May 29, 2009 by pmelcher.

Here are a few of the most revolting persistent aspect of the photo Industry:

- Blogs that get people fired

- Blogs or magazines written by people that have never ever worked in the Photo Industry yet consider themselves experts on all it’s aspects.

- Photo agencies that do not pay their photographers.

- Photo Agencies that license images under cover of a “Research or Service Fee”.  They simply take images, usually offered for free, and sell them with absolutely no right to do so.

- People that confuse easy to copy with free. It’s not because you can download an image easily that you can use it for free.

- People that use images without asking first.

- Geeks that launch microstock companies every minutes because they can.

- Hackers that spend their days breaking in photo agencies databases and stealing hundreds, if not thousands of images.

- Photographers that think they are photographers because they learned how to properly light a scene.

- Photographers that think they are good because they have been in business for a long time. Persistence is not a measure of quality.

- Photo agencies and photographers that price their images with their feet. The photography business is like driving a car, if you don’t know what you are doing, you are a danger for the rest of us. Please step out.

- Corporations that beleive they can control everything. They can’t.

- Corporations that hire non photo people and bring them in this industry. They wouldn’t survive a minute, and they don’t, if they were not working for these companies.

- Companies that have been loosing money for 20 years and are still in business. Why not use the money for useful purposes instead of feeding useless “corpocrates” ( that is an invented word for : Corporate and Bureaucrats).

- Photographer and Agencies that beleive in Say’s Law : production does not automatically create demand. Quantity is not the motor of success. The Photo agency business is not a freakin Lottery.

- Photo consultants that tell you they have the key to success and tell you to take better pictures and charge you for that. Duh !!

- Big Companies threatening photographers if they work for a competing agency.

- Photo Festivals that are just an excuse for someone to cash in some nice sponsorship money and have their hands kissed like a G~d for a week.

- Those endless photo competitions that are really just an excuse for a company to make money.

- Slides shows online that don’t work or are badly done.

- Websites from Big Publishing companies  that say they have no budget for photos.

- People that say ” Well, everyone else has accepted that price”. I really couldn’t care less how dumb other people can be. And, last thing I want to do is be associated with them.

- Photo Associations that rack up as many members as they can so they can get sponsorship money. Yet, they do absolutely nothing to help their members.

- Organizations that try to create standards and end up creating extremely useless and complicated monsters. They never use what they preach on a daily basis , so why would they care?

- Photo Galleries that exhibit the same photographers or photographs over and over again.

- People that beleive that Google will save them.

- Software that are not even compatible with each other.

- Iphone Apps. Enough already. Not everything needs to end up as an Iphone App. It’s just not that cool anymore.

- Geeks that think they know better.

- Exact Image Search websites that return no result for images, although you have seen the image a  hundred times. And they don’t even crawl photo agencies, which could be useful for people looking to license an image.

and finally, I have to stop somewhere, those photographers that pollute our visual space with their crap.

Posted in license, IPTC, idee, Plus, commercial stock, technology, keyword, google, editorial, corbis, finance, PACA, photoshop, slideshow, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 27, 2009 by pmelcher.

“ASP is a membership association of more than 350,000 U.S. photographers, Photo agents, and Photo agency of every kind of photography. Through agreements with affiliated international societies, ASP also represents hundreds of thousands of photo creators worldwide. ASP is the only U.S.  rights organization created and controlled by photographers, Photo agents and Photo agency, with a Board of Directors elected by and from the membership.

ASP protects the rights of its members by licensing and distributing royalties for the  public display of their copyrighted works. ASP’s licensees encompass all who want to published copyrighted photography publicly. ASP makes giving and obtaining permission to publish photography simple for both creators and users of photography.”

Interesting, no ? You never heard of them because they do not exist. This is the ASCAP definition. The music organization. Why not an ASCAP for photography. Creators and licensing would have a central entity that could negotiated pricing and laws on their behalf. They could be sitting in Washington DC discussing the Orphan Work law, the Google Book fiasco and why not, create a free registry for its members and users. It could also create educational tools to help Flickr members understand how to license images and put an end to the potential dangers of Creative Commons.

It would also collect licensing fees and go after infringements. Finally, it could serve a worldwide, cross types discussion platform exclusively dedicated to the pure art of licensing images.

Indeed, I dream.  It would be quickly invaded by the corporate types seeking power more than solutions and, like the ASCAP itself, drown in its own bureaucracy and infertility. But the concept sounds good, no ?

Posted in copyright, technology, commercial stock, license, google, transaction, web 2.0, law | Print | No Comments »

May 26, 2009 by pmelcher.

