everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ed and Alex talk about photography. This time we have everybody together. So Ed, welcome back to the channel. It's lovely to see you as always. How you doing, man? I am good. Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me virtually into this space to talk to people and you virtually. Thank you for coming. Thank you for me coming to my own podcast. Yes, it's fantastic to see. I'm sorry, obviously, we couldn't get together last week. But we've got some fantastic things to talk about, about prints. Because we've both been in, I think, in the zone of making, maybe not making prints, but thinking about how we put prints together. Because there was a little bit of a process to that, isn't there, Ed? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So it was really great to see you kind of unboxing, if that's the right word, untubing your prints earlier in the week in the kitchen. I'm going to go with that. I'm tubing. I'm tubing the YouTube. I was totally tubular, dude. But seeing you pull those prints out on just the quality and the size, it is a hit. Because in the old days, like my first assignment was for a hair salon. And I remember they wanted prints, which I printed in a dark room 23 years ago. So my workflow all those years ago was like make a print and give it to the client, right? And that hasn't happened for decades now. So we get so used to looking at these images online that we forget, like, you know what, man, our cameras, even our camera phones are really high resolution. Now you can make some pretty shockingly big prints that are really good quality from most cameras you can get.  Do you know what I mean? It is. It really is mind blowing. You're just in a different way. I was very surprised when I had those prints made.  So having those big prints look really cool. But before we jump into all the prints and talking about that, which is awesome. My phone pinged up on Friday, because it must be Friday evening or Friday morning or something, from one of the guys who helped me out with Facebook group. And he said that, unfortunately, obviously, as probably most people know, Elliot Irwin had passed away. And it's kind of weird, in a way, when I think about things like this. I kind of forget that they're still in the same, they exist in the same world as us. You know, some of these greats of photography. And then you sort of, somebody tells you, but they don't anymore. And you kind of feel like a little, I don't know, just like a ping, but you know, his photography, I'm going to bring some up on screen here, because it is, I think we need to look at some of this. You know, I don't know. Ed, I was first introduced to Elliot's photography through the dogs.  But on the screen, that's a super small doggy. If you've got a pair of binoculars, everybody can get them out. But you know, those are kind of the dog. And that was that fun play for us. What was your first introduction? Again, it was a humour, right?  But like, as well as his humour, there's just such rich humanity. Like that first shot you flashed up of the couple in the mirror, parked up. And you think in comparison of, say, there's a photograph of Martin Parr, where there's sort of middle-aged couples sat ignoring each other, reading a paper in the car overlooking some peak district landscape, right? There's that kind of shot in the car. And then you think about this shot in the car. And it's cinematic. It's life. It's beautiful. Like, it's eternal. And that's the key thing as well. Like, those people in their photo, they're long gone as well. And now Elliot's gone too. But the photograph remains. And that for me has always been something magical about photography. And I just feel like he led such a rich photographic life that we've got this. You can literally spend your time now. You can see how he saw the world. Simple as that. And yeah, for me, humour is the humour and just, yeah, the love for life. And I think that's such a lovely thing, such a gift. Yeah. And the fact that he's always got that keen eye for, you know, for those moments that are just kind of silly and they make a smile. And I think that's kind of, you know, that's a thing that often photographers, and that's a very broad sense, kind of sometimes forget. But, you know, the photography can be a lot of fun. But talking of fun, you know, there was some people who mentioned, you know, when I was, you know, unbulks and untubing those prints. They said that I started off as just a middle-aged man and I ended up as like a very excited child. But you've got some prints of your own that you've been sort of thinking about what it is that you want to do with them and things of that nature. So before I bring them up on screen, do you want to give people just a bit of a background about what it is or where these prints are coming from? So, you know, background 20 years plus, as a documentary photographer, make him projects and freelancing. And the thing is, I've always had ideas. And the problem with always having ideas is you tend to have a lot of them. And I had an idea 12 years ago to do a landscape photography series as some kind of wacky Arthurian quest. So visiting places linked to King Arthur and all that kind of jazz. And I never really did it. And finally last year, I did do it. I popped to literally three days to the south of France, this abandoned French village and I shot there. And then, yeah, then very recently about a month ago, off I went on the road to Glastonbury and Tintagel in Cornwall. I was shooting my Mamiar RZ67, which is a medium format film camera. And I know my days as a documentary photographer of selling and pitching my stories is kind of over. Like magazines generally aren't going to pay in the same way they used to pay. Say the Guardian Weekend magazine used to pay for stories. But what I do know is is that landscape photos do sell. I've got photographs of like refugee children. I've got photographs of like bleeding far right pro people. Like they are not going to end up on someone's wall. A collector might buy them. But what I'm looking for is kind of cool photographs that are part of my story, which will probably become a book anyway, but prints that then people can live with. So I've been off. I went on the road. It was like a whirlwind 48 hour trip. My brother-in-law tagged along and filmed a little bit on his camera phone, which I put out as a video on Friday, which is a bit of an adventure. But yeah, long story short now, I've got an edit. And what I've been by an edit is it's not like it's a common misconception. When we see an edit in photography, we mean what's called making selects. Some people refer to post production as editing. That's post production. So what I've done with Alex is I've thrown Alex like maybe three or four photos of exactly the same shot. But I've made minor changes when I was composing or the moment slightly changed.  You don't want to just throw hundreds of photos out. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's jump on because obviously we've been talking about without showing anything. So let's share a window here of a screen. There we go. Right. So I brought Photoshop into the mix today. Just there we do that. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. Let me just get rid of that. We want to see the pictures.  And I'm hoping now it has... You need to zoom. Some of them are quite cropped in now. You need to probably zoom out. Yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to... The thing is also these are literally raw scans straight from the people I dev the film with. So they're only on a Fujitsu scanner. I think they're only like 3,000 pixels wide. When I come to print properly, I probably will re-scan them. Okay. So I think... Yeah. Yeah. So you're going to re-scan them. Obviously what we've got here, let me just zoom all of these out. Yeah. Out would be a good out damn spot. There we go. All right. So those are all a bit, I think... I think Photoshop might not be the best way to do this. However, let's see what we can zoom in that one. Go one more. Because I'm trying to think about looking at them side by side. This will give some people some an idea just to see we can sort of see the changes. Because the first thing that jumps out with me is here is they're not radically big changes. No. But the thing is a choice has to be made. And now I've got these three choices. It's which one? Now the shot on the left, you can see I've framed it a bit more to the right and there's the edge of a wage crashing and a woman kind of on the edge of the cave. I further in. And then the shot in the middle, I kind of moved it a bit more to the left. And then on the shot on the right, it's almost the same. But if you look in the bottom left, there's a little dude just stood there right on the edge. And I'm not sure how distracting he is. So just one of those little things. Yeah. Bearing in mind that, you know, these are six by seven medium format negatives. I can print quite large from the my previously for my infrared book where the bigger size was 40 by 30 inches. And that was on color infrared film, which you know, I know this will look this will look even better than that because of the nature of the film I was shooting on, which was the portrait. So yeah, tricky ones. So you know, so let's look at this from a different space because obviously, you know, what is that you were going for? And one of the great problems that I've sort of discussed this sort of fairly recently about, you know, but accompanying text with images. And there's this idea that often people will try and explain what's in the photograph, you know, what it's what's what's drawing them to them. So like, oh, well, I photograph this because I love the lady with the orange in the in the cave, now the pink, as it turns out. And and that's kind of not what we're sort of going for.  So with your if we're looking at this from a, let's say a perspective where nobody knows anything about this, what would you sort of say to somebody about these photographs if they were not yours? Well, um, is there just quickly, is it possible just to maybe come out of Photoshop and just open them one at a time and flick through? Just even on my screen, they're postage stamp size. The other photos, the other options are much more different. These are very, very similar. Yeah, I mean, for me, I knew this when I was driving down there was the, you know, I had a very tight window to photograph. I was driving through pouring rain. I was just very happy to get there. And what was really cool is the rain had stopped. There was the most amazing sea mist and fog. And like I looked up, obviously I did some research about Tintagel on the way before I went down there and lots of the photos you see, of course, they're wonderful. It's a tourist attraction shot by millions of people, but it's always sunsets and chocolate boxy kind of very cliche. And my whole thing was about an Arthurian quest and I wanted it to be more mysterious. So I guess for me, it's this idea of that the rock face is so textured and jagged and crazy. You can see the sort of like almost, you can see the water on the kind of mossy grass on the top, that sort of white sheen to it. You can see it's been raining. The woman in kind of pink as a color, it kind of draws your eyes as she's there. And that's Merlin's Cave. So even if you didn't know that was Merlin's Cave, it's still a very mysterious cave and the woman stood there. I think, yeah, thinking about it. So obviously, yeah, look at the difference between the guy appearing at the bottom and taking him out. And obviously you could do that in Photoshop, but I don't generally do that man with my own work. I might do it on assignment if I'm shooting like something based on portraiture. But for this, I'd like to use exactly how it was on the film. I mean, this one's kind of nice because there's other people appearing, but I'm not sure how distracting that is. And then the next one along the one with the water, I think maybe the edge of the wave is the one. Yeah, I feel that one's this one, which if yeah, this is the first because I'm going to gather that I'm going to see him given that there go vertical