I promise, it’ll only take a couple of minutes.
The web is going through a very interesting time now. Advertising isn’t really paying what many publications need and so they’re trying to find ways to make it very in your face at your expense. For the most part though, the Phoblographer tries not to do this (don’t get me started on the tablet edition of our site, I feel you on that.)
And this is why publications are asking readers to help out. Let’s think of it this way:
- You, as a photographer, want to be paid for your work.
- On a similar train of thought, journalists want to be paid for their work.
Shouldn’t an EIC who works 80 hour weeks be paid accordingly?
Shouldn’t the designer that did a fantastic job with La Noir Image be paid accordingly?
What about the freelance journalists?
And that’s the thing: I want to paid contributors fairly and I want to cover the company’s expenses for the first year. $35,000 isn’t a whole lot to ask for this. I’ll be putting ads into the magazine, but they won’t be annoying and they’ll be very separate from the content that you see. My intention is to not interrupt your experience.
On top of this, I’m going to be doing much more than a standard PDF. We’re building an app that updates once a month or more often if you choose that specific pricing tier on our Kickstarter.
The point: I want you to curl up with our magazine and at the end of it I want you to grab your camera, go out there and start shooting. It will include shooting challenges, interviews, some tech, photo essays, photographer features, and features/awesome stories on the black and white photography world. You can check out the site to see more of this type of content.
I want to inspire you all; this isn’t going to be all about news and playing that game. It’s about genuine, organic inspiration. We’re going to spend hours and days each month going through emails, the internet, and working with other organizations to find ways to keep you inspired for what’s pretty much less than $1 a month.
This brings me to the bigger thing in the photography world. Why should you pay for content when there is so much free content out there already? Here are the reasons:
- No one is really doing a stellar job of doing this with black and white photography
- The content that La Noir Image puts out isn’t put out anywhere else. Go ahead, look around. See if any of it is featured in many other places.
- To that end, it’s truly exclusive and ahead of the curve.
- You’re getting loads of inspiration a month
- You’re getting new tutorials per month
- You’re being introduced to new talent each month
- You’re finding a way to keep supporting, at least in some ways, the analogue world since black and white is still a big part of it.
- You’ll get new ideas for projects to do for yourself by hearing from these photographers personally.
So who is this for? Every photographer that wants to be better at what they do. Let me convince you that black and white photography isn’t a crutch; and instead it’s its own thing.
To get this done though, we need donations.
As probably the youngest publisher in the independent photography blog world, I’d like to ask you to help me continue doing what I’ve been doing: inspiring others and being honest with people about photography. I’m not going to sit here and play a smoke and mirrors game or find a way to sell out. I just want to do a damned good job that you’ll eventually see is very worth it.
At the moment of publishing this piece, we’re a bit above $5,000. We need $35,000 to get this done.
So again, please help us. Loads and loads of $10 donations can help; but so too will more donations at higher levels.
If you’ve got questions, fire them away in the comments.
