May 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

Not quite there yet but O so much closer. Google has very quietly introduced a face recognition algorithm to their image search. No,no,no, it doesn’t recognize who is in a photograph yet. However what it does, it recognizes if there is a face in the photograph. Baby steps.

Here is how it works. In Google Image, do a search on any subject you would like. Type in “blue” for example. You get as a result a series of blue skies and in your url something like this :

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=blue&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

all you have to do now is add “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL and your result will only show faces, human faces.

like this:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=blue&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&imgtype=face

Obviously, since there is no options on the interface to generate this filter, it is not ready for launch yet. And all it currently does is recognize the shape of a face, not who is in the picture. That is still in the works but not very far from being ready.

A life saver for editorial photo agencies, a complete face recognition system with identification would reduce the key wording time to almost nothing and accelerate time to desktop.
Since Google sets the standard in search, you could expect image buyers to soon come to your website expecting the same ability.

from : Google Blogoscoped

NEWS UPDATE :

Bob Roberts who had more time to play with it adds:

I tried changing “yellow” for “blue” in your posted link and got a result
that gives an idea of just how close it is,
and how far they have yet to go:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=yellow&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&imgtype=face

or try “queen” to see it really be useful

better still substitute “martin+luther+king” for “blue” and you can really
sense the potential.

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May 30, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just when you thought Microsoft wasn’t an innovator anymore and that Apple had the monopoly on cutting edge innovation, the Redmond based company is about to come out with the new digital light box.

A coffee table size touch screen allows for multiple users to manipulate images as easily as prints on a table. Mounted on a wall, it could easily be used by art directors to compare and work on photo shoots. Editing will become more humane and less of a lonesome occupation. You can see a nice demo at PhotoMechanics.com.

This is only the beginning and the tip of the iceberg on how human interaction with computers is about to change. And for photo agencies and photographers, how the digital age is finally coming to maturity. In not too long, on line database of images serviced by a web browser will appear as obsolete and inadequate as the first automobiles and those who will survive will look back a these steam powered engines with wet eyes.

Corbis, with all its potential might, as yet to come up with any innovation at all, while Getty has been flirting with the edge while remaining very traditional. Recent innovations, like microstock and visual search, have come from people outside of the industry. The real innovators and creators of new, useful technology, are not photo professionals. They are, however photo enthusiasts with a genuine eagerness to make photography, and the distribution of it, a simpler, less aristocratic process. Sometimes it leads to excesses, mostly in pricing. But the good news, the very good news is that photography has never been so much in demand, and as well supported as of today. It is up to photo professionals to take advantages of this photo tsunami.

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May 24, 2007 by pmelcher.

It is not because you know nothing about technology, and for some reason sound proud of it, that you should let your business be run by geeks. As much as they can be nice and helpful, geeks only know how to communicate with two entities: computers and other geeks.

You are just an annoying, albeit very friendly, interference in their daily occupation. Yes, they can fix your computer when it crashes but you can too. Here are a few tips:

_ Do not panic. Take your time. Everything will be fine.

_Check the cables : if you lost your internet connection or cannot connect to the server, it’s probably because that Ethernet cable is not properly plugged in (usually a blue cable).

_ Reboot : 90 % of windows problems are fixed with a simple full reboot. Yes, really.

_ Buy a Mac : no viruses, spyware, crashes, lock downs. Mac Os X is probably the best operating system ever invented and todays MAC can run Mac and Windows.
In our business, technology for the sake of technology, is useless. Gimmicks, tricks, shortcuts, multiple options are only usefully if they work and if they add something relevant. For example, I downloaded Getty Images Live desktop the other day on my old windows 2000 PC. Didn’t work. I cannot even begin to explain how many computers, right now, continue to work on Windows 2000. In the corporate world and all over the world. I didn’t need it, it created aggravation. If I was an image buyer, I would be very upset with Getty right now.

If you listen to your in house geek, he will tell you that everyone runs on Vista (or Mac OS X) or are about to be. He is, because he’s a geek. Corporations and business, however, will not update their operating system before they have to. And that is only when they purchase new computers that come pre loaded with a new operating system. Not before. Why would they ? its expensive and very, very disruptive to change operating systems. And really not very useful. Productivity certainly doesn’t jump if you switch from XP to Vista.

