Artist du Jour

September 3, 2010 by pmelcher.

So while most people are getting ready to take a long 3 day weekend to bid a last farewell to summer ( at least in North America) and others are frolicking among the cafe table of Perpignan, mighty Getty images doesn’t miss a beat.

What now ?  Called the “Artist Digital Toolkit” , it is basically a plain and dirty affiliate program with a Starbucks inspired name.  You know, like when you put a link to Amazon on your website and if someone clicks on it and ends up bying something you get a cut? Well, this is the same. Except, it uses contributors to do so.

How so crowdsourcing of them.

Here is the deal : You put one of their specially branded web banners, or e mail signature, or Facebook app, or whatever they give you and if someone clicks on it and purchases an image, you get a % of the sale: 16% if it is new customer, only 7 % if it’s a returning customer, whether it’s your image or not.

Help Getty sale images and get paid to do it.

Not only you give them content to sale, but you actually help them sale it too. What else, clean the offices after hours ?

You could even increase your 30% commission on certain sales to a whopping 37%. How cool is that? I smell riches here..

You will also contribute to Getty SEO campaign by creating new links for them. But you get no penny for that. Don’t push it, ok ?

So, if you are a Getty Contributor, get your free “Artist Digital Toolkit” and watch your bank account grow…

Posted in web 2.0, prosumer, license, commercial stock, Corpocrates, flickr, photojournalism, getty, editorial, transaction, finance, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Of Photography and Trash cans

August 30, 2010 by pmelcher.

So what happens, you may ask, to a collection purchased by Corbis ? Well, you might not ask that question because you don’t care, but that is another story.

We have a clue:

1997 : Corbis purchases LGI, a celebrity photo agency, for a undisclosed amount of money . Immediately moves collection of one million color slides and black and white prints to what was then the world HQ of the Bettmann Archives on Broadway.

1998 : Exactly one year later, the director of the archive, looking bored, declares the LGI archive officially scanned. Obviously not everything was scanned, only what a bunch of Bettmann Archive trained editors considered worthy. What was not scanned of Lynn Goldsmith images, who sold her images outright, was destroyed, via a pair of scissors and a trash can. Remember, this was photo editor trained in historical images that were asked to assess the value of current celebrity images at a time when Corbis’s only interest was in commercial stock photography and not editorial.

2010 : Flea Market. Lower East Side. Manhattan:

.

This is a set of 4 color slides sheet of Kool and The Gang portraits, taken by “Susan Phillips” in 1992, clearly stamped LGI. Detail here:

The photographer, “Susan Phillips”, if my memory serves me well, was an alias name ( one many) for a famous Rock photographer.

O, and by the way, the person selling those slides was a very gentle old man who had no clue and couldn’t remember ( or didn’t want to say) where he took possession of those slides.

Sure, the photographer might have taken back possession of her images and decided to dump them. That is highly doubtful :  Photographers, even if they change careers, tend to be extremely possessive about their images, even bad ones. Those are decent portrait images of Kool and the Gang and would have some value in the licensing market.

She might have given some to the little old man to sell, out of pity.  A $20 bill would have worked much better.

Corbis tried to disposed of them in a trash can as they were recently moving offices from 902 Broadway to Hudson Street..Now you are starting to make sense. Question is, what else was in that trash ?

Posted in commercial stock, Corpocrates, celebrity, license, editorial, Search, corbis | Print | 6 Comments »

I hear blue

August 24, 2010 by pmelcher.

As we all try to figure what sells, or could sell and for how much, one exercise that we should all rather play with is how our images are viewed and interpreted.  Maybe, just maybe, that would be the key to value.

 We are still very far from understanding perfectly how our brain interprets visual input, mostly maybe because we always thought that all our visual input was via our eyes.

We are not so sure anymore. what if colors emitted some special sounds that we hear instead of see. What about perspective ? Can we feel perspective ?

Is it possible to see without seeing? and what this does tell us about photography ? And how blue could become more blue if only we could hear it.

 

Seems there is much more to what we see than what plain photography can capture and we are just beginning to understand how we understand the world around us. It is becoming clearer to us that what we need to provide, as visual providers, is much more than what a lens can capture.

Posted in technology, commercial stock, multimedia, Search, filter, editorial | Print | No Comments »

Buy a Book

August 24, 2010 by pmelcher.

I don’t know, but it seems to me that the advice in this book are good for any stock shooter, not just Microstock

If you don’t take this opportunity to find out a little bit of what Ellen Boughn knows about this industry, you are making a HUGE mistake.

