March 10, 2010 by pmelcher.

Photography has a long way to go..Compared to other digitized creative forms, like music, it is light years behind. And, for once, that could be a good thing. Like the youngest brother of a family, it can learned from it’s elders. For once, it has not yet been touch at full impact by the whole free file sharing tsunami that hit music a while back. Certainly the dams are leaking and breaking, but we are no where near what the music industry has experience.

Unlike the music industry, the photo industry is not that organized. It has a myriad of little associations biting at each other, with little or no resources, it is deeply fragmented in small to very small businesses and it has no support from giant manufacturers. But this is not the point of this entry.

The story of David Cope, very well explained in this article  (careful, it is long) is a great example of things to come. In a nutshell, for those that are too busy, it explains how this music composer, rather than writing music himself,teach his computer how to do it. At first he experimented in replicating styles of well known composers. At first, with little successes, as he had forgotten to add their flaws ( or styles). But when he go it right, it turned into one of these Shakespearean monkeys ( you know, the ones you put in a cage with a typewriter). This was not enough for him, so he proceeded in developing one that could compose complete originals pieces of music. That is where he reached a new milestone. The result was so good that many music critics loved it. That was before they knew it was a machine that had composed it, and not a human being. Than the rhetoric changed and David Cope is still being cursed at. While he is getting ready to make his work more available, the debates still rages on: Mainly, is art made by a machine still art ?

His point, well taken, is that it doesn’t matter if he uses a pen and paper or programming code to compose, it is still art. The Human being is still behind the creation, he is just using different tools. Photography is still far from being able to be produced by a machine. We have face recognition, sound detection, automated color correction,  highly sophisticated light readers, but none yet really can work together. In theory, they could. And in theory, one could program all the parameters of David Lachapelle’s past work and come out with an almost  perfect suggestion of what his next images will look like . We would still need a human being to set everything up and take the picture.

But let’s take this a step further. In theory, we could give every parameter of a photographer works and produce, in a computer, a CGI image of the next shoot. Completely automated. No need for camera, lights, studio, models, nothing. Everything could be created artificially either by taking existing images and reconfigure them, or simply create new ones. Or, instead of replicating someones style, create a whole new one. Create a picture, or a series of picture, at a touch of a button.

This is coming our way. Faster than we think. If you are worried of the myriads of microstock shooters, just think of what happens when anyone, even without a camera can create stunning images without ever leaving their desks, for a fraction of the cost. Just think about it. Everything you thought you knew bout photography is yet, again, about to change.

( As I was writing this, French newspaper Le Monde published this article about the same issue, but for text journalist.)

Posted in copyright, celebrity, technology, commercial stock, license, web 2.0, editorial, photojournalism, flickr, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

February 5, 2010 by pmelcher.

So, there was something very interesting about the photo news the week. On one side, you have the mighty Getty ( aka, the whale) who took a deep plunge in pricing with its subscription RF offering, combining microstock and pro , and on the other, legendary Magnum who manage a great coup by selling some used prints for an estimated $ 30 million dollars.

Like two extremities of the same stick, this is a great reflection of where the business of photography stands today . On one side an entity that has reduced its photography to a cheap commodity to be sold as individual snapshots and on the other, a photographers coop that is so highly respected that it can sell old back and white prints full of written notes as highly valuable historical artifacts.

Yet, both are selling the same thing : photographs . According to numerous interview given by Mark Lubell, director of Magnum New York, one key condition for the members of the coop to approve the sale was that the images would not be scattered and sold as individual entities. Magnum photographers have a long established tradition of selling pictures as a story, a group of images, that tells a story. It has been numerously debated, over the years, that Magnum could have maybe had made more profit if it had broken  these stories and sold them as individual images.

But none of the photographers-creator would have it any other way. Shot as a story, sold as a story. Part of the condition for the deal with the Michael Dell owned fund is that images cannot be separated from the story they belong to. On the other end of the spectrum, Getty does the exact opposite. It extracts images from their context, their stories , and sell them as individual files. There motivation is that the image, alone, has more chance of finding a buyer than a group of images, sold as a story. Also, individual files sales  can easily be automated while photo essay, and photo journalism in general, needs a pitch, an explanation, a real human sales person.