ABC. This is the first one that you shot. Yeah. Well, you can see it actually might not be it just why I randomly tagged because I changed the title. You can see the people walking along and they're heading towards the thing. Now, I just noticed see the man pointing in the bottom left if you can see he's actually pointing at a carving of Merlin's face on the rock. So again, for me, it's got that little moment. Then you've got the thing is you're now as as because you're you know this place. And so you're so you're you're you've I think what you've done there is an interesting leap that you kind of go, do you know, I know something that nobody else really it's not immediately obvious. No, but really bizarre. Yeah, really bizarre. This is the best shot because of the edge of the water and the edge of the wave was just a sort of weird nexus where this just happens to be the best composition. And again, there's a little flag, there's a little extra bonus thing, which for me is almost like an Easter egg, which just makes me think this is the shot. It's imbued of a little bit more meaning, maybe for me, maybe not forever people, but that's the weird thing. I mean, yeah, you can edit and you can select on lots of various factors, the composition and lighting, whatever, but sometimes certain photos just speak to me. And I think this is one of those. But yeah, I flashed up the next one. Let's have a look at the next one. So what are the next choices we got? Because I only saw those as verticals, the rest are horizontals. Yeah, so you've got wide A, B, we've got a wide A and B. That's it. So this is really a very small change in composition, isn't it? It's the same cave, but you've walked around. And I have to say, you know, I have been to Tintagel and it was awesome. I didn't actually take, I took a couple of pictures there, but it was many, many years ago, much similar sort of weather. If you get a chance to go to, is it Devon or Cornwall? Cornwall, yeah, yeah. If you go, it's awesome, but there's a lot of stairs. There are a lot of stairs, but it's fantastic. So this is, you know, these two images haven't really changed a whole heap. But there is a difference in composition, and it's just, you can get out measures and rulers and work out all these kinds of wonderful things of golden sections and Nora thirds, but for me, it's so instinctual. And like, if you just really look at it, one of them will feel better. And the question is which one feels better, this one or that one? So this one here, you've got a little bit more sort of cloud at the top. This one, you kind of, you've, you've dropped down and that, and that kind of ethereality that, that, that wispy cafe seems to now, it's a bit, for me, it's a bit more gone. Yeah. And I think also you can see there's people at the bottom. Is a person right breaking the frame at the bottom there? Yeah. I think there's, so if you come out of the edge, because I'm always keen on watching my edges and by the edge, I mean the edge of the frame, as well as the edge of the elements in the composition. Let me see if we can get this. Let's see if I can get this to be smaller. No, it's the unfortunate, I don't think it's okay. Yeah. And just flip. Yeah. They're right down there. There's this little, yeah, that one's, that's not, that's, believe it or not, that's bugging me, which sounds absolutely bonkers, but it's just one of those things when I look at a print. So go to the other one now. Yeah. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. Okay. So these, you know, there's an interesting from a photographer's perspective about the sort of things that, that you are looking at and, and the decisions that you're kind of making in terms of picking a print. And, and I think, you know, people who are watching and that you can see how easy it is to get mired down in, in trying to sort things through, you know, we just, we've just been looking here about two photographs, but Ed, you know, you've got obviously quite a few here in this, in this arrangement. But I only shot your roles of film, you know, imagine if someone went there shooting digital and took 2000 photos on the day, you know, so it's absolutely these things. See, like, like this, this particular image, right? I, okay, now I, I know where this is. Okay. Obviously, because we've been talking about it. However, if I don't know where this is, there's something about this particular photograph, I can see, you know, the, the crenellations down the bottom, some sort of fortification, what have you in the mist coming through the, the, the, you know, through the bay. And, and that just, this makes it feel a lot more atmospheric that there's something actually about this that, that draws me in. You know, it's so tragic. If you look at the title, it says damagedfilm.jpg. One of the, one of the role of the film was damaged. It must have been when I shot in America earlier this year, it must have been X-rayed or something went wrong. And yeah, man, if you zoom in, like, you might not be able to see it on this, but you'll see the word Kodak coming through. And there's weird mottling all over it. Now, I can see some mottling down the side. Yeah. It's basically, I, I don't know if I can rescue that shot, man. I know I love that shot. Oh, it's look at the line. You can see, like, a white light line going down it. Oh, Alex, come on. Come on. Just a chat. What are people saying? Okay, we'll take a quick poll in the thing. What do you guys reckon?  So on one of the shots, I didn't say, and you can see, like, the number seven from where it was the number of frames on the roll. Okay, what, what do you guys reckon? Let us know in the chat. Anyway, we'll carry on. This sort of like this, this, this, because I feel it's not a big, I don't think it's a deal-breaker, right? And I kind of look at it and go, do you know, I like the image. And if there's a roll of film where all, if this is uniform, so it looks like only one roll, man, all the shots in that one roll were like, but then you just, that's the roll. That's why it's like, it's like, like, who is the dada guy with the towards it? You know, and he went, it's not finished, it's not finished, not finished, and then he transported it somewhere and it broke and transport and he's like, it's finished. So again, we've, this one you pulled back slightly from, from the, from, from the previous vantage point, did, this feels a little bit more a landscape photographer. Yeah. You know, it's, and it's weird because, you know, as if I, if you were to present these set of prints to me or to somebody else, how would you present them? Is it a, is it a documentary or is it, is it a set of landscape photographs or is it simply a reaction to where you are? Yeah. My plan all along was to make a book basically. And the book is basically pinpointing certain places almost like on an odyssey, because that's what I've called, I've called it a quest. I'm on like a photo quest. And so part of it is very much the places that I've kind of seen and parts which are kind of interesting and like, you know, it sounds bonkers, but when I photographed at Glastonbury at Glastonbury tour, it's not a photo I share, but it's in, it's in the video that I posted on Friday. And basically, as I take the photo I say to the camera, like to me, this feels like mythological. And I can't tell you why it just feels that way to me. And hopefully when I develop the film and look at it, it will have that mythological feel. This is nice for the landscape, but you see as the morning went on, the mist lifted. So that is barely any mist there. And I don't know that some of the ones I've sent, they're so misty.  It's like, you know, because the reason that I asked about, you know, what sort of format you're going to present you, because I think that's an important thing to discuss is that, you know, when people at home thinking about going through their prints and or their images and thinking about what they want to print and how they're going to print, this idea of how they're going to fit together works. I think that that's an massively important consideration to make. Because if you're thinking about, I want to share just a single image that would be a landscape photograph, then you look at these with a different set of filters. Oh yeah, for sure. No, for me, I mean, yeah, there's the edit for the book. But also, you know, I will show these as prints for sale, but I wouldn't show all I'm showing you here is like everything. I probably would only pick one. So all the photos I've sent you, at least of the angle of the bay, I would just pick one. And it would be decide, do I go nearer? Do I go wider? You know, it's just, yeah, it's one of those things you have to consider that. Yeah, again, if you just put it all out there, it's not so good. I think that photography survived as an art form under this horrible thing, the illusion of exclusivity, like photography is an infinitely reproducible medium. So the fact that we do like additions, and we say there's only 12 in this size, I mean, that's that's wild. But that's the way it's been done and the way people continue to do it. So I think, you know, if you to show all this work and say there's like 12 of each one, then immediately there's just so many, it sort of removes that sense of scarcity. So yeah, it's a tricky one. Man, I just wanted to share them with you. Which ones can you live with? Which ones could you live with? Something like this, for example. Yeah. So Merlin's Cave. No. Okay. And not because it's not because it's X, Y and Z things, but it just it just it doesn't it's not the sort of thing I would put in the wall. No, right? Because it doesn't communicate anything to me at all. In part of a story is part of like a thing about, you know, Tintangelo, then sure, but in a book. Yeah, right. But I think what we're talking about here is single images that go on the wall, this selection of the bay with the image over the top. I think if Ed Thompson, let's substitute Martin Parr or some other name, then but then you're buying a name. Yeah, you know, you're buying a Martin Parr or whoever, right? But so that's kind of I wouldn't necessarily but then you'd look at it, you go, oh, you know, oh, Ed Thompson, he's amazing. Look at the way he does all the things. But then you come back to these. So I'm looking through here. So like this photograph, I'm quite drawn to this. It appeals to my sense of introspection. It appeals to Aquinas. I love, apart from the two figures, which I've just noticed, very bravely having a dip in the water. But I give scale. That does give scale, though, as well, if it wasn't for them. I mean, that's the thing as well is that, yeah, you have to think about photography as well as is that, you know, some photos, which are very figurative, if you have them on your wall for any length of time, you will get bored with them. It sounds wild. And I think I think about that with the photos that I put on my wall, obviously not my work, but other people's work.  