A cacophony of frenzy sellers

June 29, 2009 by pmelcher.

It is not the amount of images available to image buyers that is an issue these days, its the proliferation of places you can purchase them from.

It used to be quite expensive to set up a photo agency, back then, as everything was a manual process. It needed a lot of manpower and physical actions to get images in and out the door. Today, thanks to technology, it cost less than $100 to set up and run a fully functional website with a search engine and basic download.

So everyone is doing it. From photographers to Eastern Europeans geeks, it’s a licensing fiesta of multicolored “photo agencies’, a super abundance of sellers, like a giant marketplace gone wild. People are peddling anything for any price and are marveled when they sell one image. They turn “pro” when they sell two, they become “legends” from three and beyond.

As much as it takes years of training to take great pictures, as much as it takes years to know and understand how to sell images. Lured by a ridiculously low cost of entry, everyone with a camera thinks they can become a master seller. They get easily confused by the “field of dreams” business model : “If I built it, they will come”.

Well, they do not come…so they go to step two. The ” I walked on my long tail”  business model : I will make a lot on money on selling at very low price but in huge volume.

Well, that doesn’t really work either. The low pricing is never, ever compensated by high volumes. It remains a hope in the business horizon. That perpetual El Dorado, the land of million and billion of $1 dollar downloads.

Step three is the ” hate your neighbor” business model. You did everything to create a perfect agency with a blazing sexy, top the edge website but no one buys, so it can’t be your fault. Must be that stupid competition. They don’t know what they are doing.

After that, there are numerous additional steps. Like the “Google” business model. If I build a super fast, super good search engine, everyone will come to my website. Or the “wacky pricing” business model : If I find a new way to charge for usage, regardless of what it is, people will rush to my website. Hey, why don’t I let them decide their pricing.

Image buyers are overwhelmed, not by the huge amount of images, but rather the huge amount of places they can licensed them from. Everywhere they turn, there is a new place to find images. They must be flooded by a cacophony of emails requesting their attention. Soon, they will be invaded by image stock sellers as they leave their houses in the morning.

What makes it worst is more and more frequently, it is the same images you find at different places, sometimes for a different price.

The irony of it all is that 10 years ago, Corbis and Getty images had set themselves the target to consolidate and dominate the market once and for all. The result ? There has never been, in the history of photography, so many places you can get images from.

Regardless of all these pseudo marketing schemes everyone seems to put it place, selling pictures is really not that hard:

You just need to have the pictures that someone needs.

Posted in No sense, license, technology, commercial stock, google, finance, Royalty free, getty, corbis, editorial, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Pic of the day

June 25, 2009 by pmelcher.

When was the last time you saw a volcano eruption from above ? More info if you click on the cloud.

Posted in technology, newspaper, editorial | Print | No Comments »

Many words

June 23, 2009 by pmelcher.

Google just released a white paper on image pattern recognition, yesterday, in Miami. Not really a new concept and already developped by a few companies, like Imense, in the UK, this however is a sign that Google is going beyond text tagging to retrieve images.

In brief, this technology uses the “knowledge” of Picasa, Google image and Panoramio to define, locate and “recognize” a landmark. It then clusters all similar images. In the long run, this could tell you what you are looking at ( if you are that kind of touris)

The technology has a success rate of 80% and is not ready for prime time. However, it is on track to something we have been talking about here, over and over again. The slow disappearance of text tagging in favor of image recognition. The time is not so far when search engines will index automatically the content of an image making manual keywording obsolete. It will also deeply affect  how people will search for images, using more visual search then just plain text search. While objects and scenes will be the first step, it will take much longer to recognize concepts and ideas.

More detail info on the Google blog

Posted in Midstock, technology, commercial stock, Search, google, filter, web 2.0, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

The Many to many media

June 20, 2009 by pmelcher.

I was looking at this video of Clay Shirky presentation to TED TV today. It’s a little long ( 17 minutes) but very informative. especially the middle part.

What made me thinking is  how he portrays the development of media. If you do not have the time to look at the video, here is part of what he says, in a nutshell :There has been four major media revolutions, in order of appearance:- The movable type and the printing press. This allowed for one message to the man, but only through replication of the message. Print magazines and newspapers press fall in that category. The more you want to reach, the more you need to replicate

- The telephone . The first “one to one” live communication

- The information storage. Mostly photography, film and sound.

- The broadcast information. The “one to many”, live and with no need to replicate.