Don’t ever, ever take advice from your geek. Tell him what you need and stick to it, whatever he says.

But geeks have other flaws. If they don’t personally like it, it’s no good. They will make you miss on something quite compelling just because they know the guy who designed it and don’t like him. It’s not a technology thing, its personal. They shut your business out. Investigate new technology by yourself. A geek is never, ever subjective.

Always look behind a geek to find out what he is hiding from you.

Geeks are very proud too . If someone has a similar product that does something ten times better then what they have spend the last 2 years trying to set up themselves, it’s a no go. He will make you work on his clunky system rather than use the new top of the line software your competition is using. The same way parents always believe their baby is the prettiest one in the world. Or a man will never ask for directions.

Geeks are very, very emotional. Do not get mislead by their sensibilities.
Geeks are also text people. Not visuals. They spend their days, if not their lives, typing, writing text, code, etc. So, their world is textual. They will try to reduce everything, including man-machine interaction and user experience, to a text base interface. And use pages of text to explain it, if for some reason, you don’t find it self explanatory. Which you should.

Our profession is visual, graphic oriented. I need icons and symbols to work my way around, not a box that says “click here”.

Finally geeks, as much as they like their jobs, would much prefer be working at Google right now. The photo industry is nice but really not challenging enough for them. So their days are more filled with hopes of making it to Mountain View than making your business work.

You are just really providing them with time, equipment and books so they can :

1) really impress their friends, the other geeks.

2) get enough knowledge to get into Google, or Apple or Adobe. Anywhere but your company.

So, a piece of advice: Keep running your business the way you think it should be done and never, ever rely on your in house geek for advice. And never promote them to CTO. Because computer understanding is miles away from being business savvy.

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May 24, 2007 by pmelcher.

Filing in the blanks. Stock photographers fill in the empty spots of an agencies collection. I really want to know, who gets up one day and decides to become a professional stock photographer ? “my job”, I would assume they are thinking “will be to shoot for an archive”. Hopefully for them, they will be so much smarter than the industry itself and will shoot that ’special” picture that everyone needs, becoming zillionaires.
Mmm…The holy grail of photography.
What kind of photographer travels half way around the globe to shoot the devastating result of an earthquake in an already challenged area and decides to send all their images as gray scale ? or use a $2 camera ( think Holga) ? or worse, decides to distort the whole think with a lensbaby ?

Might as well stay at home, take a big hammer, and slam it really hard on ones’ foot.

Photographers have the right to try things, I agree. But to a certain extend. On one side of the spectrum there is a whole mass of buzzing photographers shooting stock for clients they have and will never see. They are entirely at the mercy of photo agencies because they were created by them. On the other, pros that believe that distorting reality is a definitive selling advantage.

I am aware that some photographers, like Paolo Pellegrin combine Holga and B/W, and still manage to be published. But this is the exception that confirms the rule.

Because they are taken with no audience in mind, stock photographs have no emotions. They are blend, stripped off of any and all feelings, aseptic. Everytime I look at RM stock photography I feel I am walking in a hospital, with its lifeless white walls. Like pasteurized cheese. It looks like cheese, but it certainly not smell nor taste like it.

Likely, I do not want to see actresses roaming the red carpet of a movie premiere who spend days on make up, hair do, choosing a dress , in boring lifeless black and white. There is no “decisive moment” on a red carpet. I do not want to see a tragedy stripped of it colors that make it multi dimensional and thus humane. Do sports photographer shoot in B/W? Why not? Well, maybe because the image itself defines the moment and that it needs no artifacts.
Reality has colors. Reality has defaults. More important, reality has emotions.

Somewhat related additional reading:

A great post by Jesse Nivens: In Search of Stock(y) Photography

Posted in HOLGA, lensbabies, editorial | Print | No Comments »

May 22, 2007 by pmelcher.

It seems that these days, the main difference between a pro and and talented photographer is the quality of the keywording. Having no experience, and certainly no coaching from an agency, the amateur can find some relief and help in microstock sites. But if you look at the photo sharing sites and their tagging, you will see a couple of trends: Either few or no keywords, or completely irrelevant keywords introduced to artificially make the image more visible.

