Yesterday evening I had the "pleasure" of being able to photograph the extraordinary general meeting of the Hamburg Sports Club. The recent separation from long-time sports director Dietmar Beiersdorfer had created public interest. Photographing such meetings is not particularly exciting, because the quality of the verbal contributions is difficult to capture on pixels and the subjects that the photographers present can capture hardly differ. Nevertheless, almost two handfuls of colleagues were present again and it was clear that everyone would take the same pictures.
In order to sell pictures, I simply had to be faster than the others. The meeting officially began at 19 p.m. and due to the large number of members, the welcome was postponed by 25 minutes. At 18:58 p.m. I passed on the first pictures of the people with a particular interest in the newspapers to my agency - Chairman of the Supervisory Board Horst Becker and CEO Bernd Hoffmann. Several phone calls with my boss on the agency server later, the turbulent meeting was over.
This morning I was very pleased to see the two pictures of me in the Hamburg print edition of the "Bild" newspaper. They were the only current pictures in all of the Hamburg print editions for the day. And when I look at the online editions of newspapers nationwide, they all used pictures from dpa or even just archive pictures from previous events. Interested readers will of course know that the vast majority of newspapers pay their dues to dpa anyway in order to get the important news - and can therefore use photos for free. In the wake of the current financial crisis and savings in advertising budgets, this is a legitimate means of filling newspapers with content at a relatively low cost. This shows how competitive the market for images is and how difficult it is to sell photos. And how important it is to work for an active agency. Yesterday I was working for the right one.
In addition to being happy about my pictures, I also had to smile about the cropping. I know what the pictures look like in the original. And of course it's clear that the newspapers will tailor it the way they want it. Take a look at the picture above in the newspaper that shows the podium from yesterday's event. You can click through the pictures in the gallery below – and also look at the original. Apart from the fact that I only sent away uncropped images yesterday (and am also showing them here), the images will be compressed to around 3MB so that the transfer via FTP is faster. So if my original has 3MB and the Bild newspaper only actually prints about 1/4 of the image, then hardly a MB of the photo ends up in the newspaper. This megabyte is enough to put a 23,7cm x 3,4cm image in the newspaper in decent quality.
A great insight into your everyday life and how the pictures "end". I found it exciting and to me the pictures seem to be very well done!
excitingly written article! and congratulations on your success!
I think it’s a good idea from the photo editor… 🙂