So I found my new music addiction, guaranteed to last me for at least the next month or so! The Nikon Girl music video by photographer Joey Lawrence. You can check him out at www.joeyl.com

I get my knowledge of photography from 2 sources, old Flickr.com discussions and various blogs. I usually waste hours of my spare time on a weekly basis reading up on tips, advice, and any other piece of information professional photographers graciously leak online these days.

So here I am browsing through Flickr and run across an old discussion concerning Craigslist and its impact on the photography community. Apparently a lot of people are concerned with amateur photographers leaking their way onto the web and stealing business by offering services for little to no money. It seems simple enough, people flood the market offering low prices, customers turn their backs to established professionals who are shooting at much higher rates, in turn professionals are forced to lower their rates to maintain customers. What professional wouldn’t be pissed in this case?

Here’s a quote from the discussion:

Quote: Kimberly

I was talking with a very established photographer friend of mine about the number of people who run down to the local camera store pick up a camera-buy a website-and start up a photography business all within you know–24 hours–(maybe I”m exagerating a little)

I’m not going to rant because I think everyone here can understand where I’m coming from.

I think this comes into play especially in the children’s photography realm. I think there has been a cheapening of value in the child portrait industry (I can’t speak for other types of photography)

I get on a regular basis–why are you so expensive–I saw this lady on Craigslist who will spend 2 hours with me and give me all the photos on CD for $25.

Yes, $25. I charge $1000 for an image CD. I used to think that the quality of my images would differentiate me from the “Craigslist Mom”–but how do you compete with that?

There have been several recent posts by several individuals–yes some even in this group–wanting professional advice and to be spoon fed sessions. Do these folks not unsderstand that they are hurting the livelyhood of “professionals” and adversly affecting their own ability to make a lucrative living in the future?

Now I’m not going to lie, my roots started in Craigslist well before I managed to develop a network of fashion conscious college kids. I still remember my first gig back in April 2008, I shot for just enough money to cover transportation and to treat myself to a Japanese dinner. Profit was always the last thing on my mind back then, all I wanted was to break even from my investment. My dependence Craigslist from April 2008 to now though has dwindled significantly. I hardly ever refer to Craigslist these days.

Although Craigslist is no longer one of my major reference lists for clients, I still appreciate everything I managed to learn over the one year I spent shuffling through all those ads. Craigslist gave me the opportunity to get my feet wet; why should other curious artists be denied that opportunity? You have to start somewhere.

The amateur charging dirt cheap prices and the professional charging an arm and a leg are both appealing to a completely different client base. The professional understands that there are people who appreciate and understand the work that goes into quality art, and those people are willing to pay extra to ensure top notch quality. In contrast, there are people who simply cannot afford a professional, and for the sake of accomplishing something they can’t do on their own, they turn towards the amateur and their cheaper price rates. The customer who hired the amateur photographer was never within the professional’s market niche to begin with. This guy said it best,

Quote: Wizwow

No pro is worrying about the lo-ballers. They just aren’t. Other lo-ballers are free to battle it out over the $400 weddings. And I think it is a good thing that people with little money can find someone within their budget. Kid shots for $25 a CD? That is not a worry to any professional I know… they may chuckle, but it is human nature (unfortunately).

There is a tendency to think of one’s work in the scope of where one is at the time. I always laugh when I hear a big time wedding shooter telling me that so and so was shooting for a grand and that was cutting into his business and why didn’t that kid know the value.

I wanna be there when he meets the kid and says” “Look, I make $5K on a wedding and you are killing my business.”

Really. The kid works at Starbucks all week for $250 and he can make an extra months pay working a wedding on a weekend? Can you imagine the disconnect?

In the first place, as was said above, no one who wants a CL [Craigslist] shooter wants me. No one who only has $400 for their wedding is my customer. Nobody who wants to get portraits for their business and only wants to spend $30 because they know how much a CD costs is my customer.

After reading into this, I decided to run my own little experiment and post two fake ads on Craigslist, one for a party photographer in Queens, NY and another for a fashion photographer in Brooklyn, NY. Within a day, I received over a 100 responses and I’ve sorted through and examined almost all of them (I got lazy, 100 is a shitload of messages after all). Most of the responses I received seemed to have one thing in common. Lack of, or limited portfolio. Of course, there are the outliers in there with quite impressive work under their belts, but the majority of my replies were from people who were just getting into the field and learning the trade. Some of the responses I received were filled with so many grammatical and spelling errors that I assumed many of these photographers were all younger than me when I first started shooting back in Junior high.

The Craigslist network isn’t flooded with people looking to steal the $1000 client. The Craigslist network is flooded with artists looking to expand their experience and knowledge. For this reason, they target a completely different client base. The professionals can keep their $1000 clients. The amateurs are after the gamblers.

So to the professional photographers currently out there, don’t shake your head at us. We’re not here to steal your business… yet.

The highest hand in the room. If you do anything at all, make sure you do it better than the person next to you.

I can’t believe I waited so long before finally going to a Maroon 5 concert. Maroon 5 is undoubtedly my favorite band, and they became even more awesome the other night after Adam Levine did a cover of Alicia Key’s If I Ain’t Got You! Jason Segel from Forgetting Sarah Marshall also made a surprise appearance, offering his celebrity status to hook up with any able-bodied, disease-free, St. John’s girl. Really, can it get any better than that?

This made my day. Meet Herman. Here I am sitting out in the sun finishing some last minute work before class when all of a sudden Herman breaks out in song right by the Great Lawn on campus. Yes that’s right, he pulled out his guitar and just started singing out of nowhere. Now that’s just all types of awesome. I turn around to listen, and what do I hear? Maroon 5′s “Sunday Morning”! Not only was he covering my favorite band, but he was doing it the day before the St. John’s Maroon 5 concert! Can you ask for better timing? I wanted to get a video of his performance, but he was already halfway into the song by the time I got my camera out, so I just shrugged off my bad luck and went back to work.

About an hour later I packed my bags and left for class only to find Herman sitting in the room by himself. Now that’s some incredible luck! Well I wasn’t going to miss my opportunity a second time around; here he is covering Sunday Morning:

I tried to experiment with Jayson a little and decided to shoot a lot of the photos with heavy light fall off. I wanted the light to wrap around his body and soften the overall image. In order to do this I increased the output for my background light and used the ambient light in the room as the filler. You can see examples of what I’m talking about in the first and third photographs.