June 30, 2008 by pmelcher.

Photographers used to shoot black and white because they had no other choices. Photojournalist were somewhat frustrated by their limitations of not being able to represent the world the way they saw it. Then, color became available and they jumped on it. Finally, the world could be reproduced the way it was. Sure, for a long time, because of the nature of film itself, the colors were somewhat off. But still, it was like the word processor for the reporter. Today, it seems that color has been abandoned by the photojournalists that want to be at the cutting edge of reporting. Why ?

Today, two things happened to me, simultaneously. First, the announcement of Magnum new members. All black and white shooters  (besides Alec Soth). Second, I got a copy of Dispatches, the new magazine created by Gary Knight and someone else . Again, all black and white. That would not be so bad if those black and white were different. But quite frankly, they are all from the the same school of “very dark, poorly lit, very crowded, and slightly out of focus”. Most were probably taken with Holga’s or other crappy cameras. They all feel like seeing someones  very depressed bad dreams. The only feeling that emerges from viewing them is a feeling of  “hopefully the next picture will tell me what I am looking at”. But no, like a bad dream, it keeps on. For Dispatches, it is for an obscene number of pages. For Magnum’s new members, it is probably for the rest of their lives.

I was really looking forward to seeing Dispatches. I was also really looking forward to Magnum reinventing itself by accepting some new colorful original members. Both have been very, very disappointing.

Photojournalism, at least the one promoted by the photojournalism intelligentsia,  is all about moods.   Its mood photography. And the mood right now is very dark, very depressed, very Goth. There must be another way to depict the world around us than this photographic teen age angst, no ? Goethe would have no problem finding his young Werther in these images.

Enough is enough.  Black and white is only rich if can compensate for its lack of colors. It is an handicap that should be overcome with a passion, not infinite sorrow. Sadness, unless if you have a lot of time to waste on a terrace of a Parisian cafe, if very boring. Existentialism, or at least the fashion that went along with it died long before Sartre did. This absence of being in all these empty photographs remind me of the endless conversation people used to have over how much “life sucks”. That was back when I was 15.

Don’t take me wrong. I love photojournalism. With such a passion that it rips my heart to see it abuse by bored rich kids with a camera. They reject color and digital like rich suburban kids decide to become punks and get a tattoo. Against society and to piss of their parents. To get a reaction. It is a bit if these guys were trying to hide the reality of the situation they photographs with all these artifacts. This is what this current school of photojournalism makes me think about:  A bunch of spoiled rich kids rejecting the very foundation that made photojournalism what it is.

And this is not a good time for this.

Sometimes I wonder if any of these guys even know how to take a photograph in focus anymore. This is how ridiculous it has become. I know, I know, I am not being politically correct and in acceptance of what is fashionable to like. But I will take a Natchwey anytime against a Kratochvil. A Kashi before a Pellegrini. Call me old fashion, but I love color. I love photographs that speak to me about a situation rather than a “mood”. I have an insatiable thirst for truth and knowledge and I count on photography to teach me. I count on photojournalist to help me understand my world. I really, really do not need them to add more puzzles and complication with these  “plastic camera taken at night BW photos” that Edgar Allen Poe would have taken minutes before committing suicide.

I have a mood already. Just pass me reality.

Posted in focus, Magnum, magazine, photojournalism, editorial, news | Print | 2 Comments »

June 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

It is not going to get better. In fact, it is only going to get worse. With the price of gasoline rising everywhere in the world and political freedom slowly being burned out, journalism and  twin sister photojournalism, will continue to suffer a slow and painful death.

First, there are the newspapers, that cannot compete against the web anymore. While it was just  against the speed and visuals of television, newspapers still had a few weapons of choice : The written word, the photographs and the ease of location. Unlike a TV set, newspapers could be carried around everywhere. Against the web, none of these advantages exist anymore. We can get news as faster and in even more locations than any physical newspapers can provide. No need to find a newsstand, the news is on our phones, or laptops. We can select what we read where we want. And we get images, if not videos. The medium itself is dying.

