Already, creative pros had been fighting off the countless hobbyists and amateurs who knowingly or unknowingly, on a daily basis, trying to sink your boat. Trying to patch the never ending holes.
Appreciate your views, but to be entirely honest, your above lines might not be entirely correct... Sure, photographers know the fact that there will be more and more up and coming photographers out there and chances are, they will charge at lower price (or so call "spoil the market" fee). This is a fact and they are not going any less.
However, this is not entirely true unless the photographer is in the same market as the "starting photographer".
I have been approached in weekly basis, to "collaborate"... While I appreciate the thought, mostly were declined based on their target audience (assuming that they know). Here is what I always here, "hi, we are such and such company and we have x ten of thousand of people in our database and our website has x hundreds of thousand of hits per month".
So naturally, my question is, how many in your database form a group of my interest? (I will tell them my interest group is or my target audience) and the answer generally range from uhm, what do you mean by target audience? To oh, there is no such group existed. Gosh... If I were the boss of the company and these are my marketing core people... They are fired.
To be successful, you need to match your service to your correct audience and without that it is not going to do any good. That is partly the reason why photographers fail, apart from many crucial reasons. For example,you can't possibly selling AC to Eskimo so to speak. It really doesn't matter which income groups that you are targeting, but you need to know exactly who and where to find them. It's that simple.
What Ben Roberts trying to say (the main point, I believe) is simple, you need to respect yourself and protect your belief as a creative person and we do need to put food on the table, not so much about the cheepos or the freebos. So if you interpret it correctly, it is similar case to my case study with different approach, you should learn something similar to my recent post about the Case Study.
so ask yourself, who really your target market before you start yelling at the beginners. I was there once, nobody tell me what to do, I had to figure that out myself, so you can't blame me to start it wrongly? So with that fact, I am more lenient to the beginners. But what I really hate for established photographer to have dishonest mentality and that generally hurt the market segment more badly as photographers in that segment will be brand the same way.
So for photographers who become established, I will encourage everyone to work to protect the market for everyone benefit rather then self interest only. Because as the market is protected, everyone will benefit from it and push everyone in that market to grow and compete in a healthy way.
Regards,
Hart
