December 30, 2009 by pmelcher.

It’s all about connection. Remenber, when you were a kid, people use to gather around a print photograph and talk about it. They would also want a copy and travel with it and show it to other people. In a way, photography was one of the first social networking hub.

Because of its highly physical structure, it was hard to get a large amount of people around a photograph and for them to connect via it.  Slides and projectors allowed for bigger groups to see , share, and discuss an image. As we see in   photo festival like Visa Pour l’ Image, it is still a great tool for people to commonly share and enjoy photography together at the same time. But so ephemeral and still so location based.

Magazines took the sharing to even bigger and wider groups but in the process cut the discussion umbilical cord, leaving each one as a unheard lonely voice. It was assumed that others enjoyed the same image as you had seen in the page of your magazine but there was no way to communicate with them. That role, poorly executed, was left to a single ringmaster/photo editor. But the message was not going through.

Then came sites like Flickr. People could and can connect around photography again. But this time, its is not just friends and family, it is also complete stranger. Regardless, photography true essence as a social tool was finally reborned. Because, lets face it, photography is useless if it cannot be shared.

It is the core of its nature  to be extremely social. We photograph because we want to share what we see and the way we see it. However, up to now, the medium that supports photography, mainly print publications and now online publications, have done a very poor job to exploit this. One lonely person, mostly located in a cubicle somewhere, picks an image that she/he likes and post/prints it. People see it, connect with it or not and the images vanishes. what a waste. And this is only for a very small fractions of images produced everyday. Those selected by bored photo editors.  That is not a life for a photograph.

Photography does not need Twitter or Facebook, it is the opposite. Social networking sites need photography for people to sign up, share and interact. People connect, react, share, argue, agree, discuss and love/hate around an image wherever it is, as long as the tools to communicate and to connect exist. People create accounts on Facebook and Twitter to connect and share photographs, not the opposite .

The best way to kill an image is to prevent people from being allowed to interact with it. That is probably why I hate  photography museum so much. While it allows a great many people to see an image, it completely kills any possible interaction with other viewers.”sssh” is the reigning word in a museum.

So, knowing this, where does that leave us ?  Well,  remember this graphic ?

This is the new marketplace. It is no longer the “one-to-many” that  we have seen in traditional media and sadly currently  replicated online, it is the “many-to-many”. The next generation of succesful businesspeople in photography will be the ones who learn to use photography’s social and viral nature and capitalize on it.  Instead of crowdsourcing photography, crowdsourcing photo editing. Let the users/viewers become their own photo editors and decide what images they would like to see and share. Let the images become the social network around which people gather and communicate, for whatever length of time they need. This is the hyperlink photography economy that some have been searching for.

With that in mind, have a happy, safe and wealthy 2010 !!

Posted in web 2.0, multimedia, license, technology, prosumer, flickr, editorial, slideshow, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »

December 24, 2009 by pmelcher.

Today should be a day to rejoice, worldwide. People all over the world close their doors, and eyes, from the surrounding world and regroup in their family cocoon to enjoy a few hours of peace and serenity. Outside, the battles still rages creating more casualties.

French newspaper le Monde just announced that collective photo agency, L’oeil Public, was filing for bankruptcy.  For those who only care about what is happening in their own country, or even backward, that might mean nothing. However, like a upcoming storm, events that will soon be over your head tend to start somewhere else. L’oeil Public was one of the most successful collective in the past ten years. Composed of a handful of very talented photogrpahers, they had managed to elevate social photojournalism to new heights. Mostly specialized in french social events, they were not afraid to tackle international events if they deemed important enough L’oeil was one of the rare few collective to have managed to cross the Atlantic successfully , getting regular assignment from US publication like Time or Newsweek.

A collective is not a photo agency. A collective is made up of like minded photographers who decide to pool some of their resource needs in order to reduce cost and help each other. It is a tad socialist concept, thus very unpopular in the USA as it might potentially lead to a communist revolution .

The reason for L’oeil’s closure is now becoming a banality : Falling prices and  lesser assignments. A declining demand for original photography thanks to a marketplace that is more eager to save money than make money. A marketplace that has become a playground for CFO’s and their armies of blindly dedicated bean counters. Where photojournalism has been replaced by coupon journalism, where photo editors recruit amateurs to submit free images and where photographer hold high and proud checks with $2 and $3 license sales while screaming ” This is Better than nothing”. It is a market place where pundits will tell you that the road to posterity is paved with Twitts, blogs and Facebook updates. That the next Google search could yield thousands if not millions of dollars and that SEO is your key to success, not photography. It is a marketplace where trade publications turn a blind eye to monopolistic behaviors and where cheap has replace talent. It is a marketplace  that now sees editorial sales fall to 8 and 11 cents a piece.

