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I got an email this week from a magazine to me as webmaster of the Friends of Milton Country Park web site. No subject but it read:
Is it possible to get some high res images of the Milton Country Park? It's for a unique winter breaks feature in Christmas Feast magazine,
Many thanks,
Fiona
Fiona ******, Editorial Assistant
I've starred out her surname, and I won't mention the name of the company she works for either as they're by no means unique in asking this sort of thing as my reply reveals:
[...] the obvious question is: are you expecting these images for free or are you prepared to pay?
Bitter experience suggests the former in which case I can't help you and I suggest you try Flickr, although a lot of the good photographers are no longer giving away their photos there like they used to so you may well end up paying anyway.
However in the unlikely event that you do have a budget for this then we do have a great many photos of the Park and I'm sure we can come to some arrangement at standard commercial rates. If so do you have any feel for what sort of subject matter you're looking for?
--
Regards
Paul Oldham
http://www.the-hug.co.uk
Her reply, was that it was to be included in a Cambridge section of a Christmas themed magazine and that
I'm afraid I lost interest at that point. She's a commercial company selling a national magazine so its readership is very poorly matched with the Park's (which is very local as the Park has no unique features, 80% of visitors come from Cambridge or the surrounding villages) so it wasn't going to be particularly great PR for the Park. I replied, saying (as I'd said in the first place) that I had to earn a living, just like her, so I couldn't help her.
But as you'll gather from my first email to her this sort of thing is all too common now. How commercial photographers make a living I've no idea. At least she had the decency to ask first, some people haven't in the past.
And if they ask and you reply saying "sure, how much?" some of them don't even bother to say "sorry, no budget".
The only saving grace is that we are to some extent protected from print use as they need significantly higher resolution images than for web use.
Even then I've been given the run around before. I had an advertising agency who, after a lot of messing about and we'd agreed a price and I'd sent them an image then claimed they didn't need it any more and hence weren't going to pay me.
Is it any wonder I'm not very helpful to people looking for photos?
| Tags: photos, web design | Written 28/10/08 |
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