Cameras

Photography: Gil Plaquet

There are few moments more exciting, more thrilling and more satisfying than your first paid photo shoot. And if that first shoot is a wedding, there are also few moments more nerve-wracking. A couple have hired you to document the most important day of their lives. They?ve trusted you to produce the pictures that will spark their memories, record their celebrations and which they?ll show their children and grandchildren in the years to come.

Get a portrait shoot wrong and the client will go to another photographer. Get a wedding shoot wrong and there are no second chances. The couple will have nothing but poor shots to remember their day ? and nothing but word-of-mouth criticism to offer other couples instead of positive recommendations.

And wedding shoots aren?t easy. They can last for hours, require the co-operation of dancing, boozy guests and demand lots of preparation and plenty of post-production. But they are the bread and butter of many photography businesses and for good reason. While retail firms may cut back on their product photography and magazines can reduce their budget for editorial images, people will always get married. And they?ll always be willing to splash out when they do.

My Mother?s Friend?s Wedding

Winning that first job though is perhaps the hardest part. Without a portfolio of shots to show a client, persuading a couple that you have the temperament to handle the pressure and the skills to create the photos isn?t easy. Many photographers, in fact, begin by shooting for friends or family, people who already know and trust them.

Gil Plaquet, a journalism student who usually shoots for StampMedia and occasionally for local Belgian newspaper Gazet Van Antwerpen, recently completed his first wedding shoot. He picked up the job through family connections.

?They were friends of my mom?s who knew about my photography and wondered if I wanted to document their very special day for them,? he told us. ?I was honored to do so, met up with them, showed them my portfolio and discussed pricing and the itinerary with them.?

To fix the prices Gil contacted a friend who had done wedding shoots in the past and followed his rates, lowering them a little because it was his first job. He also managed to upsell the clients an interactive DVD and a dedicated website to show off their images. Other photographers though have been known to shoot their first job for free in return for the portfolio. Joanna LeMasters, for example, shot her first wedding in December 2008 as a wedding gift to a former colleague. The couple agreed that she would use the photos in her portfolio and they would link and credit each photo to her.

Although she didn?t regret that choice, it took Joanna about half an hour after arriving at the church to decide that the work and planning involved in wedding photography meant that this would be the last time she shot for a gift.

Guests Placed My Posed Photos Online in a Day

When it came to the shoot itself, Joanna did have the advantage of having assisted her father, a professional photographer, at wedding jobs in the past. Gil, despite also coming from a family of photographers, hadn?t even attended a wedding for a number of years. Both were surprised at the co-operation they received from guests. People were generally willing to do as they were asked, Joanna found, and even the minister asked her how the wedding was going to go and when she wanted him for the shoot. The only trouble came when she chose to take the posed photos of the wedding party immediately after the ceremony.

?The subjects were very willing to obey. The guests who remained inside the church caused some problems though,? she recalled. ?The groom and bride asked them more than once to quiet down and stop taking pictures. Still, some of my posed photos showed up on the Internet less than 24 hours after the wedding via the other guests? cameras.?

Joanna can probably put that down to experience and now recommends that photographers get the posing and special requests out of the way as early as possible while there?s still light and before the celebrations begin. She also suggests using a flash for everything to save on post-production, taking multiple shots whenever possible, and above all, remembering that you?re the photographer, not a guest. While that means you have to wolf down the food quickly at the reception ? a good opportunity, she discovered, for candid shots ? it does provide a little leeway to be pushier than others. You can interrupt the couple to ask them to pose, suggest that subjects adjust their hair and clothes before you shoot and stand with your back to other guests as they take their own pictures. Gil too discovered the value of discussing the itinerary with the couple before the shoot, knowing exactly what they expect, and making sure that you?re properly equipped with enough batteries to get you through the day and either a versatile lens or multiple cameras. The practice at shooting portraits and documenting events was useful, he noted, and of course, the extra money was certainly helpful too.

Despite the difficulties, both Gil and Joanna indicated that they did have a good time shooting their first wedding and would want to do it again the future. And having done it once, winning the second job should be a lot easier too.