And there is where a key differentiation appears that is reflected everywhere in the marketplace. If your business is about licensing individual files, then its all about volume. You do not take a proactive approach to selling. Instead, you try to cover any possible potential need for an image that could humanly be conceived. You stick them in an archive. And then you wait . You wait for a buyer to come and be hooked. or not. The market creates the demand.

If you license a photographer’s work, a story, a career, an inspiration, the approach is completely different. You cannot wait for a client to come and find it. You have to go out and fetch it. You have to take the photographer’s work, find a potential client who could be interested and close the deal. The photographer, in this case, creates the demand.

If you want the market to create the demand, the prices are low, very, very low. If you create the demand, the prices are high, very high.

Unfortunately, most photo agencies these days have gone the route of competing with each other on the individual file sales path. Mostly because it much easier, cheaper, and demands almost no special skills. The more the agencies, the more the offer, the more prices go down. Getting amateurs to fill these image banks has recently greatly lowered the costs, with the pervert effect of also lowering the prices.

Magnum, and others, like Contact, Redux, PictureGroup, Aurora have deliberately chosen to represent photographers’ work and not distribute individual files. Their production is the reflection of its chosen creators, their image bank set up to license stories , and their sales staff experienced in the complex art of pitching. Sure, it’s more expensive and much more complicated. It demands talent and sometimes obstination against frustration. However, the prices are dictated by the value perceived by the creator, not the by the market. The result : deals like Magnum just made.

In photography, it’s not the market who dictates the pricing. It’s how you present it.

Posted in magazine, celebrity, technology, Cosmos, Aurora, commercial stock, license, prosumer, getty, Royalty free, news, editorial, photojournalism, transaction, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

February 3, 2010 by pmelcher.

It’s not photography that is sick and dying, it’s the people that handle it. Sure, there has been dramatic bankruptcies, like Grazia Neri , l’ Oeil Public and now Eyedea Press ( that one was a long time coming). On the other hand, there more than a billion of images on Flickr, more on Photobucket, and Facebook. There has never been so many cameras in the streets and so many people interested in photography. With the Internet, there has never been such a demand, and need for images. Smartphones, Ipad, tablets, netbooks, are only increasing the demand for stills.

Yet, pro photographer can’t seem to make a living anymore, while photo editors have either no budget or are being laid off by buckets. So what is wrong ? Well, for one, it’s those who manage photography that are sick. None of the old and current guard have any idea how to take advantage of this Tsunami of demand. It’s leaking from all over the place. The only made with Flickr was when the original founders sold it to Yahoo. Since, it’s been bleeding cash. Instead of creating tools to allow members to license it, they passed it on to Getty Images to try and squeeze some money juice out of it. It could take decades, if not century for Yahoo to see a return on investment using this route.

While magazines are dying a slow and painful circulation death, there online counterpart have yet to be succesful in generate the same revenue as they used too . Why, because they keep on trying to replicate online what has been a success in print. The fact that its not working doesn’t seem to bother them. They keep on trying.

Photographers still shoot the same thing, the same way, for a clientele that is shrinking, both in size and resources. They desperately cling to old formulas that they hope will resurface some day. Not going to happen. And finally, photo agencies try to hang on the slippery slop of declining revenue by agreeing to cut fees in the hopes there is a trampoline at the bottom of the hill. Not there.

Everyone is playing the waiting game, hoping that some savior will find the magic solution. In the mean time, they are all guilty of killing photography by undervaluing it. It’s has become a commodity, some say. Other offer ridiculous subscription model, feeling comfort in the fact that mass production Getty does it. All whine all day, all night, all the time.

Stop whining. Do . Try. fail. Try again. fail again. Who cares? You will make progress. And if you are lucky ( or smart), it will work. Better than you had ever expected. It’s not obvious. But the market is there. The current model doesn’t work, we can all agree on that. So, try new ones. Take advice from no one. Just do. It will hurt, it will be frustrating, it will be exhausting, it will feel incredibly useless, it will not work. But it’s so much better than whining all the time. Stop waiting for something to happen. Take control.

