Back from NANPA 2010

Picture: High desert sage at sunrise in the Great Basin, near Wells, Nevada

I spent the bulk of last week in Reno, Nevada, attending the 2010 Annual Summit Conference for the North American Nature Photography Association. Considering I had a book deadline coming up this next week, it was a challenge keeping the commitment to attend. I had to cancel my participation at last year’s conference in New Mexico due to other work issues, and promptly fell off a cliff. I simply wasn’t willing to risk anymore similar bad karma by cancelling a second year in a row. My greatest joy at this conference was my work as a portfolio reviewer. Over three days, I got to sit with 12 wonderful and enthusiastic people, looking over their images, discussing their concerns and direction, and offering the best, honest assesment of their work as possible. If I had done nothing else at the conference, the opportunity to help other photographers would have made the whole event worthwhile.

Among pros, the NANPA Summit is more about networking and touching base with friends and peers. I had the chance to interact with many other photographers whose work and skills I admire, including Michael Frye, Brenda Tharp, Greg Vaughn, Charlie Borland, QT Luong, Jed Manwaring, and Jack Graham among others.

Attendance at this year’s conference was lighter than in other years, which I suppose was expected given the economy. That said, there was still a very positive energy from the attendees. The tradeshow still had the traditional notable vendors like Nikon, Canon, Lowepro, Hunts Photo, NIK Software, and numerous photo tour / destination organizations.

Overall, the general program was quite varied in scope. But from my own personal perspective, they didn’t seem to have the same “wow” or draw factor as did the previous summits. It was widely noted that the keynote speeches by Phil Borges and Joel Satore were very well received. There seemed to be a slight thread among non-professional members that I talked to that several of the breakout sessions fell short of expectations, usually due to the presentation content not matching their expectations based on write-up in the program guide.

Of particular note was a presentation called, “Who are you & why should I do business with you?” It turns out it was the exact same presentation I’d seen previously. A couple of the comments I heard was the program as listed in the schedule led people to believe this was going to have a broad business based approach, yet it was entirely specific to the art market, and entirely left out any information about targeting portfolios, contacting, or marketing materials to any other markets like magazines, publishers, stock houses, or ad agencies. On top of that, the one artist presenter, while very personable, started with a preface that he’d only been doing this for the last seven years, and then showed his own marketing where he admitted that he’d forgotten to put his web site address on the card. Isn’t that marketing cardinal rule # 1a; always put your web address on everything you send out?

Another similar instance was the breakout titled “Making the Journey from Amatuer to Pro” by Katherine Feng. While finer reading of the program summary after the fact indicated that this would only be “her story” and will “inspire” others hoping to make a similar transition, a number of the people I talked to said they were hoping as with the first example to have a broader scope, depth, and more concrete examples of what ‘they’ needed to do to become professional.

The Stock & Pros meeting were both very well attended. I thought the Pros meeting was well organized, and nice that it didn’t devolve into the wild vs. captive animal debate. The Stock Photo breakout was also good in that many examples were shown of images still generating good sales. Tom Wear, presenting info on behalf of Getty, had insight on the industry was indeed valuable. But like with the Gorilla in the room, I had the sense that some other comments were a bit white-washed or deliberately softened so as to not point out some of Getty’s negative impact on the industry. Two personal points; Tom showed a bunch of images that sold for $xx,xxx.00, which is great, but it was never brought up that Getty takes 80%, while the photographer usually only gets 20%. I specifically asked about my experience with the invitations sent out by Getty regarding joining the Flickr Collection. I noted that a year ago, I wasn’t able to decide which sales models my invited images could be sold under, i.e. Rights-Managed or Royalty Free. His reply was basically that no, that hadn’t changed. While photographers do have a chance to opt out of a sales model, his reply basically pointed to the fact that they (Getty) felt the photographers there (in Flickr) simply weren’t smart enough to make those kind of decisions based on their experience. Due to the panel wanting to keep the meeting moving along, I simply had to bite my tounge, when I really wanted ask the follow-up of “Why doesn’t Getty just post information about the type of sales models, including the pros & cons, and let the photographers decide if they want to sell their images as RM or RF? Getty could then always provide an alternate model that the photographer could opt-into, rather than opting out of, and losing any chance to have the image put into the collection.

Finally, the “Video for Nature Photographers” was one of the best attended breakouts of the summit. Presented by Ian Shive (with his experience in Hollywood) and Rob Sheppard, Editor at Large for Outdoor Photographer, high expectations were a given. Unfortunately, the subject matter was so deep, that there was no way a cursory 90-minute breakout could even scratch the surface. Ian presented several fine examples of how video could be utilized by nature photographers, but almost no time on how to be using the actual dSLR-V camera(s) available to most of the attendees. I kept waiting for a few basic bullet point do’s and don’t about pans, zooms, and editing, along with the lighting and sound. What I saw was such a huge amount of info flying over the heads of the average audience member. The recurring theme of the session was that a whole workshop could be devoted… i.e., “Sound; gosh, there’s so much to know, we could do a whole workshop on that.” “Lighting; gosh, there’s so much to know, we could do a whole workshop on that.” “Editing; gosh, there’s so much to know, we could do a whole workshop on that.” Most people I talked to walked away simply saying there’s so much more to it than they thought. And while that is very true, I think more time could have been spent showing some of the very basics of how new users might take their first operational steps with a video-camera in the field.

That’s enough of a review for now. Opps, except to say that despite the smoke-filled venue at a casino, the food served at lunch was really good.

The 2011 NANPA Annual Summit Conference will be held next March in Texas.