Today's Mailbag/ Department of Shameless Self-Promotion

The latest copy of HMSA's community relations magazine Island Scene arrived with the usual pile of bills in todays mail along with this nice note from the 'zines Art Director/PE, Jonathan Tanji. I've been supplying Jonathan with editorial images for several years now. He is one of the few PE's I have worked with who ALWAYS takes the time to offer feedback about the images submitted for each assignment, ALWAYS offers a fair and decent editorial creative fee ( if you can really call editorial creative rates fair), ALWAYS calls if he has a plan to use the images in some secondary way such as publishing on the magazine's website, ALWAYS pays very promptly and ALWAYS offers a fair fee for such secondary use.

I bring Jonathan up as an example because his kindness and good will towards photographers is such a rare experience for me. More often the case is that I will receive an inquiry to shoot an assignment, a bare-knuckle negotiation over creative fees, terms of use will transpire in a series of emails, faxes and telephone conversations, finally the assignment will be confirmed, the resulting images will be submitted for approval and that's the last your hear from anyone at the publication until the work is published and you have to call to ask when payment might be expected months later. 

I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that all PE's, Art Directors and Publishers work this way. I have had to opportunity to work with several over the years that have been equally generous and great to deal with. They are the exception to the rule. Jonathan exemplifies the great qualities of an art buyer and I want to give him a tip of the hat for brightening my morning with his note and for his love of using photography displayed big on the page... full page/full bleed.

Otherwise, the morning has been filled with the tedious drudgery of running a business. Today's activities have included answering phone calls containing prerecorded messages offering me business lines of credit, extended automobile warranties, filing end of the year GET Tax forms, 1099 Form summaries (a month late I discovered when I went to fill them out this morning).