Light Reading: An Indispensable Roadmap for Your Career

Over the course of several stints as a picture editor, I’ve seen a lot of the techniques photographers use to get the attention of prospective clients. Some are pretty effective. Some are just weird.

One afternoon a receptionist buzzed me to announce a photographer who’d walked in off the street to show me his portfolio. He claimed to have only one day in town, she told me. Could I spare the time? “What’s his name?” I asked.
“Raul.”
“Raul what?”
“Just Raul.”
“As in Raul the Magnificent, or just the Great Raul?”
I’d actually encountered this affectation before. It always prefigured a gigantic waste of my time. “Tell him I almost never see photographers who only go by one name. Unless he’s Karsh of Ottawa or WeeGee, he’s out of luck… ”
“Plus,” she whispers into the phone, “he’s wearing a black cape.”  
“He’s especially out of luck!”

Guides from the Real World
The co-authors of The Photographer’s Survival Guide, Suzanne Sease and Amanda Sosa Stone, don’t specifically target Raul’s obvious branding problem in this extraordinary and very timely release from trusty Amphoto Publishing. They do, however, address some other iterations of photographic hubris, opening each chapter with a couple of sobering, splash-in-the-face paragraphs subheaded, “Worst-Case Scenarios.” Chapter 3, for instance, titled Marketing, goes right to the career-deflating sin of arrogance with this worst case scenario: “After you send an e-promo, an art director clicks on your website and you follow up by phone, saying ‘I know you went to my website. Call me back so I know what project you want me for.’”
Usually the fatal flaw in these little vignettes is less dramatic, asleep at the switch sort of thing, as in Chapter 2, Presenting Yourself. One of its worst-case scenarios is: “You want your images to stand out, so you order a 16 x 20-inch portfolio. Viewers hate it.”  The authors point out that the average art staffer works in a cubicle: “When your opened portfolio spans 32 inches and knocks over everything on the desk, you have not made a good first impression.”

Sease and Stone adroitly sift out scores of such easily overlooked fundamentals from their personal real world experience as high-end agency art buyers. Now teamed together as consultants and seminar leaders for serious professional photographers, they’ve compiled an indispensable roadmap for your photography career called The Photographer’s Survival Guide, using practical techniques and behaviors to navigate through today’s evolving media environment. There are case studies using the work of contemporary shooters to demonstrate problem solutions in knotty areas like website creation, pricing, negotiating and maintaining client relationships. The book is energetically paced, generously illustrated with work samples, computer screen graphics, tabletops of portfolio and promotional materials, and there’s an appendix of sample forms and list formats—budgets, call sheets, model and property releases—all of which are reprised in an accompanying CD, sleeved in the back cover, with templates for 21 essential business forms the reader can download and custom fit to his or her specific needs.

One standout feature of Survival Guide, is a running series of boxed-off Q & A sidebars that punctuate every chapter and speak to real issues: “What tips do you have for photographers who send out email blasts or otherwise communicate with you by email?” with an accompanying reply by a senior art producer at Campbell-Mithun in Minneapolis; or, “How often do you call in books for jobs?” followed by replies from art buyers representing three different East Coast ad agencies.

The guide’s breezy, conversational tone (for instance, “You get the job, but have no idea where to start. You ask your mom to call the art buyer and tell her you are sick.”) almost obscures the copious amount of solid, no-nonsense information it manages to pack in: a list of portfolio makers, a glossary of usage terminology, a national directory of photographic marketing consultants, breakdowns of the management hierarchy of editorial mastheads and ad agencies. For its $30 cover price, The Photographer’s Survival Guide easily delivers the equivalent of a year’s worth of far more costly professional association dues or pricey tickets to “career-building” seminars.

The book is on store shelves now. It belongs on yours.

Ah, Youth
There came a moment as I entered my emeritus years, when I finally acknowledged that there had to be a few talented photographers around who were born too late to remember the Eisenhower administration.

Actually many generations, most in fact, now qualify with, as it always goes, another emerging to swell the ranks as we speak. The photographic legacy they’re inheriting grows more diversified and complex almost by the day. It is at these young shooters, children born under the moon of digital signal processing, that 17-year old photographer-cum-blogster Charlie Styr and writer/editor Maria Wakem have targeted another new Amphoto title: Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now.

This is the first serious attempt I’ve seen to reach this audience in a voice that’s a click above patronizing “My First Camera” babytalk. The talented Styr launched Flickr’s Teenage Photographers group three years ago, and with Wakem, a PDN editorial alum, they’ve deftly identified two bandwidths for talking photography to young people. One, of course, involves the ease with which new generations handle digital technology and a hodgepodge range of gear from DSLRs to camera phones. The other—and it’s in dramatic evidence in this book’s lively illustrations—is the high-energy, hang-the-rules aesthetic of music videos and YouTube.

Stylistically, the look is undisciplined, but the information these authors have at their command is anything but. Ultimately, Click  is an intelligent compendium of technical and creative advice that applies to photographers of any era. All the evergreens are represented: the rule of thirds, ISOs, selective focus, fill flash, shutter speed manipulation, and, naturally, the universe of postproduction. But in every chapter, these youthful authors have tried to put an inventive spin on even conventional shooting situations: “Three’s a Crowd” (group portraits), “My So-called Life” (shooting everyday moments), “Life Magnified” (macro shots), etc.  
Whether you buy this book for your own kids, or some promising young assistant, or just as insight into the the visual aesthetic of this enormous and important demographic, you’ll find in Click a sparkling take on photography as a way of teaching young people how to see.

More Information:
Amanda Sosa Stone and Suzanne Sease
The Photographer’s Survival Guide:
How to Build and Grow a Successful Business
Amphoto Books
(www.watsonguptill.com/index_amphoto.php)
224 pp.

Charlie Styr and Maria Wakem
Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now
Amphoto Books
(www.watsonguptill.com/index_amphoto.php)144 pp.

Veteran commercial photographer and travel writer Jim Cornfield is based in Malibu Canyon, CA. Formerly the feature editor of Petersen’s PHOTOgraphic, and Director of Photography for East/West Network, he is a regular contributor to Rangefinder.