Highly upset!!

[Asylum Steve]

That is worlds apart from showing up somewhere, shooting it, and giving the images away to people to do with as they please...

Let me give you a better one: the South Beach club scene. My guess is there are many parallels to this situation...

The SoBe night scene is a series of events, the shots are primarily grab shots (where the moment is more important than anything artistically). Many many folks have cameras and take pictures at these places, and more often than not give them away to everyone free, and beautiful women often take their tops off and dance suggestively on the bar and tabletops until the wee hours of the morning.

Ok, that last part I made up... ;)

The point is, even though the publications I worked for could have gotten as many pics as they wanted free, I was paid quite well to provide them with the images. It was for reasons other than what I charged or what else was available.

The bottom line is, as a commercial shooter, you have to continually evaluate the various markets you're trying to work, and understand that they all evolve and change, many times for the worse.

If a given market has become flooded with cheap or free alternatives to what you provide (which IS exactly the way the fashion market is, and thus relevant), you simply have to rethink whether that market is worth pursuing.

BTW, Seb, I DO sense your frustration. I'm just saying I don't think there's much you can do about it...

[Sebastian]

If a given market has become flooded with cheap or free alternatives to what you provide (which IS exactly the way the fashion market is, and thus relevant), you simply have to rethink whether that market is worth pursuing.

BTW, Seb, I DO sense your frustration. I'm just saying I don't think there's much you can do about it...

I agree completely about pursuing other markets. But I think that there is something that can be done about the damage being done. Educating people about the worth of the images and the potential damage of free distribution on the local market, and maybe even the industry as a whole, can make people think twice about it. There will always be those that don't care, but there are also many people that do.

And the only reason I get frustrated is not because it hurts my pocket book, but because I still have this pipe dream of some day being able to write "Photographer" under profession on a form, and I just don't see being able to make a living at it in a few decades. Not the way the market is going right now. And the fact is, the market I am most interested in (editorial/journalistic) is one of the ones that's being diluted. I am pursuing other avenues, but it makes me sad to see such a decline. I don't mind shooting weddings, but it's far from my first choice...