00:00:00               Welcome to the hair of the dog podcast. I'm Nicole Begley. And today we are diving into the world of commercial pet photography with one of the pet photography founders, herself, Jamie Piper from Cal belly. Stay tuned. Welcome to the hair of the dog podcast. If you're a pet photographer, ready to make more money and start living a life by your design,

00:00:22               you've come to the right place. And now your host pet photographer, travel addicts, chocolate martini, calmness sewer, Nicole Begley. If you've been curious about diving into the world of commercial photography, but need a little bit of help. Jamie has an incredible resource called the commercial photographers resources, and you can get there by going to hair, the dog academy.com/commercial.

00:00:47               And it'll take you right there. And as her special gift to you guys, you can use a special code H O D two zero eight P R two one. So hair of the dog, 20 April 21, but shortened to HOD 20 APR 21 lowercase. And you can save 20% through April 12th, and that is good on all products except for the consulting.

00:01:15               So anyway, check it out, go to hair of the dog academy.com/commercial. I'll take you right to Jamie's incredible resources. Enjoy. Hey everybody, it's Nicole from hair of the dog. I am so excited that you are back for yet. Another weekly podcast today's podcast was actually recorded as a Facebook live interview that we did in our big hair of the dog podcast community group,

00:01:41               back in November, 2018. However, I thought it was really, really pertinent and incredible information still. And there's always so many questions on commercial pet photography. So I thought we should take this interview and bring it to you through your podcast player. So that's what we've done. So please forgive us if the audio is not quite up to our usual podcast audio standards,

00:02:05               but I think it should be plenty good enough for you to listen to and get some great ideas. This episode will help demystify the commercial animal photography world and help you get started and also quote correctly for any commercial jobs that might come your way. Hi, everybody, Nicole here from hair of the dog and I have a very special guest. I have Jamie Piper of Cal belly photography here with me,

00:02:32               and we are going to be talking all things, pet photography. So Jamie, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how long you've been doing commercial photography and all that good stuff. Give us your story. Sure. So I started doing pet photography like 18 or 19 years ago, and then I started a pet photography business for regular clients.

00:02:52               In 2003, I started doing commercial work locally in 2003, 2004, just for like small businesses and continue to do that through the time that I was doing pet photography for private clients. And in 2008, I did my first like big, like five day produce shoot with tons of people and huge shot list. So that was 10 years ago. And then in 2015,

00:03:18               I decided to drop the private client photography altogether. And it wasn't because I didn't enjoy doing it. I just didn't find it challenging anymore. And commercial photography is extremely challenging and I love that. I thrive off that. So I get bored really easily. I think I need more stimulation than your average person. So definitely worked, definitely increased the challenge and stimulation level.

00:03:40               So for the last three years I've been doing exclusively commercial photography. Well, I might do like one or two private client shoots per year. That very rarely my bottom and price for a private client is 1500. That's like shoot and burn basically. So it's a pretty good way to put off most people who contacted. So that's where I am now. Awesome.

00:04:03               Awesome. Very good. Well, let's just jump into some of the questions. I know our first question here is from Travis and it is pretty much a, what is considered commercial photography? What's the difference between private clients and commercial photography? Like what are we talking about? Yeah. So if you do a Google search, you'll find a whole bunch of different answers.

00:04:25               And my favorite answer and the one that's easiest for me to remember, and I think will be easiest for you guys to remember is if you were creating photos that are going to be used to sell a product or service for a business of any size that is commercial photography. So you could do a shoot for a private client, and then they'll email you two weeks later and say,

00:04:44               Hey, I have a real estate website and I really want to use your photos on a flyer or on a website that is commercial work. So that would be you're licensing that image commercially, not for like a print that's going in someone's home. So product services for any kind of business that's commercial photography. Awesome. Awesome. And that kind of leads us into our next question,

00:05:07               which is from Shalena. And she wants to know what's the best way to approach or start to find that first commercial client. Yes. So can you repeat the question verbatim? You got it. She says, what is the best way to approach or find that first commercial client? Okay, great. And the reason why I asked you to do that,

00:05:25               Nicole is it's actually two different questions in one, and I have two different answers. So approach is literally how to approach them. Like how, how do you, how do you start the conversation? And then finding is how do you research them and how do you decide who you want to work with? So I'm going to start with the second part first.

00:05:43               This is, this is kind of a big topic. So I'll, I'll give sort of an overarching view that the best way to get started in commercial photography is to start local with small businesses. And I have a lot that I can say on this topic, some of it you guys are not going to like, but if you know me, you know,

00:05:59               I'm no bullshit. I will always be honest. I'm not gonna blow, smoke up your ass and tell you things that you want to hear, because that is not how the commercial photography industry works. You have to have pretty thick skin and you've got to really like get it and understand how the industry works in order to be successful at all. So here's what I'm about to tell you that you're not going to,

00:06:16               like if you've never done any commercial photography at all, if you've never scheduled a photo shoot that was strictly for commercial photos, I strongly recommend that you start portfolio building for commercial work. It is, I've said this multiple times in the last week, it's a totally different animal than portrait photography. The photos are even different and it's more challenging for sure.

