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 »

February 2, 2009 by pmelcher.

While we see a proliferation of photography in our everyday lives, much more than we have historically have ever been subjected to, we also see it diminishing in size.

Before the 90’s and the advent of the web browser, our only interaction with still images was mostly in print magazines or huge billboards, along with catalogs, brochures and POP ( point of purchase) displays . Professionals would use a loupe to visualize slides in order to see its details. Some, like Life magazine, would use projectors against a big screen to select the images they would use.

It was a slow process, but however efficient. As our news pics, ads or family pictures migrated from print to digital, their size diminished suddenly. At first, it was web designer who, because  of  the limited bandwidth of our old phone modems (remember those ?), reduced every image to its bear minimum in order to make their site faster to load. The dictatorship of the thumbnail had arrived. Even later, when broadband arrived and became more popular, image size on the internet never really grew. This time, again under the orders of those web designers, it was in order to respect the average screen size of the majority of monitors.

Somehow, somewhat, these rules still remain. From Flickr to Facebook, from Cnn.com to Msnbc.com,  without forgetting the banner ads that populate the borders of our favorite destination, the great majority of images that we see everyday have been reduced to thumbnail size . Not even the size of a 1/4 page in your favorite magazine or a 4 x6 print.

We live in a thumbnail society. The amusing part is most print publication have not really capitalize on this difference, and if anything, have reduced the number of double page spread.  A huge mistake. Just look at the popularity of the Giga Pan of the Obama inauguration or the web site “The big picture“.

Photo agencies, worldwide, have put their catalog of images online and at a  thumbnail resolution , whether it is editorial or commercial stock. lots and lots of small images.Millions actually. To the point that some smart photographers have realized that what they sell is not the image, but the thumbnail of the image. When they shoot and prepare images to be licensed on the commercial stock market, they make sure that the thumbnail is more than perfect. They even push their luck by making sure that it will appear as perfect square, as those will stand out better in the thumbnail space allotted to them. And it works. Most editors, confronted by database holding million plus images, quickly choose from the thumbnail first, going for a larger preview only to confirm their choice. They will handle the full resolution much further down in the process, mostly after they have already licensed the image.

And why shouldn’t they ? The image will probably end up on a website anyway, at a size similar or a bit larger than the thumbnail they actually picked initially.

News photographers do not have this choice, obviously.  They continue to shoot with a full page magazine size in their head. Some still even think about the dying double page spread. None, or very little, have the thumbnail in mind.

Thinking about how your image will be seen as a huge influence on the way a photographer takes an image. No one would be crazy enough to use a large format camera for a website usage ( although I am sure some do anyways) as well as using a point & shoot for a glossy magazine cover.

The funny part is that, with no intended synchronicity, our equipment follows the same trend. All 35 mm photographers judge their work through a LCD panel no bigger than 3 inches wide. Sometimes, the same size as the final usage . The other ironic part, is that our televisions do not seem to stop its growth. Flat panel television seems to have liberate our sets of size constrain and more and more people are watching their favorite shows on displays the size of a wall. Strangely, at least in the US, the  networks seem completely oblivious to this change and keep programming shows that do not take any advantage of this new size (Ah well, maybe in ten years..).

Ansel Adams and many others would have never become famous or succesful in this internet/thumbnail age . Have you ever seen one of his images in the size of a small square? Not impressive. We could go on for ever and ever with example of photographers that just can’t live in a thumbnail size

.

This is an Ansel Adams picture viewed as thumbnail

    So what to do? Not much as of yet. As our TV sets merge with our computers, as our broadband continue to suck gigabits at speed light, our visual real estate/data capacity will continue to grow to a point where we will be able to enjoy National Geographic images the size of our walls with a resolution as close to reality as possible. Everything form Mediastorm’s great multimedia’s to a photo shoot with Angelina Jolie will finally blow up to a realistic size. Oh the possibilities…. However, this doesn’t bode well for the vertically framed  image, but that is another story.

Posted in magazine, celebrity, Cnn, technology, commercial stock, mediastorm, multimedia, editorial, msnbc.com, photojournalism, flickr, news | Print | 1 Comment »

December 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Part of the reason text journalism is failing is mostly due to the laziness of its reporters. It seems that if something was not presented to them via a press release or already published elsewhere, they will not write about it. There is almost no investigation left and everything is just reprint and Copy/Paste.

