Friday, July 6, 2007

Insomnia and business adjustments

View from my kitchen balcony. It's about 5 o'clock in the morning and I just took this photo. The peak behind the valley ridge is called Manaslu, at 8156 meters it's the 8th highest mountain in the world.

© Morten Svenningsen.


Slightly insomniac here and mosquitoes inside the mosquito-net aren't improving the situation. Hence this write up. Ain't much going on here these days. Outside in the big world, BBC correspondent in Gaza, Alan Johnston, was released by his kidnappers after about 4 months of uncertainty about his destiny, and in the US, everybody's favourite president semi-pardon'ed Scooter Libby so he doesn't have to do any hard time. Looks like everyone's escaping captivity! Here in Kathmandu, the weather changes from exhaustingly warm over oppressingly humid to shockingly wet. It's called the monsoon. And it's a good time to get things done indoors. Although I must say that I do enjoy the odd crazy downpour from time to time!


So what am I doing indoors? Adjusting my business model a bit! Sounds fancy, eeh?


Well, up until now, the business side of things have frankly been a bit disappointing. As a professional photographer and journalist I've now come to realize that I've probably been spending too much time photographing and assimilating news stories! How can that be a bad thing, you ask? Because it leads to the fact that I've spend too little time tending to the professional side of things. Marketing, promotion, visibility, customer care, sales, that sort of things.


So I've done some thinking. About being a photojournalist in Nepal. Basically, I figure there's 3 categories of work:


1. News
2. Features
3. Stock photography.


The news bit is a difficult category to work as a freelancer. First of all, foreign media don't care much about the little everyday affairs here. So I'm waiting for the big events. The coming of the earthquake. The third revolution. The stoning of the King. Maybe even that constituent assembly election they're all taking about. (We've been waiting about 14 months so far, and now they say wait until November. Oooh-keeey, if you say so!)


Anyway, when shit really hits the fan (pardon my French, ladies) and things get a bit interesting around here, I'll be up against the local Reuters, AP and WPN guys. Even if I get the best shots, it'll be their stuff that makes the front pages the next day, simply because they have the global business infrastructure and all the accounts plugged in already. Hard to compete with, so I'm not really working that field right now. Just keeping myself posted. But I do have a few things up my sleeve I'm gonna try out when the time comes.


The second category, the feature stuff, is more interesting for me. The possibilities here range from stark social realism to human interest 'softies'. There's a lot of interesting stories here and I'm planning to do more of that stuff in the near future. I'm even contemplating a redesign of my website in order to give more emphasis on this field. I've been looking a bit into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies lately and I'm sure there's a few things that I can improve. So I'm pretty sure it'll happen. First, however, I need to figure out a way to do it that doesn't require a month or two of programming...


Of course, I could join some agency, but in my experience it isn't really worthwhile doing. The "middle-class agencies" don't really seem to be doing much good and the top agencies are pretty hard to get into. I've had brief contact with one of them, but otherwise I haven't pursued the idea much. Maybe some day, but for now I actually enjoy taking care of everything myself. I decide what to do, how to do it and when to do it. It's just up to me and the client.


Thirdly, there's the stock photography thing. In this field, I'm actually in the process of joining an agency! I looked around and decided to go with Alamy in London. So I'll send them all my generic travel/landscape/sunset work and see what comes of it. That's what I'm working mostly on right now, editing, adjusting, keywording, even though it's a bit on the brink of my field of interest. But if it helps to pay some of the bills...


Actually, I'm quite curious to see how the whole thing's gonna work out. Alamy's already got thousands of contributors and millions of photo's (9 and counting) but 'only' about 16.000 shots from Nepal. The funny thing about Alamy is that they practically don't do any editing at all. Their contributors range from amateurs fooling around to serious professional photographers living exclusively on their stock sales. Of course that means that there's heaps of mediocre stuff to kick around in on their (dump?-)site. But they're trying to implement an automatic ranking system so that the most relevant stuff gets places at the top of the heaps. If it works out for them, I think the "long tail" isn't gonna be a drawback, in fact it might even work out as an overall asset for them. And hence, for their contributors as well.


So that's about it for me this time. Plenty of work in the pipeline ahead. Take it easy till next time...


PS : It's now closer to 6 o'clock and the Manaslu view from before is now again obscured by the monsoon clouds.