The Cake and the icing

April 18, 2007 by pmelcher.

Corbis: If I see one more article praising Steve Davis for the great work he has done at Corbis published in a major US newspaper, I will stop reading newspapers. After the declining New York Times ridiculous press release, it is time for the Seattle PI to think that running a company for 10 years without a profit is a sign of intellectual prowess. And it is not if he didn’t try. Back in 1998, Corbis had announced that it would be profitable by 2000. And they said the same every year after that.(Here is an article from March 2006 saying they would be profitable in 2006). On a side note, even before taking officially his new position, Gary Shrenk, also known as Steve The Second, has fired half of the management team, in a show of respect to the old tradition set forth by his glorious predecessor. “The pope is dead, hail to the pope !”

Virginia Tech: As an old pro, I couldn’t not resist checking who would get what images from the shootings on their website. Getty took a while to get images on its website and at the end of the day ended up only with a few images taken after the actual events. WPN had the first images of the shooting or at least taken around the same time. Nothing very interesting, mostly images of policemen walking about with guns. I couldn’t check Polaris, because you need a name and password. Corbis had a edited down version of what Reuters had. After all, we all know that Reuters is really bad at editing. Atlaspressphoto had the best material and rather quickly right after Associated Press.
But really, what I wanted to see was two fold: The so called citizen journalistic reaction and if “alternative” licensing site would have anything. Flickr members took a long time to upload anything and up to now have only limited images. Bad quality, not interesting. Scoopt.com did not appear to have anything of value as they had a picture of motorcycle racing accident as the picture of the day. French multimillion dollar Eyekea had nothing. On the pro side, neither Photoshelter nor Drr had anything either.

I believe it takes more than having a camera in your hands to take pictures. Although, I am sure, the great majority of students present had cell phones with camera in them, none took a picture.I wouldn’t have either, because the difference between a pro and an amateur is that the amateur will try to save his life first, while a pro will try to take pictures first. So much for citizen journalisms. If these sites fail to carry the same images that the photo agencies have and that professional image buyers are looking for, then they are nothing more than overpriced microstock platforms.

As I have had written before, there is much more to licensing images than just slapping a price on an image and posting them for sale. You have to either create or fulfill a particular demand. It is not the quantity of images that matters, it is the quality. In so far that quality is the relevance of the image to a particular need. Bakeries do not bake million of cakes in the hope that some will sell, they bake a few that they know people will purchase.

Posted in flickr, photojournalism, wire service, corbis, getty | Print | 9 Comments »