January 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

We are all getting fat. let’s face it, we are gaining weight and it doesn’t seem like it is going to change. When we were dealing with slides and prints, we needed to physically move. We needed to get up and get the images in drawers, got to a lightboxe, compare the images, put the slide in sleeves, and get them ready for a messenger to pick up. Depending on the size of the photo agency, the traffic department was either close by or a few flights of stairs away. Even photo editors had to be “on the move” as editing required a combination of many physical steps.

Today, from the moment  we sit down in front of our computer screens with a coffee and a bagel  (or anything that will serve as a breakfast), turn on our screens, we hardly move. With a combination of tools, from phone to browsers, we hardly have to move. Thus we are getting fat. I am sure if you look down at your midsection right now, you will see a sign that you are gaining some unneeded volume. We barely move to get to a conference room where we cautioulsy sit down again to listen or talk with our peers who are also gaining weight.

Starring at the glare of our screens for more than eight hours a day, switching from e mails to photographs, news websites to blogs, our eyes are also becoming weaker. Hard to find someone working in this business who doesn’t wear glasses. Although our eyes are our weapon of mass destruction, they are slowly declining on us , as we abuse them hours on.

And of course our skins are not looking better either. We barely see daylight anymore as we hardly have any reasons to be outside. Only photographers escape this doom fate, as they still need to move to create their art. They  are, however, still constrain to the  mischievous chair and screen combination while they caption, photoshop, upload their images for hours on.

And the future doesn’t look much better. As we get more and more wirelessly freed from our offices and work more from home, we might decide not to wash so frequently, let alone take care of our forever growing  hair. We might decide that eating three times a day is not enough, thus enjoying a permanent flux of food. We might not have any need to get out of bed that often as all our necessary tools of the trade may be at arms reach.

Paca, Cepic, Asmp, APA, SAA, PLus, ASPP and all other organizations should vote for a mandatory gym membership for all employees of our industry. We should lobby our respective governments to put in place salvation laws that would require a minimum of one hour of forced exercise to all those wishing to work in the photo industry . Finally, we should  put in place motivational points of interest in our offices in order to force more activities than just going to the bathroom.

Otherwise, my dear friends, we might become instinct before we get to see the full effect of Global Warming.

Posted in IPTC, magazine, technology, keyword, web 2.0, photoshop, filter, photojournalism, editorial | Print | No Comments »

December 28, 2007 by pmelcher.

There are many ways to kill. Many different ways that we manage to find somewhere in ourselves to destroy the things we love the most. The violent murder of Benazir Bhutto earlier this week is a prime example. During a period during when most of us enjoy the comfort of our simple lives, the world continues to rip itself apart in what seems to be an incontrollable violence that goes beyond our understanding.

Like many others I am still in shock and appalled by the event in Pakistan and the brutal assassination a woman that stood for change and democracy against relentless nihilism. I took a tour, from my distant home, of the photographs taken that day, and thanks to Daryl Lang of PDN, watched the two sideshows done by the New York Times and CNN with the images of John Moore of Getty Images.At the end of the CNN slideshow, I looked at this image :

and thought to myself, how did John Moore ever think of doing a zoom effect in the middle of this commotion ? Three shots where fired, and explosion just happened, people are lying dead all around him and he still find the time to create a zoom effect. Even think about it. My second thought is that he didn’t do it on purpose and just happened to zoom out when he took the frame. Still, this image puzzled me.

Until I saw the same image on the New York Times slideshow:

And then I realized, he didn’t. And here I made a false assumption. I previously wrote :

[ Someone at CNN thought that it would be more dramatic, more intense to add that stupid zoom effect]

Thanks to avid reader Gary Gardiner who checked the Getty site, we now know that both images were taken by the same photographer. Apparently, due to his shooting with a motor drive, both images are very similar, one probably shot as he was zooming out to get a full length of the man. That will teach me to write a blog before finishing breakfast. My apologies to CNN and to those I got confused. More from Gary in the “comment” section below.

PS: I forsee a World Press photo here…

Posted in multimedia, magazine, Cnn, photojournalism, photoshop, news, editorial, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

October 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

After spending a day at Photoplus today, one aspect became really obvious. There were more internet businesses for amateurs and semi pros then I have ever seen. The web 2.0 bubble has definitely reached the traditional photo industry and one can see numerous web based solution for everything photographic. It was interesting to see, besides the traditional giants booth, like Canon, Nikon, and other Fuji or Olympus, a myriad of do it yourself, on line, community based solution for the wealthy amateur. And, a bit like the lotions that will make you a slimmer person or make your hair grow, these websites will enhance your photography to depths and lengths you had never dreamed about.

