Sometimes you show up somewhere and are totally shocked. Happened to me this week. I went down to Pritzker Pavillion to photograph a woman named Dessa. Her manager had called me and asked me to come down to photograph her. I did a quick photo shoot with her at soundcheck- she was very nice and a pleasure to talk to.

Then the show started, and as the kids say today- OMG!!!!!

Easily the best show I have seen all year. People around me described her as trip hop. I heard a bit of rap, a lot of rock with a great band, and parts of it were kind of operatic. She has a great voice, very smart songs and great stage presence. I couldn’t stop shooting. At one point, she jumped into the audience, who went crazy. After the show someone described her as a cross between Fiona Apple and Lauren Hill. (Best parts of both of them.)

All in all a great night of music in downtown Chicago. Proves that we live in a great city, when music like that can be heard for free most nights during the summer.

Weird stuff on TV this week!

Last Saturday night Kelly Clarkson and Jason Aldean played at Wrigley Field. On the news that night, there was a five minute piece on Kelly Clarkson, the opening act. At the end of the piece, the announcer said “Jason Aldean also played.” So… did Jason’s people not let ABC Television shoot any of his show? Seems that way. Seems kind of weird for someone to headline a baseball stadium in the third largest city in America and not get any publicity! (Nothing in either paper).

Then, two days later, Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z played Soldier Field. Same TV station covered the show. They were only allowed to tape one song, which was lit with dark red light, so dark that you couldn’t tell who was who in the picture! Seems that this is very counterproductive. They were on stage together many times. Couldn’t their people have allowed another song that was lit so that you could see who was who?

I once talked to a lighting designer for a major tour, who had no idea that photographers were only allowed to photograph the first two songs, which were lit very dark. So the next night, the first two songs were lit with bright white lights! Easy solution.

My friend Eric found an article online this week that pretty much sums up what is wrong with photography in the 21st century!

It explains how camera phones are replacing real cameras. (There was a photo in the Chicago Sun Times last week of Robert Plant shot from the sound board with an iPhone!! They should have just drawn a stick figure!)

It explains how pricing has gone down over the last 10 years or so:

The first big slide occurred in the early 2000s when newly created agencies like iStockphoto and Shutterstock sought to profit from the surging supply of images facilitated by digital technology.  They aimed to reach beyond a narrow group of relatively high paying professional picture buyers to the legions of independent designers and’ dabblers’, who perhaps needed imagery but couldn’t afford (or were no longer willing) to pay top dollar for it. Dubbed micropayment sites, these agencies recognised that by using online distribution and drastically slashing image licenses (to a fraction of what they had been), they could expand the market for photography – a move that benefited the owners of those companies a lot more than it did the creators of the images they distributed, many of whom earn just a few cents from each sale.

Note the part about it not benefiting photographers! Couldn’t have been more true. As sales go up (quantity) prices go down, to the point where an individual image licensing fee is laughable.

The next great point:

Every news event is now recorded not just by professional photographers and journalists but by an army of amateur by-standers who have the ability to share their ‘creations’ almost instantaneously – and for free. Bastion of journalism the BBC already regularly makes use of crowd sourced journalism – or user generated content (UGC) to use the technical jargon. So while one can hardly expect to be remunerated for publishing an image on Facebook, it is slightly worrying that unpaid crowd sourced imagery is also appearing in the mainstream media who generate revenue from the content they provide. With so much free imagery available, the temptation is often too strong for editors to resist. After all, why pay for something you can get for free.

Hence: The Sun Times has fired their entire photo staff and is relying on writers cell phones for photos!

Then, the real problem:

The current paradigm relies on calculating rates based on a matrix of factors including the relative size of an image on the printed page, the position of the picture (inside or cover), the print run of the publication, the geographical distribution area and related languages. Yet with an ever increasing number of eyeballs on screens and not paper, and with so much value being derived from advertising online the predominantly paper based approach to calculating rates seems out of synch with the realities and trends in media today. Of course online usage is usually remunerated but it almost always tends to be treated as an add on. If a magazine buys a license to use your work in their print edition they might, or might not, pay a little extra for using the same picture online, even though the online usage might double (or more) the number of people seeing your image. Given the way things are going, I’m starting to wonder if it shouldn’t be the other way round. The principle value calculation should be based on electronic and online usage and the print usage should be the add on.

