The basics of Copyright and Licensing

Posted: July 7th, 2010 | Author: CallumW | No Comments »
Filed under: General News, How To, Post Categories

I’m getting asked about this more and more so I thought I’d blog a simple answer for people to find
(or me to point them to )

Typical question:
"I have no idea where to start with licensing etc. I don’t honestly care what the client does with the images, as long as I can also use them in my portfolio. So how does that work?"

Scenario: A client asks you to take pictures for them. Product, commercial, event, whatever.
You do the job to the brief and you make the pictures and you ‘own’ all those images under creative commons copyright law.

For your client to use the images for their intended purpose, they also need to purchase a license for the selected images. Photographers will license for time, usage and exclusivity.

Time.
This can be from 1 day up to unlimited time.

Usage
From 1/4 a subpage on a website, a book cover, a billboard or broadcast on TV.
The potential usage is extremely broad and is normally grouped into braoder definitions

Exclusivity
Normally images are either non exclusive or exclusive to an industry sector only. Very rarely are they exclusive across the board and it’s effectively locking the image down for the client’s use only. But you still have the copyright.

If a photographer sells or signs over the copyright then the new copyright holder canuse and re-sell or license the image as much as they like.

For Photographers AND clients:
To get an idea on expected basic licensing costs, go to a stock library, select a picture and choose the advanced licensing options.
Select a Rights Managed scenario to see how much 1 picture licenses for.

And that’s the very basics.
There’s a lot more to it such as how to relicense and building contracts or working with selling/working in the media and if you want to earn from pictures then you need to know it fully.
[subliminal message]buy BTL ….. buy BTL[/subliminal message]

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Footnote: The question included "I don’t honestly care what the client does with the images".
We should. One of the main reasons the industry is falling apart is because the uneducated are ‘giving away’ their pictures for virtually nothing.

But there’s a simple fix: 
http://www.callumw.com/index.php/201006/it-only-takes-30bucks-to-make-a-profit-from-photography-and-save-the-industry-at-the-same-time/

Get the book
Read the book
Know your rights
Protect your business and more importantly protect your clients

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Tags: answer, Beyond the Lens, BTL, copyright, exclusive, law, licensing, question, rights, Rights Managed, RM, time, usage

It only takes £30 to make a profit from photography and save the industry at the same time

Posted: June 27th, 2010 | Author: CallumW | 1 Comment »
Filed under: General News, How To, Post Categories

I was recently asked:
"this is my first commercial job and all I’ve done so far is agree a price. Presumably I’ll need some sort of contract? Or do I? And is there such a thing as an example or template I could adapt and use?"

It’s a sad fact that the imaging industry is being eroded by the uneducated.

When I say "uneducated" I don’t mean someone who’s sole objective in life is to get 5 stars on their name badge or to get home in time to watch Hollyoaks, but people that don’t invest any time to know their rights, how to manage their copyright/license or just how to run a business.

It’s fantastic that talented image makers get an oppertunity to be rewarded when asked to make an image for a client, but when they don’t know how to quote and they give away their pictures for virtually nothing or their objective is only to buy a new bit of kit… that’s where the problem lies.

All too often people are doing bits on the side without covering their basics never mind making a profit.
(It is a business after all)
Some companies are quick to exploit the uneducated, because it keeps their overheads down. It’s not their fault. They’re looking for the best price and so they may discuss a project with someone lacking in business knowledge and talk them into working under the market rate.

But it can turn out like printer ink……

I stocked up on some cheap ink off the web for my document printer at 1/3 the price of branded ink.
Bargain I think. Keeping my overheads and expenses down.
The TV adverts said "Buy branded ink – it’ll last up to 30% longer than unbranded ink".
I sit there thinking "Yea, but I can get 3x the ink for the same price."
I get the ink, I put it in and it doesn’t work or the results are unreliable and no good, not what I wanted.
I end up trashing all the cheap stuff and having to go out and buying the branded ink to do the job right.
Waste of my time. Waste of my money.

You’ll notice that larger companies skip the ‘cheapest is best’ approach when it comes to their public image and they’ll go straight for the right person who can deliver the desired results first time.
They understand the value that they will bring to their product.

It’s easy to spot how we get programmed as it spills into other areas of our life too.
For example, if you go to a restaurant, and we find ourself looking at the prices more than the fare, then chances are we rarely end up with the best plate of food in front of us and we’re left unsatisfied.
If we ordered our favourite dish then we get what we want – even if it cost a few percent more

You can spot the entrepreneurs … they order their 2 favourite dishes and get the best meal of their life
Plus they have fantastic leftovers for the next couple of days

I’m happy that people get out there and sell themselves, there is plenty room for everyone, but to properly exist side-by-side with full time photographers, they need to correctly quote and bill for the job.
Even if the license is free/included, we still need to know how to create the paperwork to protect our commercial and private clients.
Clients also need to protect themselves by making sure they get hold of the right paperwork.

I did a couple of years semi-pro before I moved to full-time but I always quoted and billed a proper price, even though it wasn’t my main income. Ironically it was easier then as I had an income from the day job so I had some security. If the job didn’t go through then I had my weekend free to relax or do my own projects with no fiscal dent. Win-win.

So, how do we get educated?

