February 5, 2010 by pmelcher.

So, there was something very interesting about the photo news the week. On one side, you have the mighty Getty ( aka, the whale) who took a deep plunge in pricing with its subscription RF offering, combining microstock and pro , and on the other, legendary Magnum who manage a great coup by selling some used prints for an estimated $ 30 million dollars.

Like two extremities of the same stick, this is a great reflection of where the business of photography stands today . On one side an entity that has reduced its photography to a cheap commodity to be sold as individual snapshots and on the other, a photographers coop that is so highly respected that it can sell old back and white prints full of written notes as highly valuable historical artifacts.

Yet, both are selling the same thing : photographs . According to numerous interview given by Mark Lubell, director of Magnum New York, one key condition for the members of the coop to approve the sale was that the images would not be scattered and sold as individual entities. Magnum photographers have a long established tradition of selling pictures as a story, a group of images, that tells a story. It has been numerously debated, over the years, that Magnum could have maybe had made more profit if it had broken  these stories and sold them as individual images.

But none of the photographers-creator would have it any other way. Shot as a story, sold as a story. Part of the condition for the deal with the Michael Dell owned fund is that images cannot be separated from the story they belong to. On the other end of the spectrum, Getty does the exact opposite. It extracts images from their context, their stories , and sell them as individual files. There motivation is that the image, alone, has more chance of finding a buyer than a group of images, sold as a story. Also, individual files sales  can easily be automated while photo essay, and photo journalism in general, needs a pitch, an explanation, a real human sales person.

And there is where a key differentiation appears that is reflected everywhere in the marketplace. If your business is about licensing individual files, then its all about volume. You do not take a proactive approach to selling. Instead, you try to cover any possible potential need for an image that could humanly be conceived. You stick them in an archive. And then you wait . You wait for a buyer to come and be hooked. or not. The market creates the demand.

If you license a photographer’s work, a story, a career, an inspiration, the approach is completely different. You cannot wait for a client to come and find it. You have to go out and fetch it. You have to take the photographer’s work, find a potential client who could be interested and close the deal. The photographer, in this case, creates the demand.

If you want the market to create the demand, the prices are low, very, very low. If you create the demand, the prices are high, very high.

Unfortunately, most photo agencies these days have gone the route of competing with each other on the individual file sales path. Mostly because it much easier, cheaper, and demands almost no special skills. The more the agencies, the more the offer, the more prices go down. Getting amateurs to fill these image banks has recently greatly lowered the costs, with the pervert effect of also lowering the prices.

Magnum, and others, like Contact, Redux, PictureGroup, Aurora have deliberately chosen to represent photographers’ work and not distribute individual files. Their production is the reflection of its chosen creators, their image bank set up to license stories , and their sales staff experienced in the complex art of pitching. Sure, it’s more expensive and much more complicated. It demands talent and sometimes obstination against frustration. However, the prices are dictated by the value perceived by the creator, not the by the market. The result : deals like Magnum just made.

In photography, it’s not the market who dictates the pricing. It’s how you present it.

Posted in magazine, celebrity, technology, Cosmos, Aurora, commercial stock, license, prosumer, getty, Royalty free, news, editorial, photojournalism, transaction, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

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 »

February 27, 2009 by pmelcher.

I know it has been said here that the World Press Awards 2009 was a nice selection, albeit maybe too much linked to the most important events of the year. Who is to say that a lesser known event might have had stronger images ? Regardless, ever since the results, new information has been brought to my attention that I would like to share.

<Disclaimer>  I am a big Obama fan and a huge admirer of Callie Shell’s work. This has nothing to do with either politics nor quality of work < End of Disclaimer>

This image of Obama, taken by photographer extraordinaire Callie Shell, was apparently a set up. Callie asked, or challenged, the then candidate Obama to do pull-ups while they were waiting backstage:

While it is  a great picture, it still bothers me highly that the photographer would have provoked the image. To me, a photojournalist should always remain a spectator and not an actor, and especially not a stage director. He/she is there to document an event, or a moment, without possibly affecting it. Of course, it is almost impossible because just having a photographer point a camera at an event will create some kind of  reaction. There has been many examples of images taken only because the participant in a news event saw the photographer and reacted accordingly. There not much anyone can do about this.