For just a small monthly fee.

Of different size and with this feel of “we are here to stay”, these stands will offer you anything from do it yourself self-published photo books that, if you listen to their sales pitch, will sell more than Annie Leibovitch ever sold, to others that will make you a seasoned pro, selling more images than Getty has in the last 10 years. So once you buy all the gear, then all the accessories, you are teased by these businesses that promise to build you a career and make you extremely wealthy with what you thought, only just about an hour ago, was a only a week-end hobby.

While Adobe or Apple have magnificent stands with pseudo preachers screaming into wireless microphones in front of a wide-eyed audience on how to turn an ordinary image into a work of pure biblical proportion, an army of recently VC-ed funded start up will grab your emerging hopes to stuff them in a community-based, crowdsource-powered “shlingalabada”.

Rows and rows of false promises with shiny teeth hiding a sharks’ appetite. A little Las Vegas strip full of a salespeople who practically beg you to join them in their fruitless gamble, in the desperate hope that you will give legitimacy to their underlying lies and insecurities.

The most interesting part is that, with purpose or not, the layout of the huge Javitz center is set up as a warning: as you enter, you have from left to right and wall to wall about three of four rows of the companies that make the foundation of this business. The giants: Nikon, Kodak, Adobe, Lexar, etc. As you venture deeper inside, you then hit the accessories guys, long time accepted parasites of the latter: lens companies, bags, lighting, etc. and then, once you escape the peddlers of tangible product, all you seem to see is computer screens. The fabulous wonderland of the virtual world. Online classes, online models, online storage, online archive, online this, online that. Some very legitimate, most, however, probably never to be seen again.

During the first dot com, the amateur world was not digital yet, so it was speared. This time, the market is perfectly rip. In a very compelling way, it is a perfect showcase of the current photo universe. What is the most troublesome is that none of the microstock where present. Why ? A fear of putting a face on the scam ? After all, Mr Corbis and Mr Istock/Getty, Dreamstime, Fotolia and Shutterstock, what better place to meet and recruit more contributors ? And when you think about it, where are the traditional agencies. After all, Photoshelter, DigitalRaiload and IPNstock are there recruiting photographers, why not them. Or is the Photoplus crowd not good enough to be accepted in their closed membership club ? One reason the traditional agencies have taken a beating from microstock is that they have snobily ignored a large part of the shooter community and yet they persist to behave like tightly restricted, invitation-only clubs.

One can see the circus of the double digit, multimillionaire VC funded carpet seller of web 2.0, live at Photoplus 2007. Two days left.

Posted in prosumer, web 2.0, Photoplus, flickr, photoshop, Royalty free, getty, corbis, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »

May 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

I don’t understand. When images first started to appear on the internet way back in the 1990’s, photographers and agencies were up in arms about how web browser had to cache images in order to display them. It meant, and still does, that a copy of the images is downloaded into a computer, thus making everyone who sees your images, an infringer. Many tried, in vain, to find a way to display images without going through this process, even asking users to delete their cache after a visit.

That was a failed battle. Then, when Picture Search company Ditto.com launched, another segment of the photo industry raised their battle shields and even brought them to court. Obviously, when Google did the same, more people joined in. Displaying thumbnails without licensing them was, after all, a copyright infringement. Thanks to the Fair Use law, that battle was soon lost too.

Today, hundreds, if not thousands of images are continuously being stolen from either agencies or photographers’ online portfolio. Most drop their arms in despair in front of the quantity of known cases and live with this constant pain as if it was a normal part of doing business.

Yet, these are the same people asking, screaming and complaining about DRM in music. The same that downloaded free music from old Napster or the current Kazaa. They have MP3’s up the wazzoo, listening to stolen music while editing their images on hacked version of Photoshop. They cannot understand why a music company would not even let them copy ad nauseum music that they purchased legally.

There are two critical aspects at play here: one, the total lack of DRM initiative in the photo industry. Run a photo or photography DRM search in Google and you will find nothing, zero, nada, niente, zilch. There is the Plus initiative of course, but it is mostly a catalog of licensing terms, not a Digital Rights management. Maybe one day, someone, somewhere, will use it to create a photo DRM.