Posted in license, multimedia, prosumer, copyright, magazine, commercial stock, technology, focus, flickr, photojournalism, news, getty, Royalty free, editorial, transaction, slideshow, finance, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

February 1, 2010 by pmelcher.

Finally..all in one place. Micro and traditional RF have finally united in one, simple to use, website. The entity behind it ? Well, Getty Images, of course. Some were already playing with it, others were staying away from it, Getty jumped in it, two feet at a time.

No more of this ridiculous RF branding that presupposed that RF image buyers are actually faithful to brand like they would be to a car manufacturer ( oh, dear, I only buy Honda’s) . They need an image quick and easy, and that’s all. They don’t care if it was shot by Joe Boobleeboo or that guy that grossed millions of dollars last year ( ya, right).

Because the pricing is by subscription only, there is no price comparison. Thus images are downloaded based on their value to the customer, not by how much they save. Amateurs are now on the same level as super pros ( are they any left in the RF space ?) . Meta search engines like SpiderPic can stuff it as the cannot compare pricing.

Getty has finally broken a few old barriers here and fighting back against its odd competition. Shutterstock, as well as the Alamy’s and other volume based image banks must be shaking in their winter boots. There is volume her, there is extreme ease of pricing, there is very strong search capabilities and most important, there is superb ease of use. No more of this pricing on size, no more pricing based on collections (or brand), no more of different offering/different sites. All in one place.

Furthermore, once downloaded once, an image can be used over and over without any additional license fee. Thus big companies ( book publishers, corporations, small image intensive design companies) can easily create a in house database and store images until they need them again: for free.  Why need to go anywhere else? This is going to suck the air out of a lot of RF based businesses ( that was predictable) by attracting a lot of customers.

Pay once, download once, use infinite time is something that we are probably going to see expand like a wildfire through the industry for a multiple of reasons : Poor or nonexistent DRM, inefficient tracking systems, expensive legal process, especially for RF.

This new launch by Getty will certainly have a huge impact across all aspects of the RF photo sector. It will be very interesting to see who will try to compete via others means, and those that will just decide to shut down. One thing is sure, there is no turning back now.

By the way, this is the same model that they plan to roll out for editorial usage very soon. (more on that another day)

Posted in license, technology, commercial stock, Midstock, Search, Royalty free, getty, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 8 Comments »

January 18, 2010 by pmelcher.

When smart people are combined with top end technology, something magical happens. Spiderpic is such a example. Brainchild of Ginipic, who had already launch a multiple database desktop application, Spiderpic is not only an image search portal but also serves as a price comparison site.

To top it all, it is very simple to use : enter a search parameter and hit enter. You will be offered a variety of images  from different sources. Up to now, nothing really revolutionary. However, once you decide which image is right for you, you can click on it and there it will show you its price on different site. Same image, same size, all the  different prices. Thus, you can make the right choice and purchase it at the lowest licensing cost.

Of course, SpiderPic only works with microstock companies for now. but it works extremely well. The implication of such a deal are multiple. First, if widely used ( it is in Beta for now), it will drive the microstock companies into a price war that might leave many on the floor. It might also convince more users to go exclusive with one provider, as too avoid a drop in their revenue. Finally, it will put a full stop at the slowly growing cost of microstock.

Since about 90% of the microstock content is available on different competing sites, price shopping, especially with such a great application, will certainly be the new microstock sport very quickly.  The company, Spiderpic, will make its income via the referral programs of the  providers. The more usage, the richer they will get. Furthermore, since the hole process is automated, they can run it with as low as two people.

Some microstock companies might be tempted to block access to their database to hide their prices. Not a good idea if and when Spiderpic becomes popular. They might just be ignored by image buyers altogether. Others might decide to make their pricing less obvious, by having a very low call price, enhance at download time by “hidden” fees. Finally, others might require more obstinate memberships ( Shutterstock, subscriptions, etc) in order to keep their current customer base.