However, interacting with your subject should not be allowed, regardless of the situation. And it certainly should not be rewarded with a major journalistic award. This situation breaks my heart because I love this photograph, but just knowing that Obama did this knowing the photographer would create a sellable images just ruins it for me. Its almost like it was staged.

The second info I received was about those sports images:

Like you, I was very impressed with these images, considering the extremely brutal environment the sports photographers have while shooting the Olympics. These look like studio photographs that would have taken a lot of resources and time to set up. Amazing. Well, apparently, it so happened that these images did not travel like that when originally send to the EPA wire. Not at all. What you are seeing is heavily post production retouching of the original images. The background was much more visible and the drops almost impossible to see. That begs the questions : should participant of the World Press Award should submit their original images or should they be allowed to heavily retouch them ?

These images are still great, don’t take me wrong. It is just the ethics behind.

Finally, I don’t know what that is :

It got 3rd prize in the Portraits category. Is it because the Jury do not beleive the Chinese can’t do better photography than  imitating classics with puppet dolls? How does this series, that looks like a photography student Saturday afternoon exercise, win a prize ? its amusing, cute, indeed, but how is it photojournalism? Is it photojournalism on photojournalism ? Huh ?

The World Press should change the selection process a bit. For one thing, they should add multimedia. Now !!.

But also, I beleive they should have a 110  person jury that would judge images all year long as they come in, on some sort of sharing Facebook type site, where each one could add great pictures as they see them. This is the 3rd millennium and juries could easily use existing technology to post images as they see them. Other jury members could add their votes  and at year end, the votes would be tallied. Even the public could participate in one category. No need for mass CD or FTP submissions, for week-long exhausting viewings sessions of 10,000’s images in  dark rooms, or other antiquated selection process.. If they don’t do it , I will.

Posted in multimedia, magazine, technology, Aurora, web 2.0, photojournalism, editorial, slideshow, wire service, news | Print | 9 Comments »

January 21, 2009 by pmelcher.

While two of the United States magazine distributors are raising their rates in the worst economic period possible, adding a potential $1 billion in cost to an already battered publishing industry, it has become clearer that the photo industry needs to brake out of  its traditional chains.

According to the New York Post, two companies who are in charge of distributing  magazines in the US are raising their fees next month. As circulation is dropping for everyone, due to the combine forces of the relatively free internet and the cost saving reaction of most consumers, this hike could spell the doom sooner for some of our most famous magazines. Circulation, or getting your magazine to your readership, is extremely expensive in America as it is a tremendously big country. Unlike Europe, it is badly networked by railroads, thus all major transport are done by truck and roads. It is full of little towns all over he place. You get the picture : Magazine publishers are at the mercy of these distribution companies if they want to have any circulation (not unlike other countries ).

With ad buying falling and circulation dropping, some publishers were hoping a price decrease would give them a well needed boost. This circulation cost increase will not permit that. I suspect that the weeklies, who also have the added pressure of not being timely anymore, will be the first to drop. There will be less magazines.

If you add the internal pressure of cutting cost and those diminishing photo budget, all one gets to see these days are pictures of those photo agencies that have succumbed to the  subscription model. It used to be that wire services where were photo editors would go if nothing else was available because everyone had access to the same images. But today, it is the opposite. Seems exclusivity, or at least having a different image then your competitor, is much much less important.

So what is a photo agency to do ? Create its own viewership. After all, it is not that their images are bad, but rather unfordable to most photo editor. And not because they are expensive, really. They are just more expensive. This trend of only seeing subscription base imagery is only going to increase, shutting out whoever refuses to accept these rules. And the most frighting part is that websites are probably the biggest consumers of that model.

Papparrazis agency have been the first one to do it. X17, quickly followed by Splashnews and others have already created their own market for their images, racking huge traffic and revenues for their self published photo blog. To the point that some magazine refuse to work with them because they feel they have become competitors to their publication and stealing precious advertising revenue away from them. Even Getty images has been toying around with this for a while now, using Jammd.com and ex - viewimages.com as a testing ground. Smaller agencies will not be left behind. One of the most recent project is one by Aurora photo . On a page solely dedicated to Obama’s inauguration day, they have posted their photographers coverage of the historical event. If they can’t sell these images to the traditional media, they can still get them to the viewers out there.

