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This morning, a young exterminator came to my house as I apparently have rats in my attic (San Diego is rat heaven, in case you didn’t know). He kept looking at my art-covered walls and said that I had some great pieces. He talked knowledgeably about it. I asked him why he was an exterminator when he obviously had such art knowledge and he said “I’m a photographer. I do this to pay the bills.”

It was all I could do not to hug the kid. He was unquestionably devoted about his art and would not compromise on it, so he had no complaints about having to kill rats and the like to earn the money for his “camera addiction.” He talked about how he had so much to learn and far to go, but that he made his art whenever he could (and he does so regularly–rather than go out or whatever) and this job was a perfectly fine way to make a living while he walked his along the path. He had absolutely no shame about his day job, and I loved him for it.

The next time you think about taking a bad deal because you need the money, remember the kid who, rather than sell out his art, climbs into disgusting places to kill dangerous beasties. Face it, what he does is, for must of us, pretty close to the proverbial ditch-digging in cache. Let his respect for his art rather than pride in his ego remind you that protecting your art is worth far more than your (imaginary) pride. You need money? Get a job. Don’t sell out your art.

One of the things I suggested giving up this year is being a whiner. As I mentioned, I am tired of hearing photographers (and others) say “I can’t do that,” especially when it’s something as simple as asking for something like a meeting with a target. What is the worst that will happen? You’ll be told “no.”

Ooooo! Scary!
Not.

So, in the hopes of convincing you that “no” just isn’t all that bad and that sometimes, when you ask, you get a yes (even for crazy requests), I offer you this article. This guy asks for stuff most of us would never dream of asking. He gets plenty of noes for his efforts, but he also gets some surprising yeses and, most of all, he’s learned his way past his original fear of asking.

For those of you who have the BAP2Go app, the tech provider is still having problems and there will be significant changes soon. I would appreciate it if you would email me so that I can contact you directly about these changes and to send you a link to a new podcast. Leslie@burnsautoparts.com is the address.

As a wrap-up to 2012, after looking back over the year and what I’ve seen happening, I’d like to make the following suggestions of things any creative professional should quit for 2013 (and beyond):

1. Complaining about the state of the industry. This is a big one and it’s eternal. For as long as I’ve been working with creative pros (and that’s like 20 years now), every creative I know has complained about his/her particular industry, but photographers are particularly “good” at this. Let’s just stop it. There will always be lowballers and idiots (clients and colleagues)–whining about them is a waste of effort. Instead, use that energy to do something positive for your business, like calling an old client and touching base.
2. Being a bad client’s bitch. You know what happens when you drop a client who treats you like a dog and you lose that income? Not much, because in exchange you free up your time to find a client who respects and appreciates you. You can’t change a bully client, so just walk away and feel how great that is! You’ll also be able to hold your head up and respect yourself more.
3. Fixing it in post/Photoshop. There is nothing wrong with doing great post-production, but there is something wrong with relying on it for stuff you should be doing in camera (or on the page). This is happening way, way, way too much. For photography, the quality shows when you shoot really well, even if you manipulate the bejeezus out of the image later (same goes for music, etc.).
4. Doing it for free/cheap, especially just because you want to be a nice person. If you are losing money doing the work, you aren’t being a nice person, you are encouraging business failure. It’s not selfish in a bad way to do what you need to and that is to say “no” when people ask for freebies or deals. Saying “no” often results in you being more respected as a professional. Bonus!
5. Avoiding doing the business-y stuff. Instead of putting off doing your books (etc.) until you have no other choice, pay your bills and do your books regularly, like every week. Schedule it. I like what my friend John Durant does: every Monday morning he does the business stuff like invoicing, etc.; if he gets a shoot, he bumps the paperwork of course, but otherwise it is every Monday, boom. That also works to get the icky stuff done and off your plate first thing in the week–freeing you for the rest of the week.
6. Doing too much social media stuff. Social media will not make your business successful. You will not be that one in a gazillion who hits, so stop wasting all your time posting and tweeting and following and using far too many so-called tools to reach out to a huge audience. If you want to be famous, then you need to think about what you are doing with your life. If you want to be a successful artist/creative professional, put your efforts on making and monetizing your art, not making people like you. You can’t pay your rent with a +1 or a like. Instead, spend more time targeting the best targets for your work and reaching out to them directly and, preferably, in person.
7. Contributing to the problem. Every time you make it look easy or play down the work behind your work, you are lowering the perceived value of your work and the work of your colleagues. Stop saying “I got lucky” or “It’s not that hard” and the like. This is part of why I encourage creatives to try to bring back some of the mystery of their art. For example, don’t provide monitors for your clients–tell them you will show them when you are ready. They may bitch about it at first, but as long as your work is fabulous, they’ll get over it and, more importantly, you will look more like the miracle worker you are.
8. Being a hypocrite. You cannot have pirated/torrented music or films or books (whatever) and be a professional creative without being the worst kind of hypocrite. Don’t like reading that? Tough. It’s the hard truth. No, your free music doesn’t only affect the impersonal labels, it hurts “little” people just like you. More importantly, though, it’s just simply wrong to take someone else’s creative work and then expect to get paid for yours. Stop justifying it however you do and instead do the right thing: pay for the creative works you acquire. All of them.
9. Shooting only digital or using only digital tools to make your work. Whatever your discipline, photography, illustration, even writing, do it the old fashioned way occasionally. If you can get a client to pay you for this, great (and more are, by the way), but just do it for yourself. Draw, sketch, hand letter, shoot film, write longhand… doing your art the old way will force you to slow down and change how you approach your work (for the better) when you then go back and use your more usual tools. I can’t over-emphasize this idea enough–you will use the modern tools better and will be more creative overall, if you do this every so often. I like the idea of taking at least one day a quarter (preferably more like one day a month) to make art manually/sans digital.
10. Not registering the copyrights in your works. I’m going to put this as plainly as I can: pursuing infringers is now a legitimate secondary income stream for many creatives (replacing stock sales for more than a few people) but it only works if you register your copyrights. Imagine you find one of your works reproduced on (for example) Forbes.com without your permission. If your copyright is not registered before the infringement (or during the safe harbor time, but I’m not going into that here), you can only get the reasonable license fee for that use (“actual damages”) and that will be maybe a couple of hundred bucks. However, if your work is registered before the infringement, you can get statutory damages and your attorneys’ fees–likely thousands of dollars. Which do you want?

