Both author's skills and the cost of equipment are irrelevant. If the author decides that the cost of equipment is the pricing factor, it's his or her right.

The comments here mostly point out that this pricing decision is not logical.

This has everything to do with the law, because if not for copyright laws, he wouldn't be able to demand payments for copying of his published photos.

   5. (Law)
   (a) The asking or seeking for what is due or claimed as due.
   ...
   [1913 Webster]

I think photographers (like musicians) face two problems: the amateurization of photography, and the lack of marginal cost of distribution.

Photographers need to figure out how to get paid. You can try to charge me the cost of production if you want, but I'm not going to pay it, esp. when there's a large and growing base of amateurs who will give me their work for free. This is why there is a culture of asking for a free license in exchange for exposure: because market dynamics have driven the price down that far. Someone who approaches you for free work isn't going to pay you what you want no matter what. You need to find the people who will pay you.

The freemium model is the only one that really makes sense to me. You give away your past work for free, as a marketing cost, and charge a service fee for those premium customers who have the budget. You charge for the actual production, not for the distribution.

As someone who considers himself an amateur photographer, there is no way I could just "reproduce" that for free to someone.

First consider the amount of money his lens costs, how much his filter costs, because those things are not "common" parts of an amateur photographer's kit.

Then consider the amount of time he put into his craft, the countless hours he spend reading up on photography: lighting, white balance, ISO, apeture, etc. Then going outside to do nature shoots or going inside for some modeling on a white screen. All of that is blood, sweat and tears he expended to be good at what he is doing.

Do you think a junior programmer is the same as a senior programmer? There are obviously times where some program or code is so simple that either programmer could get the job done (and even then a lesser programmer might miss some minute detail), but if it were true for all programming jobs then obviously the people in the industry would be screwed because no one would pay a salary for more than just a junior programmer. Replace what you've said about photography with programming and do you still believe it to be true?

If you really feel that you should get your photos free from an amateur photographer that is your choice, but you're not going to get the same picture that that guy took and he's happy to not sell you that picture for free. Just getting the perfect lighting for a photograph is tough and I doubt an amateur could just set that up and take it for you at that quality.

That might work for him, but I doubt it's viable for photographers in general, at least in the future.

He has also mentioned that people who give stuff away for free or "credit" are just burned again later on because other companies don't want to pay, they want to "credit"

Like I said, those companies aren't going to pay no matter what. They're looking for a free product. If yours isn't free, they're not going to change their budget, they're going to look elsewhere.

My point is that copies are basically free. When you use the copies as marketing, you're using their zero marginal cost as a feature. What you charge for is the part that costs you money: production. You have to find the people who are willing to fund the production of photos, not just the distribution.

My point about amateurization is that, no, maybe you or I couldn't reproduce that photo, but could a thousand amateurs? What about when the equipment gets rapidly better and more inexpensive at the same time?

Then consider the amount of time he put into his craft, the countless hours ...

Here you're making an anti-capitalist argument. I should pay him what he deserves? Who decides how much his hard work is worth?

I'm actually not a programmer, but your point isn't lost on me. But I think it actually bolsters my argument. Programmers generally have figured out how to make money, and it's not be selling free copies. It's the reason SaaS and freemium models are dominating.

So, yes, you can replace photographers with any job and I think it'll still be true: you have to charge for the parts people will be willing to pay, and zero marginal cost distribution isn't going to be it.

In fact, to make it personal: I'm an aspiring writer. I write on my blog and I just got a couple of pieces published in the Atlantic Tech blog. I don't get paid for any of that writing. If I tried to charge for it, no one would pay me. So I give it away for free while I hone my skills and build my (freely available) ouevre, in the hope that eventually the quality of my work will be such that I will be able to fund the production of the work, not the distribution of copies. (I.e. in the hope that I'll get hired by a web site or magazine to write on staff full-time.) So my money is actually located exactly where my mouth is.

> In fact, to make it personal: I'm an aspiring writer. I write on my blog and I just got a couple of pieces published in the Atlantic Tech blog. I don't get paid for any of that writing. If I tried to charge for it, no one would pay me. So I give it away for free while I hone my skills and build my (freely available) ouevre, in the hope that eventually the quality of my work will be such that I will be able to fund the production of the work, not the distribution of copies. (I.e. in the hope that I'll get hired by a web site or magazine to write on staff full-time.) So my money is actually located exactly where my mouth is.

Who's to say he hasn't already paid his dues? Maybe he did do sample work when he was just starting out and he's now at the phase where he's monetizing his skill set by selling good photos. He doesn't have a problem with companies that don't want to pay, he just says that what he does isn't cheap or free to do so pay him some money for his time and effort or just don't use the picture. If some website asks you to write full-time but they can't pay you anything other than exposure, are you going to take it? No, because you have a valuable skill that should be paid.

But let's try to keep it in the context of the post. He has a picture, apparently companies _want_ this picture so he has something that they cannot get just by grabbing an amateur's version of the photograph. These companies also have large ad and marketing budgets so money shouldn't be an issue yet somehow it is. I think in this case he has a right to be mad. He can't work for free, and since he took it and owns the rights to it he should be able to tell those companies to piss off. If there is a demand for his photo to be used then he should get paid.

I'm saying it's not about paying dues. I'm saying dues-paying is exactly the wrong attitude. I'm not writing for free out of some sense of obligation to the field. I'm doing it because that's the only way I can think of to build enough credibility to be able to charge for my productive capacity in the future.

...and he's now at the phase where he's monetizing his skill set by selling good photos.

My argument is that selling copies is not a great way to monetize that skill-set that he's built. It might work for a few people, but I think market dynamics are such that that's not going to be viable for many people for very long.

If some website asks you to write full-time but they can't pay you anything other than exposure, are you going to take it?

That's not the analogous situation. A closer one is: if a website asks to use a copy of one of my posts, paying only in exposure, would I take it? The answer is yes, I already do that. I could ask them to pay me for work I've already done, but it's a hard thing to ask, when people can get the same thing for free elsewhere.

He has a picture, apparently companies _want_ this picture

Yes. They want it for free, despite their large ad and marketing budgets. Money is always an issue. What makes you say "it shouldn't be an issue"?

He can't work for free, and since he took it and owns the rights to it he should be able to tell those companies to piss off. If there is a demand for his photo to be used then he should get paid.

You're right that he should be able to tell people to piss off if he wants to. He can try to charge a billion dollars per photo if he wants. I'm not saying he shouldn't, I don't think anyone is. I'm saying it's not going to work. I'm saying it's not a viable strategy for photographers at large for the foreseeable future. You're crazy if you think the companies that are asking for the photo for free are going to read this blog post and realize the error of their ways.

There is a huge difference between amateur music and professional music, So big a difference in fact that I would say there is no comparison between them.

Good professional musicians make money just like we programmers do. The problem starts when amateur musicians/programmers take music/photography as a hobby first and then try to make money out of it.

The biggest problem with this is they don't match the quality of work produced by the actual professionals. And now have to compete with fellow amateurs.

Amateur photographers/musicians can't make money for the very same reasons why your side android apps project doesn't make anything more than $50 an year.

There are two kinds of photography, 'on demand' and 'stock' which is to say you hire someone to come out and take pictures at your wedding that is 'on demand', you need a picture of a waterfall in Hawaii to put into a travel brochure you find one in a catalog, that is 'stock'.

The guy who takes wedding pictures has lots of great equipment. The guy that shot mine brought three cameras, one for shots around the event, one taking shots of the location , and a portrait setup for one on one pictures. Now he probably had 15 - 20K worth of gear there, but he does 10 - 15 weddings a year. So even amortizing with a lifetime of 3 years for each piece of gear his equipment 'cost' is worst case 30 shoots, so $666 per shoot.

I really do think the think the effect here is that it is so easy to put photographs on the web, and for many folks they just took the picture for themselves, they don't have any problem at all giving people rights to reproducing their picture anywhere. So people who acquire pictures ask for it free first, and then if you respond that no, you are only interested in selling it, you can come to a negotiation over price.

Unfortunately, from what I've read on photography blogs there are also some pretty large price / value discrepancies between photographers and buyers. This seems to lead to a number of blog postings like the one referenced with (often) one side of the story.

Conversely, if a famous photographer took a beautiful photo with a disposable camera, you can bet it would be worth more than $15.

The entire premise is near-offensively wrong.

Ultimately it's supply-and-demand: get paid $X because people are willing to pay that to acquire the image, regardless of his alleged talent and costs. As it is, he's handing out small copies of that image for free, while begging people to not violate abstract notions of intellectual property. Maybe someone will like the image enough to order a hard-to-make high-quality large-size limited-quantity signed-and-numbered copy and pay a dear price for it.

What many people with only a superficial understanding of economics don't seem to grasp is that the "perfect competition" ecosystem that is described in Econ 101 - in which goods are priced at cost - is an EMERGENT property of free trade.

Key word is emergent. The cost of a good is not enough justification for judgment of what someone out to pay for that good. When that good, labor, and all inputs of that good, and inputs of those inputs are priced fairly and freely, then such pricing tends to emerge. But saying "I paid $XX for a plane ticket and this equipment to produce this good so I deserve to be paid $XX for it" is Begging The Question. The inventive camera maker, or the bankrupt airline that sold you the plane ticket below cost, could be make the same argument of you. And the cheated, suicidal Foxconn employee who made the camera components could make the same argument. And so on.

The point is you can't force the pricing you want. Allow people to trade freely, and order emerges.

It's actually a discount in that regard since most people would have to spend considerable time learning how to take that photo.

It's a perfectly good starting place for a price. And nowhere did he say that price wasn't negotiable.

It's similar to buying anything on the market - A toaster would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build from scratch (http://www.thetoasterproject.org/), but no one pays that much (not does any manufacturer expect that much) since no one is really going to build one from scratch.

The author's argument gets really weird at the end when he claims that if someone misappropriates the image, he would charge the cost of his camera, his laptop, his software - the whole shebang that went into it. It's a very strange way of computing the loss of value to him. The loss of value could be zero (if there was no buyer for that image in the first place - a lot of photographers take excellent images without anyone actually buying or wanting to buy them ever), or it could be many thousands of dollars if it is a piece of art that is highly valued. Basing the value on the cost of the equipment that went into producing it does not do justice to the image either way.

Then he has to work as a professional. "Professional landscape photographer" is an oxymoron. There is essentially no commercial market for landscape photography. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of sufficiently high-quality images available for free.

The only thing I'm formally qualified to do is sound engineering. The development of Digital Audio Workstation software and cheap microphones meant that by the time I left college, there weren't any recording studios left to hire me. I could say exactly the same thing as the OP about how much my studio equipment costs, about how long I spent learning my craft, but the simple fact is that there are too many studio engineers willing to work for free.

Landscape photography is a hobby, like sport or music. Some people are so exceptionally good at that they can make a living doing it, but everyone else has to suck it up, act like an adult and do something that people will actually pay for. John B. Mueller shoots weddings, I write software. He shoots landscapes for fun, I record music for fun, which is exactly why nobody will pay us to do it - thousands like us will do it for free.

I don't know if he was just trying to establish the 'overhead' costs, or that at a minimum, discounting his time, that's what it cost him, but I'd like to see that number be higher, if anything.

This, to me, is the same argument I made recently regarding musicians, in the creation of music, the finished work isn't zero-cost. Ignoring the recording studio costs, media costs, distribution costs, there are other costs like instruments, instrument lessons where applicable, etc.

Even if you believe that you should be able to reproduce an artist's work free of charge (which I admit I often am conflicted on,) you have no right to take the work that it cost them money to produce for free because you aren't depriving them of anything.

I will point out that there is a reason HN advocates making money by developing web apps over creating binaries that are posted online for all to copy, with a shareware note attached. We have the exact same problem with copying. We just have learned to deal with the problem as best we can. Is there really nothing photographers can do on their own to mitigate the problem?

I would not forward this thread to a photographer if asked "what do hackers recommend I do to mitigate my work being ripped off?" not for lack of ideas but simply because it's just not what they want to hear when things like SOPA/PIPA are floating around. "Innovate or die" is harder to swallow when there are folks saying "We'll protect you".

Photographers and other content creators alike find things like SOPA/PIPA enticing because it feels like someone is looking out for their interests.

As for only charging for your expertise, use of equipment/software, and time are also things businesses legitimately charge for, so it's fair to factor those into your value as well. It may not be the best way to assess the worth of your work, but it is a part of it.

