Photo Sales For Advertising Use Pay The Bills

The bottom photo of the dive flag at sunset had been used in both print and trade show advertising for the Monroe County (Florida Keys) Tourist Development Council annually for three years.

Image our surprise and delight when their advertising agency contacted us once again to negotiate pricing for its new use in a print ad, top photo.

The fee we agreed upon is 10X higher than what we would have been paid for the editorial use of this image in the same magazine at the same reproduction size.

The message is clear, photos used for advertising pay the bills, take no prisoners!

Young Stewards of the Ocean

We just completed a a wonderful photo assignment for National Wildlife Federation about young people involved in staghorn coral restoration. We photographed these young divers as they harvested the coral from an underwater nursery, cleaned the growth bases, tagged and measured the corals.  Surfacing with their selected corals we then traveled to a damaged area on a nearby reef where we photographed the boys and girls using a special underwater epoxy to "plant" the corals on the reef.  

Since our contract dictates we cannot release the photos until they are published by National Wildlife Federation, the photos shown here are of another coral restoration event involving college students that we photographed on assignment for a magazine in 2007.

It's really gratifying to work on an assignment about such a positive project!

Life on Mars

Sometimes you just can't sleep at night.  You've got this idea, this concept and you know there will be no rest until you breathe life into it. Creativity is like that. Fortunately I have a wonderful wife who feels the same and we often work together, as we did here on Mars, to make an idea a reality.

Fossil Shooting Out West

Therisa and I learned long ago that the key to survival in the highly competitive world of photography is to shoot "niche" subject matter. These are subjects that not everyone photographs so that when a photo editor is, for instance, searching for an image of a fossil snake, we should not face an avalanche of competition.  We plan our photo journeys accordingly and are both well tuned into locating unusual subject matter in advance.

The fossil snake above was discovered in 2007 and only the second fossil snake from the Green River Formation in Wyoming.  Preliminary identification suggests it's a boa.