Favorite Blogs and Websites
- Managing Your Digital Life Dealing with and using all the electronic stuff we accumulate
- Photofocus Formerly TWIP… photographic news and reviews
The Strobist
THE place to go to to learn about lighting… Also a lot of info on making your own photo gear.
Tag Archives: Gulf Air
“Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness.” — John Heywood
Remember my conversations with Ink Publishing? It seems that they aren’t the only company trying to get something for nothing. The website “The Photography Biz” wrote an article a couple of years ago about the value of giving away a photograph in exchange for “a photo credit… Their opinion? I think the title says it all:
Why photo credit lines aren’t worth the paper they’re written on
Since the advent of digital more and more people are making images. That’s a good thing. The downside is that the explosion of photo sharing sites like Flickr and PBase have created a ready made amateur market for business savvy publishers to exploit.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re not doing anything illegal. They are simply playing on the fact that there are lots of new image producers in the marketplace who don’t have the first clue that their images are worth anything, and they are banking on the fact that “being published” is reward enough on its own.
Read the rest of their piece here… Highly recommended (as is the website), if only to get the link of Harlan Ellison ranting…
Gulf Air’s side of the argument
One of the places I asked for advice regarding Gulf Air’s offer of paying for one of my photos with only a photo credit was the TWIP forums on Flickr. Ms Cathay somehow found out about the post and wrote her side of the story…
Ink Publishing often contacts people on Flickr. We have very small budgets and as contract publishers we do not make the huge amount of money you seem to have worked out above. We only use flickr when we are finding it hard to find the image we need on a photolibrary, so it is usually obscure things (such as your tree of life). You are under no obligation to give the image. I should point out to you however, that a photo credit, especially in magazines with as high a readership as ours, is not worthless and I have myself commissioned many a photographer by seeing a photo I like in a magazine and then googling the photographer. Also we often keep flickr photographers on file who have sent us images and commission them in the future should we trust in their standard of photography and ease of dealing with them.
hope this helps with your query
Helen Cathcart
Senior Picture Editor Ink Publishing
This hasn’t mollified those that were against the deal… As somone pointed out, I have trouble believing she’s going to pay me money in the future if she has a habit of searching for people to give her stuff for free…
“Which side are you on, which side are you on?”
A slight moral quandary…
Gulf Air magazine (one of those in flight magazines that try to sell you overpriced executive toys and gadgets) wants to use one of my pictures I took while in Bahrain.
The flip side is that the want to pay me with just a photo credit.
It’s not the lack of money that bothers me, per se…. I’m flattered they like the photo and thrilled to actually be in a magazine. However, if they get a photo from me for free, that means that some photographer that is actually trying to earn a living at his/her craft is going to be deprived of income. This has been a topic of discussion in many of the photography forums I frequent… I don’t want to be one of those guys who drive the prices down for everyone else. That’s almost as bad as scabbing.
On the other hand, I’ve never considered the photo to be commercially viable. It was one of the first pictures I took with my first digital camera. I don’t have it in a RAW format, and there is nothing outstanding about the shot. It’s just an average vacation photo (at best).
It would be nice to be published, and have this credit in my portfolio. It could drive traffic to my store (though I see that as very unlikely). I might be able to get some other work with the publishing company (Ink Publishing), since they have many inflight magazines for all over the world…
But do I shaft the photographic community by doing this?
In the end I decided to ask for compensation, even if it means being passed over for someone not as picky. I haven’t been rejected outright yet. While the editor is making remarks about how she has others under consideration that will allow publishing for free, I figure if she had a wide variety of choices we still wouldn’t be talking. I’ve just sent her two watermarked images for her layout person to play with, since she says the flicker images were too small to work with, and I don’t allow anyone to download different sizes (for a good reason, apparently…)
My decision hinged on three things. One, it didn’t matter what “everybody else” might do, I was responsible for my own actions, and the rightness or wrongness of them was separate from what the next person might do. Two, as others have pointed out, photocredit is pretty much worthless, especially on a plane where the viewer was unlikely to be able to act on the knowledge in any way. Three, Gulf Air magazine apparently makes 4 million a year and reaches 200,000 people a month… Why -can’t- they compensate me fairly?
I published this post in a couple of different places. One thing I found interesting was that the responses were more or less 50/50, even amoung pros and non-pros… I was expecting the people who earn a living from their photos to be a bit more hard core about “giving it away for free”, but I was wrong…. 
Updates provided as they happen…
Oh, and the picture in question…
The Tree of Life, Bahrain