-  The internet. The “many to many”, live medium.

He goes on by saying that on top of shattering the existing mediums, the internet has also brought participation from the consumers, the producing consumers, the many that add their content to the medium, the prosumers. Not only the many to many receive information, but they add to it, alter it, share it, and redistribute it.

What made me think is where does photography fit in all this? Obviously, the amateur, as we have seen it with Flickr or Microstock, is now a full participant of the marketplace. And since there is many more of them then pros, it will only get more overwhelming. That is  already a well-known fact. However, how do we make our photography something that the consumer can interact and participate with ?

Up to now, photography is a one to many medium with no interaction but that will soon be changing. We recently saw it with CNN and Msnbc.com. Both launched, for Obama’s inauguration, a collective photosynth. A place where people attending the ceremony could upload their images and have them stitched to compose a global picture. As in any infancy project, it was not a total success. But its getting there.

Because of the failure of traditional media, our pictures of Iran ’s current protest are also composed of a patchwork of a multitude of amateur images of variable quality being uploaded. That is another form of prosumer based photographic content.

Rick Smolan’s “time capsule’ is another alteration of the same idea using a mix media format.

We could go on and on with current experiment and proof of concepts. Giant media company are currently either fighting this idea while other are embracing it.  It is clear that the solution will be to make photography that people can participate with, interact, maybe alter and send  back through the network. Something more contemporary then the current broadcasting model of one to many.

How do we transform pro photography so that it can survive in this new many to many model. And how do we succeed in finding a beneficial and sustainable business model ? While I am not at liberty to expand on this here, I can leave you with a visualisation of your new marketplace:

That is the Cheswick/Burch Map of the Internet , showing the inter connectivity of the networks and its traffic. (This baby needs to be fed and just looooves photography, like nothing before.)

Posted in celebrity, license, magazine, technology, commercial stock, multimedia, Search, photojournalism, news, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

I read the news today, Oh boy…

June 19, 2009 by pmelcher.

More annoying things:

- Did you know that Google Books include magazines. Yes, the search giant you like so dearly is currently also scanning  magazines which you  can now read, for free, online. Those include your images. No compensations, not even a simple note asking for your authorization. Did you know that when you licensed that image to a magazine, back in 1994, you were also granting them the right to reproduce your image for worldwide online use ? for free? well, you did. And you even authorized Google, that did not exist at the time, to stick ads next to them and make money.

For those, who again, will say ” well, it’s good publicity”, please explain how.

- The GetmetaSmart tour. Currently touring the US to explain to photographers how to include metadata in their files, this tour is full of great intentions. It sincerely tries to promote a wider usage of properly inserting information with every single image that travels. But, seriously, what is the point when anyone can strip it away with no consequences  ? wouldn’t it be wiser to lobby the software industry and the IPTC org to make that metadata safe and password protected?

This tour is like teaching people how to paint their houses with water color. First rain and all will be washed away. Good idea, wrong track.

- A woman copied 24 songs, she gets fined $1.92 million dollars. That is $220,000 a song. Corbis looses 16,000 images, they get fined $7 dollars per image. Justice anyone ? at least the musicians can still make money with these songs, Chris Usher never will .

- If something like the Iranian protests would happen in the US, the media would never use amateur photography. Because it is in Iran, they don’t care.

- Snaptell is bought by Amazon/A9. They encourage people to take pictures of book covers  so they can find a match. Copying a photograph used to be copyright infringement, now its mainstream. What next. Photograph an image you like, upload its settings to you camera and redo the same ? we are not so far, are we?

- NGO’s, Foundations,  Charities are becoming the biggest providers of photojournalism worldwide. Yet, they all have a very clear agenda. How is that compatible with photojournalisms. How is that different then General Electric  sponsoring your next assignment ? Where is my reality, I want it back.

- It’s Friday and some website still pay $5 per image.

Posted in copyright, license, Search, celebrity, magazine, commercial stock, technology, Cnn, No sense, IPTC, editorial, law, news, transaction, photojournalism, keyword, google, web 2.0, corbis | Print | No Comments »

A blind eye

June 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

It is interesting to see that as the technology has made easier and faster to transmit images, we are seeing less of photojournalism on main events.

30 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that such events like the Gaza/Israeli war, the Sri Lanka war or the Iranian protest would not be photographed. Now it seems to be the rule more than the exception. More and more, governments seem succesful in blocking any professional coverage of events they deem to cast a negative light on their policy.

