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This article is Copyright 2005, James Morrissey, and may not, in part or in whole, be reproduced in any electronic or printed medium without prior permission from the author. The images in this article are the property of Thom Hogan and have been licensed to James Morrissey and the NWP Photo Forum for the purpose of this interview.
Part II: Thom Hogan on the Business Aspects of Nature and Wildlife Photography
Black Beach (c) Thom Hogan
JM: You mentioned above that you look at yourself as a part-time photographer and more as a full time writer. Do you think that this is the secret of your success? That is, having been able to find a way to make a financial tie between photography and some other career that is related to photography?
TH: No doubt. Many people express the desire to become full time photographers but don't really have any way to bridge themselves from what they're doing to what they want to do. They make a leap and often the distance is too great to land successfully on the other side.
JM: Do you feel that it is necessary in order to have some other form of 'tie in' business in order to make a life of nature/wildlife photography possible?
TH: No. But you need to have the right expectations going in or else you might seriously underestimate the amount of time it'll take to become cash-flow positive, let alone profitable. Let's just say you were really lucky your first time out and caught that wolf/bear/elk encounter that happened in Denali last year. So you call up National Geo and somehow convince them that you're the real thing and have the real goods. A week later they might have the photos. A month later they might decide they want to use one of the photos. A few months after that the photo gets published. A month after that you get a check (for a much smaller amount than you're probably imagining, by the way). Great, you've made a sale. Are you a successful business yet? Nope. You'll likely have to sell those photos many more times in order to even recoup the cost of that trip.
But it doesn't end there. Here's another pitfall that happens to newcomers: they can't deliver consistently and don't have the depth of coverage to compete. Following up on our simple example, you've now got a relationship with National Geo. They have another Alaska-related story coming up and they liked your pictures, so they call you up and ask for all your bear photos from Admiralty Island. Say what? You've never been there, so obviously don't have any such pictures and tell the photo editor that. How many more phone calls do you think you're going to get from National Geo? Short answer: none. When I was editor at Backpacker there was a reason why the same photographers names kept appearing (and still do): they were people we worked with who we knew had the goods. Jack Dykinga. Carr Clifton. Galen Rowell. The Muench's. Art Wolfe. John Shaw. That list ought to look familiar, right? They didn't always have the very best picture for something we needed (although often they did), but they always had A publishable picture. So when a few days before the deadline to ship the issue off to the printer the Art Director came up to me and the Photo Editor and said "we need a photo that illustrates X to fill this space," guess who we called?
When you asked about whether my writing helped me establish my photography business, yes, it did. But not in the sense you might think. By having a different source of income, I was able to just start stockpiling images. I must have somewhere well north of 10,000 images no one's ever seen at this point, since I didn't have to rely upon photo income. Once I've doubled my library and filled in a few holes, I think I'll be ready to try selling stock seriously and can perhaps back off the writing side and concentrate more on selling my images.
JM: You speak strongly about the need for business knowledge earlier in the interview. Short of an MBA, do you feel that there are any essential business basics that may be offered at a local University that people should take prior to starting their own business or to improve their existing business?
TH: Well, being able to budget and estimate cash-flow is probably the two best skills you need on the back side. But being able to network and sell are the two skills that'll help you most, and there are plenty of ways to find both formal and informal courses that help you with that. I don't think I'd be wrong if I said that, on average, the successful photographer spends at least half their time networking and selling (or has someone spending equal amounts of time to what they do photographing, which amounts to the same thing). For publication, you need to spend a lot of time sitting down with photo editors reviewing your portfolio--you can try doing this by sending it to them and talking to them on the phone, but you'll find it's a lot easier for them to say modestly positive things that sound encouraging but weren't meant to be that way. You need to stay in constant communication with the photo editors you do develop relationships with, and you need to prove that you're willing to adapt to their needs, not the other way round.
If you're selling prints in the art market, you still need to spend lots of time selling, and if you're smart you'll ask lots of questions of the folks browsing through your work. I've seen photographers with great stuff miss sales because they printed the wrong size or priced incorrectly. You're not going to learn what your audience wants without interacting with them.