Posted in license, commercial stock, Midstock, Search, Royalty free, prosumer, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

La vie en Rose

August 5, 2010 by pmelcher.

After you put on you dancing shoes and you are ready to spend some of the alcohol funneled energy you have kept for hours during the endless official ceremony, there is someone watching you very closely. Because soon, you will be offering them food for camera. That incredibly volatile moment that only he or she can capture in a millisecond flash and transform into a lifelong memory.

Sure, it’s your friends wedding party, but somehow, you are going to be the star.

It’s not that you want to take the spotlight. Someone will put you there. Despite yourself.

If you though wedding photography is that boring catalog of posed photographed in a park at sunset time, think again.  Thanks to the shifting media economy and more particularly, the demise of thousands of newspapers worldwide, the wedding photography trade has never looked better. You just don’t see it.

A multitude of jobless yet extremely talented local photojournalists have left their police scanners behind in favor of the sweeter sounds of 80’s disco inspired DJ’s to document, for  a fee, the lives of the common. The result is quite amazing :

These are the winners of the Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA), an international association of …well.. photojournalists turned wedding photographers. And it’s not just America, like other photo trade organization, it’s actually worldwide ( remember, photography knows no boundary ?).

Did I hear someone called the death of Photojournalism? Not so fast. I see a strong pulse  here.

It’s a peaceful organization : No endless whining, no boring tirades by old timers regretting the good old days, not talk of microstock or any kind of stock at all, no Getty images ( well, not yet), no pictures of dying Africans in B/W, no medium format photography of greenish empty parking lots ( in China, preferably), no Social Media gurus ( no Gurus at all, actually).

Just great photography…enjoy. ( click on the image above to see more).

Posted in newspaper, commercial stock, Social Media, photojournalism, slideshow, getty, news, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Message in a Bottle

July 29, 2010 by pmelcher.

This is what happens when you tweet :

Your little message in bottle that you thought was so important disappears in a sea of messages. We are not saying you shouldn’t tweet, just saying you should take pictures instead.

Posted in Social Media, Waste of time, Corpocrates, Tweet, commercial stock, No sense, multimedia, technology, web 2.0 | Print | No Comments »

Crowdtaste this !

July 26, 2010 by pmelcher.

So.. No idea what to shoot next ? well, why don’t you get your camera to choose?

This company has launched a prototype that can tell you if the image if the image you are about to shoot is aesthetically nice or not . The camera , in itself, is not much. It is actually a camera phone ( Nokia). However, it is linked to a website, Acquine, that permits users to rank images based on their taste. The result is a database of images ranked by “crowd taste”.

Nadia from Andrew Kupresanin on Vimeo.If you look at the result on Acquine, the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine” , you will not be surprised. The highest ranking images are  very predictable and …mmm.. boring.. Boats floating in front a Mediterranean looking scene, Landscapes, dull portraits, it’s like a catalog of dull images. But that is what you get when a crowd votes, isn’t it ? You will not see a World press in there.

This camera, and even just the site, is a great tool for microstocker or commercial stocker that would like to fill in the blanks of common taste . It is perfect for those who perpertuate the idea that an image has to be composed properly and well lit in order to fullfilits requirement.

However, it is a better tool for those who are to create. What to avoid. How to stay away from banality. What not to shoot. What to avoid.

Technology can sometimes bring us horrible, horrible tools : This is one of them.

Article on Wired here

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

In search of Goodenough

July 22, 2010 by pmelcher.

So, it seems that most people would consider that we have reach a turning point in our industry. Which one, no one is really sure. Let’s see if we can fix that.

What happens when people are asked to perform the same task for less  compensation they are used to receiving ? Well, they use the same skills they have always used but in less time, as they try to augment the number of jobs they can perform, in order to increase their revenue ( or at least keep them flat). Thus, they come out with more or less the same product or service, but just less worked upon. It caries less quality, less commitment, less attention to details.

When amateurs entered the  commercial stock market via microstock, they where very lucky. No one was looking for high end quality images, just images that did the trick. Art Directors and Graphic designers, using microstock, were looking for images that fit their needs, but no more. And that was fine because their was no masterpiece in there. As the market grew, contributors quickly realized that this was number games. The more images you could upload in the least amount of time could render selling via microstock a profitable proposition. And so they did.

Today the market, both from  amateur and pro offering , is filled with these images. They are ok; they are Good Enough. Because the image buyers are also under the same budget/time constrain, they are quite satisfied with that offering since they also will not spend the time to research more.