The US, with the first and second Iraqi war were the first to initiate a partial blockade of imagery. They subtly enforced a control of photographers by forcing them to be either pooled ( first Iraqi war) or embedded ( second Iraqi war). It has been quite succesful in avoid the American public and the world to see the real impact of these wars.

Israel was even more succesful in completely shielding its theater of operations from any media. Sri-Lanka followed suit and now Iran.

It doesn’t seem so hard, after all. As long as you threaten the media with  physical harm or arrest, you are practically done.

Thus, the only scarce images we get to see are those official images, or those taken by participants, both with very clear agendas.

The reasons for this major shift in coverage are numerous :

- Lack of financing from the media. Either they cannot afford to send photographers to these part of the world, or they will not pay enough to justify a free lancer to risk their life. The disappearance of media outlets does not help as a photographer can’t even count on volume sales to cover his costs.

- The new journalists : they much prefer to set up Google alerts, check Twitter, Facebook and other sites than lift their asses from their chairs and report themselves. Twitter success, for example, is not due to its users, but to how broadly the media is using it. You have more chance to be published these days if you have a Twitter account than if you send a video to CNN Ireport. And why would those journalist leave the comfort of their cubicle if everything is delivered in their desktop.

- The death of the photo reporter : few and rare are those who really care about covering the news at all cost. Gone are the days of the Capa, Mccullin,  Adams, and many, many others that could not live if an event was not covered properly. Today’s photographers are too busy courting the NGO’s and Foundations to pay for them to cover anything.

- The death of photo agencies : the Sygma’s, SIPA, Gamma of the not so old days would do whatever it took to support a photographer willing to go and cover an event. Since you can now make a hundred time more money with a picture of Lindsay Lohan leaving her hotel a few blocks away, why bother ?

- The disappearance of the great news magazine: Besides Europe, great news magazines have vanished. They have not been replaced by online equivalent. There is a huge void. Not because there is no audience, but because there is no great editor in chief, great news gatherers.

It’s appalling to see, at least in the USA, that just because  foreign journalists are being kicked out from Iran, the pro coverage stops. It will only get worst.

Update : an exception should be made for Polaris Images. see here

Posted in magazine, technology, Newsweek, newspaper, SIPA, editorial, photojournalism, TIME, news | Print | No Comments »

The Fish Market

June 15, 2009 by pmelcher.

Your stock photography at work :

For those who have never been, this is a CEPIC congress. Rows and rows of tables and chairs. Every hour, on the hour, people move from one table to the other, looking at another computer screen while listening to a used pitch.

Really, it is a bunch of suplliers looking for new content to propose to they customers back home. Like a big fish market. There not much talk about photography here, instead its more about volume (size of a collection), percentages and distribution. They then break for lunch where they all eat bad food. And then they start again. If that is not enough, they have the option to go in stuffy break rooms where bored people listen to panels about the business of photography for hours on.

Once they are finished, they all get together for a cocktail party where they try and enjoy themselves while eating some more bad food. All this for three days. Non stop.

If  a real photographer would walk in this room, they would cry ( they are not allowed in) . It is like walking in a warehouse full of accountants. And this is being going for decades. The same companies, the same people, doing the same thing. None try to grow and none never did. If they are lucky, they will sell for few millions to one of the big ones and forever retire. If not, maybe their kids will take over. Maybe not.

Every year they all sit down and look at those screens hoping not to be left behind, in this incessant race to survive.  Microstock is eating them alive, and they all talk about jumping in, maybe. Or hope it will disappear. Video footage? yes ? no ? maybe ?.It’s too much, too fast, too soon. None, however, feel that they are a dying breed. They hang on.

This is no different than any other distribution trade. You have a shop, you go and fetch products to please you customers. By the pound (sorry, the thousands of images). People come from all over the world, China, Korea, India, Pakistan etc to make these exchanges. I will represent your stuff, you will represent mine. Hours on of these repetitive discussion and deal making. An hour at a time. Every hour, for three days. A mini marathon of meetings that leave you drained and exhausted. And empty.

No one really leaves happy because there is no reason to. It’s just another season and summer vacations are not so far .  No giant leaps, no creative destruction, no innovation, no waves. The goal here is to stay alive, to survive another year, another term. Certainly not to take any risks.

All return home their pockets full of notes, business cards and their ears full of comments and opinions. Mostly reassuring, because that is what they were seeking. The deals made will be executed and some secrets will be passed on.

