Some Studio Shots of Fishing Lures
Here are a few digital tearsheets from a series of ads I photographed while I worked at Adventure ADV.
Saint Lucia Vacay part 3
As mentioned in part 1 and part 2, I went to Saint Lucia with my girlfriend, but it rained on us basically the whole time. The rain kind of dampened our plans for an awesome beach vacation, so instead we had a short kayaking expedition in the rain.
Saint Lucia Vacay – Part 2
As mentioned in part 1, I just got back from Saint Lucia with my girlfriend. We took a quick trip to celebrate her birthday and I also needed to work on my tan a little bit in preparation for the summer. Unfortunately it rained almost the entire time and we barely saw the sun, so I’m still ghostly white.
I also didn’t shoot very much because I was on vacation. Mostly I ate and slept. Here are a few random images though.
That drink above is my new favorite drink. It’s called a BBC- Banana, Baileys, Coconut Cream (all blended with ice)! I had a lot these. Thanks Marvin!
Be sure to check out part 1 and part 3 for the rest of my Saint Lucia vacation images.
Saint Lucia Vacation part 1
To celebrate my girlfriend‘s birthday we snuck off to St. Lucia for a few days. Most people don’t know much about Saint Lucia, including me. Almost everything I know about it can be learned from looking at this google map. We stayed in the northern tip of the island but the airport is in the south, so we had a lengthy commute and I shot pictures from the front seat of our shuttle.
The roads were pretty sketchy in some parts because there was a hurricane that hit the island in October of 2010 and it did some extensive damage.
Unfortunately that commute was the only time we really saw the sun for the rest of the trip. It rained on us for the next 3 days.
More images coming in part 2 and part 3.
Headshot for Lyla
So my good friend and an amazing designer/strategist/genius, Lyla, asked me to shoot a new headshot for her website! I was more than happy to help out. Here are two selects!
Photography ‘contest’ = Bad Deal for Photographers
Many photography contests are just bad deals for photographers. This is an excerpt from an email I received as a member of a local photography group.
My name is Alex Doubet, and I’m contacting you on behalf of US Road Sports & Entertainment Group (USRS). We own & operate the Publix Georgia Marathon (coming up on 3/20/11; ~18k participants) and the Atlanta 13.1 Half Marathon (10/2/11; ~4k participants).
We are starting a photo contest for our Atlanta-area marathons. The theme of the contest is “The Spirit of the Endurance Athlete”. The contest will function as follows: Any and all photographers may enter. They will be given a photographer access badge, and will take photos of the event, trying to best capture the theme of the contest.
One winner per event, decided upon by USRS, will be awarded a prize of $150. The winner will also be entered into our grand prize contest, competing against the winners of the photo contests in our other 13, nationwide races. The grand prize winner will have his or her work emailed out to our entire email database (125,000-150,000 people) with their name attached to the photo.
We are looking forward to making this photo contest a huge success, and we think it will be a great opportunity for your members to potentially reach a massive audience. As a condition of entrance, we require only the right to duplicate and use all photos taken for promotional purposes.
This is a terrible deal for photographers, as are many photography contests. The problem I have with this is that it is such a blatant attempt to create an awesome photo library for promotional campaigns for about the cost of a decent camera and lens. ($2250 = 15 events x $150 prize/event)
Not only is the ‘prize’ of $150 not even enough to get me off the couch, it’s only a little more than making minimum wage if you add up the hours spent shooting and the hours spent editing. SO, if you decide to risk the potential of damage to your gear, and you shoot some good images, and you happen to win the ‘prize’, you get an insultingly small outlay of cash in exchange for handing over unlimited usage of your ‘prize winning’ shot, and every other picture you took that day. If you happen to be one of the many photographers who didn’t win the meager $150 ‘prize’, then you’re handing over unlimited usage of your images in exchange for… nothing.
Let’s do some simple projections and figure out how big this image library is going to be. Let’s assume 50 photographers participate at each event, and let’s assume each photographer submits 100 images at the end of the day. That’s 5000 images per stop and there are 15 stops, for a total of 75,000 images. Some of those images are going to suck. Honestly, I think most of those images are going to suck… So let’s be really critical as to what goes into this new image library and assume 1 out of 10 makes the cut. That leaves 7500 supposedly high quality images for this image library.
Ok, so the total prize cash adds up to $2250. Let’s assume a contest marketing budget of the same amount of $2250 for a total contest cost of $4500. That comes out to a cost of 60 cents per image. And remember these are good images. That’s a lot cheaper than buying stock images. Istock charges at minimum around $1 per image.
My favorite part of this whole thing is actually the Grand Prize.
