September 7, 2011 by pmelcher.

“Thoughts of ” is relocating or expanding :

On Facebook :  Thoughts of a Bohemian page  for the daily snippets

On La Lettre de la Photographie for 2 columns a week. One column is dedicated on the best there is to discover about photography on the web while the other, brand new, is about the world of photojournalism and photo agencies. You can read it and subscribe, for free, here : La Lettre de la Photographie.

what about about the typos ? they will follow me everywhere I go…

Obviously this blog will remain open, while quite not as often,  for longer thoughts and  hair raising revelations

Posted in magazine, celebrity, license, multimedia, Plus, technology, Corpocrates, Good Enough, Waste of time, Social Media, Search, No sense, finance, transaction, editorial, news, wire service, photojournalism, keyword, web 2.0, prosumer, getty | Print | No Comments »

August 2, 2011 by pmelcher.

Can the memory of a photograph be better then the image itself ? Do we tend to embellish what we have seen and liked ? Most probably so. The memory of a photograph contains , on top of the graphic visualization of the image, the sum of all the emotions and memories linked to it : The personal experience. It contains all the subjective association that we have made while looking at it, thus creating a highly personal layer that the original vision did not have. Thus, what we remember of a photograph we love is much better than the original. Are we disappointed when we see it again ? Most often not. Since it had triggered all these satisfying internal connection the first time around, it will do so again and again. Unless, if for some reason, when we had first looked at it, we misinterpreted it. Of rare occurrence, but it can happen when we are in a non typical heighten emotional state when we were first exposed to the photograph. Or our lives has taken us down a different path. A photograph you thought was great during your teenage years my not seem the same when you are a 50 years old . It can still, however, connect you back to comfortable memories. The memory of a photograph is always better than the original because of our personal input.

Thus, in pure logic, the more generic an image the better. It should serve a canvas for personal experience, right ? Well, absolutely not. because a generic image doesn’t trigger any emotions. It just stays blandly generic. in order to communicate to its viewers, a photographers needs to be as personal as possible . He should forget about trying to please everyone, everywhere. And this is where commercial stock photography has failed in the latter years. Obsessed with RPi numbers, they have flooded the market with one size fits all images empty of emotional triggers. When the miccrostockers came into the market, they brought back in the emotions that had left the industry for a while. And besides pricing obviously, they beat their pro elders on content. They just got more response to their images.

Of course, they are now doing the same mistake as the pros and relying on charts, equations and past revenues to dictate their next images. And like their predecessors, they are seeing revenue declining. No one can claim and secure photographic success. It is probably harder to maintain than to attain. However, by succeeding in ignoring the false sirens of success, one can easily navigate closer to the surface. If one continues to deliver a personal experience to its viewer, than 99% of the battle is won. The rest is marketing

Posted in license, commercial stock, Social Media, Corpocrates, Search, prosumer, Royalty free, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

July 21, 2011 by pmelcher.

They say that 95 % of communication is non verbal. This is the realm of photography. It explores and transports through time and space the world that resides outside the Word. Confusingly enough however, we tend to give much more credit, and emphasis, to the written/spoken word.

Our newspapers and magazines spend more space on word than they do on photography, forgetting so often the famous adage that an image is worth a thousand words. We seemed convinced that if we do not read it, or hear about it, it cannot really be real. So, an amazing amount of energy, time, and money is spent on collecting data that can then be transmitted via words when a few images could easily, and more powerfully, do the same. Centuries of dubious philosophies however, started by Plato himself, has taught us not to believe in what we see. A concept that  we still carry well into the 21st century.

However, how many times have we witnessed a scene without hearing a word and immediately understood what was going on : people arguing on a street corner, a women paying for cloth in a store, a kid receiving his first ice cream of the year, all do not need a word for us to understand fully. No explanation needed.It is, in fact, how we understand our world best. Dogs, our best friends, can communicate with us without a word. 

That is what photography is all about, the third language ( words and music being the first two). If your photographs explain, then they have done their duty. If they just replicate, then they are no better than a mirror, or worse, a photocopy machine. No one has every been ecstatic in front of a well done photocopy.

 Photography is about the 95% of our communication that is non verbal. Not a word and yet a universe of comprehension. A vehicle of understanding that even Plato would have enjoyed.

Posted in commercial stock, focus, license, photojournalism, editorial | Print | No Comments »

July 10, 2011 by pmelcher.

