Paul Herrmann

Paul Herrmann, a director at Redeye came in too talk to us about career opportunities including the market; pricing, pitching and negotiating with clients; copyright and licensing; access, consent and the law.
Paul Herrmann is a photographer and the director of Redeye, the Photography Network. He has been a freelance editorial photographer since the mid 1980s, specialising in social issues and the arts. In the late 1990s he helped start Redeye, and as its director since 2003 built it to the largest and most successful professional development network for photographers in the UK. 
I have had the pleasure of going to a talk at the Chinese Arts Centre and got the opportunity to listen to Paul Herrmann introduce a photographer there.

When giving the talk in our Universities studio Paul mentioned some really interesting things that I hadn't really started to think about yet. For example, pricing and costs. Being a student still I haven't really put much consideration into payment and pricing up different jobs until Paul mentioned it. He mentioned that It is important if working as a freelance photographer to keep personal and business accounts completely separate and too treat all income from jobs as a business matter therefore getting paid for every aspect of your work.When deciding on a price for allowing a company/publication the use of your image's, you need to consider the media that the photo will be used in; the number of times or the length of time that they want to use the photo; where and in what context the image will be used - size of the print, for example; and whether you are giving the client exclusive use of the image or not. These are all factors that evolve around payment which I have never really thought of before, as I have never sold a piece of work in the past. 
Of course he also mentioned that we should be constantly looking into events that Redeye and other companies produce, as it is a good way of meeting other photographers and allowing for ourselves to get recognised. However, there was one subject that startled me to hear from a lecturer which was photographers not getting paid as much as they should anymore, perhaps I got the wrong gist of the matter but Paul made it seem like we were getting into photography in the wrong era and it was a dying profession (money wise).

Overall the talk was very useful and informative, it was a nice change of pace to hear from someone other than our tutors and too view there opinions and also share our own.