Now, just stop and think here.

[Benny Profane]

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/med/2054779621.html

"With over 20 years in the world of photography, Andrea Blanch is a world renowned photographer. The scope of her work includes fashion, portrait, reportage & film. Andrea's work has appeared in Details, GQ, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Rolling Stone, etc. Other clients include Revlon, Johnny Walker, Universal Films, Mitsubishi etc. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. "


OK, fine, Andrea, and, congrats. You've built a biz, and, I guess it's paying off. Along the way, I'm, of course, assuming you have shook a lot of hands and established a lot of professional arrangements with clients and vendors. But, waitaminute ....... you want someone to work for you FOR FREE who has this resume?:


"Applicant must have not only a passion for photography, be self-motivated, and reliable, but should also have a thorough knowledge of MACS and Microsoft Office Programs. Applicant must have in-depth experience with Adobe Photoshop CS4 - CS5 and digital printing. A knowledge of video & video editing, and/or graphic design is a plus."

And, (choke, choke, gag), you want the same unpaid person to do this?:

"Applicant will be responsible for all aspects of Andrea's photography, including gallery shows, portfolio assembly, Web site & social media maintenance, image archive, and office work. Responsibilities will also include retouching, editing & creating images using Adobe Photoshop, coordinating and producing film shoots & printing high quality images from the computer."

Honey, you're in NYC. Look around. Prostitution is expensive. It's not free.

[creativeretouch]

"Intern must be able to work 15-20 hours a week for 3 months"

For all this work ???

Is she looking for a naive Superman ???

[zganie]

Unfortunately!!!
These type of adds are more and more frequent,not only on Craigs list and not only in New York,but everywhere
So I assume
1)theres a lot of unemployed people in the industry
2)there are a lot of people willing to work for little or no money

[creativeretouch]

I am afraid we will pay for a possibility to work in the future ...

[zganie]

Look on facebook theres a whole culture photographers,models,retouchers etc..,working for free or TFP,TFD
I have asked on here How many people actually make a living from retouching?
NOT HOW MUCH YOU MAKE! just IF your making a living
I Got a lukewarm response SO what does that say?

[Godmother]

Originally Posted by zganie

Look on facebook theres a whole culture photographers,models,retouchers etc..,working for free or TFP,TFD
I have asked on here How many people actually make a living from retouching?
NOT HOW MUCH YOU MAKE! just IF your making a living
I Got a lukewarm response SO what does that say?

What do you mean? I know a lot of people who make a living out of retouching worldwide :/

This thread is not about that... I think this photographer will not get someone like THAT but it might get something close with no personal vision (I also know a lot of ppl like that, loads of knowledge and not a lot of personal input)

If he can get it for free... why is he going to pay.

I honestly don't get it tho... I don't think his photography is all that :/

[creativeretouch]

A couple of minutes ago I received an email offering me to shoot a Calendar for upcoming season. "Unfortunately it is an unpaid work but a good opportunity to build my portfolio and experience ..."

I replayed "Unfortunately I am not in the position to take unpaid job as I have my own expenses and I suppose to pay my bills"

Thank you very much - several years ago I got an opportunity to shoot a fashion calendar on Cyprus and the cost of the production was $50.000 ... And I got paid that time

[Delicate_Media]

Yes, it is getting a lot harder in this business.
I'm a freelance retoucher located in London, I have a lot of experience and worked for some pretty famous clients in beauty & fashion, but it's still very hard to get more clients at the moment.
I had some long term clients I had to stop working for because their rates dropped from fair prices I could live off to Middle Eastern rates within half a year, and of course I also get a lot of requests for free work.
Most of the time the people who ask me to work for free are not students or photographers working on a low budget project... it's big companies who want to use the images for their websites or who want huge series of commercial fashion or product photos retouched. Of course they promise you that they "might" pay you one day if your work is good, but come on, there are so many retouchers who work for free that it would be much easier for them to just hire another free retoucher again.

I don't take these jobs anymore, I also don't work for extremely low rates anymore because I refuse to give low quality work to my clients.
I'm a high end retoucher and everything with my name on it will have high end quality.
But working that way also means that you struggle a lot sometimes to find new clients who still value very good quality work, good communication and, people tend to forget this when they hire free or low budget retouchers, a very good service.

@Benny
Your post is just another example of how hard to have to work to make it in media and how these big people just don't care about the people who work for them.
I'm sure many young people will still apply for this job...

Kind Regards,

Nadine

Nadine1301@googlemail.com

[creativeretouch]

Nadine, this is exactly what I wanted to do - always keep the top level of the quality and get paid for it. But the problem is as you already mentioned to keep old clients and get new ones. I was very lucky to shoot that calendar (2001) which brought me a good reputation. It is not easy to be a center point of everything and facing this kind of responsibility. It was for the client who wanted to establish a new brand on the market in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately he was not successful as the market is not good ...