Or does it have like a quietness to it where I can keep coming back to it? And I think an image like this, yeah, it does. It's, it's it's not telling me so much. Yeah, this appeals to my sensibilities. It appeals to my visual ideas on the wall. It's, it's also quite different from my own work. I think that that's an important consideration is that my photographs don't look anything like this. And so if I took a photograph like this, I probably wouldn't put it up in the wall because it's not something I would have done. But from you, it's an odd kind of way of thinking about it. Like I could just change how it feels because it comes from you rather than from me. But I definitely would have that on the wall. This one, I think not so much. Probably because those figures now either about to get in the water or coming out because I'm assuming it's the same people. They feel like they're too obvious now. When they were swimming, it's something that you, I saw later on went up. Oh, that's pretty cool. You know, you've mentioned the word Easter eggs a few times and stuff like that. So that kind of, they don't feel like they're Easter eggs anymore. And also for some random reason, I'm hating the, the, the soil protecting letting. Yeah, me too, man. Me too. I mean, this is a bit of a wild card I threw in and there's so many shots where there was that kind of mesh and yeah, they didn't make the cut. But I just, I just dropped this thing because it was literally like, I think it was the first moment I got there, the rain was starting to pull off. And I literally just got shooting just to get rolling. And that's that weird thing for me. It's like, sometimes your first shot, especially if I say portrait, you can be the best and you shoot a lot. And then at the end, you get good work again. But I think it's just, it's psychological. Like when you feel like you're getting a rhythm when stuff's working out, you sort of take a good shot and then two or three good ones follow. But you know, talking about that, that instinctual thing, you know, listening to that instinct and not sort of changing things too much around. Again, I was quite like this, like this and the one that I liked with the figures swimming, you know, those kind of working, if there was something to visually balance the three of them, as like a triptych on the wall, that would, that would work out quite nicely. But it is, you know, that idea about, you know, how do you choose these things? And I hope I hope people are getting a bit even getting a bit of an insight into. But yeah, but also, you know, I'm being really open, man. Like this is like, I'm just showing you pretty much most of what I've got running around. But yeah, that's the thing is also then trying to make that call. And like, you could be the greatest photographer in the world. But if you don't know which is the great shot to share, then that's it. Another key thing to talk about with these prints, man, is to think about size. Like my big mistake like 15 years ago was printing a lot of my work, like very large. And it looks cool in an art fair, right, to have that big 40 by 30 inch print. But like, that's a massive print for someone's house, you know, and photography has always been a harder sell compared to say painting or other kind of arts like sculpture. So in my head, because of the nature of this work being like an Arthurian quest, my plan was actually not to print a major like that big, you know, having kind of nice floating frame, maybe a black frame around them a bit more mysterious, and maybe even go smaller on size for some of them. But I think that's something that becomes something else then, rather than a big statement piece, it's more like a quizzical oddity. Someone walked down their corridor and there'd be a very small print of like Merlin's cave. And be like, what's that? It's something. I think you like, like, this, this, you're talking about sort of sizes. This print here. And another one that I quite like as well, that one. I think that either need to be actually quite small or massive. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird to say there isn't like a middle guy. I think if this was what is, you know, let's say this was a 20 inch along the biggest side. It, that's kind of it. It's in a weird place then. I was just thinking about this. It's on the water. It's not called it. It's like a bit standoffish. Because you want like 20 inch, you'd be maybe like six feet away. Behind my Pimmel machine boxed up, I've got like four 16 by 20 inch prints from my infrared book that are going to be exhibited like next March in an art fair.  But 20 inches actually, man, this, this ratio, which ends up 20, 20 inches by 16 with then the frame around it. They're pretty big. Like they look quite sizeable. They do get big, but I'm sort of thinking I'm drawing back on from my, from, from my print sales background in the studio. That's, you know, so 20, if I'm, here's my, here's my pricing guide in case. And my, so these are all longer size. So the smaller sizes that I started with were 16 inch. And then it's a 20, then it's a 24, then it's a 30, then it's a 40. The 16 and the 40 are kind of there as martyrs. Yeah. Yeah. So like this, this is a, this is setting the expectation of a price. And this is like the bottom end. So I'm kind of looking in a, I was usually selling about 24 inches. Now for people, that's kind of okay, because you know, for people sizes, you don't, unless you have a big room, family portrait feels like your people are looming over you and checking out. And that's why I said about like a 16 inch or as a 20 inch, you want to be kind of like about six feet ish away. Maybe that might be a bit far. Maybe sort of three or four feet. They say that the viewing distance is the diagonal. So if you look at the diagonal size of the print, then the optimum viewing distance is that as a diagonal. So if it was like it was like that, then your optimum viewing distance is like that. Yeah. So I always took it as like, it was like the diagonal and then two of those, just because it meant. Yeah, that's how big the print is. Yeah. I can't focus that near my like, so it's not that good anymore. It's about the length of my forearm. Right. And I'm looking at it with my arm outstretched. And it's okay there. But I think, you know, it's one of these things.  You know, that people may not have, you know, thought about that what size do you print these things? Yeah. Well, I've sold, when I did the infrared series from the Unseen and Atlas of Infrared Plates, I had two sides, which was 16 by 20 and 40 by 30. And the right print will sell out. I had this great shot of the house on the hill, which is this house on an infrared hill in the haunted village in Pluckley and Kent. And I only had five in that edition, and they all went. And I was kicking myself because the thing of additioning, right, Alex, is that let's say you make this great print and you've got like maybe four prints for sale. And you say, oh yeah, they're all editions of five with maybe two artist proofs. And an artist proof is one that you keep back, whatever. The minute you sell one as that edition, you can't change the addition size. You're locked in. So unfortunately, like, well, 12 years ago, and I was, no, yeah, wow, no, 13 years ago, and I was selling the infrared prints. The minute someone bought that house on the hill at that size, I couldn't sell it anymore. And I've lost count over the years, the amount of people who wanted that large 40 by 30 inch. And the last price I was selling them out, I think it was like 2800 pounds. So, you know, obviously that was a kicker. And there's other photos which from the Infrared series that haven't sold. And this is an important thing about the poster, right? So important, guys. Listen to this. This is sage advice right now. I've sold my small prints from my kind of Texas book and my Kent book. I had a little pop-up show where I live in a small little pop-up gallery. And I sold them for 50 pounds, right? They were like open edition, or maybe in the back of the edition of 100. And like I sold, okay, I think in two weeks I sold like made 700 quid, right? There was a guy who photographed locally and did the most chocolate block, like chocolate box, sunny, sunny sunset photos of the beach, whatever. He smashed it. He sold like three times what I sold in the same amount of time. But here's the problem. You can do that locally, but you're going to run out of people locally wanting to buy those photos, right? And it's a bit like what you said about the photos from Tintage or Alex is like to someone who's been there wherever they feel like a connection. My role or goal as a photographer is to try and even move away from that. So, you know, there's some great photos in my book, In a Guard of England, I shot in Ramsgate. But even people from Ramsgate would look at and not recognize. And they're not going to like those photos on that level. But the point is, is that people in Japan will like them. People in like New York will like them. So that's that whole thing trying to work out, not just like your subject matter, but how you're going to photograph it, but also the size. And that's the thing is, is that someone might, you might get a few people who want to buy your prints for 50 quid. I know a friend who does lots of illustrations and he sells like 200, 300 a pop, but 50 and smashes it. My own experience in photography is like, go higher. Like it sounds wild, but like make your prints more, more money. You will make more money selling fewer prints for more money, at least at my level, maybe the level we're talking about here, than trying to flood it.  And like the thing is, is that I think at that thing, people are going to buy the prints purely because they like them and maybe they'll be willing to pay more. So it's one of those sort of, it's a game to play, but you've got your pricing sheet there, Alex. Tell us, tell us about your price. All right. Okay. So Ed, thank you for coming to the studio. So what happens now is that I'll go and I'll process the images put together presentation. And we'll come back and look at them on the big screen. I'll take them all. My girls are beautiful, Alex. Is it okay if I just spend a moment just talking through some of the options? Oh, please. Yeah. So you see, but this is all part of, it's part of the game. Yeah. And so I would give my classes on me. Yeah, read me your viewing guide to mute portraits. Okay. And as a, basically what I would do is just talk people around them. So the, the, the, the, the largest piece that I had, which was a 50 inch, the product's called a luminizer. So it's a print on, on a float piece of floating aluminum. It was really cool. They look awesome. So that's three and a half thousand.   You just, you came in and you saw it. And then it goes down, it goes down. So the realistically, I would be looking to sell maybe a 40 inch, most likely a 30 inch, a most likely sort of 30 to 24s. We're kind of relatively speaking the most. So a 30 20, so 30 inch rose banks, 1500, the 24 is 900. And then there's a 20 to 800. So there's not a huge difference in price of these things. Then there's a thing called the santa range. So there's and all of these were unglazed, by the way. So all of my prints were unglazed, unglazed and so much as they went behind glass. Mostly from a financial point of view, as soon as you start putting glass on frames to sell, they become horrendously expensive. Also for my money, it just looks really cool. You might have archival glass, like in a museum grade, but I do lots of tray frames. So I just have it on dive on the aluminium and then a tray at like the border of a frame around it. And it looks freaking great. And there's a nice edge where it floats. The glass and stuff is just, it was a month. So that was kind of my thing. It's like, you'll notice none of these have glass on them. Do you know why? It's because you can then enjoy the print from wherever you want to put it. It's not going to get reflections. So it was a kind of cool thing. So, but yeah, these are like, these are not cheap things. Right. And this is kind of what you, I think you were talking about in terms of like pricing and stuff. Photographers, I think fall into this trap and they go, the prints, this piece of paper cost me a pound. 10 pounds. Yeah. So I'm going to charge 40 pounds. So I make 30 quick. Right. Because at that stage, it's kind of cool for somebody to buy your print. Right. The first time you saw your name in print, or the first time somebody gave you money from your photographs, what sort of buzz was it? That was amazing. It felt like a tech. I mean, my weirdest one was when a photo agency in Italy took my work to be distributed and I see, I didn't really do it now, but there was a watermark on it and it just gave me a little oh, look, there's a watermark on my photo. That's funny. I remember my first properly credited. In fact, my first appearance in print was in a sewing magazine called Burda. Yeah. It was like a little thing like this of somebody outside their sewing factory. And I wasn't even credited because it was actually, I saved a day for another photographer from vocational school who'd mucked up the shoot. Right. So we went back, flying back to Jobe, got a Friday afternoon of his beat or we just legging it down the highway to get in for the bed day. And I shot the photograph and then it got in, but he got credited for it. But yeah, that was such a thrill. But you fall into this trap of thinking like, just having somebody buy my work feels awesome. So I'm prepared to kind of just encourage people by setting a low price. Also on the way up, man, that there's this whole philosophy I've always had, which work begets work.  