Notes About TFP/TFCD For Models

Many models (if not the rest of the world) have heard or seen the term TFP or TFCD ("time for prints" or "time for CD"). Essentially this is a trade between the parties involved, at minimum a photographer and a model, but may also include an MUA (Make Up Artist) or stylist (whether clothing or hair).

In many situtations whether you're just starting out as a model or have an established portfolio (or "book"), it may make sense to ask for TFP/TFCD. Photographers who are starting out need to build their book also, so this is a mutually beneficial activity. However, established photographers may or may not offer TFP or TFCD except in exceptional circumstances defined by the photographer (which may be as simple as, they have time on their hands next week due to a cancellation and your look may benefit their portfolio). Conversely you may want to work with a photographer who has a certain style lacking in your book, so offering TFP/TFCD when you would otherwise charge for modeling isn't unusual or "backtracking".

Note that there's no expectation of quality work with TFP/TFCD, although when you pay a photographer, you should have certain quality guarantees (if at a minimum, a guaranteed reshoot if something doesn't come out right). (And you have to be reasonable about this: if the photos are technically fine, but you didn't like your hair color or shoes that day, these are -not- reasons for a reshoot). I will say this: I know many photographers who are up and coming that are incredible photographers, so going TFP/TFCD is not to say you won't get quality shots. The photographer wants to show off good work too, so it's in their best interest to do well. However, when you pay, you may have more of a guarantee about getting quality work.

There are other expectations you have and benefits you get by paying a photographer. When you pay for photography, you are (or should be) guaranteed by the photographer to get "n" number of prints or "n" number of images on a CD with a license to print, and your expectation should be a pretty quick turn-around.

With TFCD, a photographer is not required to give you a set amount of images, although the expectation is that's what you're trading for. With TFP, you should agree up front how many prints you'll get (whether many, or one you can duplicate from). When you pay for photography you're under no obligation to sign a model release and the photographer will have limited rights as to what they can do with your photos. With TFP/TFCD, the photographer may insist on a release since the benefit to the photographer is being able to use photos from your session. This is not always a deal breaker, but just be aware of this before hand.

With TFCD, make sure you are promised images on a CD are high-resolution, usually 300dpi. For images that are going onto a web site, you need low-resolution images, usually 72 dpi. Good photographers will provide you with a set of each on CD. Expect the low-resolution images to have some branding or watermarking by the photographer which may be as simple as a small copyright on the lower side, or may be a more complex logo of the photographer or studio. Prints may or may not have a copyright or logo watermarking on the front, but will almost always have a stamp on the back.

Either way, when you get images on CD, make sure you get a license or release to make prints from the photographer. If you need to make extra prints from your portfolio shoot, most print shops or copy shops will not duplicate an image with a copyright notice on it, or even one that looks like it's professionally made without having a signed print release from the photographer.

Great resources for models looking for local photographers willing to offer TFP/TFCD are www.modelmayhem.com and www.bemodel.com.

There are more issues here to discuss for another entry, specific tips and secrets about model releases. Stay tuned.

Yay! Back To Normal!

Back to normal / back to work: I finally got the web sites - the real one and the couple temp ones - all coming up the way they're supposed to for the time being (until I get time to finish updates).

My temporary High School Seniors / Senior Portrait specialty site is up at http://www.IceCoolSeniors.com, the sports and event place holder page is up at http://sports.butchleitzphotography.com (or http://www.mountainsportphotos.net ), the links to the High School Sports galleries at http://www.HighSchoolSportPhotos.net is back working, and lastly... the main studio web site at http://www.butchleitzphotography.com (also know as http://studio.butchleitzphotography.com ) is back up - that was the one I was having the problem with. The code (which was working before the move) did a thing with frames and targets that apparently isn't working on the new server so I had to re-code how the site entry stuff works... which, like I said, is now back up.

A couple senior portraits to do, an executive session, a couple weddings coming up, finish senior mailers, finish some sports highlight galleries, hit the gym, now I can get back to normal! The vacation coming up which will throw the schedule a little (but since it was planned, not a big deal).

Kind of crazy when you like what you do so much you don't want to go on vacation... and when you do, you use it as an excuse to do job related stuff: like: build some more travel and art catalog.

So - I'm "back to normal". (Was I ever "normal"?!?)

Shades of gray...

The web sites: it's funny, I got everything moved into the new servers & have almost everything up - well, the old sites for icecoolseniors.com & the place holders for mountainsportphotos.net & agencyphotos.net. But oh, no, www.ButchLeitzPhotography.com had code in the startup that just totally whacks out on the new server & doesn't get past a certain point... it sends me an auto-email saying somebody looked at the site, but then (I'm pretty sure) doesn't actually show the site to anybody leaving a gnarly looking "somethings wrong" message from the server. Bumwads! More hacking to do to correct it, get it up, get back to finishing the placholder sites.

AT THE SAME TIME: working on High School Senior mailers getting ready to go out. I'm going to offer a special discount through mid August (before schools start back up in session in the Springs). Stay tuned.

Still looking for model-reps at a couple schools like Coronado and Cheyenne, send me an email if you're a senior or somebody you know is who might be interested in a free on-location and studio shoot in exchange for making money by repping for us at their school. It's win-win for you and me and there's no lose-lose for either of us!

Had some real bizarreness yesterday (Sunday): first, saw two little wanna-be tornadoes forming along the highway near Castle Rock as my wife and I were driving back from some business up in Keystone Sunday morning. It was raining, hailing, and everybody was slowing down to watch them I think. Very surreal. THENNN when we got home, my wife Linda found our one of our cats had dragged a full-size rabbit into the house - not a little bunny (like a few others times). But not just into our house... into the master bedroom. Max (this particular cat) had it's front feet pinning down the rabbit while it was growling at Linda as if to say, no you don't, it's MINE!!! So we got Max off the rabbit which immediately took off towards the master bathroom! Finally I caught it by covering it with big storage bucket. We slid in a (get this) old Obama / Biden lawn sign under the bucket, lifted the thing over & got the rabbit outta there.

Wild!
Ok, back to the salt-mines...
b

getting back up...

This is actually kinda fun, moving all the related web sites. I'm getting to review and clean house. The customer photo galleries are all up - (in fact all the site content for butchleitzphotography.com, icecoolseniors.com, agencyphoto.net, mountsportphotos.net, highschoolsportphotos.net and more has ftp'd up to the new server). Just waiting for the domain name transfers to finish.

Some of them, like highschoolsportphotos.net, is actually working and pointing to my galleries at printroom.com, my sports ecommerce & printing partner.

So, while waiting, I'm updating graphics and links on some of the sites I was updating anyway like icecoolseniors.com.

Have a happy and safe 4th of july weekend...

butch

More internet woe-is-me ramblings!

Well, I'm getting things shifted around. I was running my own web servers for so long (like, 10 years, almost 15 years actually) that it's almost funny being like one of the "regular" folks that need a web server; I'm waiting for registrars to move domain names around - I was setting up some sites at GoDaddy for a past client (moving them off my server) a month ago and decided to park some of my stuff there, problem is that my domain names are registered at, like, 5 different registrars for various reasons. So coordinating all this is *fun*, yeah, thats it, *fun*.

I was just in the process of redoing the www.IceCoolSeniors.com web site (again) and had started putting together a new butchleitzphotography.com web site and sports web site. So I guess I need to get the old stuff moved to the new servers (when I get the "account has been set up" go ahead) along with the new stuff (so I can finish it, duh. Guess that didn't need to be said, did it?!?)

Whatever. Shooting some seniors, got a print delivery & more fun stuff today. Life goes on even without the internet! (Wow... realllly?!?) :-)

You may reach me at the studio by calling 719.590.7112.
You may email me temporarily at leitz@q.com.

internet woes

...and the web site is down. the email is down. sheesh. i have connectivity but the servers are in limbo being moved to another provider.

you may reach me at the studio by calling 719.590.7112.
you may email me temporarily at leitz@q.com.

thx.

I was recently moving the last remaining NetGrafx web client from my web servers to a new host facility when at some point I realized that I had been using the Internet (including it's pre-cursor, the Arpanet) for 25 years almost to the day. I had used internal corporate networks before 1984, but it wasn't until a I was on a customer upgrade at Stanford for DEC that I got to use the Arpanet for the first time in "real life" and not in a lab setting (which I had already done a few times at DEC). One of our tapes got munged during travel, so we connected through the Arpanet into servers we had back in Massachusetts & copied the missing files via FTP.
As I was thinking about this, some random observations:

...prior to 1984, before my first exposure to the real "internet", there were plenty of commercial and free computing services publishing content similar to what later happened on the web, but -all- of this content was available via a computer modem. As long as you had a computer terminal, you could hook up an $800 1200 baud high-speed Hayes modem dial into a computer "bulletin board" service - a set of software you could run on a personal computer, hook up a modem bank to, and share text and "live" discussions with other users. But it was only text. (My favorite at the time was TBBS aka "the Boston Bullet".)

...AOL started as an outgrowth of the Atari gaming community, expanded to Commodore 64 and 128 computers, ultimately becoming one of two large dial-in content services, the other being Compuserve. But both were kind of outgrowths of the computer bulletin board culture.

...in 1984, you could print out the names and locations of all the systems connected to the internet (the arpanet at the time) on about 3 sheets of paper.

...in 1984, TCP/IP had just been accepted as the "new" standard inter-networking protocol used by all the systems connected to the arpanet in favor of the slightly older packet switching protocols developed in the 70s.

...in 1984, FTP, Email, and Telnet were pretty much the only applications that were generally in use by systems connected to the Arpanet. HTTP and then HTML (world wide web) didn't evolve until 1990 and1991.

...in 1993 the first generally used web browser - NCSA Mosaic - appeared allowing companies with "web servers" to "publish" data on the internet (as it was now generally being called). An explosion of internet use happened at this point followed quickly by new web browsers, notably Microsoft's Internet Explorer in 1995. By 1999 it was the most popular web browser. The fundamentals of Mosaic got partially used by Netscape, but is now the basis for the "Firefox" web browser.

...in 1993 and into 1995, web pages were gray in color, with text, and photos or graphic images kept to a minimum. Compare that with today's practically unlimited extensions and platforms like cell phones, into airport monitors (that flight info you see in the airport is basically an application-specific web page), into appliances, you name it.

...in the early 90's PERL was the only programming language you could use to extend a web page into a form to capture information from a user. PERL had been released on UNIX systems in 1988 as a scripting language, and was perfect for use in the new world of internet publishing (the world wide web). You could make a pretty cool animation by writing a PERL script to rapidly read single images for display one after the other!

...Shockwave was introduced in 1996 to the web, allowing animation to be developed and embedded into web sites.

...All the way through the 90's we had to sell web sites. Many business owners right up until the 2000's still didn't get the use of the web, now considered a de facto business requirement.

...Many people today mistakenly call the internet "the web". They may say something like, "I emailed you on the web" resulting in blank slightly inquisitive looks from old farts like me who have to interpret what you meant.

...in the 2000's we started to see a rapid increase in network security breaches, corporate spying, credit card fraud, and even subtle international technology attacks. I had the opportunity to assist the United States Secret Service identify traffic from a credit card fraud ring based in Moscow with connections in London, Paris and New York based on database attacks one of our clients started having.

...by 2004, social networking sites like MySpace were evolved, with cool features like being able to extend the environment by customizing your own web pages within the context of the overall system.

...today, web applications on the internet are used to control large utilities, household items like appliances and lighting, radio and television networks, and there are even web applications that control other web applications.

All this in the space of 25 years... but since the web, the last 15 years have totally altered the human experience. Crazy.

High School Seniors

Been working on changing pricing and making handouts and flyers and business cards for the model-reps who are promoting www.IceCoolSeniors.com for me at their High Schools. Also finishing collages for past senior shoots, did a prom/dinner shoot last weekend among other things (which was interesting), had a couple sports photo orders from my sports site http://www.highschoolsportphotos.net/, and... what else, several appointments, design consultations in the office, lining up a few architecture shoots this coming week... dang!

Also developing ideas to split photo-functional units into several different web sites (like the sports one, but more so), art, Executive, Creative Headshots (http://www.agencyphotos.net/), yadda yadda yadda... I'm an idea guy with not enough time to implement everything I want to do. But I like having a queue of stuff to do rather than sitting around bored, just which there were 48 hours in a day, know what I mean?

I could tell you the ideas I have for about 3 other photo business streams, plus a boat load of creative ideas to upsell orders with, but I don't want to bore you now (and lets face it, if stuff was more ready to roll-out I'd be talking about it, right?!?)

But for right now... I am had at work on building the High School Seniors portrait business intoa year-around fun gig, and I'm lovin' it!

Camera Tech: Why You Should Use Cleaning Mode and Not Bulb or just Mirror Up

Note - I use Nikon references here, but the same info will hold true for all the digital manufacturers that have a shutter release (mirror up) cleaning mode.

Caveat: Don't clean your sensor yourself. Ok, I said the party line.
(everybody cleans their CCD sensor themselves, but manufacturers won't necessarily warranty a camera you manually dorked around with, so my blog is not an endorsement to do this).