Let’s face it, you are waging a losing battle. In fact, it’s not even a battle because one side has won already. Every time you sign up for a social network, be it Facebook, Twitter or Google +, you are faced with TOS ( Terms of Service) that are pure rights grabbing, making it a very dangerous proposition for you to share your images. Yet, everyone tells you that the only path to success is to have your images on these sites.

So, here are three core facts that you need to know about Social Networks:

- There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If someone offers you something for free, it is only because they get some kind of benefit out of it. You can be sure they will find a way to monetize your images.

- If you use a service for free, you become the product : what do you think Facebook, Twitter or Google + sell ? You. Your interaction on their sites is what they in turn sell to advertisers. That includes your pictures.

- They need the legal right to share your images. In order to show the images you post on their site to your friends and family, they need the legal right to do so. Since there is no way for them to know who are your friends, family or others ( nor do they care) , they make you agree to a blanket agreement stating that they can share them with everyone.

So, if you think you can sign up for a social network site that will protect your intellectual property, you are sticking your big left toe in your eye. It is just not and never going to happen. The answer ? Deal with it.

Accept the fact that if you post your images on a social network site, there is a 110 % chance that you could loose complete control of that image. Play along . If you post pictures of your 3 years old nephew at your cousin’s barbeque party, you have not much to worry about. Besides a few polite likes from your relatives, not much will happen to that image and it will soon be forgotten along with the other 10 million images uploaded to Facebook in a month. However, if you post the only image of a plane crash landing on the Hudson river, well, get ready for it to be grabbed and spread around.

Here is the irony. Photographers or photo agencies will post their images on social network sites in order for them to be seen, appreciated and dare we say it, shared ( ouch). Isn’t it the intended purpose of posting these images that they will end up in front of the eyes of a wealthy photo editor who will either purchase it or hire you ? And since you do not know him yet, the only path is via friends of friends re-posting it ? Should they all ask you for permission and pay you a license fee every time they do ? In other words, you give them something to share but you don’t want them to share.

Well then, quite a paradox . Ownership of an image doesn’t lie solely in managing its usage. It is also embedded in it. If you have a style, a talent, a point of view and an identity, your image will always speak your name, credit or no credit. Better yet, people who see your images will want to track you down in order to find out who is the talent behind those photograph. If they don’t, well, that’s because you failed as a photographer.

So what should you do with all these rights grabbing, soulless TOS that you keep on facing every day? Adapt.

They are not going to change because they are at the core of how these social networks make money. Not so much by licensing your images, obviously ( everyone knows there is no money there), but by using them to grow their network and thus selling more people to advertisers. And for that, they need the right to do what they damn well like with your images. Forever.

Keep that in mind next time you post images on any of these sites ( and others).  Your choices :

- Do not upload images

- Watermark your images

- Upload only images you are ready to give away

Either way, stop bitching and moaning about a new TOS like there was anything you could do about it. Although it might feel like it sometimes, it is not your platform, it’s theirs. They will do whatever they think is appropriate to generate revenue from it . They don’t owe you anything, you do.

So stop wasting your energy and time . Get back on your saddle and figure out  how you too can benefit from their services intelligently without loosing your pants and shoes ( and your sanity). Eventually the ecosystem will find a balance.

Posted in technology, Tweet, Social Media, Waste of time, digg, license, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, transaction | Print | 1 Comment »

May 27, 2011 by pmelcher.

With $1.2 million dollars of fresh investment, a new company enters the world of photography monetization.  Called Fotomoto, it allows,  with a  simple javascript installation to transform any existing photographers websites into an e commerce site. Visitors will quickly be able to purchase your images for framing or other usages.

The great part of it is that it is free to use and install. A simple javascript and your done. Fotomoto gets a cut on your sales, if you sell an image. Simple enough.

However, the consequences are disturbing. First, their is an option to download. For a fee obviously and for personal use.

One, some buyers might not abide by the rules

two, some photographer might use this to price their images at micro stock prices for RF usage .

The result, even more confusion on the marketplace, where already pricing is all over the place ( towards the low end, mostly). Sure, allowing photographers to sell their work directly and easily is a great idea. However, opening the floodgates of free for all pricing, maybe not.

Since individual photographers will make a few sales from their respective sites, the big winner here will be Fotomoto who will accumulate all the sales done with this tool . Using a now well known economical practice called the long tail, they could generate millions in revenue while the photographers themselves will have to continue to do most of the work : shooting, editing, marketing.

It will be interesting to see how well this model is adopted and how it might effect companies like LicenseStream or even Photoshelter. Obviously, some investors seem to think it will succeed. This also confirms that the walls of traditional photo licensing are falling ( microstock being the first and strongest blow), leaving non-innovative  photo agencies in a dangerous position.

