Best Business Practices for Photographers, Third Edition by John Harrington

Author:John Harrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Published: 2017-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

Although Dictionary.com defines “triptych” as “a work consisting of three painted or carved panels that are hinged together,” the editorial world has used this word—and an alternate spelling, “triptik”—to refer to a set of three (or more) images of a subject, typically during an interview, where they are gesturing differently, running along the bottom of page (or scattered across a two-page spread).

Back in the 1970s, the concept of a day rate came into being. Avoid this two-word nightmare. It might have been suitable back when feathered hair and bell-bottom jeans roamed the land, but day rate should be just as banished from your lexicon as your bell bottoms and bleached jeans are exiled to your attic or jettisoned to a landfill.

When day rate originated, it was what a publication such as Time, Newsweek, or US News & World Report paid, as a minimum, for an eight-hour day for a photographer to go out and cover something, regardless of whether the publication ever published a single photograph from the assignment. While this figure was the downside of the assignment, directly tied to the day rate was a guarantee-against-space concept. This meant that if you made an image that ran a quarter of a page, that space rate was somewhere near $250, but you were compensated at $400 to $450 for your day rate plus expenses of film, parking, shipping/couriers, and often meals if it really was an eight-hour-plus assignment. If the photo ran half a page, because the space rate might have been $700, you’d earn that plus expenses instead of the day rate minimum. Where things got especially beneficial was when a full page ($1,500), double page ($2,500), and cover ($3,000) came into play. For the fortunate photographer, a week’s minimum of $2,000 for five days’ work could result in two full pages and a half page, paying $3,700, and this might result from just a single assignment day rate.

If this model works for you and the publication agrees to it today, then by all means continue, but understand that day rates are still hovering around $500 for the aforementioned publications, and that does not even keep up with inflation from when they instituted and set their day rate and space rates, yet their advertising rates have risen tenfold since the 1970s.

So why haven’t their day rates risen? I’d submit that a higher assignment fee should be your approach, and you should allow for a set maximum number of images published and define the images as inside or cover-plus-inside use. If you’ve got days before and days after working on the pre-production and post-production, call them pre-production days and post-production days. Further, would it be acceptable during this “day” that you complete an assignment of a portrait and then a second assignment during the eight hours without additional compensation? Whatever you finally decide, make sure that your assignment rate you proffer or accept is higher than your CODB for the day, or you’ll be paying for the privilege of working and subsidizing multimillion-dollar corporations.

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