August 5, 2010 by pmelcher.

After you put on you dancing shoes and you are ready to spend some of the alcohol funneled energy you have kept for hours during the endless official ceremony, there is someone watching you very closely. Because soon, you will be offering them food for camera. That incredibly volatile moment that only he or she can capture in a millisecond flash and transform into a lifelong memory.

Sure, it’s your friends wedding party, but somehow, you are going to be the star.

It’s not that you want to take the spotlight. Someone will put you there. Despite yourself.

If you though wedding photography is that boring catalog of posed photographed in a park at sunset time, think again.  Thanks to the shifting media economy and more particularly, the demise of thousands of newspapers worldwide, the wedding photography trade has never looked better. You just don’t see it.

A multitude of jobless yet extremely talented local photojournalists have left their police scanners behind in favor of the sweeter sounds of 80’s disco inspired DJ’s to document, for  a fee, the lives of the common. The result is quite amazing :

These are the winners of the Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA), an international association of …well.. photojournalists turned wedding photographers. And it’s not just America, like other photo trade organization, it’s actually worldwide ( remember, photography knows no boundary ?).

Did I hear someone called the death of Photojournalism? Not so fast. I see a strong pulse  here.

It’s a peaceful organization : No endless whining, no boring tirades by old timers regretting the good old days, not talk of microstock or any kind of stock at all, no Getty images ( well, not yet), no pictures of dying Africans in B/W, no medium format photography of greenish empty parking lots ( in China, preferably), no Social Media gurus ( no Gurus at all, actually).

Just great photography…enjoy. ( click on the image above to see more).

Posted in newspaper, commercial stock, Social Media, photojournalism, slideshow, getty, news, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

August 4, 2010 by pmelcher.

From a Photo Editor job posting at Time, inc, the world’s biggest publisher of magazine in the world:

-Excellent editorial judgment and eye, must generate story ideas and identify topics to cover, must react to news.
-Edit and build various online photo galleries, notably never-seen LIFE archival content and LIFE.coms weekly feature: The Weeks Best Photos
-Oversee and perform the digital restoration of LIFE archival photos (basic retouching and color correction)
-Experience negotiating and managing usage rights and rates for digital, mobile and video content
-Assign, produce and direct original photo essays
-Liaise with Editorial, Legal, Sales and PR Teams in the execution of featured content packages
-Manage freelance staff
-Strong eye for young talent
- Must be creative in terms of doing more with less for less and must be ready and willing to do so

Revealing, isn’t it ? Especially the last phrase, which could be rewritten like this : Must be capable of getting the best images for peanuts and not complain about it. Ever.

This is symptomatic of the photo world today : Publishing companies profiting from the recession to squeeze top talent into a dilapidated photo department and forcing them to put pressure on photographers.

When will we see photo editors salaries only constituted of the money they save ?

Here is you budget. Whatever you do not use for photo purchase, you can keep for yourself.

Thus putting photo editor in direct survival competition with photographers.

As long as the publishing companies keep on treating photography as a necessary evil that needs to be crushed into “misc.” category along with other parasite expenses, nothing will change.

And, as long as there is photographers or photo agencies willing to accept this pathetic treatment , nothing will change.

O yes, if you wondered why we all had to sacrifice ourselves: 

Time Inc. Operating Profit Jumps 50%, Ad Revenue Climbs 4%

Posted in celebrity, license, magazine, Good Enough, Corpocrates, newspaper, SIPA, news, editorial, photojournalism, TIME, getty | Print | No Comments »

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 »

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 »

July 12, 2010 by pmelcher.

The Long love affair between photography and Media is over .

Because the editorial world is replacing experience photo editors with journalistic background for inexperience pixel pushers that are ordered to select the cheapest images, regardless of quality, they are opening the visual airways for steep competition.

A bit like traditional Royalty free opened the door to microstock by increasing prices and leaving a huge marketplace vacuum, magazines ( web or print) are leaving a wide open space for quality photography.  Because they still thinking terms of gatekeepers, they beleive the audience will follow them into whatever they publish. Problem is, this is the internet : the many to many market. They are no gatekeepers anymore, just influencers.

More and more, out of frustration to see great images go unpublished, photo agencies or photographers are doing their own editing/publishing. Zuma Press, with their Double Truck magazine was one of the first ones. Probably fed up of not seeing great images published in their rightful format, aka double page, they proceeded in doing their own magazine, featuring the images they liked the most. Is it a runaway success ? No. But it was a first.

Since then, a lot of photo agencies have launched their own blogs, featuring their own images, since their traditional clients would not use them. Not because they were bad, but because they were unwilling to pay a decent price for them. Some of these blogs, like X17online.com have become leaders in their markets. Photo agencies like VII have also launched  their own magazine, also in frustration of never seeing some of their great coverage go unpublished.

The result ? The public now has access to other sources of photography, previously hidden from them. They can see and compare. Gatekeepers are being challenged by influencers.

The smart publisher are the ones that will quickly realize and capitalize on this. Drop the most traveled image rat race for the lesser traveled side road of quality.

Here’s the deal : A well designed magazine with high quality- exclusive content will have no problem raising a successful paywall. The same way as people have no problem paying for very expensive Jewelry at Tiffany’s, or Cartier, they have no problem for paying for something they feel has value. They will not never pay for same middle of the road content. It’s not Pay walls that do not work, it’s what it’s what is behind them.

So here is the evolution of photography : More and more, creators of photography , disappointed of not seeing their best work being published, mostly because of unbreakable subscription deals made with mass providers, will start self publishing . More and more, those precious eyeballs that all want to retain so desperately will start navigating elsewhere and spread their attention span to other non mainstream sites.

The tide will be even greater when a critical mass will start understanding that they are not seeing the best , but the cheapest . Photographers will start combining their content with others and create their own outlets. Photo Agencies will gain momentum in their self publishing efforts. The media outlets that have spend millions to raise and maintain their brands will start being eclipsed by a guy and a computer.

Don’t think it can work ? Wireimage has been very succesful for many years in charging consumers to have access to medium  access to their images. No downloads, no editorial, just access to bigger thumbnails. Strangely, that model has never been replicated while their is no reason why it wouldn’t work elsewhere.

Editorial publishers are dropping the ball on their suppliers and forcing them to become their own competition. Or go out of business. Does that make any sense ? All that while lying to their clients. How long will that last ? Even with the advent of Ipads and E readers, this will not continue long.

Maybe the fall of Newsweek, and right behind, Time magazine, has a lot to do with that. If you have paid attention, you would have seen that in the last 4-5 years, they have reduced their image content to everything Getty/AP/Reuters in order to save money. Result ? Same images you all have seen on the web, but a week later…And then they wonder why people don’t purchase them anymore. They have laid off so many great photo editors that there is no way they can even find a great image anymore. In other words, they have both killed what had made them successful.

In other words, if photography is in crisis right now, its because Media is dying of a long slow agonizing death and trying the bring it along. Trouble is, photography can live without Media, not the opposite. These times are about to show it.

Posted in celebrity, magazine, Newsweek, E Reader, license, TIME, news, editorial, photojournalism, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

July 5, 2010 by pmelcher.

There is more than oil spreading in the Gulf of Mexico. There is also a veil of secrecy slowly being pulled upon the effects of the spill. In the pure tradition of “If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”, more and more rules and regulations are being implemented in order to block photographers .

“According to a news release from the Unified Command, violation of the “safety zone” rules can result in a civil penalty of up to $40,000, and could be classified as a Class D felony. Because booms are often placed more than 40 feet on the outside of islands or marsh grasses, the 65-foot rule could make it difficult to photograph and document the impacts of oil on land and wildlife, media representatives said. ”

This rule, made by the Coast Guard, not BP, comes on top of an already existing rule that  no media flights could go below 3,000 feet, due to restrictions from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Those restrictions are all to the honor of photography and it’s power. They are instituted out of fear of the impact that photography has on the collective mass. The same way as the Bush administration had banned any images of US soldiers coffin, or the Sri Lanka government had succesfully blocked any images of the war on the Tamils, this administration has no problem putting limits on what and how events can be photographed.

If you thought that the long awaited emergence of citizen photojournalism would come to the rescue, think again. Out of hundreds of images posted on Flickr, all are from GreenPeace or Nasa. None from the common man. As if the problem did not exist.

Photojournalists, more and more, are forced to break the law in order to get the right images. Not only their standard of living has plummeted, making it harder to be motivated, but they are now faced with either jail time or extremely steep fines. There is a war being waged against photojournalism at a time it is already at its weakest. If the forces of photo censorship succeed, our world will become we can forget about democracy. We might not understand it fully, but these are our eyes that they are trying to cover. It is a our ability to make a sound judgment that is threatened forever.

If photojournalists around the world are being blocked from taking pictures it’s because they are annoying.  They are revealing aspects of our lives that others do not want you to see. They  pull the curtains and denounce. If they are more and more being denied access, it’s because their images can do a lot of damages to an otherwise well kept lie.

There should be thousands and millions of images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Every American should go and take pictures of the situation. Post them all on Flickr or other places for everyone to see. A giant visual against BP, against blocking photographers and finally against a way of life that is killing us all.

No one should be allowed, ever, to restrict the work of photojournalists. There should be a fine for people preventing photojournalists to do their work and their safety and well being should be guaranteed by law.  They should have the same rights, and protection, as any other civil servant of any well balanced democracy. Instead of being restricted, they should be given extended special privileged access to news events.

They say the tree that falls in the forest where no one hears it makes no noise. Could we say the same about events happening away from cameras? soon?

Posted in web 2.0, magazine, lens, flickr, photojournalism, law, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

June 27, 2010 by pmelcher.

If you have been like most people and keeping an eye on the world soccer cup, you might have noticed something quite interesting. Well, at least if you are watching it on ESPN, the US sports channel in charge of transmitting the games live.

This year, at least that we have noticed, the cable network has added a new twist : extreme slow motion. No, not extreme slow motion on the actions that led to a goal or a failed goal attempt. Not at all. That has been used forever. Extreme slow motion on expressions.

Here and there, ESPN cuts into the video action to bring forth a face, a reaction or  a slow sequence of arms being raised in sour despair. It will focus on a  frustrated scream, an insider smile,  an exhausted look and play it in very slow motion.

Why ? Because real time video brings the action, extreme slow motion video brings the emotion. It is so slow that it could be viewed as a still, or series of stills . It brings the viewers closers to what the players are feeling at that fleeting moment by slowing down time. Almost to a stand still.

This shows how much the still, the ability to stop time is so much stronger than video. This shows  how the two are not interchangeable as some my think, or wish. They are two modes of expressions showing two aspects of the same event. The video is extremely good at showing action, the still is a master in bringing the emotion.

The comparison between stills and video must stop here. The same way as the comparison between photogrpahy and painting stopped more than a century ago. Sure, all these can capture the same event, but what they bring out is not the same. And then should not be compare.

At first, ESPN extreme slow-mo on random “moments” of the game was annoying me as I couldn’t understand their purpose. I am so used, like everyone else, of expecting video to show me actions of a purposeful meaning that I could not figure out why I was forced to see these snippets of “inaction”. Until they started building into me, making my experience as a viewer of these games more emotional. I could finally be more in touch with the players.

And really, that is what sports is all about, isn’t it? It is not just the moves that make a team win, it is mostly about the individual efforts, frustration, happiness, smiles, pains, intimacy, winks, and cascades of emotions that fill each and every players who have spend a lifetime to perform at such a high level. Sure, goals are important. But the feeling of success and achievement in the eyes of the players that made it all possible makes them human. And only a still can catch that.

Posted in focus, magazine, wire service, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

June 15, 2010 by pmelcher.

It’s on the verge of a precipice and let’s face it, it will be hard to prevent it. No, not the photo industry ; Ethics and photography. More and more we are seeing example of photographer being caught altering their images.

The issue is really affecting photojournalism and sports photography. Commercial shooters, Wedding “documentators”,  Celebrity photographers and  snapshooters have been doing all along with no real consequences . Sure, some aristocratic publication might find it awful that such celebrity had had her body airbrushed for this cover. They forget that celebrity photography is also a part  commercial photography. Celebrities are in the business of selling  their image and photographers are their to help them.   We don’t mind when pictures of fruits or cars are heavily retouched, so why do we care when it is celebrities?

The world of photo j, however, is another story. Because of our cultural background, we tend to gratify our sense of vision with the highest degree of realism. That is, between something touched, heard, smelled, or seen, it is the later that we credit with the most credible.

Why ? Because we have been taught that our eyes don’t lie. That if we see it, then its true.”Show me” is probably the most used term to categorically punctuate an argument. So has been the realm of photojournalism: Truly describe a moment in time and space. Or so we thought.

The history of photojournalism is riddled with example of fakes, altered images and other unethical use of photographs. Or where they ? And who decides what is ethical ? Where does these rule come from ?

Eugene Smith was notorious for spending long hours in his darkroom working on his prints ? Does it make any of his coverage lesser? Certainly not. Some other have cropped , enhanced, shadowed or even damaged their negative. After all, Robert Capa famous images of the D Day landing might not have looked like that if they hadn’t been damaged. They look real enough.

So where is the limit, and who decides? With technology making so much easier to profoundly alter images, deleting or adding items, changing the source of the lighting and so on, how can we, viewer, stay protected ? How can we be guaranteed that what we are seeing is the truth?

The short answer : we can’t. It is commendable that Reuters, along with Adobe, are working on trying to make altered files easily identifiable, but let’s face it, it will never fully work. No, the answer is where it’s always been. With the photographer and with the photo editor. If any of these two are ready to lie, than there is no protection. If they adhere to their own work ethic, than no lies will pass.

So, as our news coverage is becoming more and more crowd sourced and as editing barriers are falling, being replaced by automation, it is inevitable that our images will become less and less credible. I am still amazed, for example, that the Iranian Government did not use Twitter for its own advantage by posting images by fake users showing a different story. next time, certainly.

The way to preserve ethic and photojournalism is to have brands. Like we trust the New York Times for the veracity of its information, we could do the same for photographers and photo agencies.  A certain credit will certify a certain ethic. If photographers decide that their work need heavy photo shop, fine, but they should say it out loud. There is no problem with retouching an image, only in lying and trying to let it pass as an original.

If the IPTC consortium would be smart, they would add a requirement to a field that would have a “R” for “retouched” . Make it easy for people to mark an images as altered. After that, its up to the editors and viewers to decide.

Realistically, we will see more and more lying images abound. It’s going to be up to the viewers to be smarter and interrogating what they see. It will also be to the photogrpahers to brand themselves as instrument of truth. But then again, that is really nothing new.

Posted in magazine, technology, Magnum, commercial stock, celebrity, IPTC, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, news | Print | No Comments »

June 4, 2010 by pmelcher.

And you thought that the new features in the new release of Photoshop CS were impressive. Microsoft apparently does not want to be left behind and just showed to Techcrunch a sneak peek of the next release of Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery upgrade, something called photo fuse.

In a nutshell, Photo Fuse will take the best head shots out of series of images in order to create the best final composition . For photojournalist covering a summit, or red carpet photographers shooting a group of people, this tool, while quite not ethical, is a life saver. No more images where one member is blinking, or looking away. Now, as long as you had pictures of all the members not making a stupid face and looking at you at one point or the other, you can quickly compose the perfect frame.

The technology already existed but done manually, it could take a lot of time and end up not very good. Now, it seems it can be done in seconds and looks perfect. As photographers around the world use this tool more and more, photo editors will no longer have to find the one gem image where everyone is looking at the camera. Those images will no longer exist.

Is this ethical ? Well, according to the eternal rules of photojournalism, no. But if the result is invisible and the change can mean the difference between a sale or not, we can be sure that, considering the high level of competition,a lot of photogrpahers will use it.

Obviously, this is also very useful for stock photography, where truthfulness of the event photographed is not a matter.

Video here :

Posted in technology, commercial stock, celebrity, photojournalism, editorial, news | Print | 1 Comment »

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 »