News Magazines, at least weeklies, are not doing much better. They have to put all their efforts into exclusive reporting in order to continue to compete with the web’s immediate delivery. But with the rising cost of staff writers and photographers added to the ever rising cost of travel, it is very fast becoming a negative income proposition. If you cannot send your own team on location, you will not get any exclusive coverage.

As for the Web, well, it is obvious. Newspapers, magazines, TV stations, everyone is competing for attention while delivering the content for free. In a way, news outlets are cannibalizing themselves, eating away at their very own core.

Here is the dilemma with journalism today:  It is still trying to be a profit center when obviously it cannot be one anymore. News used to be for sale and people would gladly pay for it. They even went along with the fact that their attention was sold twice, to them and to advertisers.

The past and present news empires are a testimony of its success. Organization owned the news because they were the only ones capable of gathering it  and distributing it for profit . Not so anymore.

Because the cost is rising and because we are dealing with profit businesses who need to cut cost , more and more news outlet are not even selling their own news, but news and photographs bought at wholesale prices and sold at retail . AP, Reuters, AFP and others are some of these news wholesalers. They can spread out their cost of reporting to thousand of clients. But for us, readers, we only get a washed down version of an event. We see the same photographs over and over. We do not feel any connections to our favorite publications ever since the competing one has the same exact content.

Why should I pay for something that is everywhere ? To anyone, something that is everywhere is either very cheap, or free. News is not considered as it should be a paid  item anymore. It has been devalued to almost nothing. News outlets played a deadly bidding war against each other not by increasing the quality of their reporting but rather reducing the amount of money spend on gathering it.

Aggregation, shut downs, mergers are certainly are only elements of this downward spiral. In its insatiable thirst to remain profitable, the news industry is killing itself by cutting costs. They rely on Britney Spears to pump up the sales: cheap to cover and rather entertaining. Wrong idea.  A single guy with a desktop and no notion of anything but himself can outdo any organization with no money : Perezhilton.com. With free images nonetheless, as he allegedly stole photographs from photo agencies.

So what is the solution ? Cut the middle man. For the readers to directly pay for the news by making news a public service. Before you start spitting on the floor while throwing your fist to the sky and cursing my name, let me explain. Currently, you are already getting a lot of publicly funded news. AFP, for example, widely distributed in the USA by Getty Images, is a government-owned company paid for with French taxpayer’s money. DPA, grand master behind EPA ( European press agency),  is also partly funded by the German government.

Some of the best reporting, currently, is done by  non for profit companies. In the US, channel Thirteen does some of the most amazing news coverage. It has the time, the resources and the will. Because it is not trying to sell you anything, it focuses on the issues. I know, you will say that you do not want to read or see propaganda. That is like saying that all public schools are brainwashing your kids, that firefighters are bias when they put out fires or that public beaches are secretly bugged with microphones.

Of course the temptation will be great, for a government to want to censor the news, if they feel they own it. But like other public institution, like libraries for example, there are many ways to protect the editorial content. And in a way, government interference might be more welcomed than any current hidden big business agendas ( think Newscorp and Murdoch for example). At least I can vote them out. I would much prefer my tax money goes to help fund journalistic investigations than helping killing people.

Just think of it : openly public funded news outlets with finally the right amount of funds to properly cover the news. Journalist and photo reporter will  not be under the pressure of being fired all the time. Foreign governments might just be that much more careful if they know that the journalist are government employees.

We would finally get some news. Any and all news.  Some regular updates on Darfur even if only less of us care.We would enjoy original and in depth reporting, great original photography and a much, much better understanding of our world. Would you really mind knowing that the New York Times is own by the US government ? Or by public funding ? That it serves the public needs rather than a private group of investors ?

It would be a real boost for photojournalists around the world and the quality of reporting because, let’s face it : It is not because of the lack of quality and interest that photojournalism is dying, it is because of the current inadequate economics behind it.