So the answer to your question really is to look for instruction or help with a very specific set of skills. Start with the one you're weakest at (for me, that's networking--only children tend to communicate only when necessary). Community colleges, adult extension classes at your high school, traveling seminars, and self-help books at the library are just a few of the places to start looking.
JM: It sounds like you kind of 'fell in' to your work at Backpacker magazine and had a very good run there. At which point did you feel that you could go into business for yourself?
TH: What I found at Backpacker was one of the most talented set of individuals I've managed, but because of poor management and lack of focus, one of the least productive. That was a perfect situation for me at the time, actually, and yes, we had a very good run. On almost every tangible measure (circulation, newsstand sales, renewals, etc.), the magazine improved, and I'd say it did so creatively, as well. But the parent company was going through some dramatic changes and my boss started trying to manipulate me and began lying to me. I didn't feel it was the right time for me to go out on my own yet, but it was the right thing to do to get out of the increasingly hostile environment above me in the organization.
Timing-wise, it was a terrible time to try to go free-lance. In late 2000 and early 2001 I spent most of my time networking and building contacts at magazines for both my photography and writing. And I was having a fair amount of success. But the advertising market tanked in 2001 with the recession, and magazines began cutting back. I was in Paris photographing a cover for magazine when I learned that the parent company had decided to close it down, for example. By summer of 2001, things were horrible: all of my editor and photo editor contacts said basically the same thing: "we'd love to use you, but we've just had our budget cut and we've got fewer editorial pages to fill so we're mostly doing it with staff and stuff that's still sitting around unused." So I made a quick decision to shift to teaching workshops and writing new books.
My first workshop was scheduled for Sept 13 in Pt. Reyes, CA. To give me a day to re-scout the location, I decided to fly out on Sept 11. I had two flight choices out of this area: a non-stop out of Newark to San Francisco and a one-stop out of Lehigh Valley to Chicago and then San Francisco. It was a very tough decision. Essentially I was balanced all the gear I had to carry on-board and the pain of having to terminal hop with it in Chicago versus having to get an hour earlier. As you might guess, the Newark flight was flight 93, which was hijacked by terrorists and crashed here in Pennsylvania. Obviously, my first workshop ended up getting cancelled, since there was no way I could get there.
Which brings me back to that budgeting and cash-flow thing: bad things can and do happen. You've got to be prepared to weather the worst possible case and hope for the best. It was a close call for me, as multiple things piled up simultaneously (I learned shortly after Sept 11 that my book publisher was in Chapter 11 and wouldn't be paying royalties). I survived by being flexible, having a cushion, and by running on a very tight budget.
JM: Can you elaborate a little on how you worked to accomplish your initial plans? Specifically, how did you actualize your plan to make your business a viable financial alternative to your other career options?
TH: Well, obviously, I was scrambling. Having talked to a number of other folk who've made the change, including Galen (he owned an auto repair garage prior to doing photography full time), I can tell you that a lot of us have "scramble" stories. I think the key point I'd want to make to anyone considering a career switch like this is that it'll never quite go the way you plan it. Never. Thus, if you get too carried away and plan out every detail and expect it to happen exactly that way, you're going to not only be disappointed, but you'll fail. Little things need to get on your radar and be addressed. There is always something that can put you on the wrong track if you're not careful. Many photographers stuck with Kodachrome back when Velvia came out, for example. What the photographers weren't responding to was a change in how the photo editors were selecting images. Deep color saturation and even color exaggeration was all the rage in designs, not color accuracy or even fine detail. You see this more in fashion photography than nature photography, but styles come in and out of favor. The important point is to be flexible and observant.
JM: How and when did you develop relationships with companies like Nikon? Why not a Canon or Olympus Field Guide?