You've got to do it. You've got to put felt there. And when your prints frame beautifully in someone's toilet, as people have told me, and someone that goes to their loo and see my utopia sign from a Texas book in their toilet and be like, Hey, it's an interesting party. God in your room. Yeah, these kind of things. So yeah, I think you're a piece of advice I was given when I first started getting in the studio was if you can afford your own work, then you're probably not charging enough. And it was kind of like, okay, well, that didn't make sense at the time. But you can have a range. You can have a range. Look at that. And the thing is, you know, I'm talking about like, like, okay, these are, this is ala car pricing, right? So also their photos are people want now because they're their family, right? Yeah, but you're not going to sell you 10 photos of your family. You're only allowed 10. There's only an edition of 10 of your family. And so what I would do, yeah, I like to put two collections together, right? Because I could say, do you know, okay, so if you have this, so you get one of those and a couple of those and this and that. And so that kind of ticks a lot of boxes for people with selling individual images. And I'm going to bring some mine up because I've also been going through this process. So it's not fair for me just to show Ed's stuff. And you know, so I'm kind of now thinking, okay, so same sort of process. I'm going like, you know, what should I charge for, you know, for my work? And I've taken that idea that for me, it's not so much nowadays about the thrill of selling the work. It's always a buzz. Don't get me wrong. It is always awesome when somebody, especially when somebody you don't know wants to buy a piece of work. But I also don't, I understand also as I need to value it at a level that feels realistic, you know. And so with these, I try to keep it fairly simple. Now, earlier we're talking about, you know, how do you make choices about what it is you're going to print? And I was tempted, as I think a lot of photographers are, to just show a whole bunch of stuff, right? Because they're not in a book, they're not about a certain thing or what have you. And I thought if I just show loads of things that somebody will buy, and then the sense will part of me goes, no, no, you know, this is is false because you've, that's what you used to do at the studio. That's what you used to do. Otherwise, show loads, it's when you start condensing it down and thinking, okay, all of these images need to hold together. They need to sort of feel that they're part of a consistent set, that there's a certain feel about the photographs themselves.  And so that's kind of, I think, something that people don't often think about with their photography, is there are people for whom this is not a good fit. And so you have to, I think you rather wasting their time, you got to make a statement, you say, this is what I do. And if you don't like this, I'm sorry to hear that. But then maybe somebody else's work is your thing. But then this is what we're talking about kind of saturation where the guy, nice guy locally, who shot the nice beach photos in the sun, everyone in my small seaside town is probably going to want to have those, but people the next town over maybe, and then people furthering maybe no one at all. I think what we're talking about similar kind of to my work, what you're showing as well is this idea that, you know, it's something else. And like, if your work is something else, and it's going to have a smaller demographic interested, then I think it's wise to raise a higher price point. And also, you know, I hate to say this, man, but like, I feel like amateurs, like amateur photography, as in people who aren't really kind of clued up, like sort of more simple, you know, a drawn to more of the kind of, let's say you're not interested in photography, and you've seen a few photos just incidentally in your life, you're going to think that's good photography. But let's say you've given your life to it and then deep dives into photography, the things that draw you are going to be very different. So immediately, that's a much smaller group of people, you're going to probably going to connect with your work. But then they'll value your work because they get it.  That's cool. There's other people that be like, Oh, I don't get it. So that's the thing. It's like, you need to try and find that group who kind of really understand what you're trying to do. And then, yeah, I don't know, man, I think, you know, what you're saying about like, you got you have a smaller demographic who gonna be interested in your work. There's a friend of mine. She loves my photography, but would never ever put up on her walls. No, because right now, it doesn't fit her aesthetic. And that's, you know, I think when you look at like landscape photography for something like that, it's slightly easier. It has a broader sort of spectrum about an aesthetic. And that's kind of when I looked at my work, I went, okay, this, this feels like you want a very modernist house. You want like a kind of, you know, house that's made out of concrete. This is up your alley. So already I've managed to target audience like this, you know, sort of thing. And I've been thinking about I go, you know, the option that might be makes more sense. And this is also part this eventually will lead where we're going is that it this is probably better as a book. It is these images are probably better served, or that a book is better medium for them to be shared with people because a book is certainly a far different consideration to buying something to put on the wall. And I think that's where this idea about painting and what have you people look at painting that can kind of go, it's kind of abstract and it's kind of cool. Whereas I think photography doesn't quite fit into those people's ideas. It's not also, you know, like vintage travel prints and movie posters and stuff. That's kind of that's in that whole area of acceptability. You need to be a certain kind of person to have photography on your wall. Definitely. But then most you know, check it out, right? The woman who Tiffany Jones who runs overlaps publishing, she published a dissertation which is all about who buys photo books and I'll spoil it for you. I've got it somewhere up there. There's two types of people who buy photo books photographers and people who really want to be photographers, right? So that's the market. It's the same with prints, dude. I collect photography. I've got lots of photography friends whenever I see them doing a little sale like a print for 100 quid or whatever. I'll just dive in I'll grab one. They're not anywhere at the moment but I've got them and I think there's a part to think about as well is that some people will buy photography for the walls but there's also collectors and there's people who just like to collect photography.  Keep going buddy. I not only like what you're doing but here's some money and maybe use that money to make more work. You go for it. So there's that whole angle as well. It was essentially you mentioned about buying photography and you know the people who do buy photography. Now I have there's a print on the wall here that is by Obi-Wan how to who regular viewers of the channel will know is one of my favorites that I got a couple years ago I forget where but that's the only photograph that's not mine up on the wall, right? And it's certainly not something that I think I would put it in the lounge. I think my wife would probably kill me but you know because it's photography's work I enjoy but interestingly enough when so it was in the States a couple years back in in in DC we went to a place called a torpedo factory in Alexandria and that was like a little artist's enclave kind of thing so lots of people making it and there were a couple of photographers there and I looked at all of their work and none of it I would consider buying mostly because it kind of it was sort of thematically not what I want but the problem was I would look and I go I could take that I could I could have taken that photograph whereas if I look at a painting or some other photography that is like let's say wet plate photography or something like that I would I do not I can't do that but that's amazing so so that's kind of where I think a lot of photographers you know if you're trying to sell prints it needs to be something that other people can't you can't necessarily do otherwise you're just you know you're getting photographers you're going to buy your work because they visually into photography but then if it looks like your work then you're not going to buy I don't know maybe that's just a special case for me but it was kind of you know that was it was just a thought that sort of popped into my head and I went you know she's not going to buy not going to buy photos there you go that's it is what it is so it's like but now we've had some questions in in the in the in the in the chat as we began now see eagles last week I'm very sorry I missed your your question see eagles was asking about the whether or not my images would just if I saw my outside images would sell better than my inside and the jury is still out on that one so we'll find out but but there we got so Steve has asked do you think the issue is that people are too is the people are too small okay that was the people swimming I think in in one of your images or the people in the photograph yeah I think we're looking at I mean might even on my screen just the way we're sharing this it was like maybe a five by seven inch print obviously the quality of print you know when you print something at like some places print they want 300 some places print at 402 like dpi so even at that 16 by 20 they will be there they'll be little you know they'll be little but they'll be enough to give context and I think sometimes for a landscape you end up with there's nothing next especially if it's weird like if it's like geometric if it's like a beach or if it's like boulders you don't know how big those boulders are those rocks are so just the little placement it might just be enough just to sort of perk someone's curiosity but the big thing for that composition is the sweeping line at the bottom and the sort of the misty line at the top there's other there's a lot of elements kind of drawing the eye in um but I think that kind of yeah I think they're kind of weird yeah it depends I think you know often you know you're talking about context and placements and things like that it is sometimes you need like a big hammer and sometimes you need just like a little tp tap sort of thing going on and again so so so context it's what you need for context so I hope that sort of helps um excuse me I've had a weird fluy thing um and then Michael's talking about that image the way the beginning with you know the the the fogging issue and all that kind of stuff I think he's right it's like those that mistake is part of the story if it's consistent throughout the thing I mean like the actual you know the fogging is consistent but so long as the the feel of the discrepancy you know is consistent I think that may be something but Ed you know they're your photographs so so you know what yeah I mean for me it was a heartbreak because I love that shot I was looking at the film and I was like oh that's gonna be good and then I got the scans I was like oh damn it because it's very very hard to tell that kind of like um damaging from like either x-ray or dead stock you don't really kind of see it until you sort of enlarge them yeah but this kind of thing it's one of those things you you can't see it until you've got a print and it's up on the wall I think that you know this is I think that's the case for making test prints to actually see if you're not if you're really not sure about something make some prints you know they don't have to be big prints they don't have to be super expensive