Dr Getty and mr Images

December 10, 2010 by pmelcher.

The two sides of Getty Images :

Getty images : “we will drown you with our images”

Getty Images : Cool Year in review

Posted in multimedia, celebrity, photojournalism, slideshow, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

The old whore

October 29, 2010 by pmelcher.

You know what’s funny ? I’ll tell you what’s funny. By continuing to put so much financial pressure on photographers and photography, the media will loose it’s source of imagery .

With declining space rates and assignment rates, increasingly obscene rights grabbing bordering on copyright infringement, unacceptable usage agreements and overall disrespect of the photography trade, publishers are literally pushing the photo industry to look for new revenues, and respect, somewhere else.

Already photo agencies like VII with news and X17 with celebrity have entered the publishing arena in direct competition to those who used to be their best clients. Others are aggressively investigating how to license images to the million of blogs worldwide while others, like Black Star for example, have left the editorial world almost entirely in favor of the greener pastures of the corporate world.

Independent photographers do not bother approaching publications  anymore for assignments and have long gone with either NGO’s or Foundations. Even new technology companies like Mediastorm already make most of their revenue from foundations/NGO’s. We talk a lot about the desertification of entire regions of the world, soon we will see the same happening in the editorial landscape: Magazines, whether on Ipads or not, filled with nothing more than text and lonely generic images. Textbooks forced to use the same images over and over because there are no more “image suplliers”, preferred or not. Not far is the day when, calling on the phone, a photo editor will hear over and over” Time magazine who ?”.

It is not the will of anyone in the photo trade to cease doing business with publishers. However, the business conditions are becoming so unbearable that they have no other choice than to look elsewhere for revenue. And overall respect.

There will always be photographers because it’s not a job, it’s a passion. But like any passion, it needs to be fed with substantial income. In it’s short history, photography has had a strong love affair with the editorial world. Now the editorial world is treating it’s favorite mistress as an old whore. The bond is being broken.

However, it is not like photogrpahy doesn’t have anywhere else to go to be treated as a princess again. The internet has opened new revenue streams and while it is still a wild west, it promises a lot of new beginning. A lot of new love stories.

There is really no logical reasons for this change in attitude. Publishers have seen a lot of pressure on their industry, certainly, but none brought forth by photography. However, if circulation goes down, it’s photography that pays the rough price. Cuts are made, because, unlike electricity, it is deem unessential for the survival of a magazine. Almost as if, completely rid of the cost of photography, a magazine or book would actually do better. Well, soon, that might just become reality.

With licensing fees coming close to insulting, there will be no one to take those images anymore. No one to shoot wars, politics, archeology or even movie premieres. No one left to service them with their needs. Just an obscenely huge amount of crowd generated images of everything that doesn’t really matter. Pretty, certainly, but of no interest. It will be cheap, but useless.

For now, the old whore still clings to its lifelong lover in the hopes of a change of mind. But for how long?

And yes, you are right, it’s not that funny after all…

Posted in magazine, celebrity, technology, Newsweek, Good Enough, license, mediastorm, finance, editorial, TIME, Search, multimedia, news | Print | 3 Comments »

Could be

October 13, 2010 by pmelcher.

Saw this today :

Idea is smart: Charge and download images at the same time. no wires. Problem : it seems to be entirely thought around the “family picture” market only and not for the pro or semi pro user. Furthermore, you seem to need a box that is linked to your TV. Now really ? who needs another box under the TV?

One step forward, two step backwards

Posted in Waste of time, Good Enough, technology, multimedia, No sense, slideshow | Print | No 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 »

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 »

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 »

The Future of Photojournalism (Fixed)

July 13, 2010 by pmelcher.

 ( the issue with the player has been fixed)

A great and insightful interview of VII Manager Stephen Mayes. You want to understand where the photo industry is going, you have to listen to him :

Thank you Gerald Holubowicz

Posted in magazine, technology, lens, multimedia, Search, editorial, photojournalism, news | Print | 3 Comments »

The dictatorship of the wallet

May 28, 2010 by pmelcher.

Photography, like most industries affected by a center of gravity shift to digital, has experienced more than a migration from film to data packets. One of the most fundamental shift, however,  is how the decision process moved from quality of content to cost. Let me explain:

For a long time, the key decision in purchasing a license for any photograph had been it’s quality, it’s relevance to the intended usage. Sometimes, the photograph even outperformed its intended use, it was so good.  Cost, because it was perceived as a tool of value, was not an issue. Magazines had absolutely no problem in spending a lot of money to send photographers around the world and back in order to get the best images.

In fact, a lot of the magazines’ competition was done on newsstands with whom had the best cover. It was a badge of honor.

As images became easier and cheaper to transport thanks to falling memory prices as well as more readily available and cheaper bandwidth, the prices also started to drop. The cameras, the lens, the post processing, the traveling certainly did not drop. Just the cost of getting an image form A to B. Somehow, however, the belief that digital was cheaper to produce took root and, like a bad venom, infected  the whole industry.

Getting the best photographer to the location suddenly did not become a necessity. Getting the images faster took over. The best images was replaced by the fastest. Let’s just pick a photographer that is there already and get those images in. Assignment no longer included transportation to and fro. That lasted for a while as the still high cost of technology paired with the difficult technological learning curve kept the competition to a select few. However, that did not last long. Cost of equipment as well as it’s ease of use quickly lowered, allowing more and more to enter the competition for the fastest image.

Since it is impossible to transmit an image before it is taken, the competition hit a wall where everyone found themselves at the same level, transmitting as fast. So what happened ? prices dropped. The competition, as well as the usage decision, shifted again, this time to the cheapest.

Today, this is where we are : Decisions are no longer made on the quality of content but on its cost. It really doesn’t matter if your the next Cartier-Bresson, if you are too expensive, you won’t get published. If the photo budget is already spend on two or three subscriptions to photo agencies and your images are not part of the “feed”, forget it. You might as well go fishing. They will like your images, they just won’t use them.

What magazine readership do not see, is that they are paying to read publications that do not show them the best pictures but rather the cheapest. It is a very deceptive procedure. Don’t magazine attract your attention by the promise of delivering what they consider the best ?  Yet, as far as photography is concerned, they don’t. The rule has become to fit the image purchasing process within a pre-established budget. No longer do editors beleive that great images can boost readership. Instead, they beleive cheaper images will save them from oblivion.

How long would you continue to go to your favorite restaurant once you knew that they didn’t even try to purchase better product but just the cheapest ? This reminds us of those houses build with cheap dry wall imported from China that eventually made everyone badly sick. Sure, they were cheaper, and yes, cheap photography is not bad for your health. At least, not that we know of.

Photographs have a better chance to be published these days if they are cheap, not if they are good.

It is sad. Sad because there a great images being shot everyday that will never, never be seen because of this dictatorship of the wallet. Sad, because readers are being lied to by this money censorship. Sad because it is helping no one.

As magazine or website publishers continue to think in terms of broadcasting (One to many), our world is changing to social (many to many). Consumers are quickly evolving from passive participants to active contributors. As this migration is deepening, more will search for their own sources of photography that they will in turn grab and share. They will start invading the publishing world with images that they like rather than those that are being force fed to them by penny-pincher corpocrates. They will deconstruct and break the barriers of the conglomerate publishing world in order to resubmit their own vision of the world. It is already going in the world of text journalism, it will not be long before photography gets swept in.

It is no longer a viable proposition to beleive that image consumers will continue to just passively absorb cheap content. The barriers  that kept the suppliers of images invisible to the readers  have fallen, permitting them, for the first time in the history of photography, an unprecedented access to the source. They can now see where publications get their content from and make their own decisions. Ironically, as publications divert more and more what they use to the cheapest, the rest of the production become more and more visible, making their money censorship more obvious.

Obviously,  this uncomfortable situation is not going to last long. Photographers and photo agencies will soon be forced into finding lucrative ways to supply their images directly to the readers, by-passing those publishers who have refused to use them for monetary reasons. Some already do.

There is another revolution lurking here and once again, the photography world will never be the same.

Posted in copyright, license, multimedia, celebrity, magazine, E Reader, technology, newspaper, web 2.0, transaction, editorial, news, finance, wire service, prosumer, photojournalism, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

The new and the Old

May 24, 2010 by pmelcher.

When technology meets photography, handled by creative minds, this is what you get :   The Museum of London has just launched an iphone App that mixes the present with the past.

Works only in London, for now : You point your iphone camera to a location and  you can click on the “3D view” button and the app will recognize your location and overlay the historic image over the current view. See examples below. Of course they do not have an images for everywhere you go, so they give you a map where you can play with this historical enhance reality.

It’s free to download so if you are in London, and you have an Iphone, you should really try it.

Posted in technology, lens, multimedia, web 2.0, filter, photojournalism, editorial | Print | No Comments »

Shooting Stock: It’s Not Brain Surgery

April 19, 2010 by pmelcher.

Commercial stock photography is all about problem solving. The first is how to make a living shooting commercial stock. One way to do it, is to solve other people’s problems.

When image buyers go to a Web site, it is because they have been asked to provide a solution to a very specific problem: They have text, they have a layout, they have a concept and they have a client with a message. The task: fill in the visual space with the perfect image.

Seems easy in theory. If what’s needed is a picture of a tool, get a tool. If it is a concept, it is much harder.

A photographer’s job, one that shoots stock, is to preempt this problem and solve it. The more common the problem, the more successful the image. Potentially.

How does one figure what problems need to be solved worldwide? In a way, it is not that hard. As humans living in the 21st century, we share common experiences. We seek solutions to a lot of tasks and issues. Our lives, in a sense, are a continuous search to alleviate problems. And unbeknown to us, many are shared by our peers.

So, photographing our own problems, or at least solving them, is productive. Figuring out what the next problem will be is a better way to be a successful stock shooter. The image of the solution, however, should always be tied to the problem.

Once this is understood, that a stock photographer is a problem-solver, a big step has been made. But it is not all. A stock photographer should also know how to create meaning. And for that, we need to dive a little deeper in how the brain functions.

Our eyes, in a way, are very stupid. We receive light, and it bounces into the back of our brains, at the primary visual cortex, which only sees and recognizes basic shapes, like circles, squares, triangle, etc. However, this is not the end of how we interpret a photograph in our brains. It actually goes from there to at least 30 other different places in our brains, some of which we are still figuring out what actually they do.

Some we know:
We will skip quickly over the ventral stream, which is the “what” of our brain that recognizes what an object is and what it does. Sort of the catalog section of our brain. Photographs share this space, in the frontal lob, with words, and how we interpret them. We will also fly quickly over the dorsal stream. That part of the brain creates a map of where the object is. A sort of 3D GPS system that puts the object in perspective to its surrounding.

What is interesting is a third location where the information bounces, and that is called the limbic system. That is deep inside the middle of our brain and very old. Old in the sense that it has been with us throughout our evolution. The limbic system is the part that “feels” those basic emotions, from satisfaction to fear.

Those three parts are what create meaning for a photograph and what every single human being has in common, including your potential client.

That is what stock photographers should go after: create meaning. Images should tickle that part of our brains that recognize, put in perspective and make us feel emotions, because it also makes them valued.

When a creative director or a photo editor is looking for an image, it is not just a problem they are trying to solve, but a meaning they are trying to convey.

If you look at the stock industry, with photo libraries boasting millions upon millions of images, it is easy to see that maybe 90% will never sell. They aren’t useless; they just have no meaning to anyone.

Commercial stock photography, in order to strive, has to offer an emotionally meaningful solution.

Posted in copyright, technology, Magnum, commercial stock, license, multimedia, editorial, photojournalism, keyword, pictogram, news | Print | 1 Comment »