f2 freelance photographer magazine

Les Rencontres d'Arles - Workshops and Folio Review

2010-06-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

Les Rencontres d'Arles - Workshop series announced

Continuing our coverage of the international photography festival in Provence Les Rencontres d'Arles: for 2010 a series of workshops are being organised. Workshops, with support from Olympus, vary from one-day "get to know" encounters to full weeks working under the guidance of top photographers offering the chance to benefit from their vision and experience. The list of distinguished international experts includes British photographer (and member of the F2 Freelance Facebook Group) Brian GRIFFIN, who draws on a vast commercial and fine art practice, along with: Sarah MOON, Paolo ROVERSI, Marcos LOPEZ, Véronique ELLENA, Claudine DOURY, Stéphanie LACOMBE, Antoine D'AGATA, Klavdij SLUBAN, Wilfrid ESTEVE, JH ENGSTRÖM, Grégoire KORGANOW, David BALICKI, Léa CRESPI, Diana LUI, Ludovic CARÈME, Grégoire ALEXANDRE, Jean-christophe BÉCHET, Gilles LEIMDORFER , Olivier CULMANN, Éric BOUVET, Jean-luc MABY and Martine RAVACHE.
More information from www.rencontres-arles.com
Contact: Fabrice Courthial stage@rencontres-arles.com Tel: +33 (0) 4 90 96 76 06

Arles - Photofolio Review

Opening week for Les Rencontres d'Arles Photographie is only a month away now running July 3rd to 13th. F2 Freelance editor, David Land, and publisher, Simon James, will be in attendance 6-9 July and looking forward to meeting up with friends old and new.

There is still time to submit your work to the keen eyes of international photography experts during the opening days of the festival from July 4th to 13th. 100 publishers, exhibition curators, museum directors, chief editors, agency directors, gallerists, collectors, critics, art directors and famous photographers are gathered to offer critical appraisal and useful advice regarding your practice and contacts that may provide outlets for your work. In the case of F2 Freelance we have participated in Photofolio Review for the past three years and every year to date have found a photographer whose work and practice has been featured in the magazine. Before signing up it's a good idea to check out the reviewers' biographies on-line to find experts who suit practice. As a new incentive this year, at the end of the review days, one of the participants' portfolio will be chosen by the reviewers, the Fnac and the Rencontres d'Arles, to be exhibited in the 2011 edition of the festival.

For further information contact Eléna and Rosie photofolio@rencontres-arles.com +33 (0)4 90 96 76 06 www.rencontres-arles.com

Portfolio construction and editing

2010-05-14T02:10:00.003-07:00

Portfolio construction and editing is one of the all time arguing points of the freelance industry. This of course is hardly surprising when you consider exactly how important the folio is in keeping you in work. Looking again towards the June/July issue of F2 Freelance, for her feature Making the Final Cut, Miranda Gavin has been talking to London based movers and shakers within the industry about exactly what it is that makes a folio stand out from the crowd. June/July issue is on sale from 1 June

The June/July issue of F2 Freelance goes on sale 1 June

F2 Freelance Photographer - news stand availability

2010-05-14T01:56:00.000-07:00

Several visitors to the stand at Manchester Photovision mentioned they were having trouble finding F2 Freelance Photographer in the shops since the demise of Borders book shops. We are indeed addressing this problem and getting the magazine out to increasing numbers of WH Smith outlets. For Manchester based freelances the magazine can now be found at the following four branches of WH Smith: Arndale Centre Manchester M4 3AD, West One Retail Park M30 0DX, Trafford Centre M17 8BA and Arndale Centre Stretford M32 9BD. For the present F2 Freelance is available in 127, of the 500 plus, WH Smith newsagents and we hope to be in quite a few more from October. At present you may find F2 Freelance on special promotional shelves by the tills rather than the photography section but please e-mail or call me if you are having problems and I will be able to tell you the nearest stockist to where you live.

2010-05-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to the June/July issue of F2 Freelance, David has just done a major interview with Julia Fullerton Batten for the F2 Profile feature.

One of comparatively few UK photographers to successfully combine careers as a top advertising and fine art photographer, she's just back from Barcelona, where she's been shooting a Ford Focus campaign, which she says was the first time that she's been asked to use CGI in a shoot. Fullerton Batten echoes the increasing feeling at the top of the industry that moving imagery is the future, having first seen moving billboards on the underground in China seven years ago, and also makes interesting comment about the fact that, as her advertising work has taken a hit during the recession, sales of her fine art prints have actually increased.

The June/July issue of F2 Freelance goes on sale 1 June

Guardian/RPS 2000 GB Pound Photo-Essay Bursary

2010-03-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

The 2010 Joan Wakelin Bursary has been announced, offering photographers £2,000 and the chance to have their work published in the Guardian. The bursary, administered by the Guardian and the Royal Photographic Society, is awarded to the photographer who presents the best proposal for a photographic essay on an overseas social documentary issue. Submission is open to all, with no restriction on age or qualification.

Entrants should submit a series of six images as examples of their work, along with a written proposal (maximum 500 words) describing their intended project, and a completed entry form, which can be downloaded from

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Me dia/documents/2006/05/17/JoanWbursaryfor m.pdf

Completed entries should arrive by first post on August 1 2010 at: Guardian Picture Desk, Kings Place, York Way, London, N1 9GU.

The shortlist will be selected by a jury nominated by the Guardian and the RPS. The winner will be announced at the 2010 RPS awards ceremony. The winning photo-essay will be published in the Guardian and the RPS Journal in 2010. Copyright will remain with the photographer, although licence will be agreed for the photo-essay to appear in the Guardian, the RPS Journal and any promotions associated with the bursary.

More information on the Joan Wakelin Bursary and past winners from www.rps.org/bursaries/home

Medium Format Digital - do we need/want it?

2010-03-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

Manchester based photographer Andrew Farrington ( www.andrewfphotography.com/ ) has just opened a new discussion on the Facebook site brought on by Pentax announcement of its imminent move into the Medium Format Digital/ Digital Back arena.

It would be interesting to know the thoughts of people on the whole issue of 'format' size:
Who uses MFDB's? Do you intend to buy into one of the systems at any time in the near future?
Or are they white elephants, given Nikon and Canon's forays into 'mega' megeapixel sensors? For that matter what is presently going on in the food still life studios that for so long shunned anything other than 10x8 large format despite the fact that the imagery often only appeared A4 size in magazines? Has the MFDB taken over from the the 10x8 or have still life shooters switched the whole way down to Canon and Nikon DSLR as the file quality continues to increase?

Photographers' Web sites - the opening page

2010-02-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

In the April issue of F2 Freelance Miranda Gavin will be contributing a feature on building the perfect web site for the working freelance.

Here at F2 Freelance we look at loads of photographers web sites every week and one of the things that strikes me is the sheer variety of solutions photographers arrive at when building their sites. This seems a particularly good discussion for the blog and on a personal note I'm very curious to hear what people think about web site layout. There are of course quite a few "givens" that few people would argue about. It has for example to be easy to read, easy and fast to alter and add work and sections to, and at some point make it easy to contact you either by phone or e-mail, while not giving away such details as an address in order to prevent a potential burglary. In the editorial and advertising arenas it's also pretty much now felt that the portfolio section should exactly match the analogue portfolio you may take along for a visit to potential clients - but this last isn't written in stone.

The opening page however seems to be the an area of significant dissagreement at very many levels of freelancing when in some ways it may well be the most important page on the site. It would be great to hear some opinions about laying out the perfect web site for the working professional, perhaps referring to different fields of freelance photography. Any thoughts?

So how do you start a blog?

2010-02-23T11:13:00.000-08:00

Perhaps we should start out by telling you a bit about who we are and what we do, so here goes. F2 Freelance Photographer is published by EC1 Publishing Ltd. We're a London UK based company and currently publish two photography magazines: The Royal Photographic Society Journal, under contract on behalf of the RPS, and our own title F2 Freelance Photographer.

The two directors of EC1, which for the curious was named after our London postal code, are David Land, david@ec1publishing.com who edits our magazines, and Simon James, simon@ec1publishing.com our publisher. Sue Harper, sue@ec1publishing.com is our deputy editor and if you're interested in advertising in our titles you should speak to Sulann Staniford-Grainger, sulann@ec1publishing.com. Both David and Simon are photography graduates, David from Westminster and Simon from Derby, and both have worked as London based freelance photographers.

We took on F2 Freelance, www.f2freelancephotographer.com in October 2006, with the intention of producing a magazine that concentrates solely and down the line on the business side of being a working self-employed photographer. So you won't find any features on how to take photographs in F2 Freelance, or for that matter anything on aesthetics. Essentially nobody in F2 Freelance is going to waste your time telling you it works better with a bit of red in it!

F2 Freelance Photographer is built around three major profiles and includes a big section called The Business. The F2 Profile flagship feature always interviews a leading freelance, concentrating upon how he or she got to where they are today, the successes and pitfalls of the journey and current perspectives on the business today. Starting Out is for students and those recently out of college. We're very conscious of the amount of debt people build up getting their degree and the manner in which the world changes the day you leave. Starting Out never features anybody who is more than two years out of college and concentrates on the ways in which people take their first steps into the industry. Our other major profile is Turning Pro which concentrates on people moving into the industry at a mid career point as many people seem to do.

F2 Freelance covers all aspects of the freelance industry, including editorial, fashion, and advertising as well as the growing and potentially lucrative wedding and social arena. Licence to Sell is our regular feature on picture libraries; we cover a different library each issue, discussing who they are and what sort of imagery they are looking for.

Our major regular feature The Picture Editors each issue features a picture editor looking for freelance contributions and commissioning work. Recent picture editors feature include some of the more difficult to get to see, such as Monica Allende at the Sunday Times Magazine, Roger Tooth of The Guardian, and Marian Patterson of New Musical Express. As well as top end consumer magazines we also cover some of the less well known trade titles on which some of the biggest names in the industry cut their teeth such as Nursing Times and Print Week. Other features have recently included our Moving To London Graduate Guide, major features on web sites, Pitching for Editorial Work and a look at who buys what sort of imagery.

Subscriptions to F2 Freelance Photographer magazine are available direct from our web site www.f2freelancephotographer.com We also have a back issues page on the site where you will find listings of many of the features covered and be able to buy those issues via PayPal. If for example you have an idea for a published book you may want to take a look at the feature on getting a book published in the Dec/Jan 2009 issue.

So that's a bit about us, who we are and what we do. The blog of course is for you. Whether you're a photographer working towards making the big jump into professional photography, a student or assistant, a new graduate starting out, or a time served freelance from one of the many and diverse arenas within the industry we'd like to hear from you: about your own approaches to the business, your feelings about new trends and directions within the industry, any comments you have on the magazine, features within it or features you'd like to see in the future, so over to you!

Simon