Same thing happened to me later. Of course I visited best czech factories and they were surprised because of the cost of the production (which was paid to the production company) and they could not afford budget like this.

I think we need to find right balance between the quality and the price. For example I work on my personal projects right now and I do not care if I spend one week working on 1 picture (if I can). I want the best quality for my personal work which was not published yet. But if I have a client I can offer to him different levels of my services and he can make his own decision which solution works best for him. I do not want to loose a client of course but I wish to get paid as well

[Delicate_Media]

Yes, that's exactly what I think too.

I have 2 ways of retouching skin, one quicker one for catalogues, online shops etc. and one high end magazine quality one.
I always give my clients the option of choosing one or even a combination of both, but I always make sure that the quality of the images is very good.
They often print my name in the credits of catalogues, magazines etc. and I can't afford to have a cheap looking image in there, but I also can't afford to work 5 hours for £20.

The other thing is that we have a global market now and that people from different countries charge different rates.
I live in London, UK, and my hourly rate is £39 (around $50). That's absolutely nothing compared to the rate a retouching studio charges over here, but if you quote on a job in the USA it seems a lot to photographers and agencies over there.
The global market can be amazing, but I sometimes think that trying to stick to your own country (or continent) makes it easier to maintain your rate.

But I definitely don't take any free commercial jobs anymore.
I do work on tf with some amazing photographers every now and then which really benefits my portfolio.
But if a company hires a retoucher/photographer or intern to work completely for free and even uses the images in a commercial way it's just disrespectful.

[creativeretouch]

yes I am with you and I do not say this very often

In my opinion the biggest companies (In London, NY ...) will give the work to the big studio which is able to deal with the amount of work they provide and they do not have any reason to change this as it could be very risky ... Or they spread they work between two or three studios. As a single retoucher you have to be very well established for several years to be working for them.

So you need to work for the middle sized companies but they are facing the crisis now and the other people just trying to rich the top level ...

So the question is: Do you need to work for a big retouching studio to get really
good job which will satisfy you?

[Delicate_Media]

Yes, I think it doesn't hurt to work for a big retouching studio.

I actually did that for a while. It was amazing and I've learnt some amazing ways of retouching an image there, but being very honest the amount of time that I had to spent there was a bit too much for me.
It was basically monday - sunday from morning till very late at night.
I love retouching and I definitely have a lot of passion for it, but I also have friends and a private life.
I know that it's pretty much the same in most retouching studios and that you will have to give up your private life for many years until you have enough names on your client list to build up your own business, but even working all these days and hours i simply didn't have the money to hire a person to go shopping for me, cook me dinner at 0.30am, clean my bathroom and reply to my friends emails and phone calls.

I believe that hard work and especially good quality work is still worth something though, and even though it is hard sometimes I will keep on retouching, looking for new clients and do amazing work

[creativeretouch]

I expected something like that As I see we have similar way of living ...

I took a few times similar job so I exactly know what you talking about.

[Delicate_Media]

Ah that's good to hear

I just had a look at retouching jobs and found this by the way:

http://www.freelancer.com/projects/F...etouching.html

Someone needs 1 million images retouched... have a look at the prices some people are offering underneath.

[creativeretouch]

The minimum salary rate in the UK is £5.00 per hour and we are traveling to India now ...

If you have a really big amount of pictures to work on and you will have a everyday job - it means you will be able to work 8 hours Monday to Friday and you will decide to spend 1 hour with 1 picture how much will you charge per picture?

The average salary for a retoucher in UK is about £28.000 per Year (last November it was £35.000).

[creativeretouch]

I just accidentally came across this article:

http://www.macuser.co.uk/3250-the-gr...tition-swindle

By the way Benny, thanx for this post

[demandapanda]

This photographer posts at least once if not more per month, the same exact ad, always unpaid. The most we can do is flag it as prohibited, because it is, it's an illegal internship and craigslist does not allow illegal internships to be advertised. And if anyon has the time I suppose they could actually contact the studio and let them know that they're a-holes.

[creativeretouch]

Perhaps this is the way how to face this global problem - to inform those companies offering this kind of cooperation that this is illegal and they suppose pay at least a minimal rate. But is it really illegal if you agree?

[demandapanda]

It's illegal to offer, and yeah, it's still illegal even if you agree. Do you think someone who is so desperate that they work for someone who will only pay them less than minimum wage should work for that amount just because they agreed to it? It's still illegal, they are being taken advantage of, the laws are there to protect people. Half the time the people who agree to these don't even know it's illegal, they just think it's something they have to do.

