The New Year Post 2013

Time to assess last year—ok, well. past time by about two weeks. It doesn't bode well for 2013.

First, the overall picture. Since I started this blog, number of posts per year is:

2008: 88 (which was in half of a year)

2009: 118

2010: 73

2011: 76

2012:  *gulp* 45

Notice any trends? And then there's the fact that I feel like I should begin the blog with a confessional ("It's been more than a month since my last post.")

The average life span of a photoblog is two years. Actually, I just made that up. I have no idea what the lifespan of a photoblog is, but as a reader, I have seen many of them come and go. Will mine be next? Probably not. Will my posting become more frequent this year? I guess we'll see.

So, on to the day of reckoning for last year's goal....

2012 was to be the year of shameless commercialism. After my artsy "epic fail" project of 2011 during which I learned that success in gallery shows can be expensive, I vowed to devote myself to the commercial realm. The screen shot above (from art.com) shows that it was the year of black-and-white Paris photos over vintage text and the year of dogs. The year was off to a good start when about 10,000 prints sold in January. Things kept going (but at a slower pace) for the rest of the year, and then in May, I ran into a postcard rack with two of my dog prints.

I must be rolling in cash from all those sales, right? Not really, since my royalty payment is a modest percentage of wholesale. Not that I'm complaining (just trying to give an accurate picture). I know that some photographers only dream of galleries and high end art sales (and I'd love that, too), but I dream of seeing my photos on the art aisle of Target (or some similar store). 

Advice to the new photographer—you can earn more money doing weddings. Nevertheless, I'm drifting away from the wedding market—at least at my old prices. I've decided that the absolute cheapest package I will now offer is $1800. The mid-range package (with album, engagement, wedding, etc. pretty much everything you really need) is $3400. The price increase, while not enormous compared to some (Jonathan Canlas, anyone?), definitely puts me out of the range of a lot of potential clients. Raising prices in bad economic times is a risky move, but I have a limited amount of time and my old prices just led me to resent the work. 

Speaking of risky price increases, let's talk about Smugmug. 

When Smugmug decided to double their annual fees for pro accounts with no corresponding increase in features/service, many people started looking for alternatives. Being a huge Smugmug fan, my response was to save money by attempting to customize my smugmug site to the point where I could dump my regular .com and hosting plan, thereby offsetting the price hike and streamlining my web presence. I spent hours trying to tweak code in Smugmug, but never finished and am not happy with the results so far. I still have until April to downgrade or abandon Smugmug before my annual renewal. So far, I'm pretty disappointed with Smugmug—not with their stellar customer service, but with the fact that they don't provide stylish website templates (just *meh* themes). Yes, you can tweak the code like crazy if you have the skills, but I don't have time to master java, CSS, and whatnot.

Back to last year's goals...

Last year, I said I would do an occasional tutorial (I did. not often.), some posts about books I'm reading, a "variety of projects," and hopefully some "real-life retouch" posts. The real-life retouch didn't happen, so I make no promises this year.

Also related to last year, my pathetic attempt at monetizing my blog with skimlinks has thus far earned me enough money to buy a couple of albums on iTunes. I'm sure I would have done better had I written more posts and spent more time trying to promote products, but hey—it's still money and I haven't cluttered my blog with ads, so I see no reason to remove skimlinks.

A word about Pinterest

On Jan 1, 2012 I had 146 followers on Pinterest. Today, I have 1,710. The ease of pinning (vs. writing posts) and the immediate satisfaction of seeing "likes" and "repins" and increasing numbers of followers means that I have more incentive to pin than to post. I can blame Pinterest, at least in part, for my decrease in blog posts, but I don't see it ever replacing my blog.

So what's this year's goal?

I don't know. To be honest, the Sundance film festival starts this week which means I will be watching movies non-stop for the rest of the month. I knew that if I didn't force myself to do this post tonight, then I might never do it—which ultimately shows that I still maintain at least some degree of commitment to my blog.

So if I force myself to come up with a goal, here, on the spot?

Portraiture. I want to get back to portraiture, preferably starting with my own kids. You can therefore expect:

• one or more posts about my quest to redo a photo wall in my home
• some portrait inspiration and experimentation
• the occasional tutorial
• ???