00:06:41               Clients have much higher expectations because generally they're spending, you know, four or five, six, 10 times more money. And so you have to be able to deliver what they're asking you for. Especially if you want to get testimonials referrals to other companies. They know. So here's how I started. And this is what I recommend for those of you who are,

00:06:58               who are new and trying to find those first few commercial clients use the relationships that you already have. So maybe your friends with a dog daycare owner, or you shop at a pet store regularly, and you know, the employees there or whatever, any kind of small business that's local does not have a national presence is who you should be targeting and pitching to them is going to be really easy because you are offering them a free photo shoots and free images.

00:07:30               Now, when you do that, those of you who have created pricing for your portrait photography will understand this. You're going to do the same kind of value added stuff as you would do for package for private clients. So you're not going to give them a thousand images, you know, at maximum resolution that they can use for anything they want. And even if they grow to be a national company that can use them in a magazine ad or something,

00:07:52               you're not going to do that. So you want to restrict the licensing, restrict, restrict the quantity of images they're getting. So maybe you give them something like twenty-five images are included in the licensing. And they're just for web and collateral, which is print things like brochures, business cards, flyers, that kind of thing. And then if they want it to license more,

00:08:12               they can for a very small price. So maybe like a hundred dollars an image or something, but really what you're doing is you're practicing. You're trying to get the feel of a, how to carry that kind of responsibility, where you're shooting all day and shouldering all the risks. You know, if the shots don't turn out is it is on you and you really have nothing to lose because the clients pay him anything for it.

00:08:34               So all that said, think about who you want to shoot for for free. If you've had problems with a local business, you're not going to, you're not going to want to work with them. So work with people that you think would really value what you're giving them, even though they're not paying for it. And if it feels awkward or the,

00:08:53               or the person seems hesitant, you can say, well, if you would like to give me a donation, that's great. If you feel like it's worth something, you know, right. Say $300 afterwards or whatever, it doesn't necessarily have to do it for free, but it's a lot easier to pitch something you have never done before, right when it's free.

00:09:11               And so the problem is if you haven't done any commercial shoots at all, you have nothing to show the client, right? You don't have a portfolio, you don't have a client list. You are brand new. So I, even if you've been doing pet photography for 10 years, you were JSO in the commercial world because commercial photography is a whole other industry.

00:09:32               It really, yeah. The stakes are higher. The people are paying money. They want to make sure that they know that you're going to be able to produce them that, okay. Absolutely. So hopefully it just answered both parts of that. I, I always recommend people go there in person. So if you can get a meeting with the owner,

00:09:52               it shouldn't be hard to do because you're pitching free photography. And if they go to your website and they see your photos, they should be like, yeah, duh. So decide who you want to work with, who you think would value what you're, what you're giving them. What kind of images you want to create to put in your commercial portfolio.

00:10:07               And then I would do guys, I'm not going to like this, but I would do probably eight to 10 commercial shoots portfolio building so that you can get really, really, really comfortable with what you're doing before you're having to deliver for payment. Absolutely. And you have a variety to show potential actual pain clients. Exactly. Just starting out portrait photographer,

00:10:27               that their whole portfolio is just their dog. It's like, well, exactly. And you know, D two different product companies in a commercial portfolio is really not enough, right. To impress, you know, someone at an ad agency or a medium sized company or an international company is just not enough. All right. Awesome. Yeah. I think that answered that really well.

00:10:48               So our next question comes from Cindy and she has a question about licensing image that you already own. So maybe first you might want to mention just the, what licensing is. And then her question is how to charge licensing for an image that she's already created. Yes. That is a great question. And it's, doesn't have an easy answer. No,

00:11:12               an easy answer. It's okay. Commercial photography is so complicated that even though I've been doing it for 15 years, I wrote a full page of notes last night that I could refer to for this interview. So yeah, when a commercial client contacts you of any size, I don't care if they're a small business, you know, a single sole proprietor or,

00:11:32               you know, a, a multinational corporation that makes a difference and they want to use your images commercially again, to sell a product or service you are doing. What's called image licensing. The image has a license. The license defines what they're using that image for. And you literally write in the image license. It says image, license on your contract.

00:11:56               And underneath that, you write what that is. So it might be full page, single ad in modern dog magazine, 30,000 distribution, North America, only for 12 months or whatever. Well, it's not there. Okay. I guess it would be to come out monthly anyway, one month, whatever it is you define the time you define the specific usage and you define the quantity and then you have a price.

00:12:23               So you create that license and you send it to the client. So this is also a two-part answer if I'm remembering correctly and I'll get back to the pricing in a second. So you create that license, you send it to the client and you say, does this work? And then you negotiate. If they say, Oh, that sound my budget,

00:12:40               which they pretty much always do. So you have to get comfortable with negotiating. That's a big part of a commercial work is negotiating. So once they agree to your price, you invoice them. You include the image license itself on the invoice. It's very, very clear what their licensing, what they can use it for. You include your terms of use.

00:12:59               And then they pay for the invoice, which is agreeing to the terms and the, and the license. And then you send the file to them electronically through Dropbox, or we transfer. I personally use, we transfer because you can see if the client's downloaded them. So it solves a lot of long-term problems. So that's what the process looks like. I think she had asked,

00:13:20               I went back and asked for clarification. And then, and then she had asked will either one, what does the process look like? And then how do you decide how much to charge? So that's the process, how much to charge, unless you've been doing it for a really, really, really long time, you're not going to be able to pull a number out of the air off the top of your head.