I have actually called out companies on doing just this and I contacted the companies they were listing through, NYFA for instance, that they were hosting an advertisement for a job that was offering less than minimum wage for a studio manager position. The ad specifically listed $10/hour for a studio manager position but for the first 3 months it would be half of that, $5 per hour. I told them that it was a complete insult to offer $10 per hour for a studio manager with all the skills and qualifications they wanted, although it is not illegal, however paying $5 per hour for any period of time is completely illegal. NYFA forced that company to at least offer a legal wage for the position from the start, or I'm sure they would have removed the listing. When I checked backed the listing stated legal wages for the entire time of the position. I worry about contacting companies because I'm afraid my name would get out there, but I finally got so fed up with it I decided I didn't care to work for people who thought it was perfectly fine to screw people over and not pay them what they deserve for the work they are doing and allows them to pay rent and buy food, etc.

[paulafrog]

Originally Posted by Delicate_Media

Ah that's good to hear

I just had a look at retouching jobs and found this by the way:

http://www.freelancer.com/projects/F...etouching.html

Someone needs 1 million images retouched... have a look at the prices some people are offering underneath.

Now that's scary people would even bother to take the time to type a bid!

[zganie]

I am not saying that no one is working in this industry,just saying about the response I got
This Thread is exactly about work,people constantly undervaluing your work
trying to get you to work for free or cheap
You think this is the only AD like this or the only city?Trust me its not I think it was about 2 years ago the BUZZWORD (INTERNSHIP) made news how companies were trying to get people to work for free

[Delicate_Media]

I think there is no law that can protect you when you are the one who applies for this job.
I mean... even though it's illegal to make people work for nothing, but there are still people applying for these jobs.
Let's say that nobody would apply for this job... they would probably post it again and again on different sites. But after a while (and depending on how desperate they need the intern) they would think "Ok, no one seems to be interested in this job, how much could we offer as a payment?"
It's as easy as that.

But as long as there are people applying the situation will not change, no matter what the law says.
And as long as there are people retouching 1 million product images for $200 other companies will try the same thing.

I think there should be some organization, like the AOP (association of photographers) for retouchers, where retouchers stay in contact and can exchange views and what's going on on the market, compare prices and rates etc.

[Florin]

Hi everybody.
I was thinking about writing a new post about the freelancers sites, something like "Freelancers sites: are they or not a good deal?" etc.
However, I found this post and I think we could go on along with the same idea and sharing my experience could be some helpful.
I spent a good amount of time during the last 4 month between several of this sites and I believe that today I have a good enough panorama about the inside work routine of a day by day freelancer's life.
I want to specify one point from the beginning: I have not been needing to perform these jobs for economical reasons (money), I have a lot of local work here where I'm living, I did it because I always have been thinking that working like this, "in the air", without a stable work relationship with some fixed clients (web sites, photo studios etc) could not assure a regular and decent income for living as a retoucher artist. Call this just curiosity. You never could be sure of something, say "good" or "bad" until taste it for yourself. This is what I was doing, taste it and have my own conclusions.
I will resume this in the most important points and please take it like my own opinion, this is just my private point of view:

1. THE SITES.
I subscribed in several freelancers sites, you should never depend of only one because of the variations of the jobs offers.
These sites are: Guru.com (USA), Freelancer.com (Australian), PeoplePerHour (UK), oDesk (I ignore the location), GetACoder (I ignore the location too).
Every site offers some free biddings for the projects which are demanded. For instant, Guru.com gives to you some 10, Freelancer.com some 40, oDesk only 3 and so on. You'll need to bid some 15-20 times all over the freelancers sites maps every day so this will not stand up for a long time, you'll have to pay some US $25ºº monthly for a premium membership in any of these sites and keep going on with the bids. Special memberships could reach some US $40ºº per month. If you pay a whole year membership this is cheaper.

2. THE SITES MANAGEMENT.
All of them are very well managed, there are professional administrators working the 24 hours a day and have a very good communication both with freelancers and employers.

