August 28, 2008 by pmelcher.

As I was walking down the street in Manhattan earlier today, avoiding other busy pedestrians thinking about work, I noticed a bumper sticker I had never seen before. On a red background, it read : “Save the Mountains”.  Not sure if it was a serious one but regardless, it made me wonder. How come we haven’t seen a “save photography” or “save photographers” sticker yet. After all, the industry is  in more danger than mountains.

Here are a few reasons:

- Overcrowding : Like anything that we human beings like too much, we tend to use it and abuse it until there is nothing left. We are over fishing, over farming, over driving, and in the process, killing everything associated. Photography, thanks partially to Flickr, but also digital, is not only everywhere, but done by everyone. Boundaries between pros and amateurs are melting faster than the polar ice and everyone that use to have a job directly related to photography is in  more danger than Polar bears. It is not just photographers bearing the weight of the overcrowding of this field. Photo editors are also being laid off as magazines or newspapers are either shrinking or shutting down.   Photo agencies will soon also suffer from the saturated market and will start reducing staff as they will not be able to sustain their growth. After all, if photographers are seeing lesser commission, you can be sure that agencies are making less revenue.

- Technology : No one needs a photo editor at Flickr. Why? because Flickr edits itself. Newspapers website are shrinking down and more and more relying on wire service feeds. Just post the feed as it comes in, or automated it. Not very hard to do. No one really needs so many photographers either anymore.  Remote control cameras now cover what took a sleuch of photographers to do. And they don’t complain. Amateurs are shooting as well and can now very easily contribute. Although not yet successful, it would not be hard to see an agency entirely made up of amateurs. Heck !, you could get the Olympics, or the Conventions well covered by amateurs, if you organized yourself well. Thousands of eyes in every different position possible. Imagine the possibilities.

- Intellectualism : Some of our best publications have been taken over by over thinking. In a desperate effort to differentiate themselves from the commons, they  have been taken over either by “new” photojournalism or “new” fine art. Nouveau Photojournalism, we have spoken about. Holga happy reporters who seem happiest in images where you see the less. Nouveau Fine art has taken the opposite approach and is hyper realist. Close up images of uncooked eggs, deserted parking lots at night fall with heavy greenish tungsten light,  snapshot-looking photography with visible flash effects, anything that looks desperately real and slightly unappealing is in fashion. Both agree that if the image disturbs you in any manner, than it must be good. Especially if you think it is a bad photograph. Then, it is probably genius.

- Microsoft : It was a good world when Microsoft did not care about photography.  We were all left to build our own digital world with whatever tool we wanted. For a while, we had to deal with Adobe’s monopoly on photo editing, but that was disappearing. However, recently, The big Redmond giant has been working its way into the field. And we all know what that means. Nothing will ever be the same anymore. No need to explain more ( Corbis anyone?).

- Blogs and opinions : Everywhere and everyone has an opinion. Everyone is an expert. Everything and nothing is written about photography. It is exhausting. It is all over the place and nowhere. Someone should regulate it. For once thing, all the old farts that have been teaching photography in colleges for more than 20 years should be forced to retire and certainly not allowed to blog. They are frightening.  Anyone that has not sold or licensed images for a living should not be quoted on professional blogs because they try to take pictures in places where it is not allowed. It is pathetic. All these blogs are screaming for attention and readership and will write almost about anything as long as they do it everyday. Including publishing boring press releases on the size of a collection. Its obscene. stop it. It is okay not to write anything if there is nothing to say or not to publish a press release because it is stupid. Yes, I know, I do not have to read them.

All these are reasons to start a “save photography” movement. We could have fund raising parties with Karl Lagerfeld as our Keynote speaker and dance the night away. Have cool hats and T shirts with our logo. and finally, make bumper sticker that I could stick on my car…if I had a car.

who is with me ?

Posted in technology, commercial stock, magazine, multimedia, editorial, flickr, corbis | Print | 1 Comment »

August 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

 There are more and more photo business news websites yet:

- London Features International, a photo agency that has been in business for more than 20 years, crashes and burns and hardly no one even mentions it or comments on it.