00:13:39               I can do that now, but I've been doing it long enough, but I am. I am falling back on all the experience of all the similar licenses that I've done, but I still get requests for licenses. And I'm like, I have no idea. I I've never done anything. Even remotely close to that and have no idea what to charge.

00:13:57               So you, you will use what I call pricing tools. And these are going to be invaluable to you. I have five pricing tools that I use. The ones that I'm going to recommend are photo quote, which is software you'd have to pay for it. I think it's $150 a one-time fee or a subscription. It's a one-time fee still. And they,

00:14:16               those of you, FYI who have the old version, they came out with a new version. I want to say it was like late 2016. Those of you or the old version should upgrade to the new because the new version includes social media now. So anything social media related, they have pricing suggestions in there. So photo code is, if you're doing any commercial work,

00:14:34               please invest in photo quote. I honestly don't know how it would be able to create pricing without it. So photo quote is one option. Getty images has a PR, a calculator like a stock calculator online. And you literally do a Google search for Getty images calculator, and you'll find it. And you can't find it on their website. You have to Google it right on what you do is you plug in all of the,

00:14:56               all the usage and you'll see, this will help educate you on what types of things are included in usage. And then it'll spit out a price that price is could be for any size company. So it's usually extremely higher, like, Oh, I'm like $30,000. There's no way they're going to be $30,000 for this photo. So then you have to kind of work backwards,

00:15:19               kind of reverse engineer and figure, okay, well, if this could be for a multinational company that makes billions every year and this company is regional, what, what would be more appropriate for them? So that can be helpful. Another pricing tool uses my experience. I'll also contact other commercial photographer, colleagues, friends of mine and say, I, what,

00:15:38               what would you charge for this? I, and, and I don't care how long you've been doing it. If you've been doing it for 30 years, people, commercial photographers still do that all the time. I can't remember what the other two are, but I know that there's five. That's a good start. No, that's awesome. That's so helpful.

00:15:53               I'm sure there was a time when those things weren't around. I mean, how I said the internet and that, that ability to find some information. Yeah. Well, back in the day, commercial photographers could pretty much charge whatever they want. They made a lot of money. So things have changed since then. All right, hold on. Then next question is here from Holly and it's a two-parter might even be there's two questions.

00:16:17               So the first part, is there a platform or a place for commercial pet photographers to join a list that commercial clients can basically shop on or, you know, find their perfect photographer? Like a directory? Yeah, no. Would be nice, but no. Yes and no, but, but first I want to preface my answer by telling you guys something really,

00:16:42               really, really important that I want you to remember from this in commercial photography, you are not going to use the term pet photography. It is considered commercial animal photography. So any directory that you find, any organization that you join, anything that has like a list of types or genres of commercial photography, your category is animals. There is no pet photography category,

00:17:08               right? So even if you're only photographing dogs, you're still a commercial animal photographer. So that's what you need to be targeting in your social media. That's what you need to be looking for in terms of, you know, where to get listen, directories commercial animal photographer. Okay. So now that we've cleared that up, there is no list of commercial animal photographers on like a,

00:17:28               like a stock hat or animal photography website that I am aware of. That said when marketing and this, this ties into marketing, Holly's question about where to get listed. Like where are clients finding you? You really have to think about and do research on where are the kinds of clients that I want to work with looking for new photographers and the four places.

00:17:51               Well, it's really one and two, the four places that I'm going to recommend you start are the first thing you should do. Like this is probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give you guys is join APA. It's a photography association for commercial photographers. There's also SMP which many of you are probably already familiar with. I have been a member of both.

00:18:11               I dropped my S and P membership a couple of years ago because I didn't feel like the benefits were very valuable. If some T does a lot of advocating for copyright and APA does a ton of member events and member education. So you can learn a massive amount about commercial photography by attending their events. And they do webinars sometimes too. So APA, look it up.

00:18:35               I think it's apa.org. If I'm remembering correctly, they do have a directory of commercial photographers that are members. So I know that that's one place that clients will look for. New commercial photographers is APA website, and you'll see, they've got, it's a fantastic website. And I love the people who run the organization. They're just really good people. So start with APA.

00:18:56               If you're serious about getting into commercial work, you have to join APA. I'm just like you, You have no choice. So please start there. And then the other two websites, I recommend you add your name to and your website to our behalf. It's the hands is great. A lot of art buyers and ad agency folks will look at the hats for new work.

00:19:15               And you can also see people collaborating together like retouchers and photographers and digital and all these different people. We'll team together. They'll do a personal project. They'll post the photos on behalf. And so it's a great place to put some of your commercial portfolios. And then the last one is drip book. Drip book is free. Be hands is free. So you're not investing money.

00:19:35               And there's probably, I mean, I would say another 12 to 15 directories that you could add to, but those are the ones that I recommend like A whole another world. Yeah. It really Is. It's a whole, it's a whole other industry. Crazy. So yeah. So her other question is, is the best place for your commercial portfolio on your website?

00:19:56               Or should it be separate? She still does some private clients too. So I'm assuming that's how she's asking that question. Yeah. And I think Holly, if I'm remembering correctly, you were the one that said that you want to transition at some point to exclusively commercial photography. I think that's what she was saying. So, Oh, I've got very strong opinions on this.