Regardless, this tool will put the microstock industry in a tale spin, forcing  marketing department to find other means to attract buyers than just low pricing . It will also make very difficult for  any company wishing to increase their prices to do so without loosing a lot of customers. Finally, its ironic, that the microstock industry finds itself pin down to their original appeal at time when they all thought they could slowly and discreetly increase their rate.

Regardless, this is a great tool. Now, if it could also do traditional RF and maybe one day, RM, that would be great. In the mean time, I very highly recommend you try it..and use it.

Posted in Midstock, license, technology, commercial stock, Search, keyword, Royalty free, transaction, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

January 11, 2010 by pmelcher.

Photography should be a revolutionary act. It should be a kick in the establishment, the common, the mundane. It has to be an act of revolt against banality and conformity, a powerful explosion of new ideas. It should be as violent to the mind as a thousand thunderstorms. It should rip apart the accepted social fabric . It should denounce, point, accuse and solve. In one frame. It should be a declaration of war to everything we take for granted and accept as obvious.

It should incessantly question reality with the passion of a martyr. A constant question mark, it should make our leaders fear it, and our priest denounce it. It should know no frontiers, no borders, no cultural identity. It should have the same impact East of Bangkok and South of Lima.

Photography should be lifted high and proud by those who request to change the world as a constant demand for reform and social changes. It should beg for perfection, over and over, pointing at all the little details of injustice, abuse, destruction and greed. It should rattle every misconception until they break into a pathetic silence.

Too much of what we see today in photography ( thank you, commercial stock) is a sea of banality, of repetition, of dullness. It is status quo and no more. A long straight road of  boring pre digested concept. Like a TV dinner : Please reheat and serve hot. Millions upon millions of images that rote just a few days after being exposed, so much full of artifice they are. A constant stream of annoying visual buzz that we hardly notice anymore.

Photography should shove you out of your chair, make you react, force you to rethink everything you ever took for granted. It should stop you dead in your track and make you want to change your whole life, and the ones of those around you. It should haunt you  in your sleep, follow you all day and make you feel naked. It should empower you to make that change you had in you. It should break the heavy top that sat on top of  that lava revolt you have in you. Break the ice of indifference you so conveniently ignore.  It should not be a warm cosy blanket that keep you warm in the middle of a cold winter night but rather the violent act of removing it and exposing you to the freezing winds. A window blasted open.

Some aspects of photography are dying because too many have forgotten the revolutionary roots of photography, its iconoclastic heritage. As it becomes more common it also becomes more dull. Slowly, the reign of the medium is taking over. Medium quality, medium content, medium effect. Photography is becoming pretty, useful, a business. It’s an industry of expectedness, where chance and luck disappears in favor of technocrats shooting bullet points.

It should never live in a sales channel or exposed to RPI’s. It should never suffer the humiliation of being included in a compilation or a theme. It should never be treated as something you search for in a immense repository of banality. Finally, it should never suffer the assassination of being sold via a subscription.

Posted in google, license, celebrity, commercial stock, web 2.0, prosumer, news, editorial, photojournalism, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

December 30, 2009 by pmelcher.

It’s all about connection. Remenber, when you were a kid, people use to gather around a print photograph and talk about it. They would also want a copy and travel with it and show it to other people. In a way, photography was one of the first social networking hub.

Because of its highly physical structure, it was hard to get a large amount of people around a photograph and for them to connect via it.  Slides and projectors allowed for bigger groups to see , share, and discuss an image. As we see in   photo festival like Visa Pour l’ Image, it is still a great tool for people to commonly share and enjoy photography together at the same time. But so ephemeral and still so location based.

Magazines took the sharing to even bigger and wider groups but in the process cut the discussion umbilical cord, leaving each one as a unheard lonely voice. It was assumed that others enjoyed the same image as you had seen in the page of your magazine but there was no way to communicate with them. That role, poorly executed, was left to a single ringmaster/photo editor. But the message was not going through.