L’Oeil Public’s situation is certainly not  a fluke and should not be dismissed as extremely far and extremely irrelevant. It is what is awaiting a lot of businesses and individuals in the year to come. Prosperity in not just around the corner and the “something is better than nothing” mentality will not work.

Posted in TIME, license, magazine, Newsweek, photojournalism, finance, news, france, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

December 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

All the E-readers and tablets are fine and exciting as long as they offer something new. If magazine publishers are going to do the same mistakes as they have been doing online, that is copy and paste the print content on a digital format, then let’s forget them.

Who will want to carry an extra item if its only a digital copy of what they can get on print. The other day, Time Inc released a video of what Sports Illustrated might look on a color E-reader. Besides giving updated sports results and bigger slideshows, the rest was exactly the same. Page of text, with same layout as print, with a few lonely photographs to illustrate them. Sorry, but there was nothing exciting about that.( Bonnier released  another example of a boring Print to E Reader layout in this this video. When you are done yawing, please continue). If the format is reinvented then the layout should be too. What we need is a Alexey Brodovitch of the E reader, a revolutionary mind that will break the old tired rules of publishing and make reading magazine exciting again. Someone that will invent the continuous magazine for example, breaking away from the daily, weekly, monthly, bi monthly cycle that printing and circulation demanded. Someone that will take advantage of the new possibilities, the new format for all that it has. Simply applying cheap make-up on a dead format will not work. People are not going to purchase and use these electronic tablets just to save the environment. The salvation of the magazine is  all in the content, not the support.

Take for example photography ( mmm, wonder why ?). Up to now, publishing empires of America have used photogrpahy only as a tool to prove or confirm a point , not as a narrative. Take news magazine like Time or Newsweek. They will use photography to illustrate an article on a topic, just to confirm with a visual what is being written about in the text. Why ? because as humans, we tend to trust more what we see than what we read. The written text has authority while the visual has credibility. In the current print media, the text is always, always privileged over the visual, even if sometimes the images would be a much better tool of communication. The image is used as a punctuation point after a series of written facts and explanations.

Part of the reason for this lies in the print limitation. Photographs have a lot of color and that used to be more expensive. Also, they can take more space and print is limited in the number of pages it can offer. Finally, they are much more difficult to lay out than plain black and whit columns of text.

But E readers and Tablets have none of these limitations. They are free of all the rules and regulation that had dictated the behavior of their print brothers. They are free of space , time and cost limitations. They no longer have to be the punctuation points of their text sibling. They can now freely and openly become masters of the information, leaving a simple caption the role of punctuating their reality.

The current batch of e magazines are a boring crop of conference room challenged idea spit out by a committee of politically frighten mid managers. They come out of the mind of those who want to save their jobs rather than create new idea. Where are the great Art Directors of tomorrow? Those that will reinvent the layout and the magazine at the same time. We have the tools, what we need now are the creatives.

Same goes for photographers. It will be those that stop thinking about photography as a punctuation mark, as a one image narrative, as a quarter space or double page , those who reinvent the narrative that will pierce through the frozen grounds of the current creative tundra .

Let’s kill the punctuation mark.

Posted in magazine, Newsweek, E Reader, multimedia, newspaper, finance, photojournalism, web 2.0, news | Print | No Comments »

December 13, 2009 by pmelcher.

Apparently, Getty Images has decided to go after market shares in full force. In a seemingly coordinate worldwide effort, it has launched an all front offensive against any and all its competitors, no questions asked.  They now offer new low prices in exchange for being the sole provider . If a publisher agrees to only use Getty Images, and no one other, they get new preferred low pricing.

The competition is then offered to lower their pricing also, should they want to remain considered. What they are not been told is that even if they do decide to match those pricing, they will only be used when Getty Images cannot supply an image. Which is rare these days.

It seems that Getty Image is going all out for market shares and probably hopes to compensate for the lost income by increased volume. It is quite sure that they must have spend long hours calculating the probability and have studied many many charts. Thus, that their new policy is, at least according to their numbers, a profitable one.

A lot of Getty’s competition will suffer heavily from this. Mostly smaller size agencies that already have been living on the edge of their profit margins and do not have much or any exclusive content. The others, well, have a clear choice. Either stop believing that their salvation is in cheap volume of sales  and increase their rates, or die a slow painful asphyxiating death. Trying to hold down to the diving whale by matching pricing is a suicide swim.