00:20:14               I would strongly encourage you to create a separate website for your commercial work. And the reason why is I'm gonna give you guys a resource. I want you to write this down because this is phenomenal for doing research. I recommend that you get a website with photo folio photo P H O T O F O L I O. Yeah. Photo folios, the website,

00:20:38               the vast majority and other website providers might disagree with me. But the vast majority of highly successful commercial photographers use photo folio for there are portfolios. When you go on photo folio and you research the websites that these commercial photographers have, you'll see that they are no fluff, like in pet photography. It's all about branding and making things pretty and having tons of information.

00:21:00               And there's a lot of writing and stuff. And you've got like graphic elements and you don't have that in commercial photography. It is all about the images. The focus is on the images. So your branding is a logo and that's basically it. And maybe some of the colors and the fonts that you choose, but the focus is on the photos. You want to have them big front and center and they have to be freaking perfect.

00:21:20               We're talking retouched and not all of my photos on my website are retouched and I've gone back and I'm like, Hmm, it doesn't look very good. So it's better to have like five stellar, perfect cream of the crop, fully retouched to absolute perfection photos, then 50 great photos, but they're not phenomenal. You know what I mean? But having said all that,

00:21:45               make sure that you have enough content that it doesn't look weird. Like you're not going to create a new commercial photography website. If you only have two images, Do your eight to 10 free shoes and then make the website. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's the same process as when you started doing pet photography is just for commercial work and stuff. Yep.

00:22:05               Yep. Perfect. All right. So Chris has the next question. It's how do you juggle, transitioning into commercial photography when you're busy with client sessions and editing? Oh My God, Chris, you stumped me on this One. I was like, clone yourself. It's probably the first answer, but that's a little bit more difficult. My answers, I don't know.

00:22:27               It's really, really hard. It's really hard. I'm going to be really honest with you guys. It's really hard. And here's why, I mean, there's a number of different reasons why, but number one, when a commercial client contacts you and it, you are representing yourself, you don't have an agent or a photographer's rep, which is what they're usually called the commercial industry and the rep I'm repped by when you don't have a rep and they're contacting you directly,

00:22:52               you need to get back to them immediately. And the reason why is because you are competing, yes, you're competing when you do pet photography. But when you're doing commercial photography, you were a hundred percent of the time competing with a minimum, two other photographers. Yeah. And there's high tables are usually like, I need it yesterday. Yeah. A lot of these people are in New York.

00:23:11               So if you're on the West coast, like I am right now and they, and they, and they're emailing you at eight, o'clock your time I am for you. Yeah. And, and you're like, you know, So my goal is always to reply within an hour. And I don't care if you respond using your iPhone and there's no signature and it's one line like,

00:23:35               that's what you do in the commercial world. You don't, there's nothing fancy about it. It's all about like exchanging information as efficiently as possible. So it's one part of the challenge. The second part of the challenge is timelines are being squeezed dramatically. So you end up with, with agencies, contacting you and saying, clients really hoping to have this,

00:23:53               the shoot done. And the photos by like 18 days from now. And you're like, Ooh, It's like two weeks to finish, to like schedule produce, do the shoot dogs and shoot for four days and edit all the images. Yeah. And I mean, I've turned down shoots before where I'm like, I'm sorry. It's not, it's just not possible.

00:24:15               Right? Yes. I have the time to do it, but it's not, it's just not feasible. It's not going to happen. So that's an extreme example. It doesn't happen all the time. Usually you have at least three weeks. My happy place is four weeks of planning and production time before the shoot occurs. But then I usually work on bigger shoots.

00:24:32               So if you're successful in your pet photography business, it's going to be even harder for you to do commercial work because your schedule is booked out. So, and the, and I do not recommend bumping your private clients because you have a commercial shoot. I just don't think that's very ethical unless it's someone a repeat client and they're really, you know, understanding and easy going and maybe their dog could be included in the commercial shoot.

00:24:55               So none of that is very helpful information. So I do For this question, I think Holly will appreciate too, the best way to do this is you're going to do two things. One is you're going to build a phenomenal team. You need to have a producer. The producer is someone who does everything, but the photography, they plan all the elements of the shoot.

00:25:20               They bring everyone together. They source the talent. They work with the location scout. They do everything. And they'll even interface with your client. And you're, CC'd on emails, but you can continue doing the work that you already have scheduled. So get a producer. You're not going to be able to do it without a producer, generally small, and some medium size shoots don't have the budget for a producer.

00:25:41               But even if it's just a matter of like hiring a friend, who's willing to work for $20 an hour in Oregon, they organize a very detailed bank and a very detailed or oriented, organized on the ball on time friend or an event planner. Who's just getting started. I don't care who it is. It's just someone who could do that work that,

00:26:01               that you don't have time to do. So you have to have a producer and then you need other team members as well. You're going to need to use a digital tech and not someone who is set with you with their laptop. And you're tethered to the laptop with a cable. And they ingest the images using capture one software and they will, they will flag all the bad ones that are blurry and the exposure is off so they can easily be deleted.