Then came sites like Flickr. People could and can connect around photography again. But this time, its is not just friends and family, it is also complete stranger. Regardless, photography true essence as a social tool was finally reborned. Because, lets face it, photography is useless if it cannot be shared.

It is the core of its nature  to be extremely social. We photograph because we want to share what we see and the way we see it. However, up to now, the medium that supports photography, mainly print publications and now online publications, have done a very poor job to exploit this. One lonely person, mostly located in a cubicle somewhere, picks an image that she/he likes and post/prints it. People see it, connect with it or not and the images vanishes. what a waste. And this is only for a very small fractions of images produced everyday. Those selected by bored photo editors.  That is not a life for a photograph.

Photography does not need Twitter or Facebook, it is the opposite. Social networking sites need photography for people to sign up, share and interact. People connect, react, share, argue, agree, discuss and love/hate around an image wherever it is, as long as the tools to communicate and to connect exist. People create accounts on Facebook and Twitter to connect and share photographs, not the opposite .

The best way to kill an image is to prevent people from being allowed to interact with it. That is probably why I hate  photography museum so much. While it allows a great many people to see an image, it completely kills any possible interaction with other viewers.”sssh” is the reigning word in a museum.

So, knowing this, where does that leave us ?  Well,  remember this graphic ?

This is the new marketplace. It is no longer the “one-to-many” that  we have seen in traditional media and sadly currently  replicated online, it is the “many-to-many”. The next generation of succesful businesspeople in photography will be the ones who learn to use photography’s social and viral nature and capitalize on it.  Instead of crowdsourcing photography, crowdsourcing photo editing. Let the users/viewers become their own photo editors and decide what images they would like to see and share. Let the images become the social network around which people gather and communicate, for whatever length of time they need. This is the hyperlink photography economy that some have been searching for.

With that in mind, have a happy, safe and wealthy 2010 !!

Posted in web 2.0, multimedia, license, technology, prosumer, flickr, editorial, slideshow, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »

November 10, 2009 by pmelcher.

The current photo industry and newcomers apply a completely flawed logic to licensing images. It is too often believed that if an image is largely seen, it will be licensed. The thinking come from primeval logic. It goes like this:

- if an image is not seen, it will never be sold. (which is a truism). Therefore, if it is seen, it will sell.  (which is a complete myth).

With the age of the internet, thousands upon thousands of would-be entrepreneurs has set up shop with image archiving platforms thinking that it will be all the necessary work to be performed to make lots and lots of money. Just make sure that images can be seen, search and paid for and voila !! its done.

Even as the short history of the web proves otherwise, it remains a very potent dream. There are billions of images on Flickr or Photobucket that will never, ever be sold. and more are being uploaded as you read this. And they also will not sell.  beyond those platform, there are many many more with e commerce capabilities. Snugmug or the defunct DigitalRailoard are other examples. Sure, it is easy to create a platform where images can be seen and purchased but it doesn’t mean they will be sold.

What a large number of photo gurus misunderstand with the success of Istock is that it was build with customers first. if you recall, the first people to put images on the site were people who needed images. It was an exchange platform. As it started charging a fee for downloads, it kept on growing as those same customers were selling their images to other customers.  Many other microstock companies have launched since and are not understanding why their sales are flat.

This myth has also affected how images are edited. Before digital, every precaution was taken to only keep  the best images. Now, the same mentality applies through various argument: Better more than less, let them decide, you never know, better uploaded than not…and so on.

But the same rules applies. A digital crap is still a crap, even if it can be seen by millions. The reason images do not sell these days are exactly the same as they were pre Internet. They suck. No one wants to buy them. Whether they are on the Getty images site or some obscure lousy website.

It would be interesting to have one day an industry wide survey on what percentage of images are actually licensed compared to the overall size of the database. 4%? 8% ? 10 % ?. The same survey would probably also show that the most carefully edited images databases also have the highest yield ratio.

What is captivating is that it very often the same people that complain that industry has too much content offering that will turn around and explain to you that if an image is not seen, it will not sell. Thus feeding the same beast they complain about. It is the same people that will copy another succesful niche with subpar images that will also complain that there are too many images available.

