Suppose you’re the director of photography (DoP) at a big magazine or newspaper and suppose your budget has been slashed (but I repeat myself).

How do you keep publishing great images?

You can no longer afford to hire great photographers. If you could afford them, you’d still have to get them to sign a work-for-hire agreement, which the great ones won’t do. Well, a few of them will, but you need to properly compensate them, put them on staff, and float them a low interest loan on their upstate, weekend home. So that’s not happening, because remember, you’ve got no money. To make matters worse, the day-rate you offer freelance photographers hasn’t risen in 25 years. You can only keep them in the field for a minuscule amount of time, and you’ve still got to somehow grab their copyright.

What do you do?

Faced with this dilemma a few DoP’s and photo editors have hung up their loupes and walked away from the editorial market. An honorable decision to be sure, but what if you’re not ready to quit or you have a upstate, weekend home of your own to pay for?

You can struggle to find great photographers who are willing to work under these conditions and fail, or you can be clever and simply redefine the word “great”.