StraightVibes.comNew York. Jamaica. Brooklyn.

I came across a few popular New York based party-photography websites over the course of two weeks and to my surprise, the number one issue that they all share involves promoters not paying them fairly for their services. Under ideal circumstances, party photographers charge promoters a fee to promote events and taken pictures for publication online. But unfortunately, they are having a hard time getting paid for their services because promoters who hire them are failing to fulfill their end of the bargain. These shady promoters are notorious for making partial payments, paying whatever they feel the service is worth or simply not paying at all.

This, in my opinion, is not only a brutal disregard of the time, energy and money invested by photographers to cover events, but it highlights a lack of credible promoters within New York’s dancehall community. Mind you, I’m sure that their are a few credible promoters, but majority of them are; for a lack of a better description, full of horse manor.

Promoters and those alike who seek the services of party photographers fail to understand that it takes money to take pictures and publish them online for the viewing pleasure of partygoers. In fact, a party photographer’s expenses often includes, but not limited to: transportation, equipment cost, website maintenance and web hosting. And mind you, these costs exclude living expenses; therefore, it would be safe to say that most of them are operating at a loss and have to rely on out-of-pocket money to cover overhead expenses. It is for those reasons and a host of others why I don’t blame party photographers for putting shady promoters on blast online in order to collect owed money.

The unprofessional manner in which some of these promoters conduct business is perhaps one of the main reasons why StraightVibes.com is not aggressively trying to cover events. Because quite frankly, we don’t have the time or energy to run behind promoters for money. It is a very sad image that is been painted of New York based dancehall promoters, but I’m hopeful that they will someday realize that their credibility is far more important the promoting a sold out event.

Tags: Events, party pictures, photographers, promoters

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 5:18 am and is filed under O.M.G. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.