- ASMP gets $1,3 million dollars LAST YEAR and only reveals it now (and only because PDN was spilling the beans). They are “not sure” what they will do with it yet. Guess they need more time to think. Is it just me or someone is fooling someone ?

- If I had half of a brain and was somewhat concerned about the Orphan Work legislation, I would look into this Copyright Clearance Center who apparently does collect money for usage. There just might be an interesting answer there, no ?

- Jupiter Images finally reveals its revenues for the last quarter and it is worse than anyone could have ever imagined. They are in negative growth with a stock price close to being under the limit.  The corporations are hurting badly, what does it say about  the rest of the industry ?

-  Microsoft Pro Summit invited spoiled little kid Thomas Hawk ( not his real name) to its Pro Summit. Anyone care to react ? The guy is a neon light loving Flickr happy rich kid with nothing else to do than blog hours on about his iphone and media center and he is considered a pro by Microsoft ? Anyone feel insulted here ? ASMP guys ?

- Its August 8 and the Digital journalist website is still in July ? Does anyone worry or care  anymore ?  ( Ok, they are always late)

- Brian Storm and his team are also moving to Brooklyn . Who in the photography world can still afford Manhattan ? Besides Corbis, obviously. Does anyone know ?

These are all important questions and no one seems to take them seriously. Someone needs to be in charge here. any suggestions ?

Posted in Jupiter, celebrity, magazine, mediastorm, web 2.0, editorial, flickr, corbis | Print | 1 Comment »

August 6, 2008 by pmelcher.

The photo agency industry continues to complain and whine about its condition, endlessly consummated by demons it has created.

For one, it has created this endless pool of incredibly mediocre photographer that has for far too long managed to make a living taking pictures. Its not amateur photography that is getting better, it is just pro photographer that are getting worse and lazier. The over reliance on a defunct principle that they were the only one to own the channels of photography sales made photo agencies indifferent to the quality of their product. After all, it was them or nothing. Even Getty, who once believed it could corner the “distribution of image” market and set it own rules got a nasty wake up call when Istock through the first kick and Flickr the second punch.

Today, the photo agencies have a lot of excess weight. Photographers they keep because of old friendship or by pure habit, endlessly submitting the same images in the hopes that the Golden age will soon return. While they wait, in absolute stubbornness, the majority have decided that playing with pricing will offer them a new opportunity.

Amidst unverified rumors that their competition is doing the same, prices are being slashed to levels that have never been seen and that defies even the law of gravity. Since print publications are not doing so well either, everyone is more than happy to comply, bringing the whole market to a spiraling absurd end. To top it all, Angelina’s twins selling for an allegely $14 million just adds more photographers in the pool, hoping that they will too, one day , hit the jackpot.

Take Florida based photo agency prphotos.com ( created by some wireimage ex pats), for example. Someone there with a brain the size of  sand has decided to offer red carpet images for web usage on a subscription basis. That wouldn’t be so bad if the prices were not so ridiculously low. Some of its offering is as low as  “Under A Penny Per Image”. At that stage, what is the point ? With what seems 5 people on staff, how do they intend to pay their bills?

Do they still believe the internet is the dumping ground of photography ? But more important, what does it say about how they value their photography ?

We haven’t seen the worst of it yet. There will be more of these whacked-cracked photo agencies popping up everywhere, one “smarter” than the other, offering waccadoodle prices in a desperate hope to become the new Google of photography.

Getty, now privately private will soon release a lot of weight ( read photographers) that will in turn compete not on quality but on sub pricing flooding of an already over saturated market with less than attractive images. It will not just hit editorial, but commercial stock as well, until only a few agencies survive. Already photographers have a hard time. If they associate themselves with foot-shooting agencies and their magic potion pricing, they will have to take other jobs to make ends meet.

There is no salvation in stupid pricing. It is just stupid.