It’s a fair battle and great photography will prevail against reduced budgets. If photo editors are unwilling to fight for great and original content,  it will still find viewership. Because publishers do not control the medium anymore, the users do. Remenber, Google owns our browsing experience, not Time Warner. It is a failed and obsolete approach to believe that there is no viewership outside the traditional editorial brand names. Readership is not disappearing, it is just shifting. Thus the smart agencies, like Aurora, or others, will capture it while media companies will desperately try to retain them.

Posted in celebrity, Search, magazine, technology, Aurora, google, web 2.0, news, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

January 1, 2009 by pmelcher.

I like the new year. For one good reason. Everyone does a round up of all the best images of the year in a beautiful slideshow. So, like every year, I wandered through the internet, looking at different version of the year in pictures. This is where I went:

AOL

MSNBC

The Big Picture
The New York Times

Sports Illustrated

Der Spiegel

Time Magazine

And this is what I saw. Only pictures from either AP, Reuters, Getty and a little bit of EPA. All wire services, nothing else. At first I thought it was just a USA thing, but no. Even Der Spiegel, the famous German magazine did the same. Time magazine, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated decided that the best images were the ones that they had assigned, thus presenting only pictures of either staff photographers or assigned photographers.

Now, do not get me wrong. There are a lot of very talented photographers at the wire agencies, and some did an incredible job this year, but still. Ignoring photographers from Aurora, Redux, Noor, VII, Abaca, Sipa, Gamma, Reporters, Magnum, National Geographic, Minden, and so many other source, just because they are not accessible via a monthly payment is plainly ridiculous. Its pure journalistic laziness. And another pin in the machine.

All these so called photo editors who called themselves journalist either did not take the time to look around or simply refused to do so because it would cost them more money. Sad and pathetic. It is an insult to the photographic world to blindly close your eyes and the production of all these extremely talented photographers. It’s plain censorship. Economical censorship, maybe but still censorship. They will not publish and show these images because they are too expensive. Thus their readers will never see them. Not because they are bad, but because they will not pay for them.

Who is to blame ? The subscription model and the bean counters that have taken over. Who is suffering ? Everyone, since we are all deprived from seeing the real “best of” and only get to see a washed out version, pre packaged by the wires. What does it say about the state of our industry. Well, for one, that if you are not part of a wire service in 2009, you will have a hard time being published or seen. That real photo editors are disappearing and being replaced by researchers. That there is a real treasure to be mined for those who think outside the wires, and finally, that the public, the readers, are being scammed.

So all these year end “best pictures of 2008″ should be renamed “best cheap and affordable pictures of the year”, leaving room for someone with a budget, and a conscience, to do one with the real best picture of the years.

Posted in SIPA, magazine, Magnum, Aurora, TIME, photojournalism, editorial, finance, slideshow, msnbc.com, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

July 15, 2008 by pmelcher.

Outside of the beaten path of wire services endlessly pouring at the same endless flow of images, there are islands of beauty. One of those, untouched by endless years of relentless competition, is photo agency Aurora. True to their initial vision, Aurora keeps on showing the world that true and great photojournalism can co-exist with a selfish capitalistic world. The images are beautiful, the topics not always made for easy viewing and the passion and dedication of the photographers almost medieval.

For those who were not at Look3 in Charlottesville last June 2008 as well as for anyone who believes and think that photojournalism is dead or dying, here is a little clip Aurora did on 9 of their photographers :

Posted in magazine, lens, Aurora, multimedia, photojournalism, slideshow, wire service, editorial | Print | No Comments »

July 3, 2008 by pmelcher.

You should interrupt everything you are doing right now and head immediately to aurora@15.com. Jose Azel and his team invite you to a year long birthday celebration !!. Based on the Surrealist’s “Cadavres Exquis” ( exquisite corpse) game, the rules are quite simple : one random photographer shoots an image and post it on the site. Once posted, a randomly selected photographer has 48 hours to post another image related in some ways to the previous one. And so on.

Called Action/Reaction, it will go until the end of the year.

It could have used a comment box or some other way for viewers to interact but it is still an exciting exercise. Go on now, go check it out :

Happy Birthday Aurora  !!!

Posted in technology, Aurora, multimedia, photojournalism, editorial, slideshow, news | Print | No Comments »