?All in all, I enjoyed the experience,? said Joanna. ?Giving them the finished product and reading/hearing compliments on your work is very rewarding. The nice thing about shooting a wedding is that there are often quite a few friends of the happy couple who will soon be getting married themselves.?

Digital imaging changed everything. The darkroom turned into a Mac, rolls of film capable of holding no more than 36 pictures became plastic rectangles capable of holding  hundreds of shots, image selection began to take place immediately after the shoot, photographs could be delivered to clients at the click of a button, and deadlines became tighter than ever.

And of course, new sales channels opened up, allowing anyone with a camera and talent to put their work in front of buyers, revolutionizing the world of commercial photography.

So what happens now?

It would be nice to believe that after the upheavals of recent years, we can all take a breather, get used to the new ways of working and spend our time figuring out how to make the most of them. But life doesn?t work that way. The photography world is still changing. Smaller microstock sites like DigitalRailroad and LuckyOliver have found that selling images at a buck a piece isn?t as easy as it looks. Larger firms like PhotoShelter have discovered that buyers don?t always know what they want ? or don?t buy what they say they like. And there?s still plenty of room for improvement in image searching, display and purchasing.

Consolidating Three Million Images

One new trend then might be seen in BrightQube. Launched in 2007 and headed by Lee Corkran, a former professional photographer who has also worked for Digital Railroad, the service has few images of its own. Instead, it consolidates more than three million stock photos from more than 40 different companies, including Corbis, Jupiter Image?s Comstock and Getty?s Stockbyte as well as many independent niched firms such as GoGo Images and Photo India.

For buyers who don?t want to flip from site to site while looking for images, that already makes BrightQube a useful portal. But the service also stands out in the way that it displays search results. Instead of offering page after page of images, ordered usually according to a secret recipe of keyword relevance, views and downloads, BrightQube presents what it calls a ?Dynamic Mosaic? interface ? a giant, automatic-loading, animated wall of thumbnails which buyers can navigate with their arrow keys or a navigational grid, zooming in on the images that look the most promising. According to Lee, the system, which looks like a two-dimensional version of PicLens, allows customers to search ?hundreds of times faster than on other sites.?

Images are initially ordered by keywords, with the most relevant photographs placed in the middle of the mosaic, but buyers can then choose to order the images by price or size.

[P]hotographers working with collections large and small can be assured their images will appear on a single, equitable page of search results, in front of buyers? eyes, giving every picture a fighting chance to be found, seen and sold,? Lee told us.

But first, photographers have to get their images onto the wall, and that?s where things can get a little tricky. In a May interview with SocalTech, Lee indicated that the company was experimenting with adding user-generated content and that a private beta would be available in early fall. When we asked him in mid-November whether independent photographers could submit their images to the site though, Lee merely said:

?Not at the moment, but we are looking into this feature in the future.?

The Back Door to the Mosaic Wall

In the  meantime, photographers will have to use some indirect routes. While some of the companies from which BrightQube sources its images have the kind of acceptance standards that could block non-professionals, BrightQube does divide its inventory into two collections. ?Everyday? images are microstock photos sourced from Dreamstime; ?professional? images come from everyone else. The lack of exclusivity in microstock means that the service offers photos from just one low-cost royalty-free site: buyers looking for ?everyday? photos would likely end up looking at a wall made up of identical photos.

The easiest way for a photographer to get their photos onto BrightQube?s wall then will be to submit them to Dreamstime, giving the company an important advantage if the service takes off. It would also help to make sure that the photos show the right subjects. According to Lee, the  most popular keywords currently being sought by buyers are ?woman,? ?couple,? ?young,? ?business? and ?wildlife? ? broad enough categories to suit most photographers.

The remaining question then is whether the service will take off. One of the reasons put forward by Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, to explain the collapse of his company?s stock division was the subscription model that locked buyers into companies that they?ve used in the past; changing sources in the middle of a month risked a financial penalty. That?s still a challenge that BrightQube will have to overcome. At the moment, they?re not sharing their sales figures though so it?s impossible to gauge how well they?re doing that.

Even if BrightQube itself doesn?t turn out to be the future of stock photography though, it?s likely that future will include faster searching, a neater display? and the consolidation of stock libraries.