Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free...
That has been my conclusion too Stainless.
I have become much less inclined to give away images because like others have commented if you broad cast free images too freely you diminish the perceived value of your work, and help build a culture where folks expect freebees.
The same thing is happening in other areas of photography. In the late 1980's early 1990's if I got good pictures of a news item like a moutain rescue or car crash into a creek I could call the local newspaper (Rocky Mountain News here in Denver) describe what I had and if they were interested they would invite me to come down to the newspaper and they would develop my film for free. In exchange for exclusive first use rights to any images they liked, and a fee which at the time as equivalent to $125 today for a single image on page 3 or 4, plus full photo credits with the image as "special to the Rocky Mountain News by <my name>".
Today most of the news papers are dieing, and most news photographers are out of work. The media that has gone digital in the U.S. now uses the "you report" model where they ask folks to send in images they have of important events. By crowd sourcing those images they get the equivalent of a photography department of hundreds of photographers for free. The people who send them in have no clue what the value of their images are and give them away in return for a photo credit, and the news papers keep the images in their archives so they might be re-used multiple times with no payment to the photographer.
As a result documentary photography (which is much of what we do out at Bonneville) is a dieing art. I have a more photo journalistic style than Pork Pie or Ray did as a result of those efforts 35 years ago to shoot for the news paper, and am trying to force myself to do more "artistic" photography. I notice the shots but often don't take the time to take them. In recent years I have started to take the time to shoot those images, and occasionally even to plan of an image ahead of time.
In addition the modern cameras are good enough you have to really work at it to totally screw up average photos, and people no longer know what top quality photography like Ansel Adams did even looks like because in their entire life they have never seen a tack sharp wall sized print. They are conditioned by 600x400 pixel "good enough" pictures on the web and think that that is what they should be paying for. Throw in a culture of acceptance of cut and paste casual theft of images on the web without photo credits for the source and you get a general lowering of the perception of value of an image.
In my view, the only way to control that is to stop flooding the community with freebee images and dumping all your images on the web for anyone to pilfer at their pleasure.
Strong watermarking helps a lot but even that can be removed by a determined user. Cropping can also be used by not giving away the whole image in high enough resolution to be reproduced as a high quality print or by only showing the technical detail you need to show the person.
As I mentioned earlier in another post I have spent significantly more than $10,000 on my equipment over the last decade, and I am sure Pork Pie and others are in the same range. I could easily spend $7000 for a single top end long telephoto lens for those "at speed" shots but get by with a $1000 lens. Throw in the costs of travel and any reasonable value for your time to cull through pictures, select the best shots, do your corrections, captions and coordinate with the customer about what they are really looking for and it is easy to justify a reasonable cost for large prints.
I in the past talked with Ray about this I know he burned up several photo printers trying to deliver quick turn around shots to the racers, and eventually realized he was losing money on every print he sold at his very reasonable prices.
Until the photographers as a group actively defend the value of their work and insist on reasonable fees for their work this deterioration will continue.
This is a world wide phenomenon effecting all types of photography. If you go on the web and look for it you can find several open letters to photographers to defend the value of their work and not to give themselves and their work away to people who do not appreciate what went into the photos time, money and creativity.
I know photographers who have torn up large prints rather than sell them at the price the customer said they were willing to pay.
If you really sit down and figure the costs of "doing business" How much does it cost you to get to Bonneville with x thousand dollars worth of camera gear, reasonable value for you time spent out on the salt (say a 10-12 hour day not being uncommon) even at minimum wage that works out to $70-$120 a day fee if you were a commercial photographer. Look at the fees for working commercial photographers they often charge $150-$500 just to show up at a photo shoot, plus expenses and then once the shots are taken, they separately negotiate fees for individual shots often in the hundreds to thousands of dollars per image depending on its use. Add to that the peripheral equipment computers, software, high quality photo printer or sending the images out to a lab to be printed, plus postage for shipping.
Pork Pie you are a very good photographer and a responsible supporter of safety for the racers by your donations of knowledge gathered through your images.
Don't give it away, it is fair reasonable and proper for you to get a fair fee for your work.
Just like a wedding, Bonneville record attempts and the events surrounding them are once in a life time events and cannot be "re-shot" at any price.The picture I have of Speed Demon pooping a turbine impeller out the exhaust pipe at 300+ mph is not something you can recreate no matter how hard you tried.
Same for my picture of Spirit of Rett in the traps on the return run as they took the Golden Rod record.
They are in every sense of the word as precious as a wedding kiss photo. We should present them in that light.
Getting good shots under the photo conditions out at Bonneville and understanding the who what when of how things work is a valuable skill set not to be short changed.
Typical web discussions about photography fees (these are wedding based but I could find the same discussions in all types of photography right now):
http://victoriabcweddingtips.com/?p=296http://www.caughtonfilmphoto.com/costofphotography.html