Posted in newspaper, multimedia, magazine, TIME, photojournalism, news, editorial, wire service, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 27, 2008 by pmelcher.

“We think Corbis has the resources and patience to succeed in the long-term. We will beat them with better [commercial] execution” Gary Shenk, CEO of Corbis to the Sydney Morning Herald.

There is long term and than there is eternity. Corbis is gambling that eventually, one day, when no one is looking, for no particular reason, ( probably because there is no one left on Earth), just like that, they will “succeed” and maybe post a profit along with it.

The SMH article is  about the rise of amateur photography and  Snapvillage, the Ireland based subsidiary of Corbis that the money loosing company has build to  compete with Istockphoto and other Microstock.

Posted in Midstock, commercial stock, prosumer, finance, corbis, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

June 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

I am a big fan of coops. Initially started in France, Magnum being the most famous one, Coops are small photo agencies created by a group of photographers who pool their resources in order to survive. Most do not last very long, because, along with the financial pressures, getting along amongst photographers with a lot of personality is not a easy task.

That’s what a coop is, really : a group of very individual individuals with a very strong ego. Thus internal fights and argument are quite frequent and explosive. Nevertheless, although very rare in the US ( VII being the exception), coops are striving in Europe. Not just France, but Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy. You have to have that socialist edge to create or be part of a coop, not really an American thing.

Photographers who belong to those coop have complete editorial freedom and shoot what they want, when they want.It is not always favorable to great business, but it allows for genuine photography. And that is where they are very strong. Far from the hard news already covered by countless wire services and photo agencies, Coop photographers tend to cover the unexpected and forgotten. In a industry now only obsessed by speed, they take their time. They do not produce much or fast and sometimes tend to over think their images. But nevertheless, you might be surprised. very surprised.

PictureTank, the Coop of Coops, or rather a platform that allows for different agencies to pool their images in one place, is a great way to discover and follow the work of many photographers. Presented in full sets rather than single images, it displays the story the way they were meant to be shown. It carries a full respect for the photographers work.

These agencies are not affected by Getty or microstocks. Not even Britney Spears worries them as they all seem to have made a vow of poverty. They understand that the path they have taken will not lead them to stardom or richness ( material, that is), but like priests of a Godless church, they have decided to devote their lives to photography. They cannot be touched because their world is not made of nice cars and expensive restaurants. They care about their work and nothing else.

Not all are good, far from it. You probably have the same ratio of good to bad than anywhere else. Some are helplessly useless while others shine like diamonds. No surprises here.

At a time when photography is all about numbers, dollars and no sense, where photo magazines worry about a supermodel’s ass while others are proud of their scatological content, where  Alain Meckler admits failure even in trade shows production and Corbis remains hopelessly in the red, it is good to see some fresh production.

Posted in photojournalism, Search, magazine, Magnum, wire service, slideshow, getty, corbis, france, editorial, Microstock | Print | 2 Comments »

June 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

So revenues from traditional clients seem to decline. Price per image are stagnating, if not dropping, while market shares seem to be eaten away by more aggressive, younger companies that have much lower operating costs. The cost of entry in the photo agency world has dropped so low that a new photo agency is born almost every month. In all categories, RM, RF, Micro, editorial. While they are not really offering anything new, nor do they have any long term planning, they dilute the general offering of stock image on the market by making more of the same images available.

Sites like Alamy, Photoshelter and others like microstock have even broken the traditional link between photographers and agencies and are now just acting as distributors and plain lean mean selling machines. They have little or no personal regards for the photographers they represent, have never met them nor do they intend to, have no connections with their careers, have no clue what they will shoot next and almost couldn’t care less. All they want to do is connect them with as many buyers as possible and collect a percentage on every license granted, a la Ebay.