This is important for many reasons ( more in a later post)  :
THE YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHERS ALLIANCE DEBUTS IN CHICAGO,
ALAMY FIRST TO PLEDGE SUPPORT

MAY 6, 2009, PAVILION, NEW YORK: The Young Photographers Alliance (YPA) (www.youngphotographersalliance.org) made its debut in Chicago at Picturehouse’s 4th annual event held on Thursday April 16, 2009 at the River East Art Center.

YPA is the creation of Jerry Tavin, co-founder of IC Worldwide (www.icworldwide.com) and Deborah Free, President of Picturehouse Marketing US/Visual Connections (www.picturehouse-us.com). Both are widely-recognized as advocates and leaders in the photography industry. Founded as an international not-for-profit educational foundation, YPA is focused on bringing disadvantaged students opportunities for advancement in photography.

With the elimination of art education in public schools and the ever-increasing cost of a college degree, these barriers are more difficult then ever to overcome. This lack of support directly affects photography students and could prove to have a long-term negative impact on the future of professional photography.

Amid these concerns, YPA was created to inspire and support the next generation of image makers through college scholarships, mentoring programs, internship opportunities and educational seminars, internationally.

“We are pleased that YPA was so well received after our announcement. The enthusiasm and support was immediate, both at the Picturehouse event and the PACA Annual Meeting held in Chicago,” said Jerry Tavin.

In addition to two scholarships already provided by Jerry Tavin and Picturehouse, Alamy (www.alamy.com), pledged a third scholarship for the 2009 recipients.

“We think the Young Photographers Alliance is a great concept, and we’re excited to be involved at this early stage.”
Alan Capel, Head of Content, Alamy

YPA is also pleased to announce the position of Erin Moroney of Axiom Photographic Agency (www.axiomphotographic.com) as their European Liaison. “I’m delighted to be part of YPA.  In this current climate, it’s very easy to be cynical about the industry.  It’s refreshing to be involved with an organization that is so committed and passionate about nurturing new, young photographic talent.”

YPA is receiving endorsements from various organizations as well. ASPP Executive Director, Cathy Sachs states, “The American Society of Picture Professionals is very pleased to add its support to this wonderful new initiative.  The mission of the Young Photographers Alliance dovetails very well with our own educational and mentoring programs.  In addition the whole photography community has an opportunity to come together to share the passion of these disadvantaged young photographers, and create a nurturing environment for them.”

In New York on October 13, 2009, the evening prior to Picturehouse, a reception to announce the first Young Photographers Alliance scholarship recipients will be held at the Metropolitan Pavilion. In addition, a Silent Auction of the work of many of the scholarship applicants as well as professional photographers will be on display. All proceeds will be divided between the scholarship funds of the students and YPA’s various projects. More information about YPA’s programs and events will be available in the coming months.

#######

Be involved or die…

Posted in commercial stock, CEPIC, PACA, editorial, france | Print | No Comments »

May 21, 2009 by pmelcher.

Web 2.0 and beyond is all about empowering the consumer. It is no longer a viable business to make a product and sell it. These days, you have to let your customers act upon it to make it more personal. Technology allows this and as we have seen with Nike and it’s sneakers, it is highly successful. After all, we are individuals and we like our product to reflect us, and our taste.

Enter publisher and photographer of a  “A Day in the Life ” legend, Rick Smolan. He is releasing the “Time Capsule” book on Obama that lets you add your own images. Along with those of respected professional, you can now have a coffe table book that also contains your own photographs and experience. You can also add some of your own text. Every issue becomes exclusive to you.

More explanation here :

This is only the beginning of a new trend we have already seen with the MINE experiment from Time Inc. More and more, a bit like Google for news, one will be able to customize what they want to see, read or purchase. Not only customize, but personalized so that the user/buyer becomes part of the experience. An active consumer. A prosumer.

This will affect how images will be licensed in the future as, the more we seen on demand publications, the more a photo agency or photogrpaher will have to adapt its business to follow. Websites will not longer be a repository of stock images to be used by pro researchers, but accessible by anyone that would prefer to customize their edition.

An example : I read Time magazine and I am an avid  fan of the Aurora news photographers. I could choose to have the whole issue illustrated by that agencies photographers only. or mix and match with multiple sources of your liking . The same could be done with websites, books, or anything using photographs. Of course, I could decide to have only Flickr images.

This will mean the end of monopolistic distribution channels for photography and instead of trying to seduce photo editors, Photo agencies will have to seduce the public directly.

This is exciting times. See and purchase the Obama Time Capsule here.

Posted in copyright, magazine, technology, Aurora, license, TIME, editorial, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, news | Print | No Comments »

May 20, 2009 by pmelcher.

“ITN’s shareholders have reportedly held detailed discussions to sell a majority stake in the News at Ten and Channel 4 News producer to Getty Images, the international picture agency.

