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  #21  
Old 15th October 2013, 06:39 PM
MarcAeonDELETED MarcAeonDELETED is offline
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Default Side step

Lets side step for a moment and look at effective working models and take a moment to bring up successful galleries. What can we learn from the experience of shopping at one, who is buying from them, demographic and profile, what is being purchased, and what price ranges are people purchasing at. How are photographers dealt with. Genuine figures would be nice. ( By PM is you would rather keep it private ) To be clear, we are of course talking about photographic galleries. Can someone kick this off please? We are all stronger as one.
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  #22  
Old 15th October 2013, 08:27 PM
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MartyNL MartyNL is offline
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If people are seriously interested in selling their work online they could always use Saatchi online. Apparently, it gets 70million hits a day and listed in the top 300 websites worldwide!

A link if anyone wants to get started...

http://help.saatchionline.com/

Marc, what would be the advantage of the platform you advocate?
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  #23  
Old 15th October 2013, 09:07 PM
MarcAeonDELETED MarcAeonDELETED is offline
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Saatch sell everything. This is just for, well. I guess you have read the thread to know.


Quote:
Originally Posted by MartyNL View Post
If people are seriously interested in selling their work online they could always use Saatchi online. Apparently, it gets 70million hits a day and listed in the top 300 websites worldwide!

A link if anyone wants to get started...

http://help.saatchionline.com/

Marc, what would be the advantage of the platform you advocate?
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  #24  
Old 15th October 2013, 09:44 PM
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skellum skellum is offline
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Home at last!
First up, as promised, Mike Johnsons musings on editions-
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad...otographs.html

Interesting in that Photographers may defer to the needs of the Art market at their own expense. As balance, one commentator points out that galleries take their own risks. I used to sell some stuff through our local art centre and never minded the commission- every now and again a check just fell through the door. Great!

Why not Saatchi online? I just spent twenty minutes looking at junk. A site dedicated to a particular kind of work makes it easier for those truly interested in it to find what they want.

Mounted prints are really nice. A weird piece of magic turns a photograph into something special when you mount it. A loose print is very easy to see as being no more than a single sheet of photographic paper. Hard to present that as being worth enough to show a profit for both photographer and gallery (online or physical).
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  #25  
Old 15th October 2013, 10:47 PM
MarcAeonDELETED MarcAeonDELETED is offline
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Thank you for posting that. A really interesting read. The part that struck me was, to quote:

All works are editioned. The year of the edition and print number are written on the print. "1/15, 2013 edition"
2) You print additional editions (or not, as you wish), up to one edition per year, as you see fit, enlarging or shrinking the number in each edition as you see fit.

In the end, you can print as many prints as you like. The buyer gets assurances that there won't be a zillion prints just like his out there and knows roughly where his print stands in the pecking order.


The link and posts above do labour a lot on the photographer, dealer and gallery but I think it is very important if not the most important thing for the customer to get real joy and satisfaction from the whole process of buying / investing in an image and to enjoy owning it. This will come from good, very good quality product and service. There is always a market for high quality items backed up by good service. What else can we learn and from whom?
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  #26  
Old 16th October 2013, 05:34 AM
Richard L Richard L is offline
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I've never done editions. I always explain that because I complicate my printing life so much with different sizes of image, complex printing maps and multiple toning, there is no chance that I could make two prints alike, so even a small number edition is out.

The whole edition thing with photography is a throw back to different printing methods like etchings, dry points etc, and in many ways is more of a marketing device with photography.

The angle I use now is that my prints are called darkroom prints, and differ from digital prints in as much as making a darkroom print is a combination of skills, craft and whatever else you want to add to the process that a machine made digital print totally lacks.
It's surprising how many people are now interested in the idea of darkroom printing, and assume that all photography is digital.

Cheers
Richard
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  #27  
Old 16th October 2013, 06:02 AM
DaveP DaveP is offline
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I think if selling to the general public then as lpng as there's something edition-life scribbled on the mount then that's enough, be it an edition number, series number, or just a number!

Surely if the worry is that you're limiting yourself to only printing X number of a certain potentially very popular shot by being a limited edition, what's to stop you ruinning another edition at a different print size, or a different paper surface? Another thing I've seen done is changing the prices on prints, so lower numbered prints in an edition cost less, and as the numbers creep up so does the price. This encourages peole to buy early, and also ensures that although you might get fewer sales of higher numbered prints at leasta those you do get will be proportionally more cheddar for. It also means that you're unlikely to ever fully sell out an edition, so if you ever needed to make a money-is-no-object sale of a particular print you would be likely to have on available.

I think some kind of signing and numbering protocol is used, its especially important these days, when many photographpers' print ordering system literally just sets in place a string of automated events where eventually a print drops out of a machine into an envelope with the customers address on it with no intervention by human hand. With darkroom prints the punter on the street probably may not be able to detect any difference in the print quality between a wet print and a digital inkjet, so you're got to play up the handmade aspect of it to really get the point across.
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  #28  
Old 16th October 2013, 06:18 AM
Richard L Richard L is offline
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I do see the problem Marc might have. It's not much use just keeping 1 print to sell unless it is by someone famous. I suppose there has to be a stock, or edition, or run, or whatever, so how many of us would be prepared to print a run say of 20 prints of say 5 images. 100 prints. Nice idea, but unless I start printing small again there is no way I'd do that.

I think the whole edition idea will not attract many darkroom types, especially those making bigger prints.

Richard
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  #29  
Old 16th October 2013, 11:12 AM
Alan Clark Alan Clark is offline
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For a three year period beginning in the year 2000 I sold photographic prints at Craft and Art fairs. These were a mixture of inkjet and darkroom prints. Of the hundreds of potential customers I spoke to when they visited my stall I can't recall a single person who made any distinction whatever between inkjet and darkroom prints. And this was over ten years ago when inkjet prints were notrious for being likely to fade very rapidly. Now we have more permanent inkjet prints, and baryta coated papers that allow inkjet prints to be made that are virtually indistinguishable from darkroom prints I wonder if there is any reason why sufficiently large numbers of people would deliberately choose to buy darkroom prints.
As photographers we worry endlessly about D-max, paper surface and print quality. But the people who bought my prints seemed to be primarily concerned with the subject/content and atmosphere of the photograph.

On the subject of limited editions, hundreds of inkjet prints can be made once you have the file. And they will all be the same. But darkroom prints are all individual, all unique. Should we not be emphasising this uniqueness? Talking about an "edition" of darkroom prints rather plays this down, in my opinion.

Alan
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  #30  
Old 16th October 2013, 11:28 AM
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Miha Miha is offline
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Perhaps because a darkroom print is a photograph and an inkjet print is not?
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