And so I read here and there, on-line manuals of how to be the best “keyworder” in the world, completely contradicting the famous adage, ‘ a picture is worth a thousand words” . Seems that these days, if you believe these self proclaimed keyword prophets, salvation is in a well captioned image . This  completely defy the purpose of photography. Because , if there is anything where amateur can compete with professionals is how well an image is captioned. Furthermore, it is not because an image is seen that it will sell.
So, this new school of photographers, ( let’s call them the keyworders), assume that all their images are excellent and all they need to do to make then go over the top is to add some judicially found keywords, if possible a lot of them. And these master of linguistics then proceed in telling everyone that hope resides in the text attached in the image, forgetting the images themselves. They have become slaves to technology.
Poor sorry things. They spend more time on their computers torturing themselves with thesauri and dictionaries, controlled vocabularies and other scrabbles rather then taking more compelling images. Image buyers don’t buy keywords. Image buyers are not stupid, nor lazy. And, if anything, a photo agency is not Google. Professional image buyers go much deeper than the first 2 pages of results to find the right image. much deeper. Don’t forget, unlike the people that search Google, finding is a job for them.

But it is clear what is going on. The medium to untalented photographers who used to make a good income before microstock by selling images of apples for $300 are retreating to what might be their last defense line. They are desperately trying to fight a loosing battle on a field where they do not have the edge, leaving as a legacy, extremely well keyworded images that nobody wants. At least for that price.
There is no salvation in keywording. While it is important, it is the not magic wand that will save your collection. Amateurs are right behind and if anything, becoming everyday much better at keywording. And, although it feels like a lot of work, it doesn’t bring the rewards expected. The good old days of the professional stock photographers who chose that profession because no one would hire them on assignment is slowly coming to an end.

Commercial stock photographer shooting to fill an image bank of images is a dying breed. They are being hit with an extremely bitter price war that suddenly cracked open their nasty little secret. A photograph of an apple on a table should not be worth $300. Neither a long straight road ending in the horizon. Editorial photographers have been fighting the equivalent price war for many years and  it has harden the competition for quality images. So they took upon themsleves to compete with relevant quality images, not keywords.

It is not enough to have the image anymore, you have to have the best image.

Finally, the future of image search is not textual. It is ridiculous to believe that, in order to be found, an image needs to be explains with words. Companies are working on adapting the way we think to the way we search and soon you will see the results. And the “science” of keywording will look as amusing as the tools left behind by the cavemen.

Posted in keyword, prosumer, flickr, editorial | Print | 2 Comments »

May 21, 2007 by pmelcher.

There is something fascinating, even quite mesmerizing about this site, Flickervision. It  displays, using Google Map, every new image added to Flickr and where it was uploaded from. While I do not see any immediate  professional application for it, it could be an interesting marketing tool for an editorial photo agency looking to highlight the depth of international coverage.

See it here: Flickrvision 

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May 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

I don’t understand. When images first started to appear on the internet way back in the 1990’s, photographers and agencies were up in arms about how web browser had to cache images in order to display them. It meant, and still does, that a copy of the images is downloaded into a computer, thus making everyone who sees your images, an infringer. Many tried, in vain, to find a way to display images without going through this process, even asking users to delete their cache after a visit.

That was a failed battle. Then, when Picture Search company Ditto.com launched, another segment of the photo industry raised their battle shields and even brought them to court. Obviously, when Google did the same, more people joined in. Displaying thumbnails without licensing them was, after all, a copyright infringement. Thanks to the Fair Use law, that battle was soon lost too.

Today, hundreds, if not thousands of images are continuously being stolen from either agencies or photographers’ online portfolio. Most drop their arms in despair in front of the quantity of known cases and live with this constant pain as if it was a normal part of doing business.

Yet, these are the same people asking, screaming and complaining about DRM in music. The same that downloaded free music from old Napster or the current Kazaa. They have MP3’s up the wazzoo, listening to stolen music while editing their images on hacked version of Photoshop. They cannot understand why a music company would not even let them copy ad nauseum music that they purchased legally.

There are two critical aspects at play here: one, the total lack of DRM initiative in the photo industry. Run a photo or photography DRM search in Google and you will find nothing, zero, nada, niente, zilch. There is the Plus initiative of course, but it is mostly a catalog of licensing terms, not a Digital Rights management. Maybe one day, someone, somewhere, will use it to create a photo DRM.