Some traditional agencies  distributors have already done that (think Getty Images here). Part of Istockphoto recent growth must be heavily tied to its introduction to existing Getty Image clients. It still remains compartmentalized, for now. The very near future will be to see all prices and all contributors on the same platform. There is no reason to keep the brand separated on different websites, is there ?

So, what is a photo agency to do in such a world ? Well, some are looking for collateral revenues. The editorial celebrity space is a good place to look for answers. Most have created their own blogs, along with advertising. Traffic generates attention but also revenue. They were already receiving a lot of hits from consumers looking for the latest images, so why not capitalize on it ? Some like X17 ( x17online)  are doing quite well. Getty Image, with its ViewImages and Jamd’ are also in this space, in a slightly different way.

Splashnews has introduced an interesting experiment recently. Under the heading of Splash Style, they take  online fashion shopping to the next level > here is how it works. You watch one of their paparazzi videos and click on a dress or handbag that you like. It appears on the right as still picture. You can then proceed, by clicking on the still, to go to an online store who will be more then happy to sell you that dress.

Obviously, Splash is taking a commission on the sales, even maybe just on the click to the store. After all, someone might not purchase that dress immediately. While clicking on a specific body part of someone who doesn’t want to be filmed is a tricky exercise, ( go ahead, try it. I’ll wait here.

…Ok, back ? Hard, no ?,

the concept is appealing. How to make money with stills, or videos, on your site, without licensing any images and respecting your traditional clients and no overhead. Without even needing inside information, it is quite evident that this model is not very lucrative. Yet. But it is another very good example of how modern photo agencies need to break out of the traditional licensing model and aggressively seek new revenue streams. We had touched on that topic here.

The days of quietly waiting at a desk for someone to call seeking for an image that you might or not have are over. Gone. Finished. Someone has gotten to them faster, sooner and probably cheaper. Nothing personal, they needed to, in order to survive. They made the mistake of entering this business because it was cheap and looked really easy. Now they are stuck in it. And you are stuck with them.

So, instead of waiting for the good old days to come back, ( which they will not because they never existed), or Getty to call and offer a few hundreds of millions for you archive ( they will not, they have what they need right now), or just some incredible lucky break ( better play the Lotto..), it is time to look for those collateral revenues that might just end up being your main revenue.

Posted in celebrity, magazine, technology, commercial stock, license, finance, getty, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

June 19, 2008 by pmelcher.

When Brian Storm speaks, the world of photojournalism learns. The Poynter Institute, a journalistic school, has a 26 minute long interview with the founder of Mediastorm. The interview, being held in front of a boring backdrop by a girl who obviously needs some more courses in broadcast interviews could have used some visual pointers to go along Storm’s amazing insight.

Posted in multimedia, mediastorm, magazine, technology, newspaper, photojournalism, news, editorial, msnbc.com, corbis | Print | No Comments »

June 17, 2008 by pmelcher.

- A useful blog. With some delay but with quite a bang, Photoshelter finally launches a very useful blog for its users and beyond. Full of tips, info, rules and dynamism, it could very well become a very helpful resources for stock photographers who take photography seriously. Does that mean they plan to close the other useless egg hugging blog who rips off hundreds of valuable images for free under the cover of ‘fair use” ? Go ahead, shoot that blog

more on School of Stock here:

- Multimedia continues to rule : Ed Kashi  has launched a wonderful website entirely dedicated to his work on Nigeria delta. Curse of the black gold, offers, among other option, a great multimedia who has all the attributes of a Mediastorm production. A must see, keeping in mind that Kashi was briefly captured and jailed to bring this issue to the world.

Multimedia here:

Update : June 19, 2008 : this article on MSNBC :

Nigerian oil field shut after U.S. worker seized

- Geolocation without GPS: Geolocation is the ability to pinpoint the location, on a map, of where an image was taken. Carnegie Mellon University took millions of  already geographically tagged  images from Flickr as a tool to identify the location of an image, any image. Works a bit like this. You upload an image which compared to millions of Flickr set. By recognizing attributes, it can almost accurately find out, by itself, where the image was taken. Using the same principle, one can easily see how automated keywording could benefit from this crowdsourcing approach. More details here

- Getty’s latest set of numbers: Funny how no one noticed how the Wireimage brand took a huge beating after being purchased by Getty. According to Getty’s published number, Wireimage went from  + $ 3 million a quarter, to a few hundred thousands the next full quarters. What happen ? Did the Wireimage staff just stopped working ? Furthermore, PumpAudio seemed to have also fallen to zero revenue for two quarters after acquisition.

Posted in mediastorm, celebrity, technology, commercial stock, multimedia, Search, slideshow, flickr, web 2.0, keyword, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

$54,000 ?… “Advertisers pay as much as $54,000 to run a one-day ad package on the site.” says the LA times article on Perezhilton.com. It is already a known fact that some agencies now license images to that site, in full knowledge of its past infringement and the current lawsuit. What is less known is that those images are licensed for a mere $50 or so. Some of these agencies are probably also screaming about microstock and  its low balling prices.

PerezHilton.com is not a small one person operation anymore. It is well staffed. It receives 7 million pages/view a day. A day ! that is 7 times the amount of readers that people magazine gets in a week. With a licensing system like gumgum.com, at .20 cents per one thousand views, that would be $1,400 per day/per image.

Yet, they pay much, much less for images.

When are photo agencies going to wake up ? Perezhilton.com, without photographs would not and could not exist. It is all about displaying photographs. Yet, they set the pricing rules and not the opposite. It is insanity.

Most say, “it’s for the publicity”.” If you sale an image to PerezHilton.com, it sells better elsewhere”. Why not pay them to publish your image, if you really believe that ? at $54,000 a pop.

There is no excuses for these ridiculous prices besides professional ineptitude. It is not the market’s fault if prices are falling, it is due to the incompetence of certain and their misunderstanding of the laws of pricing. It is due to the stubborn idiocy of some that believe that  a sale, any sale is better than nothing. No other businesses function like that. Imagine going to Tiffany’s and saying,”I will only pay $50 for that diamond necklace because, after all, I know a lot of people and when I wear it, I will tell them I got it from you”

Nike, Addidas, Canon, Sony, practically any company make you pay to advertise their product. People buy T-shirts with the brand displayed in big letters. Cameras have logo on them. It is almost impossible these days to leave a store with a product that does not carry the manufacturers name in big on it. And no one gives a break.

No one, no one goes to a clothing store and say: “I will wear your T-shirt that says Nike on it if you sell it to me for $1..”.Not even those that license images for around $50.

Yet, the photo agency world does it. At least some of its players.

At $54,000 a day on advertising, one should think PerezHilton.com can pay more than $50 an image. Especially when the site does nothing else but publish images.

Mario Lavandeira, the real person behind the site, “debuted a clothing line, sold exclusively at retail chain Hot Topic, last week. He also appears in a summer movie, “Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild,” hosts a syndicated radio show, is writing a book on celebrities and is in talks to start his own record label. “I want my own little empire.” ”

And he will succeed thanks to the helpful hands of some challengingly impaired photo agency people ( you know who you are)  who think they are outsmarting their competition by underselling. Or, hopefully, he will have to use the money he saved to pay for his blatant copyright  infringement of X17 and INF images.

Full article on Perezhilton.com here

Posted in celebrity, magazine, gumgum, license, transaction, news, law, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 10, 2008 by pmelcher.

We are getting there..slowly.  It is not an easy road, but we are getting closer.  In the last year or so, we have seen more and more image search companies come out and expose themselves. Even the even mightiest, and certainly the worst, Google Image is thinking about changing its algorithm.

The holy grail is, of course, the end of the keyword based search ( aaaargh !). The first baby step we are currently seeing only focuses on face recognition. For two main reasons :

- A face is always a face, a triangle between two eyes and a mouth, and rather easy for a computer to recognize.