00:26:26               So that will significantly cut down your post-processing time on these thousands of images that come from the shoot. So definitely is a digital tech. And then also get a really great retoucher on board because you're not going to have weeks to spend after the shoot focusing a hundred percent that client and processing the images and doing all the retouching. So you're going to need a producer,

00:26:49               a digital tech and the retoucher in order to focus full-time on your business, your pet photography, business, and clients, and do commercial work. Now, as far as scheduling goes, 98% of commercial shoots are during the week on weekdays because ad agency people generally don't like to have to fly somewhere and work on a weekend. I can't blame them. So if you can,

00:27:12               every two to three weeks, I'm referring to my notes here. Cause I had to think about the timing. If you can, every two to three weeks block off a two day chunk, keep it open if possible, just book clients outside of that until you get really experienced and you have a big portfolio and you're working primarily with international clients, you're not going to be doing the three,

00:27:32               four, five, six, seven day shoots. Most of them will be around two days, maybe three. So having a two day chunk every couple of few weeks will give you some flexibility in terms of booking those commercial shoots. So that's my answer to the really difficult something questions. Definitely. Yeah. Kind of batching, basically starting to batch your work a little bit too,

00:27:53               of like, I even tried just for my own sanity to book my private clients kind of together because once I start shooting them, like, I'd rather just do a couple sessions. We'll have a little break. Yeah. Yeah. And, and then you can do all the post-processing at the same time, right? Yeah. I also love outsourcing. Yes.

00:28:12               That makes me happy On that note, Nicole, you have to outsource stuff when you do commercial photography, because there's one of you and, and you cannot, and you should not take on all of that responsibility by yourself. Right? You won't sleep and you'll be totally stressed out and that's not worth it. It's actually one of the fantastic things about doing commercial photography is you don't have to shoulder all of that work.

00:28:34               You have a team and the team is supporting you and they're you, you are their boss. There. They are your employees. You're employing them and you get to tell them everything, tell them what to do. And so your responsibility is to show up and shoot. That's what you're there for. Nice. Awesome. All right. We're going to shift gears a little bit from the commercial stuff to stock.

00:28:56               So first of all, do you just want to mention kind of what the difference between commercial being hired for commercial target shooting versus stock? And then the question is what's the best stock photography website for pet photographers, photographers, we should say. Yeah. So, Oh, this, it breaks my heart to have to answer this question because you guys are not going to like the answers,

00:29:17               unfortunately. Oh, I have so many opinions about this and I don't want to talk about it for 20 minutes. So, and I've got notes on this. So just stick with the script, Jamie, I I've had a stock website online since 2011 and it's had a wide variety of different incarnations. I've used different website providers. And I, in that time,

00:29:39               I've done a lot of research on other stock photography websites that are either animal specific or pet photography specific or generalized and include animal photography. And in all of the, all of the animal and pet photography, websites, stock websites that I have seen that are like, what I would call boutique, you know, smaller boutique stock agencies have essentially died in the water by all appearances.

00:30:07               Now I don't know if that's absolutely true, but it doesn't appear as if there's any activity and the photographers that I've spoken to who have their work listed, aren't making any money at all. That is also true for fetch stock, which is my new-ish stock photography website that I launched almost exactly a year ago. It has been almost impossible to get traction with my new stock website and I,

00:30:28               and I'm someone who has an established client base and, you know, ready buyers. I, I know that there's a whole bunch of different reasons why, but this is what I want you guys to think about in order to sell stock work, you really have to advertise because people are doing, if they're not already familiar with, you know, shatter soccer,

00:30:46               Getty, or whatever, they're doing a Google search and looking at Google images for a Portuguese water dog, jumping off a dock, for example. So you have to advertise in order to get your website high enough and the search engine results for potential customers to see you. Here's a problem with advertising. If you use the Google keyword tools and you put in search phrases that a potential customer might use,

00:31:14               you'll immediately see that the competition for those keywords is very high. So we're talking like expensive. I mean, it's like something like $13 per click or something. I mean, it's insane. Like you, you can't, it's impossible to compete. You just can't compete unless you have many thousands of dollars to spend every month advertising, but here's the other problem.

00:31:36               And you'll notice this. When you do your research, you do a Google search for a Portuguese water dog jumping off the dock. Then you will see ads from Shutterstock and I stock photo and Getty and all the, all the other ones that say Portuguese water, dog jumping off dock. I don't know how they do it, but you click through and it is search results for all of the Portuguese water dog photos they have on the website,

00:32:00               but there's no dog jumping on Jumping off the dogs. I don't know how Do that, but you, so you're talking about a very, very specific search phrase and they're driving traffic to their site from that. And they're on the first page. So not only are they in the first three organic results, but they're also in all the ads as well.

00:32:21               Yeah. So that's one huge problem. The other huge problem that's in my opinion, insurmountable is the big stock agencies have accounts for ad agencies and commercial clients. They have accounts they're invoiced, and they have accounts receivables that collect for these invoices, you know, every 30, 60, 90 days, whatever their, whatever their terms are. And you can't set that up as a small boutique.

00:32:48               It's just not to have the functionality on the backend would be extremely expensive. I know because I've looked into it. So you can, you can try setting up a subscription model, but that's really only going to be effective if you've got, you know, many, many, many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dog and cat photos on your SOC website.

00:33:07               So then you're getting into huge volume, which increases the price. So they're, they're whole bunch of reasons why these boutique stock like pet photography and animal photography or websites, including my own. Haven't succeeded in the way that I, that I've hoped, you know, over the years, my best advice to you guys. And it pains me to say this because I I've been against them for so many years,

00:33:31               but is to submit your best content and your most unique content. So Portuguese water, dog jumping off the dock is a good example or photos of dogs and cats together. Perfect. A lot of people want that and they're hard to find, to take your best content and submit them to Getty. And stock is another website that I love. I think some of you guys will really like stock.

