News:

Recently on my photoblog and a personal email sent to my friends, family, and colleagues, I asked that they nominate me to be given a scholarship from Chase Jarvis to fly to Chicago and attend the ASMP Strictly Business 2 Conference. The SB2 conference is something I wanted to attend to sharpen my business skills. I am basically self taught and just about everything that I know about business, I’ve learned from my father Jeff Barbour, Philip Beaurline, John Spiro, ASMP and EP. I’ve made many mistakes and learned a lot over the last six years, experiences that I pass on to my close-knit group of young photographers and self-employed entrepreneurs. By going to SB2, I knew I would learn more skills and share that knowledge in return.

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My stock agency, PhotoShelter, just came out with a new cool stock photo widget. It’s a rotating slideshow of all my images available for licensing. The cool thing about it, is you can embed it into your blog, social networking page, desktop, email, what have you.

Neat, huh?

As of today, November 12, 2007, you can now license much of my work as stock imagery through the PhotoShelter Collection. I’ve made a direct link to my microsite on my site’s navigation system (STOCK) and you can also click here.

PhotoShelter Collection is a brand new stock agency based out of New York City. Their search system is really great. It’s intuitive, logical, and fast. The pricing model is unique, too. There are three levels (High, Medium, and Low) of Royalty Free pricing and Rights Managed pricing. There are also three levels of photographers in the collection, so there’s a wide variety of imagery at various prices. The collection is edited by PhotoShelter staff and they rank images into three categories: Pro Stock, Contemporary, and News.

A lot of my work was ranked editor’s choice and fell evenly into Pro and Contemporary categories. I’m reaching close to 200 photos, so there are lots to choose from. And if you don’t license one of mine, I’m sure you can find some great work from the thousands of other photographers on PhotoShelter.

Please let me know what you think by making comments here. Thanks!

-lincoln

I have sort of love/hate feeling about email marketing (a.k.a. spam). On one hand, it’s great to be able to send out promotions to thousands of potential clients and not have to waste paper or waste the fuel it takes to have each one delivered. It’s very green, all things considered. But, on the other hand, spam is a nuisance. 90% of the spam I receive is deleted on entry. I’m trying to calculate how many hours per year I spend deleting spam, but it’s got be a least a full day.

So, I feel this weird sense of guilt when I send one of these out. I mean, you kind of have to. How else are they going to know about you? Plus, printing direct mail pieces is expensive.  I have a tight budget for advertising and every penny counts. In cost vs. value, you can’t beat email.

Anyway, here’s my latest emailer in case you missed it or it got in your junk folder.

LINCOLN BARBOUR PHOTOGRAPHY Portland, OR 503-467-9470 info@lincolnbarbour.com Want to be removed from this mailing list? Click Here. It’s that easy! Having trouble seeing this email? Click Here.

One of the most challenging parts of being a commercial photographer is the estimate. It such an essential skill that has taken me years to get figured out (and I still make improvements every time I do one). One of my biggest stumbling blocks was the Usage Language. Usage is how you assign your creative fee. The more usage, the more it costs. But there are so many ways to describe the same types of usage. And so many different photographers and reps use different variations of Usage Language that I imagine it’s it’s hard for a buyer/client to compare one estimate from another.

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