On Sharing.

 
I have never under­stood why so many pho­tog­ra­phers like to keep infor­ma­tion to them­selves. Per­haps it is a self con­fi­dence issue, or maybe they spent years per­fect­ing a unique tech­nique or sys­tem. Regard­less the rea­son, it isn’t smart. A cou­ple of years ago we were hired to pro­duce a series of work­shops in South Amer­ica. Early on, we real­ize it would not be pos­si­ble to launch the event. The rea­son? The local pho­tog­ra­phers host­ing and coor­di­nat­ing the event did not want other pho­tog­ra­phers to see what they were work­ing on.

Do you become a Grand Mas­ter chess player after read­ing Aron Nimzowitsch’s “My Sys­tem,” or a great Chef by sim­ply fol­low­ing Mario Batali’s Ital­ian recipes?  Would you become a rock start after read­ing Keith Richards won­der­ful “Life.”  Of course not! So, why do you think that by shar­ing your Light­room pre­sets, a Backup work­flow, cool edit­ing short­cuts or new light­ing tech­niques you are los­ing some­thing invalu­able? Quiet the opposite.

Apple observed the flood of ille­gal music file shar­ing that began in the late 1990s. Instead of build­ing higher walls and bet­ter fences, they built iTunes and started offer­ing legal, easy-to-use, and flex­i­ble à la carte song PAID down­loads. Record Labels obvi­ously win, artists, who receive 65 per­cent of the pur­chase price of dig­i­tally down­loaded songs, also win, cus­tomers who don’t need to pur­chase an entire CD when they want only one or two songs, win, and Apple clearly wins. In a nut­shell, every­body wins. Instead of hid­ing in your stu­dio so your trade “secrets” are not “stolen”, find bet­ter ways to share your ideas, to involve oth­ers, and to cel­e­brate often.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2012 at 08:03. It is filed under Analysis, Marketing, Photography and tagged with analysis, personal, tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.