print they can be just cheap prints just to at least see what it looks like if it's something that bothers you and then when you're committed to then when you've got the right thing then because you know making a c type print as a test print is probably a bit um probably a bit foolish yeah financially to start with but you know you can you can just print on even a photocopy it sounds nuts but you know to get a sense of how it all looks scale and size wise you know this is what I was saying before about you know making photobooks I make a lot of dummies for my photobooks and the idea is is so it's physically there in the size you're looking at it it's kind of it's really hard it's a really hard thing to visualize we say all these numbers 16 by 20 inch 40 by 30 but until you actually look at one it's a bit yeah it's a bit of a trick yeah that's that's a little side thing if you are trying to sell images um to people uh you'll notice when I was talking through all this kind of stuff then there are very few numbers in here right there's obviously there's the price um but it's like 50 40 30 24 20 I'm not talking about sizes because I was what is it's less numbers to bombard people with right because don't forget nobody knows about the size also it means that no matter what ratio you're photographing how you're cropping the image is always just the longest size you've never said that there's a specific yeah sort of thing anyway um so we got um uh Steve was saying not sure about recovering the bad images or ones um it's again that depends you know would they work with a crop it sort of depends I think sometimes you kind of I think again Ed do your images but if I was looking I said does this work as a fault is it something I can live with or is it just scrapped because it's part yeah because it's part of a book probably and a series of photos then for me it's one of those things about it breaks the breaks the third wall if that's the right way of saying it where it makes the work reflexive it's like when you use a very wide angle lens for instance and it distorts the point where the viewer is now for me anyway as a photographer I'm never really really looking through your window I'm looking at the distortion you've made to make that you're aware you're aware of the process yeah yeah sometimes I want people to kind of dive into the image and you know have that have that yeah then he's talking about sort of multiple images given potential story and that yeah I think we were talking at the time about what is the point of of of these images and you were saying about having a having them as a book yeah so then okay then their context is going to be made by the book itself that there's going to be a narrative or you build up whereas if they were standalone images then they I think you have to approach them from a very different perspective really don't you you know about yeah how they're going to live there is a strategy to what I'm doing though in that you know there was a German curator I had a chat with online like earlier this year and yeah he showed me a document which was like art sales in the world and like there's all the different abstract paintings sculpture the only photography to even make a dent was landscape photography yeah so there you go so if you're thinking about doing something commercially and I know a lot of people always say yeah but I'm not doing this for for for money I'm not trying to earn a living but you know what you might as well try I mean if you like landscape photography you want to have a go and like if you've taken something that you feels kind of beautiful or is interesting well chances are in the world it's a big world someone else is going to find that interesting as well yeah so you know finding that market yeah absolutely and I hopefully I will find a market in my way then and you know but there's the you know I think you need to be aware that just because you like the work that doesn't mean that there's like maybe a massive market for it no use the call call record producer put a book out about creativity did loads of stuff with the Beastie Boys did everyone Rick Rubin is it it could be Rick Rubin going around where he says you know what when you're making something a hundred percent just please yourself go for it do something that you love just go for it and he said that one of the problems is maybe of Hollywood and places like that is it always trying to factor in what they think other people will like don't do that man make something you love just because he loves it too there's a question here it says will selling an image do you think it should be a dip tick single portrait or image for a book and here's the thing man well I'm photographing yeah part of me has got my shopping list of maybe I need to get this location or this person but I'm just purely in the moment taking pictures I'm not even really considering that until I've got my edit and when I've got my editor photos I can start thinking about what goes where what's going to work together but I think you don't want to kind of chain your creativity in the moment of photographing you just want to kind of just drink it in and be totally immersed in what's going on later on you can make those kind of tactical decisions about oh this would be good for this or this would be good for that I hope that there's a question I think I'm going to bring in my sort of perspective from this is as a family portrait photographer and that's where my sales environment was where I taught myself I didn't teach myself but that's where I learned sales is that there were certain images that I would have in mind this could work as a triptych because I can then sell a triptych dogs for example so when I photograph dogs because working with children wasn't enough I decided to bring animals into the mix as well a dog I can go straight down right I can do a profile and I can do a profile and that way I can sell a triptych because it you'd be surprised actually I saw more big images of dogs than I did of families people go guard up for their dogs if you want to get into like actually making some money from photography photographs but that I would photograph specifically knowing that was going to go into a into a type of frame right and just before anybody goes how do you do triptychs without a glass those are the only class pieces that I sold mostly because they were this sort of like they're wider than the screen and they were just you know they're not too bad so the cost was okay but I was photographing with an idea in mind however that's mean a very specific environment photographing a very specific subject for a very specific outcome when I'm out and about photographing I'm kind of looking at these more sort of loose collections of images that would in my mind stand alone I think it maybe you got a slight different take probably because you were documentary sort of background yeah yeah no um yeah be tricky because I'm I'm generally primarily back in the day photographing for a story so in that story I'll see lots of things and sometimes it won't be something I'll expect like some I've had some portraits from my Texas book which did sell well which was a surprise because it was so quirky but some people like quirky portraits you know absolutely yeah I think there's it's always weird yeah I don't think anybody would buy any any of the pictures I took of of the of the of you know the families and stuff but there are times I think the quirkiness that's probably leaning into you know so why it's why it's popular but it's interesting I want to just go back to a comment here by do doogie now he I'm gonna guess doogie right doogie from from from Scotland possibly and and it says like looks like holiday snaps to me now this is I think this is something important to touch on is when you start putting your work out there for sale or for you know for books or heavy it's not everybody is going to like it I say yeah you've probably bumped into this I've certainly bumped into it um you know and and it can be discouraging especially when you're new or you're like you're new to showing your work publicly when somebody says they look like other snaps because then you focus just on why don't these people like what and what happens when you focus on why don't people like some photographs and then you're you're going for about I think in a negative yeah I mean I'd say you know you could think about it all travel photography is kind of holiday snaps in a way isn't it because they had to go somewhere yeah yeah so yeah so you always get that though aren't you yeah but I feel like also you know yeah holiday snaps so yeah the shots that we did say we were least thrilled with from my edit were more matter of fact like look at this whereas the shots we came back to were those kind of quieter maybe weirder compositions which didn't say this is tinta gel in Cornwall they said you know they're a bit more mysterious so you know but this is the whole reason of sharing work and having this peer-to-peer chat yeah and and and I hope when people you know watch this they kind of go okay right so the guy doesn't doesn't quite like them that's okay there are people there was somebody who looked at my prince in one of the previous videos who who said that they were just completely um uh they kept they lacked they lacked any sort of a I think he said an emotional connection because there's no people in them right and and that's the point I don't want people in them right so but for him that something was important for him and you know so you're always going to find things to resonate and what have you and there's some ideas about um you're never selling yourself cheap and the things you want your money yeah the people who buy you the people who um are buying the cheap prince or something they are always the ones who complain I'm just gonna leave that there's a truism in the world the less somebody pays for something the more to complain about it yeah so sort of one of the things and yeah Michael again he's talking about you know the general was print photos um charge three to four times the amount of costs to create the print professionally um and it goes on to include all costs yeah so when I closed the studio I was charging five times um more or less uh lower down the spectrum a bit more because a I think a 16 inch I'm charging a 550 it definitely wasn't it was in those days that was under 100 quid that was probably about 70 pounds put together but yeah you need if you're gonna do this as business you need to you know you you can't just you can't just rely on on people you know stroking your ego speaking of stroking ego there's a good question here about why do some people pay so much where was it it was they dropped some names here we go Kristen the question is how did the ones who really sell photographs on a big scale at high prices how did they do it is it only about quality now here's the thing man like we're talking about print sales but there's so many different print sale markets so starting from like oh are we frozen no no I'm sorry I was just I'm like just so just really quick you could be selling print to your website you might do like I didn't have a little pop-up show with some friends in your hometown you might be showing an art fair like a lower level art fair you might be showing at freeze you might be having a solo show in a big New York gallery and it's like all these different things are kind of going on now here's the crazy thing Alex I mentioned it briefly at the start but you can see prints by like Damien Hurst for sale at lower level art fairs now in the UK which you'd never would have seen before and they've realized that as well as having these very high profile sales for loads of money they can show at lower levels and get more saturation and sell a lot more of their stuff for a lower value but it's the quantity they're selling then makes up and it's still money in the bank for them so it's one of these weird things where even the people right at the top now in the art world and they'll be doing things on a lower level just sort of amassing like even even money in that kind of field which is something they wouldn't have really done before before it would have just been