Posted in celebrity, magazine, commercial stock, google, flickr, getty, editorial, finance, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

July 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

By now, you must have read all about the Getty Image/Flickr deal. In a nutshell, Flickr announced that Getty Images has the right to go through the Flickr collection and pick and choose the images that they want to distribute.

Now, seldom know that Flickr has been shopping around for the last two years for a way to license its content. They have approach many existing companies in order to investigate their options. I am not at liberty to say which but lets just say they are not your traditional mom and pops. But like with any huge company, time is not an issue and most potential, at first very excited, ended their conversations with a resentful puff and walking away with what everyone thought was a goldmine. When you looked closer, it is more like a coalmine. Lots of digging for little return. One huge issue, is that, although Flickr has a clear copyright policy, most people don’t care and upload whatever they want anyway. Since nothing is for sale, no copyright infringement lawsuit has ever surfaced, but most certainly a lot of “cease and desist” notices have circulated.

The second very important issue, is that Flickr has a beautiful facade, but behind it,  lies a dump yard of crappy snapshots. Their “Interrestingness” engine is a model of programming done with genius. Only the best images  surface, hiding the ugly muck below.

While these talks where going on, some mash up 2.0 companies tried to take advantage of Flickr’s API to lure users to shift platforms and take advantage of their licensing engines. That was a lost battle as Flickr monitored those links very closely and shut down  any one who  apparent motivation was money. No more than a little slap on the hand.

Getty, having a whole department in charge of making new deals could simply  not let go. These guys lose their job if they do not make any new deals. So they came out with this wackadoodle arrangement: Flick makes deal with Getty Images.

Wait a minute, Flickr doesn’t own, nor does it represent any of its content. It is only a sharing platform. How can they make a deal on behalf of their users ? They can advise them, yes, but certainly not make a deal for them. Getty will still have to ask each and everyone of them for permission to license their images. But be no fool, this has been going on for a long time. I do not know of any photo agency that has not already contacted users of Flick in order to represent their work. And those who didn’t are either fools  or not in the commercial stock business. This deal doesn’t change that, as Flickr cannot dictate anything to its users.

Furthermore only Getty, or its retarded companion Corbis, could afford such a deal. It will take them a huge time to edit through the content and find the pearls. And that is money spend, not received. Let’s say they do find a photographer with great talent, nothing guarantees them that he or she will sign up with them. Nothing at all. Or they have might have already signed with someone else. This is Gargantuan work for little return.

This deal is just a pack of hot air. We all know that Getty is no fool and that this is just a big PR balloon. It will fly, get some people very excited and overheated, and just disappear after a short sting.

What is however captivating is that Getty now officially announced, with this deal, that it can no longer trust its own suppliers or photographers with providing them with the right images. It is  also an admittance of the failure of both  their internal “creative research and intelligence” and in its long held belief that it had secured the right partnerships. To proactively and officially reach out to amateurs is sending a loud and clear message that their current content is not adapted anymore.

After thought : So what happens to those poor pro photographers schmucks who paid $50 dollars to get their images on Getty Images under the brand “Photographer’s Choice“? Let me get this straight : you’re an amateur and upload to Flickr, Getty images includes your images for free. You are a pro unwilling to upload to Flickr, maybe because you don’t want then stolen and you have to pay $50 per approve image ? It doesn’t compute

Posted in Search, license, technology, commercial stock, yahoo, web 2.0, corbis, finance, flickr, prosumer, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 17, 2008 by pmelcher.

- A useful blog. With some delay but with quite a bang, Photoshelter finally launches a very useful blog for its users and beyond. Full of tips, info, rules and dynamism, it could very well become a very helpful resources for stock photographers who take photography seriously. Does that mean they plan to close the other useless egg hugging blog who rips off hundreds of valuable images for free under the cover of ‘fair use” ? Go ahead, shoot that blog

more on School of Stock here:

- Multimedia continues to rule : Ed Kashi  has launched a wonderful website entirely dedicated to his work on Nigeria delta. Curse of the black gold, offers, among other option, a great multimedia who has all the attributes of a Mediastorm production. A must see, keeping in mind that Kashi was briefly captured and jailed to bring this issue to the world.