Second, it is the total lack group initiatives from this industry. Photographers and agencies have multiple association but not one of them has taken the initiative to start a DRM program. Everyone suffers from stolen images and ridiculous laws like Fair Use or the potential Orphan works, but yet everyone seems to believes its the others problem. Or maybe that it will fix itself.

Farmers used to go out together hunting for wolves when those came too close to their farms, yet this industry expects his neighbors to get rid of the danger. Retail stores invested a fortune into security cameras and other thief deterrent systems. Besides a hackable name and password, a visible erasable watermark, sometimes an invisible also erasable watermark, the photo industry takes little or no effort to protect their images. You would think it would be their priority number one, considering it is their livelihood.
It doesn’t make sense.

Posted in No sense, photoshop, finance | Print | No Comments »

January 12, 2007 by pmelcher.

For the upcoming week end, I thought I would share some links to a few web application I have been dying to play around with. Some are still in there infancy, others well on there way, but all our certainly a part of the evolutionary process of the FAWM project.
LightBox network : A very simple, yet efficient professional work flow management system. Mostly built for commercial stock, studio and assignment photography, this on-line application is widely used in to bridge communications between a photographer and an assigning editor. Speed, simplicity, extreme ease of use are some of the key aspect of this product that will certainly see many more releases in the future.

TrueColor: A freeware PHP based online photo editor that you can add to your website for non commercial usage. There are no specification of what you need to do to buy a license. Simple, to the point, quick, small, doesn’t replace photoshop but certainly simple and easy to use. Could be handy for a photographer on the road, using someone else’s computer, who need to do quick and simple adjustments.

Much more advanced is PIXN8 . One of the most horrible names in the industry but certainly one of the sexiest tools out there. A very advanced user interface that you can customize if you put t on your site, with a lot of option. The free trial versions has links to Flickr or Webshots to store images after you are finished, but I an sure you can change these destination to your favorite database.

FAUXTO has gone through great length to copy the user interface of Photoshop which obviously minimizes the learning curve for most users. No so sure what there business model is, if only to have an online paid version of Photoshop in the long term. again, simple, easy to use and does a what is says it will do. Nothing more, nothing less.

Thumbnail generator and Resizr : Two down and dirty simple , one function apps. Resizr can even be a firefox extension, which is useful for on the fly resizing.

One of my favorite, Myheritage.com who does a pretty good job at identifying faces. for a celebrity or spot news photographer, and with a lot of tweaks, this could be a great tool to automatically identify a subject and automatically caption an image.

All these Webdgets have one obvious drawback, is it that you have to upload your images. if you are stranded in a place with poor internet connectivity, you are all alone . Also, there might be some issues with copyright infringement as you are uploading images to some servers over which you have absolutely no control.

Finally, a great thank to one of my favorite website, Lifehacker.com who constantly post great info.

Posted in flickr, filter, photoshop, editorial | Print | No Comments »

December 20, 2006 by pmelcher.

Hard to avoid working with Photoshop if you are in this industry. And a great product too, with so many possibilities that shelves of books are available in book stores, numerous websites, classes, courses, workshops, video and soon, after the “certified” they will have a PH.D for it. My oldest son learned how to use it in school. I remember playing with my 2.5 version back in the early 90’s and having to figure it out alone, with the useful help from photographers who were doing the same. We should receive a medal from Adobe.

Anyway, I found this great tool : FAUXTO, and it is amazing. It is a proto version of an online photo enhancing tool. Of course, it is still in Beta right now but they are on the right track and soon, instead of using the 800 Lbs. gorilla that Photoshop has become, web based tools like these will allow for quick and efficient edits, either as a pay per use or subscription.
Since web browsers only handle sRGB color space, I am assuming that is the only color space available right now, but it is strong enough to enhance an image for web usage. Soon enough, color management will make it to web browsers, at least in Open Source at first.

We are getting closer to a fully web based workflow that could allow anyone one to use any computer to manage their entire workflow from start to finish. How does that help us ? Not sure as computer are going faster and space is becoming cheaper at a much faster pace than web access is improving. Web browsers are not improving very fast and offer many limitations, while broadband is not becoming neither cheaper nor faster.
Other notes:

The winners of UNICEF Photo of the Year have be announced. Not my favorite organization but always a very good selection of images.

Posted in photoshop | Print | No Comments »