For now, you can learn more here :

and visit their website.

Posted in copyright, technology, commercial stock, license, prosumer, transaction, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

May 3, 2011 by pmelcher.

Up to now, images would only give you remote information in a passive way. More than often, they illustrate an accompanying article, with no more duty than to confirm what you are reading. As much as the photographer or publisher tried, it was a view and forget operation. No so anymore.

Thanks to new technology, the image has grown to becoming more intelligent, by permitting its viewers to dig deeper into it’s content. It is also now able to call home and inform on how it is being interpreted.

Thanks to a company called Stipple, photographs acquire a new dimension, an interactive layer, that finally allows viewers to communicate with them. Thanks to a mouse over generated interactive layer, small dots appear on specific parts of the images. Those dots, once selected, present the user with numerous options. They can save, share or shop for some of the items. They can also be presented with live feeds of tweets or links to additional information .

Viewers can then interact with this new set of information in ways never seen before. They can purchase the items that they like, search for local deals or even better, be presented with discounts. Last but not least, both publishers and the photography rights owners can see, in real time, how people interact with their images.

Stipple works with all images : sports, travel, celebrity, news, commercial stock. There are no limitations.

Not only Stipple adds intelligent interaction to photographs in a smart non intrusive manner, but it also engages viewers to explore photographs in innovative ways. Beyond the frustrating limitations of the IPTC caption field that can only give an overview of the content of an image, Stipple dots can easily display extremely precise information on specific areas within a photograph.

One might think that this would be hard to implement : not at all. Photo agencies need nothing else to do then send a parallel feed of their images the same way they already do to their clients, while publishers only need to add a simple javascript code. That’s it. No added workload. And it’s free.

To top it all, both publishers and photo agencies receive a commission on all transaction generated by their images. In a depressed market, this is very welcomed news.

Finally, Stipple offers a great tool against orphan work. If the metadata of an image is stripped, Stipple will automatically reunite it with rightful owner and display the original information. Even if the image has been altered.

Using some powerful technology built in house, Stipple is the first company to fully offer an intelligent image solution to both publishers and photo agencies along with a new inventive way to generate more revenue.

You can get more information on Stipple on their website at www.stippleit.com

Posted in celebrity, license, magazine, technology, Social Media, Search, SIPA, editorial, transaction, finance, web 2.0, news | Print | No Comments »

April 12, 2011 by pmelcher.

It’s the content stupid ! well, no more.

Some time ago, if you were lucky enough to have created an image that all wanted, you could easily sit on it and wait for your phone to ring. Not really anymore. The center of the business gravity has shifted. To those who create value around the content.

The downfall of journalism is a good example. The great site of journalism are not doing as well as those who couldn’t care less about quality. The Huffingon Post beats the New York Times. Sure, traffic will tell you a different story. But, finance will not. While the NY Times is struggling to find ways to create dollar value, the Huffington Post sells for more than $300 million. Why ? Because they are in two different businesses.

One is obsessed at creating content, the other in monitizing content. And, right now, the money is in those who know how to monitize content.  In photogrpahy, the same shift has happened. You could be the greatest photographer alive, it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t know how to create value around your content. Those who have experience in doing so are the publishers.

They can take cheap text from one place , a cheap photograph from the other and voila, done. Why ? Because in the internet age of fast and free consumption, people do not expect value for their money as they do not pay. They are fine in receiving what they have paid for : not much.

Thus, why should publishers pay a premium for any photograph ? They will not retain viewers longer, nor will it guarantee  fidelity . Rather, what they focus on is the volume and the management of expectancy. As long as they deliver the little that is expected from them when it is expected from them, than they will create traction. And Dollars.

Why bother paying for an exclusive image when that image can be copied and pasted in thousands of websites within minutes ?  Why pay more for a photograph which will grab someone attention for less than a second before they move on ? It would be a waste of resources.

Rather, it makes much more financial sense to have a repeated pattern of offering over and over, with accurate consistency, the exact expected result. That is where the revenue resides. Within a context, not within the content.  Furthermore, a context can be managed, not content. That is the economy we see all around us and that is why photography, by itself, has little or no value. It is just a very small brick of a much wider context.

Photographers, photo agencies and related have no experience in building value around their images. They sell a raw material that has devaluated because the refineries, those who transform it in consumables, the publishers, only use them as small elements of their final product. They are not the product.