But none, not one, will ever come home a say : ” Man, I saw this incredible picture when I was at Cepic”

Posted in commercial stock, Midstock, CEPIC, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Sad dreams

June 15, 2009 by pmelcher.

There is only one certitude in the photography business : If you don’t spend money, you will not make money. Everything else is educated guess that some confuse with a lottery game.

As much as we never know for sure if an image will sell, and how many times, as well as for how much, one thing is certain : if you do not shoot it, it will never sell.

Even before the downturn of the world economy, photographers and photo agencies alike, seeing prices falling and competition eating at their market shares, took the approach of saving money. Cut any excessive spending. The first to go ? financing photo shoots.

We see it in both the editorial and commercial world. The attempt to try and keep status, market share, branding, while saving on the cost of shooting.

If a photograph doesn’t exist, it will never, ever be published.   On the commercial side, seeing the crowd succeeding in making fortunes on a tight budget has pushed many pro stockers to beleive they shouldn’t spend in production so much anymore. They are now copying the copiers would initially copied them.

On the editorial side, while not affected so much by the same crowd, it has been the rising cost of travel that has been the main factor. But if you do not send a photographer to shoot an event, there will be no images . And as we have seen, crowdsourcing just doesn’t work in that space. So, a lot of revenue is being lost. Even so much more, as everyone seem to focus on events that are easy and cheap to cover, increasing the coverage and the offer. The result is also affecting pricing.

The smart agency or photographer should be spending more today. Taking some risks  that could offer returns even the wall street stock market can not match. This is  the perfect time to separate oneself from the pack of the scared and conservatives. This is the time to create unbelievable images at whatever the cost. This is the time to shoot more of the unseen and reach for the deserted air of original creativity.

Those who ignore this will be soon swallowed quickly by the crowd tsunami that is well on its way.

Posted in Midstock, license, commercial stock, photojournalism, finance, Royalty free, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Photo op

June 11, 2009 by pmelcher.

A Reflection on the state of the photography world by photographer Daniel Wharmby.

Posted in copyright, commercial stock, license, photojournalism, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

Of photo pricing and air travel

June 10, 2009 by pmelcher.

It seems that these days, it is getting more important to be published than getting the appropriate compensation.  More and more we hear about obscene prices being applied to licensing rights.

Fueled by the idea that photography is a commodity and thus should be priced accordingly, photo agencies worldwide are accepting rates that would make Wal Mart blush in shame. Twice this past week, I have heard about big traffic websites ( in the millions of unique visitors) paying a pathetic $5 per image. And this without any guarantee of  quantity used . After, lets say, 50% paid back to the photographer, the $2.50 left will not even cover for the printing, postage and processing of the invoice !!!

Even companies selling commodities do sell them for a profit.  Some photo agencies are confused between low price point/ high volume and non-for-profit.

Between Getty Images selling all you can eat monthly/yearly subscription package that, at least, guarantees them a minimum revenue and microstock pricing, it is easy to be confused. Add to this a complete misunderstanding of the “Long Tail” theory and you have lots and lots of lost souls. Finally, please remember that the extreme majority of photo agencies managers never made in, or out, of a business school. Seems their feet handle most of their pricing negotiation.

There is something else strongly in play here : it’s what I would call the “air travelers syndrome”.  Someone taking a plane to anywhere these days is ready to accept almost any kind of situation as long as they get to destination. Hour delays, no food, poor service, cramp seating, nasty personnel, heavy security line, dirty planes, and so on. It is almost like holding your breath until you get out of the bad smell area. We deal with it because we really want to get to our destination. Possibly alive.

Photography pricing seems to be the same these days. As long as an image gets publish, we are ready to accept anything. Poor pricing, no quantity guarantees whatsoever, mistreatment , as long as the image gets to the “other side”.

Like air travel, we are happy and proud if we make it and the other passenger that was in line didn’t. Some sense of achievement and success. Some photo agencies will accept a bad deal just to close the door to the next one and be able to smile and wave from the window ” “Look, I am on board and not you, sucker !!”.

Not really a savvy business decision.

Bottom line: Having your images published at whatever cost is not a guarantee of success, as much as flying under any condition will guarantee you will get there. Both are very dangerous and can cause death. With the print world disappearing very fast, on-line sales will soon become the primary market. And with those prices, no one will make it to the other side.

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