I don't get it. Have you ever thought about becoming a professional photographer? Well forget it. People do not accept to pay for photos anymore.

The tip of the iceberg can be seen on this comment. Its a comment on a 222 Megapixel Image. The image is unique (you won't find another one like it). It took about a week of computer processing to assemble the image and tune the colors (I continuously exceeded the virtual memory limitations of Windows during the processing). So basically not counting the expenses I had to buy thousands of dollars of equipment and travel to remote places, just considering that I slaved about a week on it, people still get upset when I tell them that they cannot get this image for free. Yes, thats right. Sometimes I even get nasty emails about it (admittedly its about 1 in 500 I get through this website, but it happens).

That really makes me wonder though. Do these people expect their mechanics to work on their cars for free? Do they expect to get a good meal cooked for free too? I know there are many sites that offer free images, so why not go there? Oh yeah, because the image is unique. I guess its not that easy to replicate or is it?

If the bus is free, do I walk into a ferrari dealership and ask them for a free ferrari?

During the soccer world championship I have asked Reuters.com if I could license some of their images for this website here (to extend my coverage). Well guess what? I couldn't afford it and that was that. Yes thats right, I couldn't afford the small photos suitable for websites. However people come to my website and expect me to offer them a link to download a 222 Megapixel Image (which is about 220MB as a compressed JPG).

I get several requests per email every week asking for free photos. So far my policy has been to give them away for education or if someone donated to unicef:

http://www.aguntherphotography.com/node/1651

Want to know the truth? People are not willing to donate $20 for a good cause (helping starving children) to get a professional high quality work of art. I have had one person take me up on that offer and tons of people who emailed me about getting images didn't reply.

Well, today I simply test people if they are willing to pay and if its not for educational purposes I simply don't care anymore. One (potential) customer asked for a 4m x 3m print of that image (thats about 157inch x 118inch or 400cm x 300cm) for a very large display. I get a couple of similar request once in a while but people rearely follow through or loose interest.

Andre

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