TH: My original Nikon Field Guide was really not something that was externally focused. As I wrote in the intro to the first edition, it came about because I was taking these three-week photo adventures once a year to get away from the tech business, and the first week of those trips I was always finding myself trying to remember details and instructions that worked. By the end of the trip I'd be fully engaged and productive photographically, but then I'd put the camera away for 11 months and forget all that. So the Nikon Field Guide started as notes to myself. It grew large enough and fast enough that I realized that it could be helpful to others, so I sought out a publisher and the rest is history. The Nikon versus Canon thing is easy: I had Nikon equipment, so that's what I wrote about. After the book was a success, I actually asked my publisher if I should put out a Canon version. The answer surprised me. They showed me their figures on Magic Lantern Guides for both similar Nikon and Canon products. The Nikon books out-sold the Canon books despite the fact that Canon product might out-sell the Nikon product. I don't know if that's still true, but I suspect it is. Canon users seem to be a little more inclined to let the camera do its thing while Nikon users seem to be more control freaks, and thus want to know what's happening. That's a very broad generalization, obviously, but when you average it out over millions of users, I think it is still a somewhat accurate conclusion.
As for why I continue to cover Nikon but rarely venture out beyond that brand, it has to do with my time versus "owning a niche." Lately I've been grappling with the notion of doing a book on the Canon 20D. But that would come at the expense of something Nikon. Yes, I know a 20D book would do well, but would that come at some cost of people's perception of me as one of the most thorough sources of Nikon information? And what would that cost me long term?
JM: Is your current work with the Nikon Field Guides (etc) closely related to what you planned when you started to move out on your own? If not, how are they different?
TH: Not at all, actually. If you had asked me on Sept 12, 2001 what my business would look like today, I'd have been 100% wrong. The Complete Guide to the Nikon D1h/D1x was the first I self published, and I did that in the fall of 2001 mostly as an experiment. The book publisher I'd worked with for years was in Chapter 11, I wasn't at all excited about doing the dance finding another publisher (plus that would further delay any money coming in from the project). I'd always wanted to try self publishing, so I did. It didn't seem like a big risk, nor did it seem like a big potential at the time. Since no other work on the D1 was available at the time (remember, small publishers were going out of business and cutting back), it sort of succeeded by just being there. But the dynamics of that success made me look more carefully at it, and I realized that I was probably pretty well positioned to make a real run at it. My mom and dad thought I was crazy. My friends thought I was crazy. Sometimes I thought I was crazy, but I put more energy and effort into it and it became clear to me that I had a tiger by the tail.
JM: What would you do differently if you had to do it over again (or would you just rather become an attorney? :) ).
TH: Well, I'd have to tell you many more stories about myself to fully answer that question. But I'm in a pretty good place right now career-wise. Over the years I've tended to move from one thing to another every three years or so, and I don't really feel that urge as much as I used to (it's that curiosity thing). I do think that there were times in my career when I was doing what I thought others wanted me to do rather than what I wanted to. These days, I realize those were the worst days, not the best. You really have to follow your heart and your desires. And you have to be prepared to fail. I may yet still fail. But I'm willing to take that risk for the benefits of enjoying myself, feeling comfortable in my own skin, making my own decisions and controlling my own destiny.
Smoky Water (c) Thom Hogan
JM: What does your business look like now?
TH: It's too much a business, actually. When you have to make time to photograph, which I do, you know that you might be overextended business-wise. I've had to find ways to make me more productive, so as to have that time to photograph. I actually look forward to workshops since it's one of the things that forces me out of the office with a camera in my hand. But I also don't dare ignore the business side. My business is still ramping up. If I were to ignore it, it would quickly ramp down, I'm sure. My big goal is to try to get it running a little more efficiently and at a reasonable size that both doesn't consume me and doesn't abandon my customer base.
JM: Do you have any advice for people who are trying to start a business in nature/wildlife photography?