With this said and while you enjoy a probably cold day at home ( if your are in the Northern Hemisphere) lets look at  a few new things emerging at our horizon:

Our friends at Google seem to be more and more involved in image search. After putting online content from the Life magazine collection, currently being license by Getty Images, they have taken the first step to actually managing image content. Unlike the rest of the image search in Google, this collection seemed to have been indexed entirely on its IPTC content. Even more interesting, this content  does not appear on a Yahoo search. As we wrote about before, the future of search is to display content unavailable to other search engine, making it an even more useful and valuable. Google certainly has the cash to purchase such content ( Getty anyone ?).Could this Life Collection be an experiment ? A few toes in the water? But that is old news.What Google has recently released can be seen in its “advanced search” and come as numerous filters:

It is now possible to separate images from drawings and illustrations. It is also possible to search only within editorial usage, by just selecting the “news content” filter.  The drop menus also allow for even more accuracy as one allows to pick the file format, as the other can filter the b/w or color images. Finally with the “domain ” filter, you can actually do a search on a photo agency website using the Google search engine instead of their own.  Some  photo agency or photographer websites are so security obsessed that they will not let this happen, but that is their loss, not Google’s.

As it was stated before here many times, the future of the licensed images lies in being where the client is, not the opposite. Having your own website is only the beginning  and not an end in itself.

CNN. Unlike companies that have decided to cut  expenses, CNN is going all out to look for new revenue streams. After their wire service announcement, or in parallel I should say, they are beta testing their Image Source website :

Made entirely of videos , CNN is licensing their entire archive to the world. That is a huge blow to Getty who is lagging way behind in editorial video only offering lousy red carpet B roll. Cnn has also secured AFP video content, the same AFP that has a photo distribution deal with Getty images. Finally, CNN is also licensing the content they get from iReport, their user generated content.

As newspapers are dying and online sources of news are growing, CNN is betting on a huge yet untapped market. Furthermore it has little or no competition in this editorial video space. Will they license stills made from their video camera ? Time will tell.

Finally, stumbled upon a blog site today called the 37 th frame dot org. While it says that the intent is to promote photojournalism, its “About US” page not only offers no names but instead a big disclaimer saying that all images used on the site are covered by the fair use act.  It doesn’t prevent them from having big banner ads all over the site. I guess that promotion of photojournalism also means taking advantage of it these days. If whomever is behind this site would share its ad revenue with the photographers he displays on his/her site, photojournalism would feel much better.

Posted in magazine, IPTC, Cnn, technology, commercial stock, google, web 2.0, news, editorial, photojournalism, prosumer, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 1, 2008 by pmelcher.

A photo agency does 90 % of a photo editor’s work. Yet, there is always been a love hate relationship between the two. why is that ?

Let’s step back for a minute, would you ? The fundamental role of a photo agency is to already have images that a photo editor needs. Whether it be news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle or anything else, a photo agency should work as a repository of any and all photo editors wish. An never ending land of succulent fruits for the eyes, a garden of Eden of photography where one just needs to reach to get that perfect image.

In the process, Photo agencies weed out the good photographers from the bad. They create a quality filter that guarantees that images come from top notch photographers. Furthermore, they act as the sounding board for the photographers creative ego, shielding photo editors from the relentless waves of complains and curse words.

Photo agencies like to be flexible. For a premium, you can get an image for your publication or campaign only, called an exclusive, or just specify which competitor you would like to blind. In case of a catastrophe, earthquake, terrorism or plane accident, they do all the grunge work of locating the latest images so that photo editors do not have to get their hands dirty and can just wait by their phone.

Most of the time, this works perfectly well. Some magazine, websites and newspapers are entirely illustrated with photographs that fell off the Photo agency trees. In any other profession, where someone would do half your work for you, for free, that woud be well received.

In our world, not at all. It differs by country and culture. But as a photo agency in the USA, try to call a photo editor and tell them you just received this great set of images that could be great for their publication. You will probably be able to avoid insults, a slammed phone, but the reception on the other side will be  colder than the deepest  hole on the north side of the Mars ice cap. You are not welcomed.

It’s funny, because in Europe for example, they cannot wait you to show them your new material. They thrive on it. They will even buy the article along with it. It the US, you might as well jump of a bridge first.

Part of that is people do not like when you pretend to know their jobs better than they do. They take offense to that. But it is mainly due to the fact that in the US, most photo editors are gophers and do not make any editorial decisions. The editor in chief decice what articles will be published and the photo editors are ask to go out an illustrate them. Never the reverse. In Europe, however, they have equivalent powers. If they see a great photo story, they will run it, regardless of where it comes from. They are actually asked to provide stories and sit hand in hand ( figure of speech) with the editor in chief, deciding on the content.

So maybe part of the reason for the unqualified  reception photo agencies received when they pitch a story is due to the fact that each time they do that, in the US, they just push the knife deeper into the photo editors’ wound and make them remember how powerless they are. They only become almighty when they are granted a budget to go out and produce a photo shoot. And for that, theygo throught extra efforts to locate photographers that do not belong to a photo agency or if they do, try to circonvent that relationsship by all means possible.