- Between celebrities and relatives, when you deal with image search, the majority of people are looking for either friends, relatives, themselves or more pix of celebrities . There is a huge market.

So here goes many worldwide software engineers claiming image search nirvana. At least when looking for people. I have tested a few, recently, all in Beta and none quite there yet.

TinEye: In a league of it own right now as it does much more than just face recognition image search. Probably the most advanced of all,  its limitation is its extreme accuracy. Looking for an image and it will find that image, nothing less, nothing more. Every altered version of it. Great for many, many usages, but a bit limited for those just seeking a similar or inspiration.

Very far away are :

- Polar Rose. Swedish based, it has been full of promises for many years but with disappointing result up to now. Also starting in the face recognition, its algorithm just became clear to me when it recently invited me to Beta test its Plug in. I was expecting a TineEye sort of plug in, but instead, they put me to work. What is up with that ? .

The plug in works like this : every time you are on a web page, it scans every image for a face. It then puts a square around the face and asks you to put the name. As you enter the name, it starts suggesting options. It was always right on the money. At first, I was really impressed, as in ” How does it know ?”. And briefly later on, I recognized the trick. It scan any available text around the image, looks for two words next to each other starting with a capital letter and assumes that should be the name of the person in the pic. All I have to do is confirm. Thus, Polar Rose is currently no more than an elaborate and free version of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Putting the community to work. While there nothing wrong, in principal, with this approach, with all these website these days that ask for my free input, I am close to putting full 24 hours days of work, for free.

Their chances of success, using that approach, is minimal. I, for one, will not become a slave to the machine.

- Picollator : Russian by birth, this new image search also looks for faces. You can even upload a sketch and it will try to match it. I tried with this image :

surprisingly got no result.  So I went for the TinEye favorite, the Mona Lisa:

.

I got this :

Some matching results, some very weird ones.

Face recognition and matching can be a very useful tool for the news and celebrity world as photographers and editors could quickly edit film with proper name spelling by scanning the web for matching results. Especially for those B to D celebrities. It is, at this stage, still very sketchy and not quite ready for the big time.

It is also a good indication of how far we still are from a computer recognizing, properly, everything in an image. Right now, we are only scratching the matching part and even that, has it flaws.

It is also very important to know that all these sites are in Beta, meaning far from claiming 100 % accuracy and should not be dismissed until officially proven ineffective. You can try all of them, for yourself :

Tineye

Polar Rose

Picallotaor

Posted in Canada, technology, idee, celebrity, keyword, web 2.0 | Print | 1 Comment »

June 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

What do you do when you have a lot of money to spend on marketing ?

- You can create a false on line museum like Corbis did with the MofAA. A bit confusing and not quite sure how it well help sell more images, it is, however certainly a conversation starter . Anyone noticed how, since the acquisition of Veer, Corbis marketing has suddenly matured into new heights ?

- Create a cool website. Getty has created Moodstream so you can stream your mood. Mixing music, video, stills, one can set up their own customize stream. It does lead to a place where you can learn more about the visuals and maybe a sale.

Both seem to have been put “out there” in the hopes of getting discovered and go “viral”, what the French call Buzz marketing. Corbis has even set up a page for their Museum on Facebook  hoping to generate traction. Both companies are hoping to tap into the high end coolness factor, trying to aggressively difference themselves from the plebeian microstock and its inbred word of mouth.

Hard to say if either initiative will work out, although it is quite obvious that both put a lot of resources into these efforts. Pro creative will certainly be amused and impressed by these internet playgrounds, and some might even be tempted to license some art. The results, with a less culturally savvy crowed, are dubious at best, especially for the Corbis experiment.

Time will tell which is the right path to sustain, or increase, RM or Traditional RF sales, and if any are a customer magnet.

Click on the images below to visit:

Posted in web 2.0, technology, commercial stock, slideshow, corbis, Royalty free, getty, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »