Month: July 2014

I saw this brief interview on Tumblr and was particularly happy with this comment:

Whatever you do in life if it must be for yourself. When thats the case then you will want to keep your practice going, because you believe in it.

Photographers aren’t alone in struggling to make it today. Here’s an op-ed from the NYTimes about writers and money.

Talking about money is a good thing and the more open people can be about it, the less (I think) the cheap bastards who take advantage of silence will push you around.

The California Lawyers for the Arts are talking Photography and the Law in Los Angeles THIS WEDNESDAY. Go if you can!

 

For those creative professionals who live in community property states, you need to pay special attention to your copyrights. Sure, we all want to believe that our marriages will last forever and that we’ll never have to face issues of division of property in divorce, but it would be foolhardy at best to ignore that very real possibility.

Now, this is a very complex issue, but roughly speaking in community property states any assets acquired or created during a marriage are co-owned by the spouses. There are exceptions (like in California inherited property is separate) but generally speaking, if it is an asset, it belongs to you both equally. This is a state law thing and there is some variation from state to state.

Copyright is a federal law thing, but there are parts of that law that rub up against the state laws regarding community property. This makes divorce lawyers happy for their increased fees and creative professionals sad for having to deal with the mess. Basically, and again this is a big generalization because this is a blog and not legal advice, in most community property states your partner will have at the very least a 50% interest in any value of your copyrights even though they may not actually be technical co-owners of the copyrights.

Yeah, I said this was complex. I warned you. But I’ll save you a lot of the gory legal mumbo-jumbo details. The short version is that in most states the ownership of the copyrights will stay with you but the value will be split. California is a possible exception to that rule as the leading case in this area said the copyrights themselves were community property and thus owned by both spouses so when the now-divorced spouse (author) sued a third party for copyright infringement the ex-wife gets a share of the damages (fwiw, I don’t think that was right since the federal statute should have negated that, but I’m not the court).

Anyway in California or otherwise, functionally this shared interest in the value means that if you ever split up, your soon-to-be-ex has a claim to a value equal to 50% of the total value of your copyrights created during the marriage. S/He may even have a right to future royalties if the underlying work was created during the marriage. Think about how much work you create… now think about the value of that work. Worse yet, think about the cost of getting that work valued–the expert and legal fees involved will be large. Ouch.

So, these are issues you should settle before they become issues. You can get an agreement (like a pre-nup, for example) that contracts around some of this or settles how it will all work just in case you ever do split up (if you do that, I suggest hiring a family law attorney who has solid experience with intellectual property). Yes, it seems not very romantic to think that way on the one hand, but on the other it actually is: you care enough about your future spouse to make sure that if the relationship doesn’t work out, you can split up with less financial and (hopefully) emotional cost to all.

This is a very cool idea. The artist deconstructs/reconstructs and the results look sort of like seeing a landmark as a reflection in a skyscraper.

If you are not already following Clients from Hell, you ought, if only so that you do not feel so alone when one of your clients pulls something like this.

I’ve been saying it for years, SEO is a waste of your time. Here is more proof.

If you want to get clients, the right clients, then you need to make fantastic work that is your work (not trying to be anyone else) and then do the research to find who might be interested in that and reach out to them. It’s not that complicated but it is work. There are no cheap or fast tricks.

 

Perhaps in my early dotage I am turning curmudgeonly, but I am really tired of digital everything. In particular, I’m tired of digital photography especially when it is not even printed (and printed well).

There is so much connected to prints and we’re forgetting too much of it. The joy of finding an old snapshot. The smell of a darkroom. The depth of a really great print on amazing paper. Two people leaning their heads in to share the view. Looking at a contact sheet or negs with a loupe.

Without prints we’d never have this.

Or this.

Or the discovery of Vivian Maier.

 

Digital is ephemeral, intangible. But a print, even though it will fade or get water spotted or otherwise damaged, persists. Even when we don’t know the real story, a print tells us a story… usually our own.

I’m going to warn you ahead of time, do not eat or drink while watching this video or you will ruin your computer. It’s hilarious.

I really hate the FeedBlitz emails because of the ads (btw, I get nothing… not a penny…from that) but I can’t find anything better. I apologize.

However, there is a better way to follow this blog overall: the rss feed. Point your reader here: feed://www.burnsautoparts.com/blog/feed/