The publishers, going through one, if not the worst period of their existence, cannot be more happy with such an offer. Why shouldn’t they not accept it ? Cheaper cost is always a welcome opportunity and Getty certainly has enough choice for the photo editors to pick from.  Where they are mislead is in multiple ways. The disappearance of some photo agencies will make some content disappear. Forever. It has already happen and will accelerate. Once competition is decimated, Getty will have free range to raise their pricing to monopolistic heights and publisher will have no other alternatives. Finally, the remaining agencies will be forced to charge premium prices for their exclusive content in order to compensate for the lost of usage.

There are no Anti Dumping laws in the USA. That is laws that forbids a company to sell products or services lower than what it cost them to produce. The reason is hidden somewhere in the strong belief in a free economy that balances itself and only crashes because of regulations. Also, it is believed that a company applying such practices could not sustain it for very long and thus either go bankrupt or be forces to raise its prices. There are however anti monopoly laws which Getty is heavily flirting with. Controlling all aspect of an industry, from production to distribution, is still illegal ( remember Rockefeller).

Getty seems (again, nothing is sure here) to have exported this model to Latin America and maybe other continents .It is also, if not entirely, affecting editorial content. As they probably have people sign a”non disclosure”, it might be hard to find out. The best way to know however, is to see if suddenly a magazine has only or mostly just one credit.

Not to cry but it is a sad time when photography is not viewed for what it is anymore but just another box of supplies in the production process. Because of the economy, photo editors have no voice anymore, as they cannot afford to loose their jobs.

It is also sad to see some of these publications, that rely so much on photography, treat it  so poorly.

The future landscape of image provider will be very interesting to gaze upon once all is said and done . Devastated, sure. Worse ? not so sure. There has been a lot ( too many ?) of comfort riders in this business for too long and that should kick them off the back of the jumping horse.  Can Getty get away with this ? depends. Some countries my find this predatory competition and block them from doing so. It is such a disorganized industry that by the time all the fragmented competition get together, Getty will have finished signing all contracts. Plus, there will always those who think they are super smart and will try to copy Getty’s new pricing scheme, not realizing its not for them.

” Remember that your aim is to achieve the highest dollar gross contribution margin, not make the highest volume sales. You would get 100% of the market if you gave the stuff away.” - Phillipe_M from WebmasterWorld

Posted in license, celebrity, magazine, finance, transaction, law, editorial, getty | Print | 3 Comments »

December 10, 2009 by pmelcher.

It is just a question of time. Not years but probably months. Already a lot of desktop consumer based application are offering a glimpse of its power : Image recognition. Google has recently taken it a step further. Search with Image recognition.

“The concept of Google Goggles is dead simple- a user snaps a photo of an object around them, be it a book, building, text or any other object, and the app will return a search result tailored to for that object” explains mobilemarketingwatch.com.

Say you walk in front of a building and would like more info, just snap a picture of it, submit to Google Goggles and voila. Same goes for CD’s , Books, paintings and maybe photographs too. Still in its infancy, Google Goggles , when launched live, will mark the debut of image recognition  as a replacement of text search. For now, the Goggles project is limited to objects. Soon, once the Google lawyers can figure how to get around privacy laws, it will also work with people too. Meet someone new. Take a snap and in 5 seconds, you will know there whole history. Well, at least the one available online.

What does it mean to the photo industry ? Many, many changes. First, a new way to search. All database will soon be able to also offer such a search to their clients. Google tends to create standards. It is nit a bad thing, except for the technophiles out there. Just imagine: Your metadata could be incorrect and image would still be found.  A few companies already offer this technology but not as deep as Google. LTU tech or Idee, for example, will do image matching . That is, if images look similar, regardless of what is in the image. Goggles recognizes what is in the image and looks for that, and not similar images.

Google new visual search will mainly be a huge help for image key wording. Since its inception, it has been notorious for offering free API’s ( that’s a little backdoor that lets two applications talk together) to its technologies. That will allow savvy programmers to tie an image database to Goggles and have all its image indexed automatically. Those microstock will be all over this technology.  While certainly incapable to add emotion or concepts, it will however facilitate a lot of the tedious work of recognizing content.

Companies like Imense who is currently offering similar technology will certainly take a huge hit. Same goes with Idee and its CD or book Iphone apps.

While there is nothing dramatically new in this technology, it is the shear power of Google already indexed document that will make this a success. They will be hardly any images that will not return a result, besides maybe those “artistic” ones.