Multimedia here:

Update : June 19, 2008 : this article on MSNBC :

Nigerian oil field shut after U.S. worker seized

- Geolocation without GPS: Geolocation is the ability to pinpoint the location, on a map, of where an image was taken. Carnegie Mellon University took millions of  already geographically tagged  images from Flickr as a tool to identify the location of an image, any image. Works a bit like this. You upload an image which compared to millions of Flickr set. By recognizing attributes, it can almost accurately find out, by itself, where the image was taken. Using the same principle, one can easily see how automated keywording could benefit from this crowdsourcing approach. More details here

- Getty’s latest set of numbers: Funny how no one noticed how the Wireimage brand took a huge beating after being purchased by Getty. According to Getty’s published number, Wireimage went from  + $ 3 million a quarter, to a few hundred thousands the next full quarters. What happen ? Did the Wireimage staff just stopped working ? Furthermore, PumpAudio seemed to have also fallen to zero revenue for two quarters after acquisition.

Posted in mediastorm, celebrity, technology, commercial stock, multimedia, Search, slideshow, flickr, web 2.0, keyword, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 3, 2008 by pmelcher.

A while back, I had written about photosynth, when it just came out. Created by Microsoft, the idea is to stitch together multiple images taken by complete strangers to create a panoramic view taken from multiple vantage point. Well, Google just issued their version thought the Spanish company Panoramio. Panoramio is the company that allows you to post your images on Google Earth.

With its content, Panoramio has created its on stitches to render a full anonymous picture of a place. Using hundred of images taken by various people at different time, one can visualized a place or a monument thought a series a similar images. One image leads to another one and so on. Maybe the idea is to put together photographs of the whole world so that one could literally see every place. Google certainly has the means and the ambition. It would be a sort of social map constituted of all the images of the earth as seen by everyone.

You can see an example here

This technology, along with others of the kind, shows how terribly unique the internet is when it deals with photographs . The possibilities to create and expand are almost endless, while giving the user a richer experience.

This would be hard to be used in sport, however, but just think if you could stitch together thousands of images of the winning moment at the 100 meter final at the Olympics. A thousand views for one moment.

This technology could also be applied to commercial stock, making the  image more 3D and interactive.  Or in news, breaking the usual slide show linear model of one image after the other but all in one. Think of the New York Times readers gallery of photographs on the crane incident. This, to me, illustrate the “Future of Contemporary Photography” much more than any images of eggs, empty parking lots or thousand of sunsets ripped from their online presence to be pasted on a lonely, endless wall.

Posted in multimedia, technology, commercial stock, google, web 2.0, slideshow, flickr, prosumer, editorial | Print | No Comments »

May 28, 2008 by pmelcher.

Apparently Corbis is in the process of building a three floor museum. Called the

Museum of Art for the Arts (MofAA)

Here are the plans, in a building situated right next door to the Corbis offices, at 912 Broadway, in New York.

It is unclear what will be included in this new space, besides maybe a bust in memory of Steve Davis the First, or a donation point to help Corbis be profitable. It could host a history of the destruction of many brilliant agencies. Or a final homage to commercial stock photography. What we know for sure is that it is certainly not funded by the companies profit.

It is interesting to see , however,  that the Bill Gates-owned company continues to be undecided as whether it wants to be a cultural institution or a profit making operation.

On a positive note, lets hope that this new space will host some of the buried treasure of photography that the Gargantua of the photo world has had buried in caves of Pennsylvania.

More info, ( not much) on this project here. I’ll let PDN finish the investigation. Which Daryl Lang did, brilliantly.

Posted in commercial stock, flickr, corbis | Print | No Comments »

April 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

Google is thinking about changing its Image search algorithm. Currently it has a convoluted way to return results. As you probably already know, its a basic “text” search which looks at the file name, “alt” comments and words around the image to declare an image a valid candidate to a search. Meaning that if you search for “cat” for example and someone has named an image of a truck “cat.jpg”, has put the description in the “alt” comments as “cat, cat and more cat” all that around an article about how great his cat is, then that image of the truck will appear in your search.