00:33:53               See? So I recommend stock, see Getty and gallery. Do any of those sites limit what you can do with your image outside, like limit how you can sell that image? No. And you shouldn't, you should not do anything exclusive unless you're guaranteed some sort of income because you're just, you're just giving up potential revenue. If a client contacts you directly,

00:34:13               you can't license the image. So you should never sign an exclusivity contract. Oh, by the way, backing up just for just a second animal house is Nicole Smith's stock pet photography website that she launched this spring. I am not including her in the SOC websites who have failed because I haven't talked to her about it. I have no idea how it's going.

00:34:31               So don't please don't make assumptions about animal house because that could be thriving. I have no idea. Those of you who don't know is Nicole, you should know the Sprite animal house.com. Is that the, yeah, It is animals. We look animal health media there'll be a link to it. I think the actual stock site is on like stock photography.com.

00:34:50               It has a more distinct URL, but if you Google animal house media, that's Jane Cole. Smith's stock site and yeah. Yeah. So I'm the, I'm not just FYI. I'm not including yeah. Doing her experience with her site challenges. I mean, Nick's having to surmount those same challenges, but yeah, it's just it's industry wide challenges. So yeah,

00:35:13               Effectively, she actively works more with the kinds of clients that I think are, are, would be buyers. So my sell is harder because I'm, I'm working mostly with international and national clients and they're usually not licensing stock. They're booking shoots. Yeah. So, so I mean, it's very complicated. So it's a whole big crazy world. And I know A lot of the companies,

00:35:39               again, I don't want to speak for her. I believe this is correct. That a lot of the company she's targeting are more of those mid range, like animal exclusive companies. So that kind of site would be beneficial for them. Exactly how these big, you know, I have an unlimited stock with this site so I can get as many images about baseballs and this and that people want just animal stuff.

00:36:01               Exactly. But there's a second part to that that I want to tell you guys, and those of you who take my advice, I think will be heads and tails above the competition. Hahaha, if you want to make money doing stock, it's painful for me to think about all those gorgeous images you guys are creating and you're creating some phenomenal work. I mean,

00:36:21               Oh my God, there's so much talent out there and pet photography these days. So I know that you have this huge body of work of still photos sitting on your hard drives and then not making any money. And like, it sucks to hear me say, and I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not very encouraging on that, but you can definitely make money doing stock,

00:36:39               but you know, how are you going to do it? You're going to do it shooting video because there's very, very, very little stock pet video out there. And please do research on this because you'll find that the stock pet videos are pretty terrible generally. They're I mean, they're, you'll see. You'll see. So I recommend that you guys shoot stock video.

00:37:01               It doesn't have to be with the DSLR. It could, if you have a decent, like a mirrorless camera or a really nice point and shoot get a gimbal and Amazon, which is the balancer thing that gives you that really smooth looking video, you can buy one for like a hundred or 150 bucks. They make them for all kinds of cameras, shoot some shoot,

00:37:19               some videos of dogs. It does not have to be professional. You don't need to hire an editor. It doesn't have to cost you a bunch of money to shoot video because I'm convinced that 95% of the video you guys will shoot will be better than what's out there now. And then submit it to the website, pond five it's pond, as in like jump on the pond five,

00:37:40               the number five. So pond five and get on their website and you'll see what the, what the dog videos are. There's some good ones, but it's a very, very small quantity. And you get more money from a video license from a still photo licenses. There you go. I mean so much stuff's moving towards video. I saw some stat.

00:37:57               It was like by 2020, which is not far, it's like a year and two months away that like 80% of content consumed online will be video. That doesn't surprise me at all. Because video, I've done a lot of research on this video and cinema graphs, which is something that I do. They have something like a seven or eight times higher click through rate on ads than still photos.

00:38:23               I mean, it's like no comparison. Yeah. And the goldfish have a bigger attention span than we do. They just did that study too. Like why people can't fit anything movement. What's that? Exactly. All right. Awesome. No, that was good. I mean, yeah. Good info. There is one more question here from Keith. It's kind of similar to the others,

00:38:48               but is there a method to find out if there are pet product businesses in your area, and then he also is asking about a link or a submission process for fetch stock. Yeah. So I'll answer the second question first because it's easy. I am not having, I'm not inviting contributors because I really wanted to get traction. I wanted to have some sort of encouraging news and I was,

00:39:11               you know, making consistent sales before doing that. And I was not happened. I don't really know what to do with the site right now. I I'm, I'm thinking it would be nice to have a partner that wants to take it on and try and make some money for everyone. But I just, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do with it right now.

00:39:31               So unfortunately I'm not currently accepting submissions. If that changes, there is a, there is information there's if you go to, I think it's like the info menu item, you click, there's like a, I think there's a submissive submission page. It might be in the fact as well. So look up that in the future. Sorry. I know it's a really lame answer,

00:39:49               but that's my answer. The second part. Yes. I do have an answer to that question. Talk to pet store owners in your area because oftentimes product manufacturers that are like the size of client that you would want to work with have approached the stores and they may even be selling their products and local stores. So the store owners may be familiar with what those products are.

00:40:13               The other thing is if you have any dog magazines in your area, it seems like most metropolitan areas, two songs where Keith is, I would think that Tucson has some sort of pet or dog magazine contact the editor because they know everyone, they know everyone and they know who the, the, you know, local product pet product manufacturers are. So that's what I would do.

