Tom, how did you arrive to the conclusion that I don’t do ENG. Half of my work is ENG. I don’t have the deadline pressure that you guys have so I’m allowed to work on my shots. I also have a soundmen with me all the time and I don’t have to do editing. I’m also allowed to hire a grip if it would make the job more efficient. But just like you I get an assignment and I have to comeback with a story. I do ENG the way ENG used to be before all the cutbacks. Actually this entire mess started with a question about ENG 3 threads ago.From an EFP standpoint, you're absolutely right.
Now let me tell you about ENG.
Having a background in business won't help you at all in ENG. A background in business will tell you to stay the hell out of ENG, that's certainly true, but then a background in pure business will also tell you not to give money to charity and make your kids pay their own way through college.
I don't think any of us on the ENG side of the fence had any delusions that we were gonna get rich doing what we do. We got into it anyway because, dammit, we like it and we're good at it. My business knowledge is and has been since I started this job, telling me to get the hell out and work somewhere that will pay me more, like Walmart
Having a background in business doesn't help us because there's always some wet-behind-the-ears kid just out of college who's willing to work for PB&J sammiches because "I get to work in TV!" And with even formerly vaunted photography markets like Minneapolis going to OMB/backpack, and in some cases hiring kids fresh out of college or sub-150 markets, being able to say "I bring quality to the table and therefore my business knowledge tells me that you need to pay me more" is just going to result in "No, good luck in the future, and if you're lucky we'll keep you on to train the 19 year old we just hired to replace you"
This site is mostly dedicated to television photography. Not business. The freelance board is a great place to discuss the business side of things. The rest of us are here to discuss photography and storytelling, and whether we're a millionaire or a dollaraire doesn't factor in to our qualifications to discuss those things.
I started a thread asking how photographers research a story. This because while I was on a shoot in Miami many local ENG photographer came up to me asking many questions about the next game, such as what teams were playing, mind that I live 290 miles from Miami. They were totally unprepared and one of the teams happens to be from a local university.
Before heading to the field to do our usual story about two baseball team I went on line as I usually do to find out anything that I could about the teams. Doing so I found out an interesting side story about one of the player and I was able to bring back to the producer two stories instead of only one.
The following day, same job, I put on my EFP hat and spent several hours putting up lights and building a set for a multi cameras interview.
I don’t get paid any different for doing EFP or ENG. This is what I’ve been trying very hard and evidently not very successfully to stress the importance of diversifying your skills in order to be able to ALSO do jobs that are more profitable.
Of course my clients could very well hire an ENG crew for less than half my rate and let me do the EFP portions of the job in order to save some money. But they haven’t done that, actually sometime I wish they would.
And for the record, I never said anything negative about Stuart, never. I have never even seen any of his work and none of the discussions had anything to do about his work. He just keeps barging into my threads like he actually knew something about it. All I have ever said is and was to diversify your skills, learn more so you can be more marketable should the demand for your story telling fail like it failed for hundreds of photographer who now cannot find employment because of limited skill.
It's not a very difficult or forbidden subject, retraining is a major part of the economic recovery. And BTW, this is all stuff that they teach you in business school. It doesn't matter if you are a plumber, and engineer or a photographer, business is business.