Following up on last weeks post, Someone sent me a link to a CNN Blog called Apparently This Matters.

The Title:

Apparently This Matters: At concerts, put that cell phone down  By Jarrett Bellini, CNN

This guy is actually right on the mark- and pretty funny to boot!

Here are a few of his points:

(CNN) — “Wow! I totally just watched the awesome cell phone video you shot at that concert!”

Said nobody ever.

Yet, at some point, we’ve all done it.

The band is on stage. The phone is in your pocket. And, lest you actually just dance and enjoy yourself and maybe scan the floor for dropped cash, you decide, instead, to shoot three minutes of unlistenable pixel puke.

Perhaps you upload the blurry mess to Facebook or YouTube, but in the end, it ultimately just gets filed deep within your camera roll with the pointless images of some overpriced, mediocre meal you ate from a trendy new food truck.

So, recently, the indie rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs decided to try something. They posted a sign: “PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THE SHOW THROUGH A SCREEN ON YOUR SMART DEVICE/CAMERA. PUT THAT SHIT AWAY as a courtesy to the person behind you and to Nick, Karen and Brian. MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS! YEAH YEAH YEAHS”   This all came out a couple of weeks ago when a picture of their sign from New York’s Webster Hall was tweeted by Spin magazine, and it quickly got passed around the Internet. The band’s sentiments seemed to strike a nerve.

But never mind the annoyance of having to look at the stage through a sea of bright, glaring viewfinders. Even more than that, it’s all just become sort of sad. We’re disconnected from the music.

It is always weird to me to see people in the first three rows of a show, who went through hell to get those seats, either by paying a lot of money or waiting in line for a long time, photographing and shooting video of the band during the entire show! I always want to ask them what they do with that video or those photos when they get home. Unless they work for the Chicago Sun Times, I am guessing not much.

One thing they do accomplish is they block the view of the people behind them!

I wonder if any of them ever look at the stuff they shoot?

Prince played a small venue in Chicago last Saturday night (Really Sunday morning, as he made people wait in the rain and then didn’t go on till 2AM.)

There was a blog post on chicagoist.com:

Titled: When Prince Says No Photos Allowed, Prince Means NO PHOTOS ALLOWED

Picture of the front door accompanies the post with a sign on it saying Photography and Video Taping strictly prohibited.

So….the writer described trying to take a picture with his phone. At that point a “Huge security guard” suddenly in front of him waving his finger no.

So he moved to the back of the room and tried again!! Another huge guy “enveloped his cell phone in his huge hand” and sent him outside, after deleting the photo.

From the writer:

“This is the point where you might expect this writer to whine and complain and bemoan getting tossed out of a Prince show but let’s be honest, despite changing societal expectations, an artist is certainly within his or her rights to ban all photos, so while I was surprised to see it actually enforced I don’t really have any room to complain. And the staff was polite: I’ve seen security guards act far more poorly with much less reason in the past. I learned later that Prince had several guards throughout the crowd whose sole role was to catch people taking photos and, had I known that going in, I certainly wouldn’t have ever taken out my phone (though I see at least one person got away with snapping a shot without being ejected).

So Prince has a bunch of large guys following him on tour and stopping people from taking pictures. That must cost him about ten thousand dollars a week in saleries, hotels and travel to make sure that no one has any shitty cell phone pictures to take home with them! My guess is that pretty soon cell phones will be banned from concerts. Some security guys tell me that that could never happen, as people have to call their kids at home to make sure that they are all right. We shall see!!

It is amazing what sports does to a city. An estimated two million people flooded downtown Chicago Friday morning to celebrate the Blackhawks  Stanley Cup win. In a weak moment I asked for a photo pass, and went down there. What a mess. Walked about three miles to get to the stage. There I heard one very selfless act taking place. Patrick Kane, the MVP of the playoffs, acknowledged the work of Corey Crawford, the Hawks goalie, who should have won the MVP, by giving him the symbolic belt that the teams awards after every game to the best player.