more kind of exclusive galleries and that kind of stuff but it's definitely all about packaging I mean if we really get to the top end of the art market it's basically investment and the people buying the art man they don't care that I've literally read something by an art critic then Lewis it said don't don't don't buy art you like that was like an investment tip and like the idea is these people buying these art they're not putting it on their wall man they're shoving it in a drawer putting it in a board somewhere I was going to say something about you know just touch on Christian's thing that we you know you were talking about about how you know those those Peter Licks and stuff like that it's it's it's self promotion and marketing it's it's making hype it's it is taking the Robert Maples sort of thing of you know you know act like an artist until you are one or it's early I can't remember this thing even Paddy Smith's pretending to be photographers and and you know poets until you are you're fake until you make it kind of thing it takes an awful lot of chutzpah I think you know that idea of like I'm the best photographer that you could possibly see and my prints are absolute work with kind of money you need you need to be your own biggest fan and and these guys certainly Peter Licks or something you know that's what they do they you know they they are not afraid to say this is this is the best photography that we make and and and they create an ethos they create an idea around them there are some people who I think who get picked up luckily you know so like Damian Hurst you know sort of being picked up are like you know Charles Saatchi I think there's a Charles Saatchi yeah who create a market for the art that I've now bought right and and so you have those kind of ideas realistic I think for most of us especially in the photography market those cells are not going to be there I think you know it's and quite frankly I would love for people to pick up my where I mean who wouldn't right but I also realistically know it's not going to happen unless I made it one day and devoted 100% of my efforts into making it happen but none of us are like that we I think it takes a very special confluence of of of things um to do that say and we got um we got um oh Michael did you did you say Michael has Ed have you lectured Michael yeah but only kind of done the peripheral I'm the kind of wacky tutor I'd see people in the corridors and just talk to them you know wow what a wacky guy whereas when I was a student the photography lecturers even the ones who taught you would just walk past and ignore you whereas I'd see people there and I'd be like hey man and we're hanging out in chat so it's never formally taught but we hung out and we had chats right yeah oh well good good um yeah so Christian I've just seen you it's posted about to what extent does the solution it's selling at high prices simply involve asking for high prices I think that's it that that's it if you don't ask you don't get the scariest thing is I think I've solved more work at a higher price point purely because some people it sounds nuts right but people will look at your art and they think it's the value that you attribute to it which is terrible it's a tip from freelancing this is always horrible as a freelance photographer when someone gives you a commission and says oh what's it gonna be now you're panicking because you want to tell them how much you're gonna charge them but if you need the work you might come lower but then someone else might come in higher and they think well we've got more of a budget let's go over the better one the one who costs more and like maybe the other one's not there they just ask for more so it's this horrible horrible game trying to work out that happens in in all walks of life thing you know the the value of stuff like that and it's it the value of it is what you put on it or what somebody's prepared to pay for I think it's probably most likely anyway we have been naturing it on for like an hour here this is this is awesome so I'm a friend of mine the other day she goes because how do you know what to talk about that's what I said we just we just talk man we love we love photography Alex we just is for me it's like my life it's your life we're just two guys who just love life and love photography that's right I do too and and everybody who's who's been with us for the last hour or so um yes thank you so much for being here and sharing your love for photography with us with with the comments and all that sort of stuff um you know we are going to be here until the end of time just like just there'll be two of men yeah be like you have biscuits like we can keep going I've um I have I've I've got nothing no things anyway ladies and gentlemen um and everybody else um thank you ever so much for joining us here today um and if there's some topics you'd like us to you know to to to so open up for discussion and future conversations let me know in the comments below um thank you everybody and we will see you again soon oh by the way um Ed's channel is in the description box below down there click on it right and if you want to see my if you want to see my travel travel holiday snaps they're the last video oh wow I've got this done there again it's your webcam I don't know it doesn't do it with no Canon don't do that guys thanks ever so much thank you Alex thank you Alex thank you and there we go I think that's uh it says end the stream end the stream scary scary now don't I think the hang on a second I think we're still live we're still live I don't know what's going on with this why it's oh weird now it's just me now I have the power and the biscuits come with me let's quest let's go on a journey


organizational and personal stressors. So she is basically the psychologist of the group. Did I get that right? Okay. We also have John Dodge, professor of the School of Commerce and Administration at Laurentian University, partner of the management consulting firm and he usually talks on e-commerce and organizational strategy issues. We also have Steve Mitzazos. He is a partner of the law firm, so he's the lawyer in the group and he has practiced commercial lawyer with IT in the IT field for the last 12 years acting counsel to both multinational technology companies and various small software startups. So and Steve is also affiliated with Laurentian University.  Thank you very much. Hacking of America and as it's also titled in the thing that was put out by DevCon is organizations employee hackers and we think that these are related because maybe I should give you a little bit of background. We are both Bertie and I are academics. We've undertaken a study that we have funded through a very small research budget of our own. The university gives us a bit of money and we can commit it to whatever project we run without the interference so we decided to go ahead and do this. We've also dipped into our pockets a little bit to cover additional costs because we did not want to seek outside finance or to seek proposals so the research that we've done has been completely independent. You may not or may not result. It's very defensible and we think very independent. I just want to get that very clear in the initial stages. We, Bertie and I, worked together at Laurentian University and the School of Commerce and now Bertie has gone on to be dean at a new university in Toronto and we saw the loser there but we're very happy to work with on this project. The thing that we found here is that we were funded, we were interested in the research area and that we really were helped by a number of students, particularly Kevin Ellis and Yana Lahaki that were really instrumental in helping us coax on the data. We came to H2K two years ago in DevCon and we had a booth set up in the vendors area where people came around and actually committed quite a bit of time, at least a half an hour to fill out self-reporting questionnaires. So we think it's quite reasonable to present you with some of the data and some of the background material that we found. So moving on I'll ask Bertie to go to the next slide. One of the motivations of this study is that there's a lot of myths out there in the community and society in general are hackers, for the most part, criminals that should be feared or either feared and of course that they are feared some may by society. The question is are we terrorists? As a hacker are they considered like terrorists? In fact some people would classify hackers in the same group and fearing some kind of interventional or some other catastrophic event. The other thing is that if we gave hackers clinically derived psychological inventories, what would their answers be? Say about their dangerousness. So we wanted to actually find out how dangerous our hackers. Enough of the myths so we said let's move on from the myths and try to find out the reality check. We defined hackers in this case that people, persons who spent all their time learning the details of computer systems and how to stretch their capabilities as well as those who have a number of items that I'm sure familiar with, gained unauthorized access to computers and so on. I don't think it's worthwhile to dwell on how a hacker is here. The instrument used was a 22 page questionnaire. It had five parts in it. The first part was on hacker demographics, basically sex, age, income levels, all of that kind of thing. One tidbit that you would like to hear maybe that's not included in our speech that hackers are well above the median income for those employed. A very successful financial group in general. The second part was on short term issues of mind body symptoms. Sometimes you might be under certain kind of stressors and that your body is reacting to that stress and we wanted to verify what amount was how those were linked in that short term. The other three parts were really long term personality issues here. The first one relates to routine behaviors and that reflects some of your personality. Your likes and dislikes and reused well recognized and accepted instruments for these. The third one was Rose leadership style index. We wanted to compare you to business people and how they manage. How do you solve problems and are they related to business managers? We wanted to compare you to business managers set. Item four was really personality issues relating to how you manage people or businesses. When you do research you've got to go back and say what's been written so far and what other research has been done. The best comparison base that we can find was done by Shaw Post and Ruby in 1999 and it was a study of convicted hackers that were working on the inside of organizations. This was a forensic study that basically went back and trapped the issue afterwards. Rather interesting is I thought they came up with some very good results. They didn't talk to any of the hackers themselves. This all came from evidence given a trial and other aspects so one has to wear it on the sources of that. What they did find is that they said that they're introverted, more comfortable in their own mental world, in a more emotional and non predictable social world. They have a history of significant family problems. These are the convicted inside hackers, especially in early childhood, leaving them with negative attitudes towards authority. So you can see that can happen and have online computer dependency that either fears or replaces social interactions and that are basically spending maybe a little too much time on the computer. More about the insiders, they have an ethical flexibility that allows them to justify any violation, that's rather typical, have a strong role to their computer specialty, in fact far more to their computer specialty than to their employers. And this you've got to remember was done in the context of an inside convicted hacker and so they would obviously violate that. They also had a sense of entitlement, thinking that they were special and our own recognition privileges or exemptions to more many rules governing our employees. Basically they should have special rules attached to them. We're not saying these are correct. All we're saying is this was what the best research we had to do