This photo alone has paid for the camera I took the photo with & the location costs several times over now. It may well surprise you, but there is a huge market for sunset pictures, as well as other even more mundane everyday items and scenes.

Thanks.

When the Beatles were making some of their best work (in my opinion), they weren't touring. Who are we to say that the recordings are without value, just because they are easily copied, and that they should have made their money by touring?

I'm frankly surprised to see this viewpoint stated so commonly on a site where I assume many people make their living writing code. Should your ability to make money be contingent on your ability to keep your source code hidden?

you have no right to make money doing what you would like to do, sorry thats just life.

As technology has progressed, it has meant that instead of very few producers and millions of consumers of 'content', now everyone produces content. That means the value of 'content' has drastically reduced to the point that it's almost worthless for some areas.

This is progress, and you can't stop it.

Of course art is valuable, as it has always been. But as stated elsewhere, there are a billion pictures of a sunset online... supply far outstrips demand.

And yes, as a programmer, you can either work to keep your source code secret, or you can provide software as a service, charge for support, or any number of other monetization options. But you can't really sell open source software without some reason for people to buy it.

As you say, there are thousands of sunset images, probably thousands under, say, a CC or free license. That means you can use them, not that you can declare his image is worthless and use it.

In terms of can copy therefore, should be allowed to copy, that just changes the potential nature of the contract that exists. With physical goods there was a barrier to copying, but there are plenty of situations in society where what governs our behaviour isn't what we can do, it's what we all (or a vast majority of us) have agreed to do because we believe that is in our mutual best interest.

The fact it's easy to copy things means the potential for change exists and the mechanisms whereby restrictions are enforced may change, but it doesn't mean that in the future can copy will automatically mean is permitted to copy by society.

Yes, you can't stop progress, but the direction of progress is still unclear.

As to your second argument, that 'anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent': image quality isn't all that counts. In fact, it's substantially less important than composing a good photograph in the first place. Someone with a little experience can take much better photographs with a $200 camera than someone unexperienced can with a $1200 camera.

Taking good photographs is as hard as it always was. It's about artistic composition, about knowing your tools, about having enough to experience to take the shot. Ask an amateur photographer friend whether he thinks he can easily reproduce this photo. Those in my vicinity all tell me they can't. Firstly, their equipment is insufficient. A $900 DSLR won't cut it and they don't have those filters. Secondly, they would never have thought of doing it this way, with these tools. Anyone can copy. This guy has done original work. How many people have enough experience with this $200 filter to know it would be perfect for this shot?

It's illegal, yes. But the question whether copying published works is morally unacceptable to people is debatable.

Comparing sharing with killing or stealing is a common mistake.

Citing http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

And yet, people still kill each other on a daily basis. At some point it may become practical to take precautions not to get killed, or to move into a line of work or a place where you're less likely to get killed.

This guy wasn't arguing he has a hard time making a living, which is the argument that people seem to be replying to. He's arguing that people shouldn't copy photographs for commercial purposes. It's hard to see how anyone could disagree with that: I don't want my code copied either (well, specific parts of it). The question of what you should do when people in fact do copy your photographs is mostly separated from that.

This seems to come up fairly often - an article making a moral argument that copying is wrong, followed by comments saying "Yeah, but it still happens, so you should do X", followed by replies saying "no, but you don't understand, it's wrong!"

Strangely enough, this seems to come up mostly in the context of music (or, in this case, photography). I haven't seen many software blogs making a purely moral argument as opposed to a practical discussion of what to do about it.

It's called trust, it's why we've been lauding Louis CK's latest effort. Also, Apple used to distribute their OS software that way, it didn't require a serial number or online validation.

"If you run a bike-shop, don't leave the bikes out front without locks. They're going to get stolen. Don't bitch about society when they go missing. If you're putting art out on the internet, don't bitch when everyone has a copy."

Nice argument for DRM. I thought all of us here were opposed to that kind of thing.

"At least watermark that sucker."

What is that supposed to accomplish? Even if those who appropriate the picture don't crop the pictures, that doesn't justify republishing it without permission and/or compensation.

Such as PIPA and SOPA?

