A good read about business

[Mike Ditz]

http://strobist.blogspot.com/

Scroll down to the part about the vanishing middle class of photographers. It's happening all over the business. The trick is to somehow rise above the lower levels and become more than a commodity.

[Dennis Murray]

Very good read. I especially like his points about the "Semi-Pro" and rising above that status or choosing to be an amateur.

[Erik Anderson]

There's a whole lot of truth in that article. A fellow shooter sent me a link to one of the stock sites and I was surprise at the rates (it appears to be the same one in the Strobist article). I see alot of 'guys and girls with cameras' willing to take photos for nothing 'just to practice.

Producing images better than these 'competitors is not difficult, but convincing what was originally my target market that they should pay me $XXX instaed is proving to be more difficult with each new camera model release. I've readjusted my aim for the otherside of the fence, but it will be no easy task to get to where I'm going from where I am.

[Todd Corzett]

I find the comments to that article to be the best... one individual talks about making 1500 sales from an image and walking away with $300, and how that's a good deal. Maybe someone should let them know that just one of those 1500 sales alone may have been worth 10 times what he made. Even if they were all just low-resolution web images at market rate he would have made 10x more!

My only saving grace is that an average joe can't put their motorsports images onto an agency because they have no releases, but for other forms of photography it must make things really difficult!

-Todd...