Getty Images, founded by Mark Getty, grandson of J Paul Getty, and the former banker Jonathan Klein in 1995, “is an enthusiastic bidder for a majority stake in the commercial broadcaster”, according to a report by the former FT and Times media correspondent Ray Snoddy, published in the latest edition of the Royal Television Society’s monthly journal, Television. It is not clear if the talks are still ongoing.”

Read more here

Seems Getty is going all out video stock in order to escape the declining photo market.

Posted in technology, web 2.0, wire service, transaction, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 20, 2009 by pmelcher.

Like a tree that falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it fall. Did it make any noise ? The war in Sri Lanka, is it even happening ?

War photographer Don McCullin reflects in the Times ( UK) how the war in Sri Lanka has become another example of how governments manage to  shield themselves from word opinion by blocking photographers to do their jobs. As the USA, along with other countries, continue to loose daily newspapers and reduce staff and cost, so goes the truth in information. It is slowly vanishing. Trust me, if a news outlet would offer $100,000 for any valid images coming out of Sri Lanka, there would have be hundreds of photographers. But why risk your life for $200? or less. Why bother getting arrested or wounded for your images to end up as a few frames in a bland daily wire feed ?

It is just not governments that have succeeded in hiding the truth. Corporations like Getty Images, by applying their “burned grounds” pricing policy, are they accomplices. They have rendered the job of photojournalist unsustainable for individuals. Thus, making it unrewarding to try and capture the images that make us learn.

Citizen photojournalisms, the buzz of  2008, cannot help here, as the victims cannot be observers in their own tragedy. And even if they did, they would have a hard case in getting those images out. Only a pro could have brought us back compelling images.

As McCullin writes, ” I am 74 now and I have been watching this conflict in Sri Lanka unfold with the same horror I felt 50 years ago. We cannot afford to be shielded from what people do to each other in war.”

Thanks Will !

Posted in photojournalism, newspaper, technology, wire service, finance, news, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 16, 2009 by pmelcher.

Corbis press release about the multimillion preservation facility recently opened in the suburbs of Paris, France. :

“The Sygma Preservation and Access Facility is a testament to our commitment to preserving the profoundly important Sygma collection,” said Gary Shenk, CEO, Corbis. “So many talented photographers have contributed to Sygma, and we are honoured ( sic)  to safeguard and make accessible these treasures for today and the future.”

 Including those 12, 680 originals from Chris Usher that were lost ?

DPP: How are rates being set today?
Getty Images: Rates are very much set by the market. It’s always our aim to maximize the revenue that we can get for any given usage.

Except when custumors are “premium subscribers”…

Getty’s own Nick Evan Lombs fights it off with a one on one against fierce Renee Martin from the mighty Corbis..Ugly stuff.

Posted in commercial stock, No sense, france, corbis, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 15, 2009 by pmelcher.

There is no standard in photography captioning and metadata. That lossless group of taxonomist geeks who have been mismanaging the IPTC organization  have made a mess of the whole thing and its getting worse. Someone should get fired for good.

Not only IPTC is not a standard, it is now being implemented properly by anyone. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Every single one photo application you open these days has a different header for the same fields . Depending on what software you are using, the fields have different names ? why is that ? where is the standard ? Should you ever want to educate someone on how to properly caption his/her pictures, it is impossible as you cannot even exchange proper field name’s with them.

At the time when there is more images exchanged and used  worldwide, it is impossible to write or read metadata in a standardized way. It is as if this was invented and managed by Microsoft employees : a mess with no logic and practicality whatsoever.

Someone with a brain should take this organization over  and really do some productive work instead of spending time in 8 hour long session explaining to people how a standard is not standardized. And it really doesn’t matter who does it, but lets stop the massacre.This is ruining everyone’s work .

Lets have a simple 6 fields entry that would be the exact same for all software application that would contained the minimum information necessary, like copyright, description, contact info, date, location and keywords.  Make them stick to the image regardless if it is cropped, resized, altered, spit on, whatever. The metadata should travel with the images like its pixels.

And that is it. After that, you can attached EXIF , XMP, Word, Side cars, Dublin beer  and your dog to it, should you want.  Who cares ?

look at that :

“QCode:
A special IPTC format to express the code of a concept which was introduced with the family of G2-Standards. Typical for the format is having a string, then a colon, and finally another string. As the G2-Standards require to have potentially long strings as globally unique identifiers the major goal of QCodes are to shorten them and to make the controlled vocabulary visible this code pertains to. The format of a QCode is in short: “short name for the controlled vocabulary”:”code of the concept” like e.g. subj:06011000 “

who has time for that crap ?