00:40:33               Perfect. Awesome. Good place to get started. All right. And then our last question that we had submitted was what camera settings should I use to shoot this subject slash project slash scene? I've never done anything like this before. That was mine Question, which is why it's worded. So none of you guys, you guys are much better at asking questions and then what Nicole just said.

00:41:01               Cause I wrote that. So here's the thing I think this will my answer. Won't come as a surprise to you guys, given what I was saying about portfolio building for a commercial portfolio and Nicole and I talked about this a little bit and I know we agreed that we were going to talk about this, joining the live. So let me just dive right into our chalet.

00:41:19               Okay. So when you were hired to do commercial photography for any size clients, your work needs to be not good, not great, but fantastic. And I would even use the F word in front of that. Fantastic, Because you are trying to sell a product or service to a consumer and that photo needs to rise above all the noise that Nicole was just mentioning online.

00:41:46               And in order to rise above all the noise, it needs to be stellar. If you don't feel confident that you know how to shoot that subject or in that area or that time of day or whatever, don't do the shoot. Don't agree to it. And I'm being totally honest. I still turned down shoots regularly that I feel like are out of my wheelhouse because I don't feel confident I'm going to do a fantastic job.

00:42:13               Most of them are studio work. Cause I don't have a lot of experience doing studio work. I mean, I will like if you pay me enough, of course I will. But if it's a challenging studio project and I'm like, Oh, I don't even know. I don't even know where I would begin on that. Or I have some major questions or concerns about my own abilities.

00:42:30               I won't do it. I'll pass on it. And I actually had that happened recently. It was pretty heartbreaking, personally heartbreaking for me because it was with an ad agency in LA. It was an art director that I had been creating a relationship with for quite a while. And we had met a couple of times. I met with her at a couple of events and then I followed her when she moved to the same ad agency in LA,

00:42:52               which was also one of my top agencies I wanted to work with. I wasn't sure if I'd ever hear from her, like another six months went by, I was like praying, praying, praying, like, please come talk to me. And she did. And she reached out and she said, we're working with such and such dog food. And I was like,

00:43:05               Oh, awesome company. And it was a shoot that was out of my wheelhouse. And they were really excited about working with me. And I w I wanted to work with her and not agency so bad, but you guys, I turned it down. Yeah. And you said, you want to do is work with them and not do a great job.

00:43:23               And then like you'll never working with them again. Exactly, exactly. And here's the thing about the commercial photography industry. Everybody knows each other, like art buyers, art producers are direct creative directors. They all know each other. They go to events, they talk about photographers. It's it feels like a big industry. And in some ways it is,

00:43:42               but it's actually pretty small when it comes to like photographers, reputations and you know, word getting around. So you need to work very hard for every single client. You need to do the absolute best job you possibly can and not agree to things that you can't, We can't deliver on. Yeah. And I would imagine too, that it's more important to be personable and like likable and work really well for these people.

00:44:07               And, you know, do your best because nobody, even if you have the best images in the world, they don't want to work with the jerk. Yeah. Like common human decency is critical. Absolutely. And it, unfortunately, Nicole, didn't used to be that way and it's still the industry hasn't changed completely. Some of the most successful commercial photographers are like raging and complete assholes,

00:44:32               unfortunately. And they'll shoot for Nike and Microsoft. And I don't know, and they're getting paid, you know, a couple hundred thousand pursuit, but they can get away with that because they're so talented. They're so good. But that is changing. I know for a fact that's changing. Cause I talked to a lot of people on the hiring side and I ask them difficult questions all the time.

00:44:52               And so I know that they're starting to shy away from working with these really difficult photographers because there's so much talent out there now that they can hire another photographer. Who's also supremely talented, but as a really nice person and is very easy to communicate with and work with and doesn't cause much problems, Right. Yeah, for sure. Oh my gosh, you you've given like an amazing amount of value.

00:45:16               I just, I can't even, I mean, people are going to have to go back with like a notebook that was going to tell people like take notes. So good. Thank you so much. And you know, if people want to learn more because there's so much more, I mean, you could probably literally go on about commercial photography for like the entire week.

00:45:33               We'd be here till Friday. I could easily Talk until I lose my voice complete. No problem. With four or five days, like just like someone give me some water, I'll take a few bites of food. Yeah. We're still going Very involved. Very complicated, often confusing, unfortunately overwhelming topic. But it's also incredibly exciting because there is a lot of money to be made.

00:46:02               I mean, we're talking a lot of money And I feel like it's the same way of, you know, one of my missions in the private client side is to help all those people, like it brings the whole industry up when we help other people learn how to do this because you initially look on paper for a private client. You're like 200 bucks for the whole session.

00:46:24               Yeah. I made lots of money until you realize all the stuff you have. So the commercial photography, I'm sure it's like that too, because you're like, Oh my gosh, $5,000 for three days and all this licensing and Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But meanwhile, like it's not sustainable, so we need to help other people learn.

00:46:45               And then when everybody else is producing bids that are all competitive and sustainable, then the whole industry does better. Absolutely. Yes. You took all the words out of my mouth and I wanted to, I think, are we done with the questions? So I think you're done with it. Yeah. I wanted to say, and this is really important.