Corey, usually very soft spoken, then gave one of the  greatest one minute speeches in the history of Chicago sports. In front of the Governor, the Mayor, two million people and a host of television cameras, he uttered this famous line:

“These guys worked their fucking nuts off to win this championship!”

That line will go down in Chicago sports history!

That night I went down to the lakefront to be treated like a photographer should be treated while photographing my friends O.A.R. Great guys, great songs and a good time was had by all of the 8000 people that were in the audience, many still in their Hawks shirts from the rally that morning.

Recently I blogged about a  band that was charging $250.00 to hang out with them!

Now, I read that Skillet, a Christian rock band, is charging fans $165.00 to hang out with them all day at the venue, get a 30 minute acoustic set, listen to the bands new CD (Which they will then hopefully buy) and listen to sound check (any one that has ever been present at a sound check knows that the band should pay the fans for that!!!) A quote from one of their fans: They came down and just were hanging out with us, it was really cool.”

WOW. Now people have to pay for what was once considered a part of the job.

I think back to a time when I was walking out of a Bruce Springsteen show at the Uptown Theater. My car was parked near the backstage door, and Bruce was out there signing autographs and talking to anyone that came up to him. His road manager and I were talking, until he said to Bruce “Hey, it’s getting late. We need to head back to the hotel.”

Bruce turned to the crowd, and said,” Anyone here have a car and can drive me back to the hotel?” Someone, of course volunteered, and Bruce spent another hour hanging out and talking to whoever was still sticking around, then jumped in a fans pickup truck and headed to his hotel.

He didn’t charge anyone anything!!!!

It used to be that most of the music photographers in the country knew each other. Maybe I am just getting old, but recently someone sent me a link to a page with an article entitled “The Fifty Greatest Music Photographers Right Now.”

Each photographer had a page consisting of a short bio and, I presume, one of their best photographs.

Thought #1. I have only heard of one of the 50 photographers, and that is because he lives in Chicago

Thought #2. Out of the 50 photographs displayed here, there were only about 10 that I would have kept- the rest I would have deleted when I got home.

Thought #3. No use photographing a DJ or EDM artist unless you can get on stage behind them. Other wise it’s just a guy standing behind a table on stage!

Is this the state of music photography today? The three song rule does not permit anyone the ability to wait for things to happen, you just have to shoot whatever is in front of you.

Ironically, Yesterday a movie premiered on Showtime documenting the career of Bob Gruen, one of the greatest music photographers of all time.. It is a fascinating look at the music scene of the 70’s and 80’s, and show the total access that Bob got with his subjects. It also includes interviews with many of his subjects, included Tomy Ramone, Deborah Harry and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Billie Joe goes on and on about how great Gruen is and what an honor it is to be photographed by him. Some of his quotes:

“A photographer captures images and passes them on to the next generation.”

“It is so important to have these pictures.”

“These are the pictures I had up in my bedroom when I was a kid.”

Doubly ironic, as Billie Joe does not allow anyone to photograph more than two songs of Green Day! And makes people shoot from the sound board!!! He goes on and on talking about seeing Bob waiting for the moment to shoot while he doesn’t allow any other photographers to do the same.

Someone sent me this link earlier in the week: Click here!

Title of the post:  Emo band Hawthorne Heights charge photographers $150 to shoot band.

First paragraph:

Being a live music photographer might sound like a glamorous life, getting up, close and personal with musicians that many others are paying good money to see, but it’s not without its many flaws. Often annoying fans, as well as being annoyed by security themselves, couple this with the sad fact that much of the labour is unpaid nowadays and it’s quite literally a pretty thankless task.

Hawthorne Heights has come up with a unique Solution:

As The Music Network report, the band recently gave “aspiring photographers” a chance to, in their words, “Come take pictures of us all day at Warped Tour”. They’ll even be so generous and “take your pictures and put them on our Instagram page, and give you full credit for it”. All that and possibly more for the princely sum of just $150.