I know what I want for all of you… for all of us… a successful and fantastic 2013. Go out there, quit doing the bad stuff that gets in your way, and make it happen!

For those of you who have the BAP2Go app, I’m just as frustrated as you are about the lack of new podcasts. The tech people are having problems with their cloud provider and, well, I’m stuck. And not happy. There is a new Manual posted, but the podcasts… nope.

So, if you have the app, please email me and I’ll send you a private link to the latest podcast as an mp3 which you can download.

Mea culpa.

-Leslie

 

Here is some interesting research into how “faking it” actually works… in some ways. Fundamentally, it seems that how we use our bodies affects us more than we might think–as in literally affects how our bodies function (hormones like cortisol and testosterone) and that affects how we think.

It also affects how others perceive us. You might not feel powerful, but striking an “expansive” pose can subtly signal others that you are, and that means you’ll get greater attention.

The combination can be a powerful tool to getting what you want in business.

Pay attention to the other side of that, though, as the article mentions. It’s not about being a bully. It’s not about being a dictator. It’s about using your body to attract a certain level and kind of attention that encourages others to follow you, to buy into your story.

Of course, that means you have to have a good story as well. By story, I mean either your marketing message or your plan for a particular project… whatever you are trying to, for lack of a better term, sell in that context.

The best stories, by the way, are true ones. You had better believe in your story first or no amount of posing will make others buy into it.

So the cloud is still hosed. Oh well.

I can’t blame everything on the cloud, unfortunately. A lot of the delay was by my own choice. See, I’ve had a month, well, more like a month and a half, from hell. Now, my hell isn’t as bad as others’ hells, but for me, it was enough that I had to make some choices about what I could and could not accomplish. I put off doing a podcast and have completely bailed on the Manual for this month (monthly subscribers got their money refunded–if any of you annual subscribers want a refund, please contact me!).

What actually happened to me isn’t really important, but I will tell you that a big part of it involved finding out that my email had been, for lack of a better term, hacked. Someone I know had been accessing it for a long time–years, in fact. The feeling of being invaded… I can’t express it fully. It’s enough to make one hurl.

Luckily, the invasion was not into my legal work’s email (that would have been all sort of worse!) nor (apparently) my actual computer, but still… imagine having your email read without your knowledge… for years. Yeah, creepy as all get out.

So, part of my delay has been that I didn’t want to do anything until I figured out the extent of the invasion (hence no blog posts, etc.). Then I was delayed while I changed over my hosting, etc.

It’s been a big pain. And a costly one (not just financially).

So, having been through this, here is my advice to you: never ever ever share your login information with anyone, no matter how close to you. Sadly, we never really know some people and what can happen should the relationship sour (or even if it doesn’t!) can lead to your privacy being utterly violated.

