something.
B. The person creates something that's not easy to copy.
If you were hired to design a set for a play, you would get paid for your work. If you created a physical three-dimensional sculpture, someone else could try to imitate it, but the imitation wouldn't be a perfect copy. That means your original sculpture would still have value and could be sold. On the other hand, if you, on your own time, created something that cost nothing to copy, such as--oh, I don't know--a picture of a sunset, you should not expect to profit from selling it. It wouldn't matter how much time/effort/money/energy you put into creating it.
So, what's going on with SOPA then? The government realized that they don't have the resources to police the Internet for copyright violations. Of course they don't. It's impossible. So now they're attempting to foist that impossible responsibility on website owners. I have no idea how the bill is worded, but I can't imagine a scenario where the wording could be "fixed" while keeping the intention. The intention is broken. Copyright law is broken.
Copyright should be non-exclusive. Anyone should be allowed to copy anything for free.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if some food journalists or whatever get to dine for free in restaurants. Goods for exposure is a valid business proposition. It is valid to reject it, too, but I don't understand the fuss.
If 37signals would feature me on their homepage for a week I would probably also give them some "free" work in exchange. No offense taken.
I guess the "problem" is that he was approached by people he did not deem worthy. Reminds me of women who complain about being approached all the time, but I suspect they wouldn't complain about being approached by Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Just saying it is not the approaching that is actually the problem, it is the who is doing the approaching.
I guess he only uses his camera, lens and PC once and then throws them away.
He makes a good point but his calculations are based on material goods only. The years of education and experience are surely far more valuable.
This comment cost me $2000 to write.
While I don't agree with the justification of the cost based on required tools to create the image. I do believe that the main value from the photograph is the user's creativity and passion for using the tools to capture the photograph.
This comment is not free. Using the same weird accounting method, it cost me around 1000$ to make. So what ?
If you don't want a file to be used, don't put it on internet. Understand what IT is, understand what it means to freely exchange information. You are right, you got free exposure, for free. That's why we get your image, for free. The information super-highways flow in both directions.
Discussion of fixed costs, variable costs, sunk costs, marginal costs, and opportunity costs and lots of other accounting and economics pricing models avoided.
But you should make sure your CFO can explain and your marketing department has a deep understanding.
And consider taking some accounting and micro-econ courses when you have the chance.
ESPECIALLY if you are the technical founder....
He forgot to add the cost of the sun. It took billions of year to make. And the clean environment. I hear that's priceless.
I enjoyed the article. It's a good reminder that the act of consuming creative work is far easier than its creation.
Too many people forget this and, IMHO, thereby fail to appreciate the creative work. Waxing poetic, but the view from the top of the mountain doesn't mean as near as much if you didn't climb up it.
The money figure doesn't matter. We could quibble over the dollar amount or the fact that even if I had all that great equipment I couldn't reproduce the photo myself. All of those pedantic arguments don't matter. The Intellectual Property value of the photo does.
I think we've reached(-ing) the point where freedom for all to publish isn't as magical as it was 5 or 10 years ago. Democracy of publishing is giving away to Capitalism of publishing. The new killer app isn't enabling people to publish or get exposure. It's a platform for getting people paid for their time and skills.
The problem is with the simple word free.
Well it depends on the way the photo is used. If i just save it as my wallpaper (I'd copy it from my browser cache, etc), it is free for me. Complaining about this makes no sense, or overlaying it with a transparent image..
But, if i, having done nothing in its creation, try to make some money from it (like putting it on a magazine), then the actual creator needs to get some value from what I gain. It will be the ethical thing to do. In this case John Mueller, will should morally have the right to accept or deny my request to reshare/use it.
Fundamentally - he should be paid because he has something valuable that other people want, and has value to them. The cost of his equipment, or skill as a photographer are immaterial - at the end of the day, at least in the western world, the amount that you can reasonably expect to charge for something is the intersection of what you are prepared to sell it for, and what someone is willing to pay for it. The fact that the person taking the picture paid $1,000, $10,000 or $100,000 for the resources (Training, Equipment, Time, etc...) to take the picture is completely irrelevant.
I took pictures at the Company Party last night. My EOS 7D cost me $1600. My Canon 17-55 IS USM lens cost me $1000. My MacBook Air Cost me $1600. Aperture Cost me $80. Acorn Cost me $50. My Card Flash Cost me $95. My DaneElec SDHC USB 2.0 card reader cost me $14.99, etc..
I spent 90 minutes taking pictures, 2 hours triaging and selecting, and 1 hour tweaking/adjusting those pictures - ending up with 20 out of about 400 original shots that the company placed in their event album.
I was paid $0 - because that was the intersection of what I wanted for them, and what the company was prepared to pay for them.
In all things financial - that should be the driving force as to what a transaction should take place at. If I can sell 100 megabytes software that costs $0.001 to transmit over the internet for $25,000 then that is fine as long as the buyer is will to pay $25,000 for the software and I'm willing to sell it for that much.
Some people take photographs because they just like taking photographs, like myself. If someone happened to use one of my photos, then so be it. I'm not in it to make money. I'm in it because I like the process of taking a photo, as well as editing it. After that, I'm done with it. Steal it! Remix it! Open source it!
All my photos on flickr have a Creative Commons license of "Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike". My photos have ended up on some great web sites: Rolling Stone, Yes Magazine, NY Magazine, city newspaper sites, random blogs, etc... I didn't receive one dime from them, but I did receive a link back to my flickr page in the photo credit. Even when they offered compensation, I turned them down.
Some people think that if they have fancy gear, they'll take better photos. This is not always the case. Photography is more art than having great gear. Does having a sweet ass laptop make you a better programmer? I don't have super fancy gear: A Canon T1i, and some pretty decent 2.8 lenses (Tamron 2.8 17-50, Sigma 2.8 70-200, Lens Baby, Canon 50mm 1.8). Any camera can take an award winning photo (I work for the largest stock photography company and have seen this to be true more times than not).
I would suggest that the capittal cost vs marginal cost is the wrong argument. Yes, its correct but the marginal cost of a single photo is soooo low you will never make any money back (expect perhaps with massively popular photos and very good DRM systems)
ANd this approach does need a DRM and all the attendant (SOPA?) legal framework
The article does mention the solution
"You would not expect your writers to work for free"
No - but writers work for commission. If you went out without any commission and took the photo, then you dont get paid for the photo. If a beach front hotel wanted a nice shot for its website and paid you 200USD to go do it, then you got paidf - and any extra resell value you make is a bonus
So, if you are in an industry where your work can be reproduced at near zero margins, you get paid in commission of the initial creation - not the ongoing rights sales. Some ancillary benefits may acrue (credit)
As someone who gets paid to write code, and also writes code for free (OSS), this difference is clear - and to be fair it is clear also to Madonna (couple of years ago she gave up rights for music sales to more of the cash from tours.)
There's an easy way to ensure no one "steals" your photograph: don't release it as a series of bits on a huge relatively unrestricted global network of computers. You can't have it both ways: having your photograph "out there" where everyone can see it, and still claiming absolute control over every single occurrence of that sequence of bits on every single device it ever gets copied to.
> As someone mentioned, THIS single photo didn’t cost me $6,612, but if you wanted to create it, from scratch, that is what is involved. So I consider it the replacement value if it’s stolen, or how much my lawyer will send you a bill for if it’s found being used without my permission.
I get it.
He is saying that he wants to charge the other person the amount it would cost FOR that other person to create this work from scratch (to buy all the equipment, etc).
But that's just one way to look at it, and it can roll down hill fast when you start including the cost of the amount of time and education that other person would need.
At the end of the day, when someone steals this photo, they don't also steal all the equipment and software that he used to create it. That remains as-is.
He would do better to claim copyright and ask for what he would charge x 3 (penalty) plus lawyer fees.
Actually considering that his computer, camera + lens, etc is basically a sunk cost and that in a free market the price can be expected to go to the marginal cost of producing the next photograph, he should expect to be paid $12 (since the gas isn't a sunk cost).
Works of art can have a monetary value - there is something called art market.
The value is determined by how much buyers are willing to pay as well as how much the sellers are willing to sell.
The monetary value of a copy of this low resolution jpeg file can only be determined by the market value.
You can't use replacement value to charge theft, because when someone "steal" it from the internet, they always copy it, you don't lose your origin one and thus no replacement is needed.
He included the cost of the camera, but only the cost of the gas, not the cost of the car. Why include the whole cost of the camera equipment, but only the operating cost, and barely that, of the car? To be consistent, he should include the total cost of the car.
Yeah. I get that the photo isn't free, but to include all costs related to it is a bit hyperbolic. That's not a six thousand dollar photo.
This post reminds me of many a childhood argument I had.
Honestly, that was a rubbish calculation! Price of the camera? Gas? Really?
The thing with any service that is heavily dependant on the person that does it, is that it cannot be priced by anyone other than the person doing it. How can you put a price on talent or skill or experience or luck or any of the non-material things that went into taking that picture? That picture is worth a million bucks if he says it is.
Does he expect to receive $6,612 each time anyone buys the photo, or $6,612 is the total amount needed to release the photo into public domain?
This webpage isn't free.
- Served from a $5,000 web server
- Data queried from a $10,000 database server
- Traffic routed via a $10,000 load balancer
- Traffic switched via a $2,000 switch
- Read on my $300 monitor
- Browser running on my $2000 workstation
etc, etc
I'm little confused here. Yes - you must not steal some others photos and post it. But this kind of photography is more like art and the bar for making it worth actual money is quite high - it has to have soul, meaning, etc.
tl;dr:
* Don't steal other people crap even it you consider it worthless
* Don't assume your stuff is worth something just because you spend some money making it
A Finnish tabloid's photo of the Angry Birds dress was illegally published in several places and sparked a similar discussion in Finland: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/12/08/world-media-infringe...
I don't understand this. Upload your image to a (micro)stock agency to sell it, then see how much it is really worth, i.e. how much people will pay for it in the free market. (Value and production cost are two very different things.) But making it available like this while claiming it's worth $6,612 seems naive to me at best.
weird argument. Being a photographer myself, I understand they need to be properly rewarded for their creativity, effort and more importantly time.. but this is not the way to put your point. On similar lines, any thing you are buying day to day will cost you a fortune..be it a Coffee or a candy.
All that equipment and and gas are not the valuable part of this photo. You pay the guy for knowing where this spot is and how to get a decent photo of it.
By insisting that the photo is "expensive" because it required all of that easily duplicate-able tech actually cheapens it.