Second, it is the total lack group initiatives from this industry. Photographers and agencies have multiple association but not one of them has taken the initiative to start a DRM program. Everyone suffers from stolen images and ridiculous laws like Fair Use or the potential Orphan works, but yet everyone seems to believes its the others problem. Or maybe that it will fix itself.

Farmers used to go out together hunting for wolves when those came too close to their farms, yet this industry expects his neighbors to get rid of the danger. Retail stores invested a fortune into security cameras and other thief deterrent systems. Besides a hackable name and password, a visible erasable watermark, sometimes an invisible also erasable watermark, the photo industry takes little or no effort to protect their images. You would think it would be their priority number one, considering it is their livelihood.
It doesn’t make sense.

Posted in No sense, photoshop, finance | Print | No Comments »

May 16, 2007 by pmelcher.

One of the best kept secret of this industry is how agencies work in foreign markets. In the prints days, an agency would work with a sub agent in a specific country. Photographers would send process or unprocessed film and the agency would take it from there, paying for processing, editing, captioning and duping. The more agents, the more the duping and big fed ex boxes where send out to fly across the world. Commission rate worked like this. The main agency would take 50% commission on sales in its territory, and about 60% of sales outside its own country. Therefore, a photographer would see 50% of 60 %. The reason for this are explained above. The agency was taking all the financial burden of sending those images across the world, leaving the photographer with 30% of the total license fee.

And then came digital. Slowly, the work load on photographers increased. They now do the editing, captioning and sending. Agencies now set up automated ftp server that automatically forward these images to the network of sub agents. What is really interesting is that the commission rates have not changed. They are still mostly at 50%. Some agencies, like Getty, in an effort to raise their profits, have even pushed royalties down to 40 %.

But the most frightening part is that most, if not all agencies, have left their international sub agent agreement at the same level. No need for dupes, no need for heavy packages, no need for lengthy editing, so what justifies this rate ? If anything, the cost has gone down. The role of a subagent has merely become that of a local representative that guarantees follow up on payment and can sometimes offer a better market penetration that if one had to do the sells from far away.

So why have commission rates not changed? How come an agency still take 50% of all sales ? While in their territory, they could argue that they have overhead :sales and marketing, digital storage, electricity, etc, it is much harder to justify on international sales through sub agents. 50% on all international sales, when all they did was either burn CD or auto forward via ftp ?
One extremely fascinating breakthrough that no one has seemed to noticed about microstock agencies, is that they do not use any sub agents, nor distributors as they are called in the royalty free world. They have completely eliminated the need for third party distribution, thus cutting cost even more. And not at the expense of the photographers.

At a time when editorial space rates are going doing, when all publicly held photo agencies have posted a deficit for the first quarter of this year ( besides Getty), when microstock penetration in traditional market is rising, where footage is threatening to take over the internet space, it would be nice to see RM and Editorial photo agency revisit their agreements to better reflect the new realities and form a real partnership instead of a mere representation.

It would also be the time for some to revisit their international partnership and see if some countries would not be better off handled directly. Finally, it would also be a good time for photographers to have a nice long chat with their agencies.

Posted in transaction, editorial, getty, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

May 13, 2007 by pmelcher.

The next generation of photo agencies, once the scene clears and mediocrity finally disappears, will be two fold. The fast, simple, lean self service agencies (think microstock and RF) and the full service companies that will extend their offering to much more than just licensing images. Already we see the trend emerging, as Corbis offers rights clearance and Getty media management.

But it will go much further. To sustain a sizable growth while creating an obvious demarcation with the self serve agencies, some will elect to go deeper in customer care. Like offering creative support. Instead of just licensing an image, the agency will also offer creative and placement services. For example, helping a client not only to pick the right image but also work on his campaign, including final placement. As the “credit cards agencies” meld together with whatever will be left of the photo sharing community and offer a cheap and fast way to purchase images, other agencies will be holding the hands of their customers before and after the licensing of the image as an added service. Image buyers will decide which agency to work with, not so much based on the content but more on the quality and depth of the service.

It will become inevitable for content service providers to offer direct to end-users services. Currently ad buyers license images on behalf of companies and create the ads. Soon, and especially having in mind small businesses, one will be able to call a Getty or Corbis and ask them for help to create a campaign. In residence art directors’ will design, with the use of local imagery, a series of proposal while an Media buyer will come up with a few different offers for placement. At the end, the client will be offered a full package. The same could be done for book publishing and other segments of the industry. Obviously Microstock, RF and photo sharing sites will not be able to compete.