KIS : keep it simple, you geeks !! Simple, useful and agreeable to use . We do not need to know the shoe size of the the photographer. Complicated does not mean intelligent. It just means complicated. And software developers, if you do not stick to the standard than go play somewhere else, we will not use your products. Go mess with someone else’s mind.

As the CEPIC members are about to sit in their chairs for eight long hours to listen to a bunch of nerdy taxidermist talk about field #110 and how it took them 15 meetings to agree on what it should do, they should start a revolt and throw their chairs at them.

Field #110 ? who has the time to fill 110 fields for every images ?  What is wrong with these people ? do they ever caption images themselves ? Certainly doesn’t look like it.

Enough blabbering, IPTC people ! 6 fields, all named the same way and that is it !!

Posted in technology, commercial stock, No sense, IPTC, keyword, CEPIC | Print | 3 Comments »

May 14, 2009 by pmelcher.

You have to love the French !! This is a good one:

Here is the latest. In an attempt to be more convinient and user friendly, I presume, the French governement has decided to  put free automated passport machines in all the city halls ( 2000 nationwide). The idea is that you can get everything done in one place, fill in your papers and get pictures done. In the spirit of the french capitalo-socialist society, these are offered free as  it is covered by your local taxes.

However, a whole bunch of french photography organisation have now launched a petition  against this new initiative. Their claim is that theses “machines” will put out of work the artisanal photographers who use to do this for a fee. The whole passport photographer profession is a risk of losing their jobs. Thousands of jobs ar at risk, the petition claim. I fear a strike is not far away.

Lets review. These photographers claim that they make 15 % to 20 % of their revenue from passport pictures. Wow, I guess France never heard of those Photo booth. Nor do French people apparently take their own pictures. There is no limit to french coquetry. What can we say, they want to look good

Seems to me that these photographers are looking to keep french customers ignorant of their options. After all, nothing prevents them to still go to a pro and get a nicely set up portrait. But what if they just need a down and dirty passport image ? Why can’t they use a machine. For free, if it the desire of the government ?

People, the profession of passport photographer is dying. do something !!!  sign the petition here, right now. Help stop the advance of technology.

Posted in technology, No sense, transaction, france, law | Print | No Comments »

May 13, 2009 by pmelcher.

Who owns the news ? The ongoing debate between news outlets ( AP, NYTimes..) and mash ups ( Google news..)  has made this question surface. Is the first one reporting the news the owner of that news ? That used to be the accepted tradition.

Now with Twitter, Facebook, im , sms, blogs and Attention Deficit Disorder ( ADD) at all time high, it is almost impossible to say who was the first to report it. The written word has the weakness of being very volatile and impersonal ( not linked to the person who wrote it ). No one really remembers where and when they read an article about a news item. What matter is the story itself, not where it was reported.

Difficult to own any news, under these circumstances.

Some news can be owned. Great interviews, for examples. Those that reveal something new ( I beleive a whole movie was recently made about an historical interview ). The journalist creates the news and thus can claim ownership of it.

Photography is different. Many, many examples show us that the photograph is the news. Without the image, there would be no news. The photograph has to travel with the information to make it news. Thus, ownership is much clearer.

Why does it matter ? because the internet is all about  content. It is the raw material that fuels website. Twitter or Facebook, two of the hottest website these days, along with Google or Myspace would not be anything without content. Thus the owner of the content is the real powerhouse here, not the technology operator.

There are two types of of news photographers:

Those who report and those who create news. Those who report are those that will go at a press conference, shoot a few head shots with a microphone and file the story. They do not own the news, they just merrily illustrate it. They call themselves news photographers but they are only news illustrators. Their live is filled with events to cover, at a certain place and at a certain time.They can never claim to be the owner of a news item.

Then there is the photojournalists. They have no idea what they will cover next because, like  real journalists, they ignore press releases and agendas. They want and need to break the news. They will find a story and write about it with their camera.. The story becomes their photograph. They can even make news within a news. There are many example during the Vietnam war, for example. They didn’t discover the war, they discovered how it was made.. and shocked the world in the process.

Whoever owns the raw material ( remember Rockefeller ?)  is in power. If you can’t, owning the channel of distribution , you know the pipelines, is second best ( Google and Getty images know that very well). Because of the extreme dilution of the raw material ( think User generated Content), it is quasi impossible to have a monopoly on the raw material itself. However, there is no problem with owning the distribution channels.

The interesting challenge here is when ownership of the raw material ( think photography here) will come back on the hands of the creators. When copyright can be tracked much better?  When the flow of images is no longer controlled by the pipeline owners ? Will that ever happen ?

Posted in copyright, license, celebrity, magazine, technology, IPTC, google, transaction, photojournalism, prosumer, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »