Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Photogs
Or “Bryanna Bradley’s gone surfing”.
It’s a difficult time for a young person starting out in the photography business. Jobs are scarcer than ever before and freelance rates have been stagnant for the last 10 years or so. There was a time the best and brightest coming out of photography programs at schools like Loyalist College or Ryerson University could reasonably expect that within 5 to 10 years of building up their credibility freelancing for a wire service or daily paper, there would be a staff job as pay off for all the sacrifices to their personal life that freelancing demands. Schools have always turned out more photo graduates than there have ever been jobs, but the cream would always rise to the top and get work. All that’s changing.
Several different factors have woven together to create this situation. first and most obvious, newspapers have been hurting worse and worse now that the internet has become a prime source of news, information and opinion. Advertising market share continues to decline in many markets and newspapers that once had robust photography departments have had to make do with far fewer staff photographers than in the past. Major daily newspapers like the Toronto Sun and Journal de Montreal (both Quebecor properties) now have as few as 4 staff photographers when they both had well over a dozen. at the Gazette we have cut back from a high of 10 shooters down to 7.
At the same time the internet was changing the way newspapers had to do business, digital photography was being perfected. at its birth, digital newspaper photography consisted of big, clunky 3 or 4 megapixel cameras with terrible shutter lag, slow motor drives and horrible color rendition, with a price tag in excess of $12,000 per body. in addition, we had to now start carrying computers everywhere with expensive programs like Photoshop. 320 meg memory cards cost upwards of $600. All that has changed in the last 5 years. Professional quality cameras can be had for around $2000 and really good digital slr’s like the EOS Rebel T2i go for less than $800. Memory cards are also dirt cheap. Most importantly, all the automatic functions on current cameras are so good that just about anybody can shoot a reasonably sharp, well exposed photo. Much of the craft of becoming a photographer has been simplified by technology. People who used to hire photographers now do it themselves. Ask any wedding photographer how many times a potential client has told them “I have a friend who has a good camera that takes nice photos. We’ve decided to have him/her take the photos at our wedding”.
Next, in parallel with the internet and the popularization of digital cameras is the rise of the large photography agencies like Corbis and Getty. they have bought large collections of photographs and have also bought much of the stock and photo agency competition. Getty, for instance, now owns iStockphoto, Tony Stone Images, Allsport and Jupitermedia, among others. The concentration of photography in the hands of a few large agencies has driven down the value of photography. Photos can be licensed for as little as $25. It’s ironic that with everyone having a camera in their cellphone and many people carrying point and shoot cameras everywhere they go, photography has probably never been more popular, and probably never worth less.
Mix all of this together and you get another thing killing the photography market for young people, the serious amateur who will work for free or far less than a professional will charge. They’ve got a decent camera with a decent telephoto lens and a nice wide zoom. they take photos on their own time and are happy to share their work with anyone who flatters them by complimenting them on a nice image. they have day jobs and another source of income. they don’t have to rely on photography to make their car payments or pay off student loans; anything they can get for an image is gravy. they post hundreds of images on Flikr or some other photo-hosting website and get a thrill when they get a paycheck for a photo that sold for 25 bucks. one such person started offering his services to the Bell Centre and the company promoting concerts there and worked for free just for the kick of shooting the concert and rubbing shoulders with pro shooters. meanwhile, the struggling freelancer who used to get paid to shoot the shows has to split the work with Mr. Work for Free. There’s a debate raging on the message board at Sportsshooter.com about wages being paid (or in some cases not paid) by US Presswire about this very issue. I recently heard about someone offering to shoot weddings on one of the free classified ad sites. The pitch was: get a quote from a wedding photographer and this person would shoot the wedding for half of that quote.
Now, to get back to the first line of this post: Bryanna Bradley was our photo intern at the Gazette in the summer of 2010. a graduate of the photojournalism program at Loyalist College and a native of the Ottawa area, she came to us barely out of her teens and displayed a photographic maturity far beyond her age. After her internship she stayed around Montreal hoping to develop her skills further and build a reputation and a freelance business. Last month she left to go surfing in Hawaii for six months. at the tender age of 21 she was daunted by the lack of immediate prospects for furthering her career in photojournalism. too many photographers vying for too little work for too little money. She hopes to pick up her career again but for now, the prospect of winter months when she might earn less than $1000 is a lot less appealing than surfing.
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