Direct to end user licensing, while already in progress in the editorial world, will hit the commercial stock hard and clear. While properly used technology will take care of the most important repetitive tasks, smart business owners will relocate internal resources to be more client facing. After all they are in a precarious position right now as they only interact with intermediate brokers acting on behalf of final users. The ironic part is that agencies themselves are also brokers, acting on behalf of photographers. So between me, the image eater, and the image creator, or otherwise called photographer, there is at least 2 people making decisions for us that might or might not be in my best interest. I would be curious to know, on average, how many people “touch” an image before it gets to me, the consumer. From the photographer who first takes it, to the art director who decides the size and position of the selected image, passing by editors, keyworders, commentators, IT staff, and so on. But I am digressing..

Posted in web 2.0, corbis, getty, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

May 11, 2007 by pmelcher.

2007 will be remembered as the year of the panic marketing. Misunderstanding the reasons for the success of microstock and fighting against an onslaught of new offerings, some photo agencies react by slashing prices, undercutting, resolving to a dump initiative. Reminiscent of the great depression of 1929, when the supply exceeded the demand, mostly because companies would not pay their employee enough to allow them to purchase anything, the photo industry has started a downward spiral into who will license the images the cheapest in the hopes of compensating their lost by increased volume.

Reading about how a21 is considering replacing licensing fees with advertising revenue ( how very 1999 dot com of them) or Corbis devaluating their Outline brand by offering cheaper celebrity portrait, I see a trend emerging that is typical of an industry poorly reacting to a sudden change.

Let’s review. The reason for the success of microstock is based on its community aspect: buyers and sellers are the same. Therefore the more sellers, the more buyers . Furthermore, they can offer very low prices because they have leveraged technology to its maximum, lowering production cost to a minimum. Besides the cost of editing, keywording and marketing they have brought the cost of an image sold to as close to zero as possible. What traditional royalty free companies who decide to follow suit in their pricing seem not to realize, is that their margins are so low, one would have to completely revisit their production cycle to be able to compete properly. Cutting the prices in order to compete is not going to work. Actually, it will just accelerate the losses.

In editorial photography, and I am sorry to see that, the same poorly thought initiative are being applied. Outline, owned by Corbis, believes that by slashing prices on its portrait photography, it will regain market share it lost to competitor like Mediavast’s Contour or Getty Exclusive collection. It is a huge mistake. For very long, Outline was the Tiffany or Cartier of the photo industry. High end photographs for a high price. Quality is something no one has a hard time paying for. But, as they lost their top contributors to the competition, and Corbis being Corbis, they have now decided to create a discounted version of itself. The result ? Not only they are they not responding to customer demands for higher quality and new cutting edge talents, but they are diluting their valuable brand. If anything, other celebrity portrait agencies are raising their prices, not lowering them. But as usual, in a panic situation, the first instinct is to lower prices.

Now, let’s look at Getty. They are not lowering any of their pricing. Quite the opposite, I would expect them to increase their rates, including in microstock . They are combating over supply with different tools: Customer service, quality, service, and mostly by leveraging technology. They are also about to enter international markets by producing local production. The celebrity world is good example of how this works. Take “American idol” or any reality TV show that are now some of the most watched. The concept of the show exports very well but in each of its countries it creates local stars that are completely unknown outside their borders. It is easy to license images of Tom Cruise but impossible to license any images of the new American Idol winner. Politics are the same. Sports can be very localized too.Try to sell a photograph of baseball Derek Jeter to Italy. And those are the images that sell the best. As I had written in a earlier post, to be global, you have to go local.
While slashing pricing always seem to be an obvious reaction to keep or maybe increase market shares, it always, always a bad idea. First and foremost, your loyal customers suddenly realize that you were overcharging them all this time. Second, if you do not have what they need, they really do not care how much you charge. And finally, revenue always follow the trend, they get slashed too.

In 1929, when companies realized their product did not sell anymore because of poor demand, they all started cutting their prices in a downward spiral until they hit the ground. The loss of income impacted the quality of their product. They misread the reason why their product were not selling.
PS: One big lesson of 1929 is that only the companies that maintained product quality and worked with their customers made it.

Posted in editorial, corbis, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »