November 1, 2011 by pmelcher.

Tired of hearing how photojournalism is dead ? Tired of going to photo festival where everyone whines and dines ? Not sure if crowdfunding is for you ? well, a new photography festival has been created for you.

Brainchild of ex director of photography for Paris Match, Didier Rapaud, the Festival of Saint Brieuc ( that’s in Brittany, France) is offering the first photo festival where any worldwide photographer can submit their project and receive substantial funding. You have until November 21 to submit your project ( there are no set topics) and the winners will be announced on December 2011. Next year, on October 2012 , the works of the winners will be shown to the public in various locations around the region.

Besides being a breeze of fresh air in the dusty photo festival , this festival also brings originality as it brings funding from local companies. For the first time, photo journalists are introduced to companies that are interested in funding original work. In a time of global recession,when magazines worldwide are cutting back on their assignments, it is surprising, and very much welcomed, to see private companies willing and eager to support the work of photographers.

So, without any further delay, head on to their site here and submit your project. You might just get that $25,000 you needed.

Photoreporter, Festival of photojournalism in Baie Saint-Brieuc

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October 21, 2011 by pmelcher.

Drop everything you are doing, you are taking a spaceship. Not the kind that goes up for a few minutes and brings you back down. No, you are talking the Major Tom kind, destination Mars.
You have not much time to pack and the agency, in its infinite kindness, let’s you take one photograph. Only one. Choose carefully because it could be the only one you stare at for a very long time. You might even need it to explain earth to some wandering martian.
Think you know which one to take ? OK. Now look at what 100 photographers from around the world ( mostly photojournalists) have chosen.

The result is quite telling. A majority seem to take family pictures, like a trucker going on the road. Otherwise pick from their own portfolio, probably satisfied with their own work, and finally the last group will take classics, Eugene  Smith being the top pick.
O ya, there are two that picked an image of the earth. A souvenir !
What is interesting here is how the mind works. Choices here are mostly emotional, thus the family pictures. Emotional too is the choice of their seemingly favorite pictures taken from their own work. Probably because it brings them back to a place and time of reassurance. But others have chosen highly disturbing images ( mummified faces kissing). Will they really want to stare at it for 100 years of solitude ?

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October 5, 2011 by pmelcher.

Goksin was a tall man. In a country where most men are small (you have Napoleon and two world wars to thank for that), he was even taller, towering easily in the  crowded office of the company he build and named after himself.
But Goksin was tall for other reasons. He was always above anyone else when it had to do with news photography. He was always looking further and higher than anyone else. He was a giant.
The ancient Greeks believed that sometimes the Gods would come down to earth and take human form to play tricks on us. If the Greeks had a God of photography, he would have certainly resemble Goksin, and acted like him. He had an uncanny ability to outwit, outsmart and outperform anyone in his field always delivering the “plaque” to the amazement to everyone. He knew photojournalism better than anyone and knew the impact of photography better than any editor in chief.
Like the Greek gods, he had an acute sense of humor as well as deep warm love for his fellow human. His generosity knew no boundaries. But more so than anything, no one could escape his charm.
In a few seconds of meeting him, you would fall into his inescapable charm and forever remain at his service, which you did with immense pleasure. It is hard to beleive that he ever heard the word “no”.
He was an unbelievable worker to the point that most of us thought he would die behind his desk. He had a foresight like no one else and believed in you more than you ever could.
There is hardly no one in the photo world today that he hasn’t touch and inspired and we are all his forever in debt children.
To say he will be missed is obviously an understatement but he has left so much to so many people in this business that it is hard to say he is gone. He continues to live in agency owners who thrive to replicate his style, he lives in the inside voice of thousands of photographers around the world who keep on hearing ” a little more” every time they are on a shoot. He lives in photo department everywhere when editors look for that images that will end up as a double page spread and sell more copies.
The passion for photography that Goskin had was unlimited and we are forever in debt to him. He was that shoulder we all stand on.  We will have to learn how to live like orphans because today we lost all lost a father.

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September 20, 2011 by pmelcher.

Just imagine, if you will, that publishers would get paid to use your images. Just imagine that publishers would actually generate a profit directly from your photographs. All that and you would also make more revenue at the same time . Don’t you think you would be the most popular photographer/ photo agency ?

Well, as of today, it is possible. Stipple has just launched Marketplace, an online tool that facilitate discovery of tagged images. Here is how it works : Publishers connect to the Stipple Image cloud by installing a little javascript code. They can then log in Stipple Marketplace and find images that contain embedded paid tags. Once published and thanks to viewers’ engagement, these images  start paying a revenue share to both image owners and publishers. It’s that simple.

For publishers, it is a godsend: What used to be a cost center can now become, for the first time ever,  a profit center. For image owners, it is a brand new revenue source. And for both, it does not require any additional work; Stipple handles all the back work. Finally, for both of them, it is free to join and participate.

But you do not have to believe a word I say. Instead you can read all about it in the Washington Post .

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September 12, 2011 by pmelcher.

Taking a cue from the succesful microstock model here is where photojournalism is heading.  It is happening under our eyes, right now and in four steps.