It’s a convoluted relationships the one between photo editors and photo agencies. One made of trust and mistrust, of need, necessity and resentment. There are a lot of real friendships in this industry between buyers and sellers, as well as some real hate. Neither are photographers but they do battle on them, for the rights of possession. It is a continuous balancing act where neither can afford to be mad at the other while the photo editor still like to keep them at a reasonable distance.

In an editors eyes, and mind, photo agency people are not real photography people. They are like a subset of creepy creatures crawling in your garden. They can help sure, but only if there is no other way. A necessary evil.

Sometimes you wonder why they even credit a photo agency at all. Portfolio, the new Conde Nast business magazine, only puts the photographers name next to the images, adding the photo agency’s credit way back in a remote corner of the magazines’ last pages, as if to show that all the images where assigned. The Economist does not credit at all. Some others, which I find the most offensive, only put the agencies name. As if to clearly show that an image is just an illustration taken from a photo bank.

There should be a middle ground. Photo editors should have more power in the editorial decision process. A la New York Times. They should be granted and given the right to bring in photo stories. However, photo agencies can help. After many, many years of working with a publication, they have a good idea of what could be of interest. And because they work with thousands of eyes and ears worldwide, they have great stories that should be published . It would certainly beat rehashing what is on CNN on a print version, or sticking with what has sold in the past. It would make photographers more creative if they knew that publications would listen to what they have seen. I cannot say how many great photo essays gather dust on lonely hard drives just because there is no ears to listen.

As much as the photo agency business has to re invent itself, as much as photo editors have to shake the cages they are in if they want to keep being making photography quality go up.

Posted in Cnn, technology, magazine, newspaper, editorial, photojournalism, news | Print | 2 Comments »

January 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

Beyond the flashy fancy mini sites that Corbis and Getty Images have throwned to press release hungry industry newsletter and blog sites, I did a little search of my own.

If you click on any or all of these icons below, you will probably find some of the most amazing and less seen USA Election coverage. There is an advantage of being a photographer from a non “accredited” agency like Reuters/EPA for Corbis and Getty/AFP for Getty: you have no rules to follow and you get to shoot what you want.

It makes for some pretty amazing images: (click on any logo below and enjoy)

These are only a few. No Press releases. No mini sites. Just hard and pure work. VII, DigitalRailroad, Magnum, Contact Press and others had not yet made anything visible as I was writing this entry. I am sure they will. There has never been an election like this in the USA before and probably will never be again. While Corbis and Getty have gone the wire service way ( 100 photos a day covering everything and nothing), these guys are going both for the historical and the emotional route. Because the next president of the United States of America, whether the rest of the world likes it or not, is going to be the major news for the next 8 years.

Minimum.

I agree with my friend Pino Granata, Photography without passion is not photography, it’s only bored microstock.

Posted in SIPA, TIME, newspaper, alexa, Cnn, magazine, keyword, google, news, corbis, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

December 28, 2007 by pmelcher.

There are many ways to kill. Many different ways that we manage to find somewhere in ourselves to destroy the things we love the most. The violent murder of Benazir Bhutto earlier this week is a prime example. During a period during when most of us enjoy the comfort of our simple lives, the world continues to rip itself apart in what seems to be an incontrollable violence that goes beyond our understanding.

Like many others I am still in shock and appalled by the event in Pakistan and the brutal assassination a woman that stood for change and democracy against relentless nihilism. I took a tour, from my distant home, of the photographs taken that day, and thanks to Daryl Lang of PDN, watched the two sideshows done by the New York Times and CNN with the images of John Moore of Getty Images.At the end of the CNN slideshow, I looked at this image :

and thought to myself, how did John Moore ever think of doing a zoom effect in the middle of this commotion ? Three shots where fired, and explosion just happened, people are lying dead all around him and he still find the time to create a zoom effect. Even think about it. My second thought is that he didn’t do it on purpose and just happened to zoom out when he took the frame. Still, this image puzzled me.

Until I saw the same image on the New York Times slideshow:

And then I realized, he didn’t. And here I made a false assumption. I previously wrote :

[ Someone at CNN thought that it would be more dramatic, more intense to add that stupid zoom effect]

Thanks to avid reader Gary Gardiner who checked the Getty site, we now know that both images were taken by the same photographer. Apparently, due to his shooting with a motor drive, both images are very similar, one probably shot as he was zooming out to get a full length of the man. That will teach me to write a blog before finishing breakfast. My apologies to CNN and to those I got confused. More from Gary in the “comment” section below.

PS: I forsee a World Press photo here…

Posted in multimedia, magazine, Cnn, photojournalism, photoshop, news, editorial, getty | Print | 1 Comment »