3. WHAT YOU COULD FIND THERE.
Well, this is the critical milestone. Let's see some important details:
a. if you are looking for some artistic retouch demand, this kind of retouch we are doing, sharing, exposing and talking about here, just forget it and do not waist your time. These 4 months I have not seen a single one. The 99,99% of the retouch demand is the commercial one. Employers are generally some sites owners who are selling all kind of products. They provide their items pictures and ask for background removal (most of these items have to be exposed over a white background), some low or mid level retouch (sometimes they are taking themselves the photos without good lighting, twisted shots etc), levels corrections, resize and web optimization.
b. if you do not mange the vectors design you'll loose the best opportunities.
Every single day there are at least 10 - 15 logos or corporate packs demands on each one of these freelancers sites (logo + business card + letterhead + envelope). This is a gold mine for those who are "plugged in" and believe me or not, some guys are doing a lot of bucks with this stuff. I think this kind of job is great because we can see and feel that a lot of people are investing, opening new business and this is a good signal for the global economy. So, if you like and perform the vectors design you'll enjoy and make some money.
c. how the employers treatment, relationship, communication is? This is just luck. Most of them are decent and have a good communication but you'll have to deal with strange people too sometimes.

4. THE BIG QUESTION: HOW MUCH COULD I HAVE FOR MY WORK?
This is really "The Twilight Zone". I was fried with the first bid I was winning. The client offered "...we have some pictures to be retouched and we'll pay $30ºº for this job". I sent some samples and won this big deal: 135 commercial pictures to be enhanced for a web site. Maybe my 6 y/o granddaughter has more photographic skills than the guy who took these food items shots. Twisted, broken cases and labels, bad lighting... what should I say? This was the same mess, I could not believe this was my first freelancer job! Took me 1 week to perform this disaster. I always have a professional ethic so I did not rejected this tricky job, I did it and delivered it. Wasting time and money but work ethic must be above of all this bad experiences.
a. be aware about the projects, ask for the details and terms of the bid.
b. always try to highlight your abilities and explain in detail your workflow. This will convince your employer that he is treating with a professional artist.
c. never ask or bid looking for the other people biddings. Try to fix a fair rate for your working time. Respect yourself and have your artist dignity worth more than any other principle.
c. have a very opened mind if you'll deal with this jobs. You must accept that freelancers sites are global work sources. This world is a jungle. Some countries have people who are living with $30ºº a month! Yes buddy, 1 buck / per day for a whole family. This is so sad and I do understand this. Just look the TV. If some young guy of this disgraced people have some design skinless / knowledge etc. he'll offer his work for just nothing. I've been seeing this every single day and please believe me, I'm not upset about, I really feel bad, feel ashamed, feel a bad taste in my mind every time some of these guys is trying desperately to win a bid. We are not starving, but some of them yes they are.
Most of them they are not pro retouchers, just beginners, so this is not a real problem. Just a sad chapter of this story.
However, some few part of the employers will take advantage of these people necessities. You'll find projects like: "1500 pictures to be retouched. I have only $50ºº for this project" etc. etc. I've been seeing some projects with a $0,10 rate per picture and always there will be some person bidding for it.
d. my own profit during this period: US $300 - 500 monthly. Is this an attractive income for me? The answer is no, not at all. This was the price I had for my curiosity and nothing more. Remember that you should pay at least some 3 or 4 freelancers membership every month to stay alive and have some chance on these sites.

5. HOW DO I SURVIVE AND EARN MONEY IN A FREELANCER SITE?
a. first of all, before to affiliate or buy a membership try to built an external site (blog etc.) as an extended samples gallery. Most of the freelancers sites have some limitations, call them as picture's size (600x400 low res pics), number limits (basic membership allows only 5-10 samples) and so on.
External blogs samples will allow you to display big, high resolutions and unlimited number of samples. You can not display any contact information about email, website, phone numbers etc.
I've built my own:
http://designgalleries.yolasite.com/
b. you must spend a lot of daily hours as stuck to your freelancer sites. You must be aware of the instant projects' offers and bid at once. I think that maybe in some 30 minutes you could count at least some 10 bids on a project. You'll have to race with some of these guys who have breakfast, lunch and dinner waiting for a new bid.

6. CONCLUSIONS
If you work alone, if you have a stable work and have a decent income this really will be not "the other choice". You'll spend a lot of time for few money, because your working time will be divided between your traditional clients and waiting for some unknown bids in the net. You'll leave your clients waiting in file for their works and spend precious time looking for biddings all day long. If you could work as a team, some 3-4 persons, maybe this should be more attractive. You'll be not alone, you'll be able to manage some big projects (some big league employers offer good money but a great amount of work) and so on.
If you've been doing some good jobs you'll have these employers looking for you again every time when they'll need some new projects. They use to invite (assign) the new projects to the freelancers they have already known. So, the key is always the quality, but not the low price.
I think this was a very interesting experience for my ego and curiosity and also I believe that I will not buy any membership at all. I have some clients looking for me whenever they need a job and I'm satisfied with all I was doing the last 10 years of my retoucher activity.

I'll let this extra-large answer opened. If you want to ask me for something more please go on.
It's a little late and I feel so sleepy
Have a great Merry Christmas and good night.
F