to deal with, so we use that as our benchmark, as our comparison. Are these really true and can be verified? So we went on from there. The other one of course is they lack empathy towards work, to others at work, generally indicating that the social human reserve skills are not particularly strong. Just a quick brief profile here in our study, we had 216 participants in this study. They were 39% from H2K and 61% were from the Def Con 8 audience. Overall, 91% were male, obviously 9% female. The range range from 14 years to 61. The mode was 24 years, the median was 25, mean 27, so we're having a lot of work to do. So we're having a lot of work to do. We're having a lot of work to do. We're having a lot of work to do. That's really cool, right? That's the real thing. The more we've had to say from age group to university, we were having a lot of work to do. So at the age group, I had a lot of work to do to get, so I had a lot of work to do and I go through the area at the age group. I went to the So there was pretty good educational levels achieved. The other issue is that they just took a back of it. You can do it. Just go ahead now. You'll notice that we're using the Corel product. We just try to keep away from Microsoft. We know we all learned a lot of them. They're blaming it on Bernie there. The sample contained those charged with hacker-related crimes. It was 9% were charged with hacker-related crimes at over 216. And of those that served sentences for such was 32%. So basically a third of those charged were actually served harm. The sample also was rather interesting. It contained 18% had crimes of another nature, non-hacking related. And they served sentences 48%. So it's rather interesting the conviction rate was higher than the non-hacking than the hacking. But it also reflects the fact that they had more other activities going on that brushed with the law. The male hackers tended to be employed by larger companies. So they're not really large companies. They had about 4,200 employees. The hackers charged with hacking related crimes tended to work in small companies, probably about 56 employees. It's rather interesting that with larger companies they probably had more sophisticated human resource selection processes and people and human resources may not have wanted to take a risk on a hacker and immediately removed that from the list. But this is including everybody that was charged and not charged, by the way. The female hackers tended to work in smaller companies with about 1,400 employees. And I think now we move on to psychological aspects of the hacker and I'll turn that over to Dr. Bernie Schall here. Bernie? Hi, thanks a lot John. At any point in time if you don't understand some of the terms that you use just raise your hand and I'll try to explain more fully. And of course in our book we go through chapters and chapters explaining what each of these psychological items is all about. We'll start at the very beginning, again going back to the research of Eric Schall and his colleagues. I reported an early childhood traumatic series of events and when we asked the 216 people in our sample if they had experienced significant childhood trauma such as loss of a parent through divorce or death, the loss of a sibling, abuse of one form or another. Almost a third of the respondents said that they had experienced those sorts of traumatic events in early years. Probably of more importance to us, not just the percentage of respondents who came forward talking about these painful events, but the important assertion that over 60% of those who had experienced such events so that they had long term negative impacts on their thoughts and behaviors. And so we wanted to look more closely at the data to find out what exactly they were suggesting those long term impacts were. In terms of gender differences, female hackers in particular were more likely to admit experiencing childhood trauma. About what we found John and I when we did face to face interviews at H2K that once we got people to trust us with the interviews, well they would not initially admit that they had some traumatic events later on. They would talk about what had happened to them. I'm sorry? How does it compare to society? These reported rates of trauma in early childhood exceed the norm. Now we were also curious about the reporting of childhood trauma for those who had been charged versus those who had not been charged and for the younger versus older, and we didn't find any significant differences. We then move on to how the respondents said they were able to cope with distress over a two week period just before they completed the inventory. And we used the symptom checklist that was developed by George Addison and his colleagues 1974. And the scale that we used was a zero to three scale. Zero meant that over this two week period individuals weren't experiencing the usual symptoms of stress like nausea, difficulty concentrating, that sort of thing. And at the highland two or three meant that they were experiencing extreme bouts and extreme intensity. So what you have here for the 216 respondents mean scores on various clusters of stress symptomology. And the strongest short term measure in terms of clustering was around anger for the hackers, followed by interpersonal sensitivity and a fear of being rejected by the spouses and friends who were close to them. Followed by obsessive compulsiveness, which is the need to be perfect. And then we have somatization that basically is mind body disorder. So I might ask you are you feeling stressed out today and you might say no Bernie, I'm not. And then I'll say well, have you been experiencing any sorts of health issues? And you might say well, you know when I think about it my migraines have been worse the past couple of weeks. My arthritis has flared, my asthma is worse. These are all indicators of somatic outbursts of distress so that you may not verbally think or report that you're distressed but your body says otherwise. And finally we have anxiety just having this need to run away and to avoid what's going on in the world. Okay, now again we were curious about that long term impact of trauma on individuals. And what we found over and over again as we worked through the analyses that the hacker community really fears that they are going to lose their friends. They have difficulty with interpersonal relationships and they have a hard time processing interpersonal misunderstandings. And in fact we found that the strongest correlation with anger was this interpersonal sensitivity item. There was a gender difference here in terms of distress in the short term with women reporting significantly higher anxiety and somatization stress symptoms than the male counterparts. We then get into the underage 30 hackers versus the older over 30 hackers and the younger people were reporting significantly higher anxiety and depression. And I might add to a point that we would suggest that they were suffering from clinical depression. Then we went on to look at the degree of computer addiction that allegedly exists within this population. And we used as a basis Dr. Kimberly Young's research basically what she said is we know that we have someone who's online addicted when they spend over 30 hours online. And what we found for hackers that they reported spending on average 24.45 hours online, which does not qualify them at least with this indicator for computer addiction. Per week, yes. Again Dr. Young went on to say that if you are computer addicted, you will have a disrupted sleep cycle and meaning that you get fewer than six hours of sleep per cycle. And what we found was that our hackers didn't report that problem overall, but in fact they were getting on average 6.26 hours of sleep. The underage 30 group however did appear to be the most addicted to their computers. They did report engaging and hacking sessions lasting over eight hours. And they did report spending over 30 hours per week on online. We then looked at various personality indicators. I had addressed the same indicators and corporate leaders and learned about that in management in the mirror book. And I also looked at these predispositions in stalkers and wrote about those predispositions in the stalking book. Now we come to the hacking population and how they see themselves, their long-term routine behaviors over time. And the highest score that you could get on any one of these personality indicators is 10. Any score five or higher we consider to be a significant predisposition in individual's personality types. And what we found is contrary to the myth that hackers or the hacking community seem to be other destructive, we found that the majority, the number one trait was that hackers are self-healing. They're called self-healing type fours. They're balanced actually on their task needs and on their people-related needs. And that keeps them going over time just like the energizer battery. Funny. The next interesting point, the indicator that was over five for the hacking population was what we called the cancer-prone type five predisposition. This is what we would call a noise-in or a noise-denying lifestyle. And in fact it became clear to me that some of that trauma that was experienced in early childhood was repressed. And the style that these children, I guess, adopted in childhood to cope with what was going on in the home environment around them, traveled with them into adulthood. The long-term prognosis is that the longer one stays in a state of noise denial rather than working through whatever is bothering you constructively, puts you at risk for developing cancer. Just below the five level was another what we call the harmony-desiring cancer-prone type one predisposition. So what we have here, strong self-healing followed by noise-in and a cancer-prone prognosis over the long-term. We were interested in looking at the psychopathic-prone predisposition, and what we call the type three, considerably below the level five. So typically we wouldn't even worry about this for a population if the mean score is this far below five. Contrary again to what Dr. Kimberly Young says, that hackers are these computer-addicted cardiovascular-prone type A, or what we call type two types in this instrument. We just didn't find much evidence of that at all. And probably of more recent interest to the governments around the world since September 11th, as well as to researchers, what about the two as prone obsessive narcissistic type six predisposition and what we found for the majority extremely low. So our summary then, taking as a composite these hacker study findings for the sample size of 216 seem to support the assertions of two sets of academics in particular, shot from 1991 in Kagan and Dukat, 1985, which seemed to indicate that the hackers were more well balanced in nature, and our findings certainly did not support to any large degree the assertions of Dr. Young. Bottom line then, the hackers attending the H2K and DevCon 8 convention seem to have relatively relaxed and balanced temperaments rather than type A or type two task obsessed ones. We did, I admit, find a segment that seemed to suffer more and again was the underage 30 hackers who had significantly higher type A scores, those again are the cardiovascular prone scores compared to their age 30 and over count parts. They also had significantly higher narcissistic psychopathic prone type three scores. Also had higher antisocial type six scores, again, compared to their older counterparts. However, and I put this in both, all of these red flag scores were below a critical level of five. We then went on to assess the hackers' creativity levels, and Dubrin in 1995 created a test which we utilized a self-report test. The maximum score that anybody could get on that is 20, and the group of 216 respondents received a high mean score of 15.30. The cutoff point is 15 indicating extremely high creative potential. In fact, for these respondents, the medium was 16, the mode was 17, and 62% of the respondents actually had scores meeting or exceeding this critical level of 15. Then get into decision-making styles, and I'll let John speak to this. This is a decision-making style used by Ro and his colleagues, and