If you have an android phone, you can try it now : Google Goggles.

Posted in idee, technology, commercial stock, celebrity, keyword, web 2.0, google, editorial | Print | No Comments »

December 8, 2009 by pmelcher.

The other day we wrote a post about the Plus Coalition. Besides being bombarded by emails from someone who would like to remain anonymous and seeing a post on another blog defending it , there was no reaction to it. It wasn’t a big surprise. If you add those who have never heard about it to those who do not understand what it does and how it works, there is not much people left. Sure, there are the few board members, that include some crooks, who could be more vocal about it, but hey, what’s the point ? It is not going to become the standard for licensing anytime soon.

However, one can see the underlying scheme surfacing a little more. After making an exclusive deal with Picscout for image recognition without even asking for bidding from other image matching technologies, it is now encompassing, slowly, the Creative Common. After all, even free is a license, isn’t it ? And Plus will still make money, as it will still charge a fee to access images in its Registry. The question is why would someone bother to attach a license that they are offering for free, but that is another issue.

Now, the CEO of Creative Common is joining Pic scout as a consultant. The strangling triangle is now fully closed. PLUS/Picscout/CreativeCommon. Everywhere you look, you will be forced to deal with one of the three who will certainly refer one to the other. What will professional photography licensors will gain from this ? Not much besides being forced to pay to play by parasite companies.

On the same topic, I had the great surprise to see that in the video/space, Copyright infringement and rights was moving into the right direction. Probably unknown by many people, YouTube, who has been in the forefront of copyright issues, has come up with a very interesting solution. Call Audio ID or Video ID, this service allows for copyright owners to upload their content so that the automated matching system can compare any other upload to that library. The result ? If someone attempts to upload a video, or a audio linked to a video with our proper clearance, Youtube automatically blocks it. The fee ? Free. The result ? Youtube can now safely add advertising to videos without worrying about copyright issues and Copyright owners do not need to monitor Youtube all day long.

If Plus had been a little bit smarter and less greedy, they would have done the same. Instead of forcing users to do a search on a private registry to check for licenses, their database could continually scan the internet. If someone uploads an image to a site without the appropriate license, a red flag would come up. Since the Plus system does not currently handle location of usage, this is currently impossible to do. Furthermore, it would entail that Plus would not make any money, which is also an absolute no no for them. It is too bad, because with a similar system, a user who would try to upload an image for a site without the proper license would immediately and automatically prompted to contact the copyright owner. It would finally make stealing almost impossible and licensing much much easier.

The beauty of such a system is that it would NOT require a central database. Ones image database could easily work as a registry. The image would call back “home” and check for license information.

However, Plus like other registries, coming or already in place,   is just another business and another reason to suck up pennies from copyright holders. Sure, there are cost but then, why not create a subscription model instead ?

Needless to say, there is still a long way to make images more intelligent and simplify seller and buyers’ life. In the mean time we will have to cautiously navigate the treacherous waters of scammers and potion sellers.

More on Youtbe content ID here

Posted in license, copyright, Plus, technology, Search, IPTC, transaction, finance, web 2.0, law | Print | No Comments »

December 3, 2009 by pmelcher.

It said that if you give a typewriter to a monkey and a lot of time, eventually he will write a Shakespearean play. So what happens when you give a camera. Will you ever get a Cartier-Bresson book ? A 33 year old Orangutan named Nonja who lives in a zoo in Austria has been given a camera this Tuesday and has since been snapping happily.

“Nonja takes photographs with a Samsung ST1000 digital camera which connects directly to her Facebook album via wi-fi - when she presses the shutter button the photo is uploaded. The camera has a protective cover to protect against  chewing.” says The Age.com. She  has already accumulated more than 2,000 fans since she has started her Facebook page this Tuesday.Every time she snaps a picture, she also gets a raisin, which is more than most human photographers get.

So what next? Will Getty make her sign an exclusive contract ( isn’t it what Getty thinks of its photographers already )? Or will Corbis buy the entire Zoo and merge it with Veer and announce, once again, that profitability is right around the corner? Will microstockers go up in arms in saying this is unfair competition and request raisins too ? Or will they also start chewing their cameras? Will PDN make a cover story on her and will Nikon endorse her? Will she start her own photo agency and slashes prices to one raisin per image ? Will Getty be able to follow such a price ?

Regardless, Nonja will keep on taking pictures and posting them on facebook .

Posted in celebrity, focus, technology, copyright, web 2.0, corbis, slideshow, getty | Print | 3 Comments »