If you want your digital self deleted or otherwise managed at your demise, put your login info in a document in a safety deposit box or something. Or check out some of these services or read how the issue is being approached by estate planners and lawyers here.

Prevention, as they say, is much cheaper in the long run.

Anyway, for me, my life is getting back to some semblance of normal on the technical side. I’m now being hosted by the fabulous people at dogbark.com (where if you contact support you will still interact with a real, live human and one here in the USA) who made a complicated transition as painless as possible. Seriously, they did all the lifting. Good people.

And getting that done will give me more time to write here, and a new Manual next month, and podcasts.

… that is, if my app company can get the cloud worked out. 😉

I have a podcast I’ve been trying to upload for those of you who have the BAP2Go app, but the cloud server is hosed and the techies haven’t figured it out yet. The irony? The title and topic of the podcast is Life Happens–how things sometimes just make you (sort of) fail and how to accept that and get through it.

This month has very much been that for me. It’s been a tough one personally and I’ve failed in keeping some promises to you–like getting the podcast up in time. It’s hilariously ironic that I can’t share that with you until they get the cloud fixed.

Just a quick note to ask you to look at your copyright notices on your website. Do you have one on each page? You need to.

Just having a separate page about your copyrights will not legally help you if your work gets infringed–that is, it won’t help you make additional claims under the DMCA as the courts are saying that CMI (copyright management information) needs to be on the same page as the work, at the very least. Actually, it’s better to have the notice tucked right up next to the image. Each image.

While a watermark of a proper copyright notice on the image provides even more protection, at least having a proper copyright notice next to your work, online, can be a great way to prove infringement, willfulness, and you can also make a claim for a violation of the DMCA if your photo gets used without it. DMCA violations don’t require timely registration, by the way, so this is like insurance for those of you who still aren’t actually registering your work as often as you should.

But here is the devil in the details: make sure your copyright notice matches your copyright registration certificate if you have registered the work (and you really, really should). If you register your work as Betty Martin, do not post your notice as © 2010 Betty Martin Photography. Or, if your work is not registered, no fibbing on the notice: it needs to be proper and that means the © + the year of first publication + the name of the author (for example: © 2012 Leslie Burns). A smart defendant will use any mistake in the notice or difference from the certificate to kick out the DMCA claim.

Worst of all, do not think that using your website url as notice will cut it–the courts have been unsure on just what CMI is and especially if your URL is something odd, like mine, it may not be considered CMI (the law states that CMI contains info that identifies the author).

So, check your site and make sure you are protecting yourself. You owe it to your work and your business.

I used to love Behance. They made putting together an online portfolio easy and they had an effective network for spreading creative information. They looked like (mostly) good guys.

Until today. Today they announced that they are “partnering” with chillingeffects.org to provide “transparency” in the copyright enforcement process.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. A company that is entirely beholden to those who create is partnering with a group that is expressly anti-copyright in its mission? Chillingeffects.org outs those who submit DMCA takedown notices or who send cease and desist letters. It does this under the guise of “providing transparency” but the result of these posts (the outings) is just as their title proposes: a chilling effect on artists protecting and defending their rights.

I’ve received threats that would make your blood run cold because I have been outed as a “copyright troll” by sites like chillingeffects.org. They are more than happy to post your full contact information (often they will even look up stuff you might not have included in your C&D–like my home address has been published by these people) and those who think everything should be free also think that they are free to call for whatever evil acts they dream up against anyone who dares stand up for the rights of artists and other creators. It’s terrifying.

[UPDATE: ChillingEffects itself does not post the personal info, however they post enough data that the Freehadists can dig up the rest and post it on other sites, and they do.]

Anyone remember the Red Scare? The House Unamerican Activities Committee? Sites like chillingeffects.org are the modern day version of the same career-ending spiteful crap. They don’t care if you are defending your rights–they only care that you dared think that you should stop someone from exploiting your work without paying you for it. For that you are labeled and outed, like a criminal. Worse than a criminal. At least a criminal gets a trial.

And yet for some unfathomable reason, Behance thinks that working with these people is a good idea. Well, maybe it is for them, but it surely is not for the artists who use Behance’s services while also wanting to make a living from their creative works.

So, if you’ve been using Behance, quit now, and let them know exactly why. You are not a criminal for trying to make a living from your work. Your private data should not be exposed just because you are trying to stop someone from doing something illegal with your work! You deserve to be respected for respecting your rights, not “exposed” for it.

Shame on you, Behance. Have you no decency?

[UPDATE: The Freehadists are getting riled and trying to post anonymous comments. As I have stated before, I will NOT approve anonymous comments and I do check people I don’t know.]