Not very efficient, is it ? And as previously written here, the image could be completly out of focus and grainy, as long as it meets all the requirement for Pagerank, it will appear high up in the results.

Called “PageRank for Product Image Search” and presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing by two Google staff engineers, it is aim at becoming the new VisualRank.

Claiming to be an image recognition system and using advance object recognition, here is what it does. It scans all images and looks for patterns, regardless of what object is in the image. After a while, it will see that some images or at least part of the image have the same pattern . Those will be linked. The image or images that have the most similarities with all the others will be pushed to the surface.It gives you a result like that :

See that image in the middle ? It contains all the attributes of the others, thus its the most relevant.

If applied this will create a headache for the photo business. Since this search is really made to search for products to purchase and not for images to license, it is counter productive for our industry. It will not return the best image, the most liked or the most striking, only the most banal, the most common. Ouch !

It will favor non exclusive images, think RF and microstock, over RM images. It will enhance the most used images not the best ones. It will slowly bring IPTC kewording to obsolescence.

In order to bring traffic to its website, a photo agency or photographer will have to post  images as much as possible everywhere all the time.The same image. Thus an image with a lot of various usage will be the star, while news images, who usually have a shorter life-span, will not score well. But an image of a spoon might become a superstar. Especially if it is sold everywhere

Google hates photography. Or rather it sees  it as a tool, not as an art. Another way to index the world.It will become harder to find great images with Google and that will continue to open a door wide open for anyone looking to create a search engine for photography with a ranking system based on quality and relevancy. An image search and not a visual search.

More on the emmerging proposal at Techcrunch.

Posted in IPTC, Search, technology, keyword, google, filter, flickr, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Image details: Pope Benedict XVI Celebrates Mass At Yankee Stadium served by picapp.com

It is a blessing these days to see a company that grows by listening to its criticism. Ad supported licensing company Picapp has recently revamped its site and has made some good improvements.  First and foremost, you can decide if you want or not that little pop up figure they call picaboo. You can also choose the size of the image you want to post and what type of an animation.

Thus after selecting your image, you can select between a goofy interface to a more serious one. What the people needed.

A quick down and dirty Alexa ranking shows Picapp  ahead of competitor Gumgum in traffic. No big surprise as they started with a big bang using the Getty  trampoline.

The real question is why did neither of these companies have open their service to individuals.

Sure, it is nice to have access to images from pros, but what about the huge pool of amateurs. This licensing model would much better serve the Flickr community than anyone else. After all, it would be a great replacement to the useless Creative Common scheme. ” here, use my picture for free, in exchange for which I get a cut on ads”. Fair enough, no ?

But neither Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug and other mass photo storage platform will allow their content to be duplicate on either the Picapp or Gumgum server. The technology has to come to them. And that is the biggest shortcoming of both companies. Because their technology is neither proprietary neither that hard to create.

The second short coming is that neither offer the publisher any income for posting these images. Even the slightest cut would make either company immediately attractive. Imagine, get paid to post images !! Someone is bound to do it.

I can foresee very soon many  agencies offering the same type of licensing model from within their own site, bypassing the “Picgum” middle man.It would not be a problem for Flickr to add that option too. So it leaves both companies in breathless race to create enough critical mass of content to become indispensable. One, Picapp, has concentrate on overall volume, while the other, GumGum, seems to concentrate on just celebrity oriented content.

Let’s see what the future brings them. Either way, a very interesting race to watch.

Photo Licensing by GumGum | © PacificCoastNews

Posted in celebrity, copyright, alexa, technology, gumgum, license, keyword, filter, editorial, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.

Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:

After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize  the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them

“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.

Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land

Posted in No sense, Search, copyright, IPTC, keyword, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, filter | Print | 2 Comments »