WOW!!!!!!!!

First of all, the band is a bunch of washed up has beens, so why would anyone want to take pictures of them in the first place. There are usually so many great, visual bands at Warped that it would be very easy to skip a bunch of mopes who wear flannel shirts and don’t do anything on stage! The group later rescinded the offer, but clarified that the offer was kind of an “internship.”

The group are also giving fans the chance to “hang out” with the band at Warped Tour for a mere $250.

Guess the world has slipped off of it’s axis!!!

First there is this:

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer certainly has people paying attention: moms, telecommuters, Tumblr-heads and the rest of the tech world, of course. Now, professional photographers. “Today, with cameras as pervasive as they are there’s no such thing really as professional photographers. … Certainly, there’s varying levels of skills.” Mayer said at a press conference Wednesday in New York, where she was talking about Yahoo’s purchase of blogging platform Tumblr, which was announced the day before.Besides a facelift that features bigger, higher-resolution photos, Yahoo is now offering Flickr users 1 terabyte of free space. This means the “Pro” option, which costs $25 a year, is being discontinued for new users.

MarketWatch points to a blog post by James Colton (below), a former Sports Illustrated photo editor: “Using her logic, I guess we no longer have doctors either because of WebMD and the proliferation of medical information available online.”

In a couple of tweets Wednesday, Mayer apologized for her choice of words: “It was a misstatement on my part and out of context. It was about the terabyte issue.”

May 21, 2013

By Jim Colton

Yesterday, at a press conference after an “acquisition” meeting of Tumblr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was quoted with the following statement: “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore.” 

Excuse me?

I had to remind myself that this was coming from the CEO of Yahoo, who now manages one of the world’s largest on-line image databases.  Besides the obvious, that this is perhaps one of the stupidest comments I have ever heard, it is also an insult to all the professional photographers throughout history who have sacrificed everything to their craft…including their lives.

Does she really think that anyone with an iPhone or a point and shoot can cover the wars in Afghanistan or the strife in Libya or Syria where we recently lost incredibly talented professionals like Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington?  She probably doesn’t even know the names of people like Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, John Hoagland, Olivier Rebbot, and countless others, who gave their lives covering the injustices of war in the name of their profession.

Using her logic, I guess we no longer have doctors either because of WebMD and the proliferation of medical information available on-line. I wonder too, if she just asked a friend to cover her wedding rather than hiring a professional to document it….and by the looks of the photo that accompanied her statement, she might considering hiring a professional to take her corporate photo!

This whole idea that “anyone with a camera,” can be a professional photographer is both absurd and unsettling. It is bad enough that the web is now filled with fodder and noise simply because everyone THINKS they’re a professional photographer and feels obligated to post them immediately without regard to its content. There have been more pictures taken in the last two years than all of history before it….an incredible statistic! And as a result, we are being bombarded with useless clutter.

What we need now more than ever is better filters. And that starts with the person taking the image to the professional journalists who are editing them to the imaging folks who are toning them and eventually to the editors who publish them. We have an urgent and dire responsibility to disseminate meaningful and truthful images to cut through all the noise that is deafening us.

Look no further than to yesterday’s image by AP professional photographer Sue Ogrocki showing a mother carrying her daughter through the post rubble tornado scene in Oklahoma. The power of the still image, in the hands of committed and dedicated professional photojournalists, is unmatched. Let us never degrade our profession with irresponsible comments like Ms. Mayer’s.

So now we move forward to the end of the week. The Chicago Sun Times called their entire photo staff into a meeting Thursday morning and laid them all off. They are now going to use freelancers, and will also ask their writers to shoot pictures for their articles!!

So, my thoughts: Just spent 30 years building a career, open a career retrospective last night at an Elmhurst museum, big articles about me (YIKES) in both papers yesterday, and the punchline…………In about a year I will be living in the backseat of my car!!! Everyone with $300 and a ride to Best Buy is a professional photographer and will be working for the Sun Times within the next year! Wait till they see what the Sun Times pays for pictures, and the paperwork they have to go through to get the measly amount of money!!!