Can it be changed ? Maybe. No one has really tried to create a publication with exclusive or high end photography only. Mostly because those who have tried with text, like the New York Times, have spend a lot of money and failed. Up to now.

Will it change ? It will certainly if paywalls start to be successful . Because as soon as people pay for content, they expect the content to match or surpass the value they paid for it.

Thus, the future of photography, or at least the future of photography  online, depends on the success of paywalls.

Posted in celebrity, magazine, technology, license, Search, finance, photojournalism, web 2.0, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 7, 2011 by pmelcher.

A great tribute to a great man, of a period when photo editing was so much more than just getting the “cheapest one”.

from the NPPA

Posted in magazine, Magnum, license, multimedia, photojournalism, editorial | Print | No Comments »

March 9, 2011 by pmelcher.

A dream come true : your image being used everywhere. A nightmare come true : you don’t get a penny while others are. A frightening true life example of what happens to your photographs in the XXI.

The Stolen Scream: A Story About Noam Galai from FStoppers on Vimeo.

The question is : was the image labeled CC on Flickr ? If so, it could have led to this worldwide free loading feeding frenzy. How can this be prevented ? how do we instruct people to, at least, ask permission before using an image?

What is interesting is the photographers’ reaction. While he is clearly unhappy about the situation, instead of suing everyone, he has resolve to using the situation to publicize himself ( see his website here : http://www.thestolenscream.com/)  and reverse claiming  ownership of his image.

Smart, very smart. He might just end up on top.

Posted in license, Social Media, Search, web 2.0, editorial, flickr, getty | Print | 2 Comments »

March 5, 2011 by pmelcher.

Is it the end of microstock and royalty free ? No, not because of decline in usage but rather as a result of powerful litigation. A french organization certainly thinks so.

The Union des Photographes Professionels , UPP (Union of professional photographers) just recently held a round table 0n the damages of royalty free, it’s damages to the photographic trade and what they intend to do about it.

We can skip the part where they talk about royalty free and it’s damages to the industry as we have all heard it before and there nothing new here. Rather, the panel gets interesting when the lawyer, Maitre Jean Vincent speaks. He explains that after months, years of careful study, they have found various aspect of the law that they can use to challenge royalty free. A couple we found noteworthy was deceptive advertising and pricing. let’s review:

French law designated as void  any sale of goods, product and services that is priced at infinitesimal price.  For example, if one was to purchase one image on Istockphoto for let’s say $5 and use this image for a book, a magazine, an ad campaign, a brochure, on a TV set, in a Movie set, over and over again for 70 years ( life of a copyright), it would amount for less than a cent per usage. Under this law, that pricing is so low that it would not constitute a sale. Thus become illegal. Furthermore, even a third party, not involve in the transaction, can bring this sale to court and have it voided. Nothing in France can be sold for a derisory price, even if both parties accept. Anyone can condemn such a sale, which is exactly what UPP intends to do against the microstock agencies licensing in France.

The second is deceptive advertising. Royalty free, in French, is translated by “libre de droits”, brutally translated to “Free of any kind of rights”. Maitre Jean Vincent explains that definition is deceptive and not true : Royalty free images are neither rights free nor free of royalties. Again, grounds for a legal action.

The organization is  seriously involved in bringing a couple of RF companies - Fotolia seems their primary target - to court in order to create legal precedent. That would facilitate the process for the rest.

Those outside of France might be smiling right now thinking this is more kakaboula crap coming out of the country of whiners. Not so fast.

Remenber that story, Save the Passport photo ? Well, they just have won. President Sarkozy has just agreed to remove all remaining free passport photo machines located in city halls across France ( about 1,000). This will force people to get their passport pictures to be taken by approved professionals.

France is not a consumer oriented economy. Rather, it is strongly entrenched in a long tradition of protecting trades, regardless of their public utility. Thus, there is a good chance that the UPP might win their legal challenge and force Royalty Free companies ( microstock included) to readjust their commercial approach ( raising prices, adjust their license agreements). Some might even close, not seeing any profitability in the new environment.

Could this spread out in other countries ? The challenge could be elevated to become a European issue and, depending on the politics of the time, certainly pass. However, it would take a long time and allow RF companies to find new ways to market themselves. The US ? Doubtful, as this Adam Smith based economy revers its consumers as semi-gods and would never impair in their ability to get “a good deal”

Nevertheless, this is a new development in what seemed the finished war between RF and RM. It could also be the last salvo.

Posted in copyright, commercial stock, license, CEPIC, transaction, france | Print | No Comments »