The grand prize winner will have his or her work emailed out to our entire email database (125,000-150,000 people) with their name attached to the photo.
So if you’ve created the best photo from all 15 events, your image will be used in a newsletter with your name attached. That is not a prize. That’s standard usage and they should be paying you a fee in order to license your image for their newsletter. I’d suggest for an email newsletter that size and assuming they use it on the web as well, and assuming a two year licensing agreement, a fee in the range of $2000 is very fair. For THAT single image. Any other images will need their own licensing agreements.
It is the goal of US Road Sports & Entertainment Group to scam photographers into handing over usage rights for their images with no compensation. The $150 ‘prize’ is a joke and no photographer that values their work should consider participating in this charade.
I don’t think all photography contests are scams, but any contest that asks for usage rights, especially on non-winning images, should be considered a scheme to get quality images for really cheap. Do your homework and read the fine print. Your images are valuable. Protect them.
I do have a suggestion for US Road Sports & Entertainment Group if they want to build an image library in a way that is fair to both sides.
Step 1- Create a Flickr group.
Step 2- Allow anyone to upload images to it.
Step 3- Allow anyone who wants to shoot the event to shoot it.
Step 4- Encourage them to upload shots to the Flickr group.
Step 5- Browse the results, select the best images.
Step 6- Negotiate deals with the individual photographers.
Step 7- Buy only the best images for a fair price and everyone is happy.
Or here is a crazy idea… Hire a professional photographer to shoot your events.
Stalking the light
One of the things I teach people about photography is that sometimes they should be finding and shooting the light instead of chasing subjects. The light can be your subject. It makes ordinary things much more interesting. Here are some examples I shot at the office recently.
My first same gender wedding shoot
I love shooting weddings because it’s such a happy event for everyone there! People love getting photographed at a wedding because they are all spiffed up and looking good! It makes my job easy and pleasurable! You can check out the rest of my wedding work at www.kendrickdischweddings.com.
Recently I had the honor of second shooting a same gender wedding alongside CJ of mossandisaac.com. It was small but super fun! Here are a few selects.
Charlee and Widget
Trying to shoot more randoms this year and sometimes you just gotta go to the old standby of shooting your pets…
Here’s my dog Charlee enjoying her Valentines day bone from her secret admirer. Below that is Widget, the mischievous cat from upstairs.
Facebook limits page discoverability
Facebook limits page discoverability.
Pages are the business version of a profile. I’ll use the two companies I founded as examples here, (Create/Explore Workshops, Workshoppers.org). Neither of these two companies has a marketing budget, so I must find ways to promote that don’t cost anything. Facebook is one of my options. My primary goal for being on Facebook is to spread awareness for my two young brands.
The problem is that Facebook goes out of their way to limit how effective having a Facebook page actually is. I’m finding that natural discovery of my brands is limited and communications with the fans is also very naturally limited. So here’s one example of what I mean.
Let’s pretend that I’m interested in seeing what pages my friends like. Exactly what Facebook is for right? Ok, so let’s use my profile as an example so we can see what pages I like. First I have to find and click ‘info’ on side under my picture and this is the relevant area of what I see. 
So to even see what pages I’ve liked in the past, I have to click “Show Other Pages”. And this is what I see.
Ok, so what’s wrong with that? It’s not in any sort of order that I can figure out. Not chronological, not alphabetical, not popularity, not in any sort of order that I can see.
Also, separating only by commas makes it really hard to read. Not inviting for me to actually read through that list at all.
Also, that’s not my whole list. I bet you didn’t notice that the very last item in that list says “and 116 more”
So to see my whole list you have to click it and you’ll get the entire list of pages I’ve liked.
Can you find Alicia Kidd Photography? It’s in there somewhere. Good luck finding it because there is no order and it’s hard to find anything in that non readable list. The chances of me spending more than 2 seconds scrolling that list is nearly 0%.
Now as a comparison for how it could be improved, here’s the groups I’m in. Still not perfect, but so much easier to read! I’d really prefer to see thumbnails too.
My point is that it’s the businesses on Facebook that drive the commerce and allow Facebook to exist in the first place. It’s really important that people are able to find pages.
I have many more thoughts about this particular topic and I’ll go into them in further blog posts.
TJ at christmas 2010
Here’s a cute picture of my nephew TJ that I shot during Christmas. He refused to smile for me and if I really started pushing him he would change the subject by pointing at the lights and saying “lights!”. You had to be there.
Beautiful Day in Atlanta
It’s a beautiful day here in Atlanta. The rain we had last week washed away the cold and dark winter and left us with an optimistic taste of spring!