TH: Talk to Dr. Phil first. Seriously, is that REALLY what you want to do or is it what you THINK you want to do? Sure, there are some absolutely special moments that occur when you're out photographing. I remember sitting contently in the shallows of a small pond in Alaska with hundreds of mosquitoes sucking on my exposed parts while photographing a moose for a couple of hours. I was happy and calm as I've ever been. I also remember how hard it was to get to that part of Alaska, find that pond, and get 40 pounds of gear there. And I also know just how much work was sitting piled up on my desk for me when I got home three weeks later. Successful full-time nature photographers are some of the hardest working, intently focused individuals you'll ever meet. Yes, the pace of business might not be that of Wall Street trading, but it can be just as consuming. So make sure that's what you really want, and if it is, go for it. If it isn't, do what I did for over a decade: take a really nice long trip to someplace exotic once a year and do nothing but photograph. You'll get your nature fix without having to think about the business side of it.
JM: What do you think it takes for a person to be able to run a photography business as well as have a family?
TH: An incredibly tolerant family. Look, if you're really serious on the photography side, you need to be in the woods perhaps as much as half the year. A lot of nature photographers are husband/wife teams, yes, but they don't always have children. I think it would be incredibly hard to raise a family while being full-time, especially if your specialty is wildlife, which is going to take you deeper into backwoods than landscape or macro photography might. I admire the ones that have managed to do that, but they are few in number, probably for a reason. You can mitigate some of the travel strain by concentrating on an area and living in or close to it (e.g., some of the Alaskan photographers manage to raise a family because they're there, and it's not really any more difficult to photograph while raising a family there than it is to perform any other job). If you live in New York City, well, I think you may have to seriously consider moving. (Smiles)
I said before that many of the successful nature photographers are intently focused. They're focused on their work. Sometimes first and foremost. Galen was an example of this. Barbara removed much of the business pressure from Galen's shoulders, and they never had children (Galen had a son from a previous marriage, though). I don't know how successful he would have been without Barbara or if they had had children. The more extreme places you go--and Galen pretty much defined extreme--the harder it is to put family first. Indeed, Barbara was often upset at just how much risk Galen was willing to take to get the picture, though she tried to hide that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you have to be a lone hermit, risk your life constantly, and have no consideration for others to be a nature photographer. Far from it. But raising a large family and spending lots of time with them while trying to be a full-time wildlife or adventure photographer is probably far-fetched. You'll need to find a balance between your photographic and family life, and that's going to take some tolerance on the part of your spouse.
JM: I know that this question invariably invokes a job interview :), but can you give us an idea of what are your personal goals in terms of your business and your own photographic interests over the next 18 months?
TH: Short answer: hold on and do more photography. My publishing business is still growing dramatically, so I don't know now where the plateau where I can relax is (or if there even is one). That's the "hold on" part. But I'm happiest when I've had a camera in my hand for a couple of weeks in a great locale. So I'm trying to find more opportunities to make that happen.
Beyond that, I'm at a stage in my life where I've got just enough success to allow me to make strange choices. Would I, for example, take a job at another national publication? Maybe, if it let me do more photography. Would I sell my publishing business to someone else? Maybe, if it got me enough money to do more photography? Sensing a theme here? The more likely scenario is even more dramatic, though. I've tentatively planned to take six months off in 2006 to hike, camera in hand, the PCT. A couple of things have come up that might make me push that back to 2007 or 2008, but I think it'll happen sooner rather than later. And I dream about walking from the top of Alaska to the tip of Patagonia someday, again, camera in hand. I've done bits and pieces of that over the years, but I think the great photographers dream big, not small. Even if you don't shoot full time or want to go professional, I think it behooves all nature photographers to find the BIG project, the one that scares you just enough to make you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Jim Brandenburg is a good example, with his photography projects. Find a project that's going to push you and challenge you and motivate you and frighten you and take it on.
JM: What do you think it will take to achieve them?
TH: To achieve my Great Walk goals, I've got to get some business infrastructure things fixed first. I don't want to start off with a business that's running fine and finish the trip to find the ashes are cold.
JM: You mentioned earlier that you have about 10,000 images that no one (but you) has seen and that you are hoping to double that number before venturing in stock photography. Do you feel that it is technically wiser to wait until the selection is larger before beginning to sell in stock, and why?