Believing that a concept such as a digital pattern or an idea is property that belongs to someone is borderline religious -- because I'm sure you fervently believe it without any supporting evidence. Just because you can monetize something doesn't mean you own it. If I discovered the wheel first, does that mean society owes me money bags for stealing my invention?

Bad legislation and lobbyism are no reasons for or against anything.

> Believing that a concept such as a digital pattern or an idea is property that belongs to someone is borderline religious -- because I'm sure you fervently believe it without any supporting evidence.

That is arbitrary from an objective point of view. Now name me a law or human concept that is not.

Thank you for your assumptions about SOPA and fervent religiousness in a thread that has to do with neither.

Untrue. With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance. That wasn't true before digital.

Photos are simply recording something that exists. It's not creating art as such (IMHO). So unlike painting / writing books / writing code, you could just sit a monkey there with a good camera, variety of lenses, filters, etc and have him take a fantastic photo sooner or later.

Don't get me wrong, I love taking photos, and try to make my photos better each time, try to learn what settings, composure etc will make the best photo etc. But at the same time, pretty soon you'll have cameras that take a billion photos all at the same time with every available setting, then allow you to navigate through and select the best. Taking photos then just comes down to judging what makes a good photo, which most people can do (And can also be automated by surveying people or doing A/B testing etc).

> You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal.

If you kill me, it affects me. If you copy a photo of mine, I haven't lost anything. It's a bad analogy.

This is simply untrue.

It's true that at one point simply getting everything into focus at the right moment took a skilled photographer. But that was never the sum total of what a skilled photographer brought to the table.

A sunset photo isn't good simply when it's the best of a million possible photos of a sunset. It can be good because the photographer found an interesting location to set the picture. It can be good because the photographer waited-for and/or was present for an opportune confluence of elements such as weather, tide, etc. It can be good when the position and angle of the camera framed the scene in an appealing way, including or excluding other elements to enhance the shape, color and symmetry of the composition. It can be good when the focus highlights an interesting subject, and de-emphasizes non-essential visual noise.

Taking a billion photos can guarantee that you get a solid reproduction of whatever you pointed your camera at. But it will never render irrelevant the skills of subject identification, color balance (artistic balance, not simply accurate reproduction), composition, framing, etc. And lastly, it's absolutely no substitute for inspiration, education and experience.

There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you.

We've also been fed so many fantastic photos online etc, that we rarely go "wow" any more. For all we know it could be a photo, a photoshop, a CGI. What was once amazing is now often the norm.

I really wouldn't like to be a professional photographer these days, as I just don't think you can make much money at it.

Haha yeah, I guess if you disregard the context of time, weather, effort, mobility, and all that non-idealized crap, you could probably systematically move around with your magic jetpack and a camera with infinite battery or whatever it is camera's have nowadays. Then you could simply brute-force every available composition like a computer would. Beep boop.

"There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you."

Fellow computer: sudo take a gorgeous photo of a snowy landscape, and fall back on the brute-force algorithm if necessary. Make it quick, I have to find my way back by noon and I don't trust my A* algorithm.

Taking photos is just recording light that exists. You can change the position, lighting, a few options on the camera, but it's easy enough to say that for a given location, probably a few thousand photos would cover most of the possibles.

Writing involves thought. After you've typed even a few characters you're past a few thousand possible combinations. Brute forcing writing isn't feasible.

Later a computer will recreate the entire event and the photographer will fly around with a virtual camera and select the best shots.

  If you copy a photo of mine, I haven't lost anything. It's 
  a bad analogy.

  soon you'll have cameras that take a billion photos all at 
  the same time with every available setting, then allow you 
  to navigate through and select the best.

  (And can also be automated by surveying people or doing 
  A/B testing etc)

And even if you could auto-select the best shot, a billion photographs of people on some village square wouldn't include the shot this guy made. A billion photographs taken around noon would never have included this shot. A billion photographs with a different cliffline would never have included this shot. A bajillion monkeys will never write Shakespeare in the lifetime of the universe.

And even that is not a good solution. It is a workaround for those bands that happen to be good live bands. It is like moving from singleplayer (easy to copy) to hosted multiplayer games. It is good for the industry, but it still killed off whole genres just for the sake of not being copyable.