Photo business

Sadhu, a holy man having renounced the world, drinking a cup of tea, with plenty of time on his hands...
© Morten Svenningsen 2008

Man there’s lots of things to do in this business! Funny thing, the actual photography seems to be just the least of it. Looking back at the last months, I’ve spent time writing, developing ideas, posting on forums, making web-site, building links, submitting material, writing invoices (yes, it does happen), taking backup’s, trying to catch up on market news, photography trends etc., besides running the little family, doing the occasional cooking, cleaning, walking the dog etc. So far this month, I’ve taken 3 photos (one of which is the one leading this post). That’s it! Man, life as an independent pro photographer is a lot more than just taking pictures. If it’s not too late to make a new year resolution, I’ll hereby vow to take more time doing actual photography this year! Some of the ideas I want to pursue: Create multimedia, go in-depth with some photo projects, execute some of the shoots I already have in mind, create new and thought-provoking documentaries and get up in some of those awesome mountains they have around here. And still I’m (we’re) waiting for the release of a new 5D Mark II camera from Canon - and wondering how long it’s gonna take to earn something equivalent of the cost. Could do with a new laptop as well, and there’s also a couple of lenses I’d like to get my hands on. Let’s see, how many thousand dollars is that? 3,4,5,6,7,8? And that’s why I have to spend so much time not looking through the viewfinder with my finger on the shutter button. Just can’t do it all the time if you wanna stay in business. And that’s why I occasionally will have to take some weeks in front of the laptop in stead, I guess.

Time to market (news photos, democracy and the loot)

Old news: My friend and colleague, Nick, in a sharp situation during the peoples uprising, April 2006. That's a cloud of tear gas behind him, he's trying to escape by the way.

© Morten Svenningsen

I’ve been looking for a better way to get some of my newsworthy photos out on the market. News photography is just a little part of what I’m doing, but we do have an election coming up here – probably. Right now I just have my web-site to use for fast turn-around times. In itself fine, but I’m afraid it’s still not that well known among broadsheet photo editors around the globe. And they usually don’t have time to surf around on the net and contact photographers they don’t already have a working relationship with. So I’ll need to affiliate myself with one of the big photo agencies or portals. Just not interested in joining a news agency who expect me to run around and cover every little event in the region.

So I was quite happy to come home yesterday and see in my inbox a solution present itself. My usual photo agency, Alamy, informed me that they intend to implement a 24h turn-around time from upload to online in stead of the usual 3 weeks! That opens up new possibilities within my existing business infrastructure. It’s still not quite upload-and-see-it-in-the-papers-next-day, but should be good enough for second cycle use. If just PE’s will start looking to Alamy for their news photos...

And here in Nepal the constituent assembly election date has now been set to April 10. Two years after the peoples uprising (v2), eight years after the last 4-year term election and 18 years after the first peoples uprising. Talk about a long time-to-market. Two years would have been okay, I suppose, if they’d just come out and said that from the beginning in stead of repeatedly setting dates and then postponing them.

If only they were as quick as the thieves of this country... Sabina had her mobile phone stolen Monday night – Tuesday afternoon she saw in on sale in a “second-hand” shop. Now that’s what I call time-to-market! Unfortunately, before she could get hold of some muscles (me - the police is a joke around here), the guy had taken it off the shelf and then tried to tell us that he just sold it. Right!

But if you ever have your phone stolen in Kathmandu, just look around in the second-hand shops on Bag Bazar. And bring some muscles or any other means of persuasion!

New web site!

Here's the result of the last week's labour - and the last half year's speculations and preperations!

Finally: I have just finished the complete re-design of my web-site and it is being uploaded as I write this!

So what’s new?

First of all, the old site consisted mainly of photos. I realized that it wasn’t doing me very much good with the search engines, since they are all geared for text and not for photos. Even after keywording all my photos they still didn’t show up in any Google search. So in the new design I have a lot more text, carefully filled with good keywords, on the different pages. Is that gonna do me any good? Don’t know yet. I have never targeted the “internet masses” with my business. But listening to people like Dan Heller, I figured it was worth a try. Even if it doesn’t convert into a steady sales channel, I hope that it will at least boost my Google ranking which fell from a modest 3 to a meager 2 recently, after they regrouped their priorities. (The ironic thing is that I started getting more profitable hits after that event!)

Secondly, the navigation sucked on the old site. Everything was arranged in categories and sub-categories and it was getting increasingly difficult to keep it logical. Now everything is arranged so it never takes more than one click to go anywhere from the main page! It makes it a lot easier to see what the site contains.

I also changed the general layout of the site, from a heavy, serious black to a bright and light white, which is a lot more readable for text and still totally acceptable for viewing photos.

And another thing I’m very excited about is the Web 2.0 features I’ve now implemented. Or at least Web 1.5. You can subscribe to a newsletter and there is an area for user comments and debate. Not very revolutionary, but pretty neat for an amateur web designer like myself. It was implemented with something called Joomla, pretty advanced stuff and a bit over my head most of the time. But once you’ve gotten it to work, it does a great job! So at least now there is those options. Whether they’ll be used or not, that’s another matter. Time will tell...

What else? The photo essays are no longer buried in some sub-menu but brought right up on the front page. The design could be better but overall I’m pretty happy about it. Lots of white-space although it’s not always in the best places (imo). And a side benefit: I think it’s gonna be a lot simpler for me to update and maintain the whole thing.

So that’s about it. I just have one last request. I would really appreciate it if you would have a look at the whole thing and tell me what you think. Is there any mistakes that catches your eyes? Something that doesn’t work? Grammatical mistakes? Anything.

Send me an e-mail, write in the comments section, here or on the web-site. The address is, if you don’t already know it, http://www.msmediaservice.com

UPDATE 2009 : I have a new-new site on www.mortensvenningsen.com !!

Thanks!

Hi

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