TH: If you're going into the stock business, yes, absolutely. Again, it has to do with how photo editors respond. What you want to do long term is get a group of photo editors to consider you any time they have needs for photos in a particular area. You can't do that if they call and ask "do you have X" and you say "no" more than once. They'll simply stop calling. When you're unknown, things really conspire against you. You can list with some of the places that promote stock photographers (e.g. PhotoSources), but photo editors are not only busy, but they like to be productive and efficient. They do on-line and database lookups usually only as a last resort (and even then they often will go to someplace like Corbis, first).
That means that you have to be proactive. You need to get your portfolios into the right photo editors, you need to send regular reminders of your stock coverage, you need to be able to respond immediately when they do call and provide them with what they asked for, not what you want to sell. Now imagine that you've got 1000 saleable images. You might get your portfolio past the photo editor (if you can't, that right there is a big warning sign that you're either not ready yet or you're in the wrong publication). But when you tell them that your coverage consists of a hundred or so images of the Grand Canyon, a hundred of Yosemite, a hundred of Yellowstone, and so on, what are they going to think? First, images of those places available to a photo editor probably number in hundreds of thousands. Why would they use yours? If you can't answer that question, you're not ready. But beyond that, what are the chances that out of 100 images you'll have the image that they're looking for? When we did image calls at Backpacker we'd sometimes get hundreds of images for a particular call, such as "hiker approaching Thousand Lakes in Ansel Adams Wilderness." Is that in YOUR file?
Thus, you have three possible approaches to stock. First, you can shoot a lot and build a big database of images. That increases the odds that you have what a photo editor is looking for. Second, you can specialize. Instead of taking a thousand photos of Half Dome and competing with every other photographer in the world, perhaps you specialize in desert flowers. Not only is that a manageable niche, but it is even manageable from a photographic standpoint--you'll be spending an intense month or two every year in some very specific places. Not every photo editor needs desert flowers, but when they do, if you've done your marketing right, they'll know to come to you. Third, you can use an agency. Here, you join with other photographers to provide that coverage, but you also may be competing with them. When a photo editor does a Corbis or Getty search, they often pull up hundreds of matching images, of which yours might be just one. But the agencies don't really want to handle small catalogs--they want a photographer that's got a thousand or more A level images and the commitment to increase that by hundreds or thousands every year.
So, you've got to be good. You've got to market well. And you've got to have the goods when the phone rings.
JM: How would you characterize your attempts to sell stock photography in the past, if any?
TH: Haphazard, at best. I started out with the same notion that a lot of folk do: hey, I've got some really nice images, publishers will buy them. One of the things Galen did with me was to invite me in to his offices after a three-week trek in the Andes we did together. I got to see how he handled the 100 plus rolls of film he brought back, and what happened to those images. First, I noticed how little he saved in his A pile. Second, I noticed that what he did keep went into his files of tens of thousands of cataloged images that was managed by a staff of, I think, six people. That's what I was competing against. And that changed my mind about what it would take to compete. A photo editor could call Galen's offices, get the stock manager and have faxes of images on his desk in minutes (this was the mid-90's; today it would be email) and the images properly bundled up and on their desk via FedEx the next morning (or perhaps FTP'd today if the publication accepts scans). With me, well, was I even in the office to answer the phone or did they get my voice mail because I was out shooting? That's just another reason why I've backed away from trying to sell stock full time. First, I've got enough income coming in that I don't have to do it, thank goodness. But second, I'm not fully prepared organizationally to do it. Only about half of my images are cataloged. I don't have any staff who just deals with my images and managing the logistics with photo editors. Not that you need both those things, but to really make good money off of stock, I think you would.
JM: Besides having a large volume, what is the secret of moving stock photography?
TH: I said it before: no matter what type of photographer you are, if you're doing it for profit, you'll be selling more than you'll be photographing. If you're always photographing, you'd better have staff and other resources that are doing that selling. Even if you were just doing art shows to sell prints, this is still true. Marketing and sales skills and the time to do them are the things that most photographers try to avoid, but they are integral to their eventual success.
JM: Does your name recognition have anything to do with it?
TH: Boy, if you have to rely upon name recognition, you're probably better off betting on your state's lottery. Because that's often how name recognition happens: random. They say in Hollywood that everyone gets one shot (it's true of television, too, because it's a black hole when it comes to content creation--it sucks up any and everything to fill the air 24/7). But I don't think that's true of photography. You might never get that shot. Or you might get a truly random shot that suddenly puts you in the limelight. You caught a picture of something rare or previously unseen. You happened to be in the right place at the right time. Some editor picked your image for a cover and others saw it and wondered about who that photographer was. But more often than not you're just not on the radar screen until you put yourself there.
JM: Do you feel that there are better companies than others to work with? If so, do you mind naming names?
TH: Oh oh. That's a tough one. Let's start with the first question: yes, there are better places to work with, and there are also better places for newcomers than others. The reasons why I balk at the second are multiple: first, there's a never ending change that occurs in the publishing marketplace. A publication that was paying well and on time and treated you well can often change overnight. A new publisher comes in and tells editorial they're spending too much on photos and bingo, things change. Or there's a recession and advertising goes down. Or the photo editor, who was great to work with but isolating you from the real organization behind them, moves to another publication. Every time I've recommended a publication to someone, within two years things were different (and sometimes within two weeks). So I'd rather tackle it another way: start small and local if you can. I'm in eastern Pennsylvania and a publishing company called Rodale happens to be headquartered in my town. Guess where I'd start? But if I were in San Francisco, I'd start with Sierra magazine. Name me a town and I can name two or three places locally that you should start. You probably already know who they are. If they don't work out, expand your circle, but start local.
JM: Last, you mention 'sitting down with photo editors' and developing relationships as an integral part of starting an effective business selling photographs. My guess is that for many people who are looking to get in, often times the hardest place to start is knowing where to go to. Do you have any advice about how to find an editor who is willing to take time out of their busy day to speak with an unknown off of the street?
TH: Well, I mentioned NANPA before, so this is probably a good place to put in another plug. NANPA has annual conventions and one of the things that you can do at those conventions is get a portfolio review by a photo editor working in the business you're trying to sell to. Photo editors aren't dummies--they realize that it's actually a good use of their time being somewhere where there are multiple new potential sources of photos gathered together, and that describes NANPA to a T. Beyond that, you'll see what others are doing in the open screenings (so you'll know where you stand vis-ŕ-vis your competition), you'll be able to meet and interact with others who are active in the same area as you and compare notes, and you'll be able to rub coattails with some of the name photographers you've admired, who usually turn out to be remarkably approachable and helpful. So start there.
But if you have to cold call into the photo editor world, you need to make it easy for them. First, photo editors run hot and cold in terms of available time. They are on deadline parts of the month, not during others. At Backpacker, for example, we published only 10 issues a year, so there were two months during the year when the photo editor was far less busy than others. You need to figure out what those are. So your approach should be along the lines of "I'd like to show you my portfolio and get your comments, but I'd like to do that at a time where you don't feel rushed, busy, or on deadline. Can you tell me what's the best time and method to approach you?" If your approach is "hey I've got a portfolio you need to see, can I come in this afternoon" you'll get shut down so fast it's pitiful. Be respectful. Find out what works for them. Try that. Then be gentle but persistent afterwards. And if you get face to face or telephone time with a photo editor, always be asking questions along the lines of "what do you need," "how do you want it," "how can I better work with you to meet your needs," and so on. Photo editors appreciate photographers who make their job easier.
On Sunday night, we are going to put up Section III of this three part interview. It will talk about Thom's feelings on varoius environmental issues. To read more about Thom go to http://www.bythom.com.
Come join us in the NWP Business forum to discuss this interview. You can also click the 'Home' link to go back to the front page and read other interviews and articles.
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