With the American Rottweiler Club's National Specialty coming up in 2 months in Greeley, Colorado, I'm getting ready to shoot the formals once again. Only this year, it occurred to me that things are getting more complicated. Ever since I shot my first National in 2002, the Club has required that I provide images for the National website and formals of all the major winners for the Club's internal newsletter, the ARK. And our contract states clearly that those formals cannot be released by the OP to any other publication prior to the publishing of ARK.
Well, the ARK comes out some 6 months after the National. There are Breed magazines -- including both The Rottweiler Magazine Monthly and Total Rottweiler Magazine which is a sponsor of this National -- as well as All-Breed magazines such as Dog News, that would like to publish articles on the National within 30 days of the event and they would love to have some images of the big winners. According to my contract, I can't release those images to those publications even if it's in the best interest of the Club, the show and the breed from a publicity standpoint.
From a business standpoint, I'd prefer not to release any image to anybody until it's been paid for, either by the owner or by the user. As revenues dwindle from shows, it's clear that people are happy just to have their win publicized on the National Website or in the newsletter. If they get free publicity, why should they pay for a print? And everyone can right-click the image off of the website and place it on theirs with total impunity.
So, from a business perspective, is the show win shot business -- as financed by the exhibitors -- going the way of the DoDo Bird? If the Clubs are offering the service and using the images for their own purposes, shouldn't they be paying for them? It's a conundrum because that's not the historical model. In fact, some clubs actually have the rights of photo usage written into the bylaws -- try changing those!
My responsibility is to make the contract work from a revenue perspective. I need to generate adequate cashflow from a show like a National Specialty. Since there's a lot of travel involved in Nationals, typically, I might not make a profit but profitability is overrated anyway
. So I'm working on my strategies now but the essential truth of the situation is that "free" images to the Club undermine the ability of any OP to optimize revenue-generation. And, unless we can change the paradigm of shoveling all the show costs onto the backs of exhibitors, the business of show win photography will probably go the way of the DoDo Bird.
Jim
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