Jon Oringer of Shutterstock said it well: barrier of entry in stock photography licensing today is very low (actually getting lower), barrier to scalability is very high and getting higher. In other words, it is easy to find and regroup content to license (UGC or not). It is much harder to find clients. Now with … Read More →
To understand the role of photography today, we have to understand why we take pictures. We automatically tend to associate picture-taking as an addition to our memory function since a lot of our natural visual activity is geared towards storing information for later use. However, with the advent of digital and especially mobile photography, we have … Read More →
Regardless of what any teacher might say, there are two ways to become a photographer : take a lot of pictures and look at a lot of pictures. Everything else is secondary. And that is exactly what our teenagers are doing. In a recent study done by Facebook on teens and Instagram, “growing up in a … Read More →
Earlier this week, Mediapost published an article on the rising demand for original content by brands. Citing recent research, the article states that “estimated budgets for producing content have grown steadily from 12.6% two years ago to 23.3%, today — and are on track to surpass 33% by 2017 — according to new research from … Read More →
It used to be that when trouble hit the streets, autocratic governments would shut access to the media, in particular to photographers. Those were targeted for a few reasons: One, they were easily identifiable with their gear, two, they could quickly communicate a situation via photos, and three, they worked for outlets with large readership … Read More →
There is a massive subterranean shift (no, not paradigm) happening right now in pro photography and it will define photography for at least the next 10 years. Like the movement of the continents, it is slow, hardly perceptible but irrepressible . Let me explain. For a very long time, pro photography was defined by its … Read More →
Social Media opened our eyes to the reality that there is a massive talent pool of photographers that have not chosen the path of going pros. They enjoy taking and sharing photos just for the pleasure while they go on paying for their lives with other, probably more lucrative, occupations. Nevertheless, the technology world doesn’t see … Read More →
The problem with photography today is not Instagram, Selfies or other Snapchat. It is not the devaluation of the value of professional photography. No, those are nothing compared to the massive influx of a pernicious disease infecting modern photography. The problem with photography today is that everyone writes about photography. Not that is a problem … Read More →
What the image sharing culture has revealed is that non-pros are much better at taking pictures than anyone thought. In an analog world, everyone kept for themselves: Pros shooting for large distribution periodicals and amateurs shooting for friends and family.With the advent of Flickr, we started seeing a large volume of non pros with high … Read More →