I have so many feelings about transparency in the photography world that have built up, and I need to get it out.

If you’re not one yourself, there are tons of photographers who aren’t transparent with the people they work with. It’s a wound that runs deep, turns into a scar, and affects you for the rest of your life in some way. And I think that honesty is the best policy. In a world of influencers, shady models/agents, and Instagram algorithms, we need to be upfront with one another. Once you’re found out to be a sham, it won’t look good for you. And it’s rampant in every part of the industry. This blog post is one that’s going to address it in a few areas of the photography world. But there’s a lot to talk about.

Photography Rates and Gigs

Some of this goes both ways. Photographers should be upfront and honest with what a client is getting. This should be spelled out in a contract or in one single record. To cover your own livelihood, you should do this via email. At the Phoblographer, we typically don’t answer Facebook or Instagram messages when we start to talk business. We direct people to email us. Why? We want the records on our own servers. If Facebook goes down, or Instagram goes down, or our accounts get banned or deleted for some odd reason, we need records of everything. It can prevent possible lawsuits. But we also combine this with transparent and honest communication.

In gigs that I’ve done, I’ve spelled these things out in contracts. I even do so with my contributors and staff. Things change and evolve, but both of us have records of it all. I prefer to not do something over the phone or on Zoom, either. If you have it in email, you can quite literally keyword the messages and quickly find them. The hassle is so much less.

Conversely, it also means that you should sometimes explain your Photography rates. We, as photographers, need to do a lot of educating around this because it’s a service that people don’t understand. Clients think that you’re just pressing a button. But you have to spell it out so that they know. And this goes into so many complicated territories. For example, would you rather have $2,000 for three hours of work paid to you in one gig or $2,000 for 18 hours of work paid to you in one gig? I’m sure most folks would go for the former. If you went with the former, you’re probably doing less post-production work and more work in-camera to get the shot. So overall, it means that you benefit more and you can spend more time doing other things–like getting other gigs. When people realize that they’re paying for that level of skill from a photographer that couldn’t be done otherwise, they change their tune.

Working With Models

This is a two-fold problem. Some models do the equivalent of cat-fishing. They show off what they used to look like. But when you get to actually shoot with them in person, they’re nothing like what they’ve posted on their accounts. There’s a whole subreddit for this. It gives the photographer so many extra problems with photoshopping. Otherwise, the model photoshops the images themselves. Quite honestly, very few things annoy me more.

With photographers, I’m going to argue that it’s much more sinister at times. I used to know a guy who had a lot of money, lived in a massive Brooklyn loft, owned property, and had a good finance job. He’d call models over, shoot with them, and then end up sleeping with them. That’s sleazy. It’s also a mark against the rest of us who actually do this for a living. I’m not saying that genuine chemistry can’t happen. But doing it under the guise of photography is predatory. There have been photographers that we’ve reported on that do this. But other sites don’t because they don’t want to stir the pot. And that brings us to our next subject.

We Have Problems with Whistle Blowing

We, as a photography community, need to be more responsible for cleaning up our own industry. There are lots of things that happen that we know are ...