If you’re interested in making money from photography then there’s really only one source that’ll answer all your questions. It’s the best investment you’ll make and is useful for clients that need to know their rights too

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Tags: AOP, bargain, best, Beyond the Lens, billing, BTL, business, cashflow, cheap, creative, educated, education, ethics, exploit, fools gold, future, how, ink, knowledge, licensing, overheads, photography, poor, practise, projects, prospect, question, quote, results, security, smart, stupid, uneducated

How to do High Speed Sync with Studio Strobes

Posted: February 14th, 2010 | Author: CallumW | 2 Comments »
Filed under: Gear, How To, Post Categories, Training/Testing

For those that don’t know what maximum flash sync speed is, put a flash on your camera, in Speed or Manual mode set it to 1/400s and take a shot. You’ll see that half the frame (usually the bottom) is darker than the top.

This is where the shutter is passing the sensor too fast for the flash and it closes during the flash fire.

Up until recently, the only cameras that were capable of high-speed sync were Medium Format digital Leaf cameras (e.g. Hasselblad) that cost £10+K. Medium Format Leaf sensors have a different shutter system and so the sensor is exposed to the image in a different way. The camera sensor takes a shot of what it sees without hindrance as there’s no shutter or curtain moving across it.

In the older film days, 35mm cameras had a maximum sync speed of about 1/60s …. which was a bit naff.
It’s only until fairly recently the maximum you could achieve with increased to 1/250s with Nikon and 1/200s with Canon.

Although this was much improved over the old systems, it was still limiting to what you could do in broad daylight.

Then Nikon brought out what they call “Auto FP High-Speed Sync” and Canon call “High Speed Sync”.

This allows the camera to fire a speedlight multiple times as the shutter curtain passes the sensor which ‘paints’ the images onto the sensor at much faster shutter speeds.
It basically makes the flash last a bit longer so that it gets all the image lit right to the bottom

The cost for this is a bit of power.

Where your flash may be outputting F22 @1m at full power, if you increase the shutter to, say, 1/2000, you’re Aperture will need to drop to a lower value (F8?) to keep a correct exposure.

This in itself is amazing and the fact that modern strobes like the SB800 and SB900 (and Canon EX580?) can cope with this is phenomenal and opens up a lot more possibilities with your photography. It kills the batteries, but that’s why keep spares handy

However, there are 2 drawbacks to this.
1) The camera has to be able to communicate to the flash to do this. Either in the hotshoe, using a remote hotshoe cable, or with some cameras, with the built in flash can talk to the speedlights
2) As mentioned above, there’s a power loss when increasing the sync speed beyond the native 1/250 sync as the flash has to increase it’s duration

So to increase the power you need more powerful lights than your speedlight, but you can’t make Studio Strobes sync faster than 1/250s ….. or can you ?

The answer is Yes.
Better than that, there’s 2 ways of doing it

The expensive way to do it is to use a PocketWizard MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 triggers to do this. But at approximately £225 each, its not cheap.

The cheap way to do it is to use your existing speedlight (SB800 or SB900) to blip the light and set your studio strobe to be optically slaved and it will fire with the speedlight, but giving much more power than the speedlight could dream of.

The downside of this is that the flash needs to reach the Studio head which should be fine up to a point, but if you have remote lights beyond range or around corners, then the PocketWizards will be required

Below is a pictorial example of how to achieve High Speed Sync with just 1 speedlight and studio flashes.
NOTE: The studio lights are set to their lowest power setting throughout and my Nikon D700 is set to AutoFP on

1st shot – ambient light

I hook up an Elinchrom Skyport trigger as the BXRi has a built in receiver.

Pow!!! These things kick out some light…

Switch off the Skyport and set the camera to a ‘flash’ setting and take a shot to show that no ambient is showing

Switch the Skyport back on and … Half decent exposure. Notice the bottom edge of the frame is a bit dark. Looks like the Skyport/Elinchrom combination is not quite 1/250s which is a surprise. 1/200s will be fine though

Increase the shutter speed to 1/400 and there’s the typical sign that we’ve exceeded the sync speed

So lets try a PC Sync cable to see if that’s better

Looks fine at 1/200s. Let’s up it to 1/250s to see if we get the dark area at the base of the frame again

….. Nope – it looks fine. The wire connection is fine at 1/250s. The wireless must be a bit sluggish

Bump it to 1/400s and there’s the clipping of the frame again. Interesting that it’s much lower than using the Wireless trigger due to the immediacy of the hard wire connection

Time to try the speedlight. Ignore the settings in this picture
It was actually set to [TTL][BL][FP] for the next shots

Ambient shot at much lower settings. The speedlights pack a much lower punch so need to adjust down accordingly

Flash switched on and ….. not too bad

1/250s is showing clean edge to edge illumination

Ramped it up to 1/800 and it’s still lit fine, but notice the slight warmer colour shift

Ramp it up to 1/4000s and it’s still popping away quite happily

I now set the SB900 to manual and it’s lowest setting (1/128) as per the picture 6 up from here. It actually shows [M] [FP] to indicate that it’s in high-speed-sync mode.
The Flash hardly does anything to the image, but will easily trigger the BXRi optical slave….

Set the optical slave on and ….. hey presto. Clean image at 1/250s

Bump it up to 1/800 and, although it’s darker in the top of the frame, the bottom section is lit.

Increase to 1/2000s and it’s still lighting it. Bare n mind this is the BXRi at minimum powerand the camera settings are 2 stops darker than when using the AutoFP with the SB900

Increase the F stop to F4 rather than power up the strobe head

Hardly any change when increasing it to 1/4000s

And again virtually no change even though the camera is firing at 1/8000s
…. yes 1/8000s sync with a studio light

So there you have it. The easy way to perform maximum sync speeds on your camera and still be able to use studio lighting to light your subject.
Any comments, please add them below

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Tags: 500, BXRi, D700, Ekinchrom, fast, Flash, hi-speed, nikon, power, sb900, shutter, SkyPort, Sync