And in a project unrelated to photography, 2013 will hopefully see this parked domain turn into the promotional vehicle for an amazingly cool French book (sort of the anti-textbook French textbook that will make pedagogues gnash their teeth and cry out in horror) I am writing (with boy-wonder Andrew of crustaceansingles.com ) for iPads everywhere. 

That's as ambitious as this year gets. If you've made it to the end of this post, thanks, loyal reader! So nice of you to indulge my yearly New Year's rambling. I hope to repay you sometime this year with inspiration of some kind.

I'll be back post-Sundance.

An Art Print and Licensing Story

A few posts ago I mentioned the dilemma of how much commercial stuff to share. But then I also said that my impulse tends toward disclosure, so I'm going to give you a true story of a commercial endeavor and in my next post, a tutorial.

And now, the true story of the commercial endeavor.

Remember this post?

Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

No? Well, it's been repinned a billion times on Pinterest. The summer of 2011 my wife and I bought an old window frame and I knew that I wanted to use it for photos. It just so happened that a massive old dictionary I have had pages that fit nicely. I printed some black and white Paris photos directly onto select pages, tacked them onto the wall with old upholstery pins, and hung the window frame on top. I posted a tutorial on it, which subsequently got pinned an re-pinned on Pinterest.

From my wall to the mass market
Obviously, I liked them enough to put them in my own house, so I decided I might as well try out their commercial appeal. I am under exclusive contract with Wild Apple Graphics for all things mass-market, so I sent a link of the blog post to the art director along with some sample images. And I figured it couldn't hurt to mention that it was "trending on Pinterest."

The submissions process is somewhat mysterious. From my end, it goes like this: I make some art, I send it (usually via email), they get back to me (mostly) and tell me if they think it fits their needs (I'm sure they know the market better than I do. It is their job, after all.) Next, I prep the files in the appropriate size (often, this has been either 27x27 inch for the square ones and 16x20 for portrait) and then upload them via ftp.

On their end...who knows? Do they print them out and throw them in the air and read them like tea leaves? Do they meet in a boardroom and decide what they like? Does the owner's pet llama have any influence? I couldn't tell you. I know that they work (selling wholesale) with hundreds of clients and go to various trade shows. I know that they run things by some clients to test the waters. Some of the photos they have me upload are never seen again (such as some book prints that I love), and others make it into the catalog. More on that mystery in the future...

A file I once submitted that apparently failed to impress. Source: takeoutphoto.blogspot.com via Marc on Pinterest

Finally, after a few months, a royalty check arrives with an itemized statement that shows me how many of which prints have sold (but it doesn't say which companies have purchased them, for whatever reason). Art licensing royalty rates are not high, but I have no complaints because I realize how many people (and possibly, llamas) are involved in the marketing, printing, and distribution of my photos. In January, for example, about 11,000 of my prints sold. If I thought there were any way I could sell that many prints by myself, I probably would, but that is hard to pull off as one person. Even when my ABC Paris photos were featured on Design*Sponge (which, incidentally, is what got me the contract in the first place), the sales from all of that publicity were relatively modest.

A Paris dog print that has done well.

Source: fulcrumgallery.com via Marc on Pinterest

From printer to digital files
Back to the dictionary print story...I shipped a bunch of actual prints on dictionary paper (and others on paper from old art magazines (circa 1899) that I bought at a Paris flea market years ago. The printing was a nightmare. The printer heads often hit against the edges of the old paper (the dreaded "head strike" that made the manager of the print lab cringe) and I lost of few of my favorite pages to misfeeds, margin errors, etc. One day, I sent my assistant to run off some prints and half of them came back upside-down (not his fault). The ones that worked were shipped off to Wild Apple, where the best of those were digitized. I don't have the files on hand, but you can see an example here.

Source: art.com via Marc on Pinterest

That was the hard way. Once I started to prepare new files, I did it digitally, as in the "Paris" typographic photo above. This was so much easier to do. If you are pretty good with Photoshop, you can easily figure out how I did it. If you're wondering how to save yourself from the headache of misfeeds and other printing nightmares, stay tuned. In my next post, I'll show you how it's done.

If you want to see more, you can check out some of my prints at art.com.