fan mail

Hello,

I'm just emailing you to let you know how much I love your work. I really do love black and white photography and when I searched it on the internet, your site came up. I was looking through all of your photos and there really is something about them that makes you stop and think; every one has its own beauty. They seem to reflect a great deal of simplistic happiness that does still exist, yet many people seem not to see.

Simple things like children playing or walking with a loved one or even standing in the rain. These are the real pleasures that life brings to peoples' lives and I think your work really conveys this. I can see a great deal of my own happiness and of the things that make me happy too. Your photography has somewhat inspired me to search for these things in your own depiction of life.

Yours sincerely,

F.P.

* * *

Yikes. Still no sales. Maybe I should pass the hat as I seem to be so inspiring. Tomorrow a graduate student is coming by to interview me. When sales are slow, I think the best model is to sell (if you can) your prints for big bucks in galleries to people who've got lots of dough and forget about this nickel ante stuff.

You keep the web presence, but you're too big to sell directly over the web. You are now represented by so-and-so gallery.

Do you know that I got three phone calls this week asking if the address on my website was a store?

You can't sell in the galleries and on the web at the same time. Well, you can - but you can't sell at these web prices. Galleries prints - framed - are going to be at least $500 each, probably more. So how can you sell the same print online for $75? Can't do it. I don't know. May be time to do some rethinking.

A few minutes later. Yes. Re-thinking. I know what I'm going to do. (Another crossroads). I'm going to raise the prices on the web so that they are closer to what gallery prices would be - and pursue getting gallery representation. As much as I'm not crazy about the gallery world - I can't see any other way around this web impass. Rather than trying to sell a lot at $75 - I'll see what if anything I can sell at $200. Maybe $250 on the web and $500 in the gallery. Yes - that's what I'm going to go after for the rest of this year. Because frankly, I can't sell enough at $75 a piece to pay the rent. And so I am taking on other jobs: teaching, web design etc. But I would like the prints to pay the way.

FAT SNOW!

And then it snowed and we had those nice super fat flakes for about 10 minutes:


Fat Snow #1

Matt called me a little later to tell me about the snow - but even with bronchitis I had to at least go out and stand on the corner.

Swordplay

Swordplay - Paris

60,000

That is amazing. But last week I hit 60,000 page views, and one $25 sale. That is a new record in terms of popularity and dismal monetary conversion. As usual, a lot of these views are from hotlinks where one of my images is used as background material for a teenage blog. The web is the new teenage angst hangout. And angst needs an appropriate background. Enter Dave Beckerman - angst backgrounds incorporated. Okay, not incorporated - but dark and mysterious enough to put your stories about how so-and-so didn't look at you right - on.

In the old days - these were posters that you stuck up on your wall and drove your parents nuts with. Now those posters are in cyberworld. And your parents don't even have the password - do they?

Now you can stick anything you can find up - and it don't cost a dime. What I should do is hold a parasitic contest. It will be based on bandwidth usage and one of the categories will be "Best Use of a Hotlinked Photograph." Another category will be worst use of same.

Well, there you go boys and girls: 60,000 page views and one $25 print sale. You do the math.