The decline of traditional photojournalism.
Nothing really new here. Rising cost of living (travel, lodging, food) has made it almost impossible for current print and web publishers to send top talents on stories anymore. The profit margins are not there anymore. Although there is a bucket full of very talented photojournalist available, there is just no funds to make them do what they do best. Furthermore, with the deaths of traditional photo agencies who used to pay for half of the costs, there is just not enough financial support to keep it going. It’s not photojournalism that is dying, it’s the funding that is going dry.  Furthermore, photo editors that championed the great stories have long gone, either retired or pushed out due to corporate restructuring or cost saving measures.

The rise in volume of the me-too photojournalism.

Here again, nothing we haven’t heard or seen before. Automated cameras that can nail an image in the even poorest conditions has helped introduced a new wave of photographers that can, and will snap at anything and everything and force distribute it via every channel possible. Force distribute because we really do not want to see it but thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media, we get to see them anyway. The poor state of our economy has not help, obviously, making this forced free lance job even more appealing to many. It also has become easier to get published, at least once, giving everyone the false impression that this is easy. Anybody can become a photojournalist these days : you just need to be where the media attention is focused upon.

The death of the photo agency.
Photo agencies used to be the gateway to the media. With trained professionals, they filtered out the bad from the good and edited the work of the talented to make it even more compelling. They would also seek out news stories and send the best photographers to cover them, not only creating the news, but partly covering  for the costs. It was a gamble, where talented journalists would scout newspapers worlwide for that snippet of information that could be turned into the major news of the week thanks to the talent of a brilliant photographer. Those editors are gone now. Gambling on stories is just not an acceptable business model in our corporate world. Photo agencies are not agencies anymore, they are image distributors.

Speed vs quality.
Thanks to digital, the key decision element for an image to be published is how fast they get to a desktop. Thus a bad photographer can very well become successful if he is the fastest.  More and more, this is what we, viewers, are being served with : the first images rather than the best. Thus the key to becoming a published photojournalist is where you are and not who you are.

Where does it lead us to:

Where everyone can be a shooter, with no money to be spend on travel, no editors acting as gatekeepers and speed as the key factor, the decision us easy;

Forget the photo agency as an agent of talented photojournalists. The key now is to have a lot of contributors worldwide and hope that one will be at the right place at the right time. With photographers everywhere chances you will get the right image at the right time will increase, like buying a lot of lottery tickets.
In the film age, the cost of film, processing, shipment was too prohibitive. Now, you can receive and store million of images for a buck or two.
This well know photo agency recently proudly claimed representing 40 photographers in Gaza only. For a territory 140 square mile ( 360 Km2), that is one photographer per 3.5 square mile.

Thus, taking a queue from the microstock model, photojournalism is now switching to the volume based model. While profitable for a photo agency, it is devastating for photojournalism and photographers themselves.

Posted in technology, magazine, Tweet, Social Media, Corpocrates, Good Enough, newspaper, TIME, editorial, getty, transaction, finance, photojournalism, wire service, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

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

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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

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April 25, 2011 by pmelcher.

Photography has always been about Time. and Space.  When one presses on that button, both are frozen, captured and can thus be delivered elsewhere in Time and Space. That was then.

The makers of the GigaPan, a machine that takes multiple images of a scene with various focal lengths in order to reconstitute it into a massive file have now launched the Time Machine GigaPan.

The GigaPan is well known for allowing viewers to zoom in and out of a photograph without losing any definition, as well as scrolling left and right, giving users more control on how they view a photograph. Now, with the addition of time lapse, one can also travel through time.

The advantage ? A scene is no longer static and one can zoom in ( or out) at specific moments . More user control.

Is this the future of photography ? While the concept is very appealing, giving still images more depth than they could ever dream of ( yes, Stills can dream too) , the file size is already a huge drawback. Furthermore, not all subjects can be time lapsed ( and unlike the current trend, nor should they), nor that all subjects are good candidates for zoom in scrolling.

However, some can be and actually gain depth from this new technology. This is where GigaPan would love for you to help. Join in there project and discover, with them, what would work with this. Come on, when was the last time someone asked you to participate in the future ?

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April 19, 2011 by pmelcher.

Always a late entry in the continuous flow of photographic awards, the Pultizer is still a very a very, very honorable one to receive. Mainly because it is one of the oldest ( the oldest ?), but also because it is so tied with sister, the written press. This year’s crop has made no discovery of young talented 20 year old who grabbed his camera and got the scoop of the year. None of that.  Rather, the jury went for established professionals with years of industry background and strong financial backing. Is that wrong ? Not at all. photography should not be about who you are, how you did it, but  about what you show: the photograph.

This year’s winners also show that while newspapers might be a dying breed, newspaper photogrpahers are certainly not. They still photograph world events with the same passion and commitment as ever.

That is exactly what the venerable Pulitzer showed this year . One little thing, however : Can someone redesign the site so it does look and feel it was made in the 70’s ? especially, can we make a little effort to display the photographic winners a tad better ?

See winners here :  Breaking News : Pulitzer 

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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.

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