And so, here we are, in 2010 in the “Good Enough” market.  This middle place between perfect and not so good. It’s a comfort zone that satisfies all the available element : Time, Budget and Expectation. Those who handle the budget, those God-like figure that stand omnipotent behind any photography job , have unleashed a new powerful attribute to our everyday lives. And we all have  followed. Photo agencies have also lowered their standards and have accepted images they would have never accepted 10 years ago. There is nothing wrong with that : 10 years ago, there was no market for “goodenough” images. Today, there is.

Of course, the snake eats its own tail. This widening of the market allows more contributors to enter their offering, because that is the only thing they can do : Good enough images.

Who suffers ? Well quality suffers, obviously. Since it is not rewarding anymore to spend a lot of time on images, no one really does. If someone is happy with a half done job then that is great. Perfectionist suffer as their market is diminishing.

Who else ? Well, image consumers, obviously. They don’t get to see great images anymore. Just illustrations that didn’t cost too much to purchase and fit the need. No more, no less.

And don’t think for a second that this is a microstock only issue. Photojournalism, celebrity, sports, portraits,  wedding, every aspect of the photography world has been affected by the “Good Enough” mentality. Publications are quite satisfied in publishing good enough images and nothing more. Look at Time and Newsweek, for example. They are now full of wire service images which are the supreme masters in providing good enough images.

Even websites, supposedly on the cutting edge of  media publishing, use images by the pound, regardless of their quality. They are not looking to secure rights to superb images : Just those that fit the need. Who cares if their are not great, they didn’t cost much.

It seems to be fine with everyone : They pay less, they expect less.  Readers, especially online since it’s free, also know they cannot be demanding.

Maybe at the tail end of this recession we will see the resurgence of the exceptional, the high quality, the amazing.  For now, however,  it seems  we will  continue to fill our lives with good enough and dream of a better future.

Posted in license, web 2.0, celebrity, magazine, commercial stock, prosumer, flickr, editorial, transaction, finance, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | 2 Comments »

A genius talks

July 19, 2010 by pmelcher.

Man I love what this guy has to say :

Posted in license, multimedia, Search, TIME, celebrity, magazine, E Reader, commercial stock, technology, web 2.0, prosumer, news, corbis, getty, editorial, transaction, flickr, photojournalism, finance, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »

I and them

July 15, 2010 by pmelcher.

Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about your clients. Here and there, and almost everywhere you hear, or read, photographers and photo agencies complaining about this or about that. Their complains can be resumed to : ” But what about me”

Always starts with “I “. I used to make more money, I used to shoot this, I , I , I. aie.  Maybe the reason you are not making any money is because you do not think about your clients. They have shifted, evolved, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Budgets or content, they needed to find other sources of photography. You, as you were continuing to think about “I”, you lost them.

The funny thing about sales, in any business, is that you always know how and why you gain new clients, but you never know why you loose them. They are tons of matrix to analyze  where new clients come from, what they do, how they purchase from you. But if they stop visiting you, you never know why. The reason is obvious : they are gone and you cannot communicate with them.

However, it is one of the most important piece of information that you might ever need; Why do you loose clients. Sure you can speculate. It’s my competitor pricing, it’s because I am too good, etc, etc. Because you do not have any hard data, the assumption is that it’s always someone else fault, not yours.

Well, recession or not, your clients retention should be the most important activity you have. You want them to come back, over and over again, even if you are not the cheapest. Because, unlike your new clients, you know them, their needs, their payments, their tastes. So much emphasis is made these days in new client marketing while nothing is done for current customer retention.

The same you probably managed to grab someones customer, someone else will take yours. Because you obviously do not care. You want new, now. Shouldn’t your growth of your business be measures as much by how many customers you retain than how many new you sign up ? Do you pay attention to their needs instead of looking for new markets ? Sure you can find yourself a niche, but what happens to your faithful customers, will they follow you ? Do they even care if you tweet ?

So turn the chair around. Stop looking at what you could do and focus on what can be done. Stop wasting energy ( and cash) on prospect and start fixing the leaks. Why are you loosing clients, why do they go for cheaper ? Do they feel that your content is not worth that much anymore? Did you even notice they left ?

Start building a sound and safe foundation instead of thinking about the tower . Sure new client marketing is cool and graphically challenging. But your stuff was cool too for those that still purchase from you. Why ignore them? So stop with the”I” complain and start listening to them.

Posted in technology, lens, commercial stock, focus, license, transaction, photojournalism, Midstock, editorial | Print | No Comments »