Unapologetic Friday

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.

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