I think there's over 100,000 people in business of this test that's been applied to, and what you do is you have four management styles. You have an analytical type style, a conceptual style, a directive style, and a behavioral style. Analytica obviously looks for information, crunches it out in an analytical way. Conceptual is looking at a broad spectrum of things, and somebody that can do detail may not look at the broad spectrum, and the other one is directive, very firm, directive style. Doers do that style, and the behavioral style would be highly organizational, HR kind of touchy-feely style to make it very simple. Very simply is that the hackers are cognitively complex and creative in their thinking, meaning they tend to have the analytical and conceptual mix. Rather interesting than that is this is the mix that you tend to see in CEOs and presidents at that high level. What was rather interesting looking at the main behavioral style is that the group is a whole or lower, meaning you probably wouldn't be human resource managers. So there's no surprise to that I'm sure as well. Moving on, I'll hand it over to Steve and we'll take a look at some of the legal implications of our study. Thanks John. This presentation will focus more on the economic, social and political context of anti-cacking laws as opposed to black letter law. One on not a U.S. letter and two the anti-cacking laws are changing by the day. So I think in order to put this into a better context it's more important for us to understand what's shaping and motivating these laws. And although it's no longer fashionable to cast debates in an ideological context since the end of the Cold War, I think in order to properly understand this debate you have to look at it from an ideological perspective. And to that extent what we see here is that the criminalization of rate-head hacking represents a struggle between two competing paradigms over the control of information and knowledge. On the one hand there exists what we refer to as the property rights or property paradigm and that contains certain fundamental tenets of property rights that deserve the protection of the law to paint a very broad brush. As in most industrialized nations moving to a post-industrial phase information technology has become more important and the protection of individual intangible property rights and their security of electronic infrastructures is critical. Now the proponents of the property rights paradigm are in many instances its individuals trying to protect artistic creations, their privacy but it's also institutions like government and corporations concerned about national security security of infrastructure or the security of e-commerce transactions for example. In terms of who's driving the property rights or property paradigm agenda it's primarily corporations and state entities that have taken the lead in advancing the property rights paradigm and you see that in criminal prosecutions that you are familiar with and as well increasingly now in the civil action context one example would be the Napster litigation. Now from the competing perspective and competing ideology what we have is what we call the hacker paradigm which really encapsulates this idea that there should be a free flow of information. The hacker paradigm itself has a sound very sound ideological base it's a fundamental tenant of our society as well that in order to advance knowledge information should be shared and I think it could be argued that it may have even a stronger base. Examples of this would be the recent announcement by MIT to have open courseware and the manifestation of the hacker paradigm arguably is in the hacker attack itself. In order to try to understand what's happening in the legal context we try to look for some analogies and these are not analogies that we've necessarily come up with I mean people talk about it all the time the electronic frontier and the electronic frontier has a lot in common with the old frontier being the wild west we're here in Las Vegas which is quite fitting I suppose and the parallels with the old west are very striking both from a practical level and a legal level. What you have is you have new technologies allowing communications travel work exploration the older west it was the railway now it's the internet you have huge fortunes being made innovation risk taking or being rewarded on a scale previously unimaginable. People and technology finds itself ahead of the law the frontier attacks attracts all sorts of people good people bad people the ugly and monopolies are created antitrust challenges results. Some results is what we characterize as a disorder to order equilibrium and as the frontier becomes increasingly disorderly and as in the frontier in the old west it was that there's a lot of good real estate resources and the value of the electronic frontier is obvious. The need there is a need to be impetus for the state is to create instruments of justice and you get the common notion of what we call frontier justice we need to make there's a scramble to establish new laws and law enforcement agencies to deal with these issues now in order to assess the reasonableness of any law called and I think that's the case with the electronic frontier I think most observers would argue that there's probably been an overreaction in terms of the legal response and we're going to look at what the lawyers are about basically we perceive the three main drivers for anti-hacking laws one being national well-being which is obvious secure electronic infrastructure is critical to the health of our economy and our society the second driver would be a lack of understanding for the most part I think lawmakers law enforcement although they have an understanding of this area as well as perhaps you do or maybe none of us really understand exactly what we're dealing with and the third driver which drives from lack of understanding is fear and this essentially drives this overreaction and as a result you have the criminalization of many light-hat-hacking activities oh it's okay look around my thunder Bernie the slide said basically no justice without knowledge part of the concept of justice in order to have an informed debate about what law is reasonable people, society lawmakers have to have a very clear and unfettered understanding of what the issues are we see this in debates that are occurring in our society where the issues are fairly clearly understood legalization of marijuana, abortion capital punishment these are issues which most people understand and even there we have a real difficulty in striking a fair balance so in a situation like hacking unfortunately there's not this clear understanding that people are being motivated in many instances by fear so our hope is by undertaking this study that we'll be able to shed some light on the hacker community in particular the differences between the light hats and the black hats and this should we hope influence lawmakers and law enforcement in a positive direction Ben I'll pass it back to you okay so our bottom line that you will be seeing if you read a book is that hackers are getting a bad rap and that's unfortunate because society does cover hacker skills you have a lot of the talent that we seek in industry today I guess in recent weeks accounts have been taking a tough rap themselves we go into detail in the book about is the verification of the hacker community justified we have a book filled with all sorts of cases colleagues of yours I'm sure that you're familiar with who we're going to share and then we have analyses of those details and try to relate those analyses to our data and we address in the book this key question should organizations employ hackers and I guess if we told you our answer to that you'd never buy the book now I must say that we had fully intended to launch a book here as John had mentioned earlier at DevCon 10 and in fact if it weren't for Burn Yes and Dark Tangent we never would have gotten as far in our data collections we had and we complained to a publisher that we really wanted to launch the book here at DevCon 10 what could they do to help those of you who might be interested and so we've agreed to give a 20% discount to anyone attending here and we have hundreds of sheets to distribute to you if you have interest in what it is we have to say and I guess that pretty well is our presentation for today so if you have any particular questions that you'd like to ask us please feel free to come up and I'm going to turn the mic over to John Any particular questions? The book title is The Hacking of America Who's Doing It Why and How Questions? Yes we do speak to a large degree about the differences we looked at younger versus older those charged of hacking related crimes versus not and then gender differences I'm now doing a study on women in IT so this is the next path and I'm walking down to anything else? Go ahead the question was is there any studies of non-U.S. hackers and in fact this study could be considered international we actually had respondents from Canada from most of the European countries so it's and we found nothing significantly different between the groups that we interviewed anyway for the sample size that we started with Anything to add to that? Any other questions? There's one over here and then one over there I'm not sure if I heard the question properly but the question is it's a self reporting survey that represents the total group there's always a question in research whether you're representing the population we had people volunteer from two separate groups and they filled it out and they spent a significant amount of time a half hour if anybody here did that it's not an easy questionnaire to do we had people so we think it fairly represents the group that filled out the questionnaire and that's the best available information that you can apply against the population but until some other data collection management can be done there was another question I'd be able to hear and then we'll move over No I didn't think so and there was another question here here yes the question is I believe it relates to is 216 adequate enough to give a valid response to the numbers that end the statistical side generally you get your errors down reasonably on these kinds of instruments that are well tested if they're anywhere over 100 so probably 200 is not a bad sample size we allowed it to be quite open we would have been happy to get more it took a while to administer the study and so it's and it was detailed we might take slices of it again and make it sometime get a wider distribution but this was a very detailed questionnaire and of course people reluctant to take the time to fill it out so can you repeat the question I believe the question is would the results have been different or better if you had observed people operating a computer then from filling in a questionnaire is that correct or interviewed in the process when they were on the computer I think that what I was doing I had the interview with people I made my observations at that point in time and John did as well and I don't have any reason to believe that people were faking the responses and we certainly have ways of looking for that in the data and I'm sorry I guess the question was would they show different personality traits when they're off the computer we don't know because we didn't do it I don't have any indicators to suggest that that's the case that's a wonderful thing about research you never end academic pursuits is there a question from the back I guess yes there's a question of the rules we use on addiction I guess related to the number of hours and whether it was online at work as well as on hours and I'll turn that over to Bernie I think it was Young's it really doesn't matter Young doesn't make that distinction although the way we asked the survey we were able to tease out whether people were answering strictly as an off employment point of view or on the job as well so we had a series of questions I guess what I'm trying to say that got at that issue and in the book we comment that computer addiction from several different angles any additional questions thank you very much and I'm glad to hear again