00:47:09               Some of you guys may be wondering like why in the world am I sharing all this information? I have the, my commercial photography guides, which I can mention in the second, but there's a massive amount of information in the big bundle, which has like 520 pages and all the documents and forums and like 11 different guides and like 356 page ebook. I mean,

00:47:31               it's just a massive increase in Asia, everything, everything you could possibly need to get started in the commercial industry. So I'm sure some of you have wondered why in the world would I be selling all of this information when y'all are my competition? And I know this because our directors often tell me who I'm kidding, Competing with after the fact. And sometimes they'll even tell me,

00:47:53               well, they're bidding. I even know sometimes how much you guys, once you guys estimated. So the problem is this. I don't care if you've had no commercial photography experience before. And many of you have had this experience, you will still get contacted to bid on a commercial photo shoots. And it's about your work because your work is the most important thing.

00:48:16               And so if you've never done it before, and you're thinking like the first big shoot I did was like $18,000, I think. And it should have been at least a $75,000 shoot. Now that I know 10 years later. So in my mind I'm thinking, Oh my God, 17,500. And it was probably like 12,000 net. Maybe I left so much money on the table and the client took advantage of me because I was ignorant.

00:48:41               Right. And unfortunately what happened was another commercial photographer who makes a living at commercial photography, lost that job to me because I was inexperienced and I didn't know any better. And that's happening to me. Like I can't tell you guys how many shoots I lose to people like yeah, Not unicorn, but I mean, the viewers, because you guys are so dramatic Underbidding because you don't understand the value,

00:49:05               you don't understand how the process works. You don't have all the information and the knowledge and the tools that you need to be really professional and, and operate as a traditional commercial photographer would. So I want to do two things. I want clients to stop taking advantage of inexperienced and naive photographers and have so much money left on the table. And I also want to start losing jobs to photographers when it isn't even a fair competition.

00:49:34               You know, I find if my bid is 50,000 and they're bidding 20,000 and the client's like, well, I can tell they don't have everything their need in their bid. Like, I can tell the people I've done this before. They don't care, but they're like, we'll, we'll solve all the problems that come up. And even if we have to do a reshoot,

00:49:51               it's still going to cost less than what Jamie's charging. You know what I mean? And then the, and then the final thing is, is I, it pains me to do reshoots for clients that I really love. Who've hired the cheap inexperienced photographers that could not deliver on what they promised. And then the client has to reshoot and then they're like,

00:50:09               Oh shit, okay. Well, we just wasted all that money. Now we're going to work with someone who is experienced. So we probably should have hired to begin with. It's painful to hear that. And I've had many of those stories before, so I'm not as generous as you guys think. I am have selfish reasons for sharing all this information.

00:50:23               Because as Nicole mentioned, especially in the commercial photography, the more knowledgeable everyone is, the more sustainable this is for all of us. I hope that makes sense. Yeah. And I mean, truly a commercial photography world is not someplace where you just want to be like, I'm just going to dip my toe and see how this water is. Like,

00:50:42               you need to be prepared. This is I'm part of my friends with big shit, you know? Oh yeah. There's a lot at stake here. I mean, legally for you, you know, for the client, for the images they're expecting you to produce, and it's just important to be educated and how lucky we are that there's information out there.

00:51:01               And people willing to share that because it didn't always used to be that way. It was all very hush, hush. And so like, you were left how you learned, which was like, Oh, I think I do this, but there's no excuse to think you do this anymore. There's resources now, like your big Mundell, which, you know,

00:51:17               has so much information to help get people on the right foot and, you know, approach this successfully. There actually is no other written information like this available online, which is no big surprise because again, commercial photographers don't want to share all their secrets because everyone has competition. Everyone, even you're competing against commercial photographers who have never photographed a dog before they get hired,

00:51:41               just want to test my hide so much. I'm like, so everyone is your competition, unfortunately. So like, yeah, you can either spend 15 years trying to create the experience yourself and do all the research that I've done. Or you can just spend a couple of hundred bucks and buy the bundle and spend the next three or four months reading it and,

00:52:06               and, and be able to move forward with confidence and knowledge. Yes. Amen. Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. You're so welcome. I mean, the amount of information you shared was fantastic. And so thanks so much, Jamie, the one last thing, and it won't be long on the website that I have for the commercial photography guide.

00:52:29               So if you guys are curious, but you're not ready to like dive in, go to the blog, follow the blog posts, there's a mailing list subscriptions. So you can sign up for the mailing list. Probably like maybe once a month, I'll send out an email with new blog posts, I'm calling the articles. And so these will be really valuable articles on commercial photography.

00:52:47               So you can start there if you want to. Fantastic. Thanks. So, yeah. You're welcome. Thank you. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Bye. If you've been curious about diving into the world of commercial photography, but need a little bit of help. Jamie has an incredible resource called the commercial photographers resources,

00:53:08               and you can get there by going to hair, the dog academy.com/commercial. And it'll take you right there. And as her special gift to you guys, you can use a special code, H O D two zero a P R two. So hair of the dog, 20 April 21, but shortened to HOD 20 APR 21 lowercase. And you can save 20% through April 12th and that is good on all products except for the consulting.

00:53:41               So anyway, check it out, go to hair of the dog academy.com/commercial. I'll take you right to Jamie's incredible resources. Enjoy. Thanks for listening to this episode of hair of the dog podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe. So you don't miss our upcoming episodes.

00:54:04               One last thing, if you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our [email protected]. Thanks for being a part of this pet photography community.