I see many Nikon photographers whine about cleaning their CCD sensors. They hate wanting to drill down into the camera menus to find the "Lock Mirror Up for Cleaning" mode entry under the setup menu. They say (and I saw a forum entry where somebody said this: "screw Nikon, I just use bulb".

I have to admit in the interest of full disclosure that I used to use bulb or mirror-up or (yes, my favorite) lock a wired remote shutter switch into the released (open) position (like I was taking a long exposure & manually timing it, kind of like bulb with a remote lock) when cleaning my sensor.

But my eyes were opened last year by a Nikon tech (Ron Taniwaki). Since I repeatedly (even today) saw an entry from somebody in some forum where they were whining about the lock for cleaning mode, I thought I'd share the rationality for correctly using Lock Mirror Up For Cleaning mode since apparently this isn't knowledge that's out on the net. I even just looked for cleaning and mirror-up discussions in various forums and didn't see the "correct" argument. So:

Why you want to use your camera's cleaning mode or lock-the-mirror-up-for-cleaning is this:

Other modes like bulb, long exposure settings, or simple "mirror-up" assume you are taking a photo, not cleaning the CCD, so the camera applies an electrical current to the CCD to allow it to gather light and convert an image to a file (through the rest of the camera logic) when the mirror (or shutter) closes.

The problem with trying to clean a charged CCD while any trace current is applied to it is that there's a static energy that forms on the surface of the CCD that attracts tiny particles like dust, hair, etc, to it. You can get the idea of how this works by simply holding your arm up next to your computer screen you're reading this on and seeing how the hairs on your arm stand up to the screen. You can even feel it. And it's creepy. (Or cool. Depending on how weird you are, you weirdo!) (Hey, I do it all the time!)

BUT - if you use a camera's cleaning mode to lock up the mirror, current is being applied to the mirror ONLY to hold the mirror open, but NOT the CCD. So... you're not attracting the same stuff to the CCD that you're trying to clean off at the same time.

Since you can damage a heck of alot of camera components cleaning your CCD (like the the CCD, the mirror, and more), this is why your camera (assuming it's smart enough) should not let you go into cleaning mode if there's no AC adapter connected OR if the battery is below a 60% charge. This is bad mojo you can get into if the mirror drops while you're still goofing around with your swap or tacky-pad or brush in there at the same time, so your camera - which is probably smarter than you are (no offense) checks it's power source first before letting you come in to mess with it. (Ps, now you get an idea of how brushes work: if you use the correct kind of brush and "charge it" correctly, it's carrying a static attraction that sucks junk off the CCD. If the CCD is also carrying a charge, you're defeating the purpose and probably attracting junk off the brush back onto the CCD, duh!)

Since we're smarter than the camera, we get frustrated having to mess with the stupid thing when we want to clean the CCD and the correct setup or tools menu item is grayed out (because the camera doesn't sense enough power available)- so we bypass this by using "bulb" or straight mirror-up mode, etc.

But you are potentially causing problems (or at the very least increasing your cleaning time: "wait, i just cleaned it and it's got junk on it again!") since the CCD is a dust magnet when power is applied to it.

Hopefully this sheds some light on why you should use the cleaning mode when you have to clean the CCD.

Happy spot removal. (cleaning is a whole 'nother blog waiting to happen, but there are -alot- of good cleaning references on the net, one of the best being here: http://www.copperhillimages.com/index.php?pr=Tutorials).

Had a fun senior shoot last week where we used part of the studio that I have not used in the past for shooting, and that was my presentation room where I normally hold client meetings and do...presentations (duh)! It's surrounded (practically) with windows with mini-blinds, and has some nice furnishings, so it makes it a fun place to experiment with light in. Ashlee's one of my new senior models and helping me out with representing us at some of the high schools, so she was game to come in a mess around for a little while.

The light from different times of the day is really interesting, but since it faces southwest, the stronger light in the afternoon - especially that sweet golden light you get near sunset - is just too much fun!

This chair Ashlee is sitting in is from my front reception area (waiting room). I had intentionally bought several styles of chairs when setting up the studio so that we could have some variety and fun things to shoot with for different purposes... I tend to like old looking chairs, especially ones with a slight Victorian style to them (like I know anything about furniture styles!)... but they're great, especially for senior portraits. I love getting - especially a guy, who'd otherwise look a little, I dunno, awkward in jeans, not formal, and put them in a formal chair. The contrast is subtle and makes a little statement that I think comes through in the photo.

At any rate... I'll be doing more shoots in this room I think. I may have to start calling it the Solarium or something. It's giving me all kinds of ideas about shooting in and around my building in other settings. I'm so fired up!