So let’s not contribute to this problem and let’s call a cat a cat: making images visible or accessible does not create value . Let’s destroy this myth once and for all. and while you ‘re at it, delete all those crappy images.

Posted in No sense, license, technology, commercial stock, prosumer, flickr, Royalty free, getty, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

October 20, 2009 by pmelcher.

Commercial stock photography has been walking on its head. Since its beginning, it has approached its own business space with an upside down approach.

Let me explain : At the beginning, Photographers would shoot images that ended up on  online storage system with the hope that one day there will be a demand for these images. As the number-crushing corpocrates invaded this business, past sales report became the investigative tool to predict demand. The principal is quite simple : If someone, somewhere, licensed an image then someone else, somewhere else, surely needed the same one. To predict future demand, some even hired “experts” to perform field research on trends and gather market intelligence. The result ? a quite imperfect method of prediction investigation that currently results in a very imprecise production.

Enters a company called Demand Media. Self titled “The leader in social media”, the company is a huge automated content analyst and producer.  Using a combination of sophisticated algorithms and millions of Google search entries, it delivers what keywords, or group of keywords, are, or will be, the most frequently entered. It then spits out a list of topics that it posts on freelancing websites where anyone can produce the desired results in exchange for a few dollars. It then takes the newly created content, posts it on You Tube ( They only deal with video for the time being) and sells the space to advertisers. Videographers get paid a flat fee of about $20 per video.

Since their algorithm predicts the popularity of a search query, they can guarantee a substantial level of traffic to their advertiser clients. It is working so well that Google (owner of You Tube) has signed a deal with them, too happy to finally find a way to monetize their video hosting site. The videos are mostly self-help, DIY ( Do It Yourself) and tips.

Demand Media, according to Wired magazine, posts about 4,000 new videos a day thanks to a worldwide army of freelancers pumping thousand of clips, or articles, based on what an emotionless algorithm spits out everyday. ” This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.” continues Wired Magazine.

It is an industrial use of the “database of intention“. The database of intention, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is what Google made a fortune upon. It is all these search queries that are entered on Google.com every second that explicitly shows what people are looking for. While Google monetized upon it by selling ads linked to the query, Demand Media is making its income by producing content.

So what about stock photogrpahy ? Well, that is the next step for Demand Media. Already producing clips and article by the pound, they are now going to enter the photography space. Not by offering images that maybe someone somewhere might be looking for but actual response to real searches. Thus putting the industry back on its feet. Sure, the first steps will be to produce images to look at, and not to license. But it will not be long before someone ( Istock photo anyone?) will realize the huge potential of this image database and license its content. Imagine, a photo library entirely made of images that people are actually looking for. That would be a first.

The ramification of this game changer are enormous for the stock market. First, it will attract a lot of microstockers who will prefer to be paid on the shoot rather than a commission on sale. Some will actually make much more revenue than they currently do on current sites. The clientele of these microstock sites might completely shift away and use the Demand Media database since they will be sure to find what they are looking for. Finally, traditional Stock agency will finally be overwhelmed with a Ford like approach to their trade.

Demand Media has a lot of cash in its bank and a novel approach to the Stock Photography industry, cutting cost to a minimum while increasing productivity. It’s what Getty images or Corbis should have done if they had been smart, instead of wasting there time and money on “artists”. Might be too late for both. It is certainly too late for the traditional industry.

Full article on Demand Media here in Wired Magazine.

Posted in web 2.0, Midstock, technology, commercial stock, prosumer, finance, Royalty free, getty, corbis, transaction, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

October 13, 2009 by pmelcher.

While everyone is searching for what commercial stock might become in the future, the Chinese might have one solution and it is quite revolutionary. Researchers from TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University along with a Singapore based researcher, have put together Photosketcher, previously called Sketch2Photo.

The principle is quite simple : you sketch what and how your final image image  should look like and it fetches all the elements on the internet and stitches them together for a final composite image.  Better yet, here is a visual explanation :

This would be a major breakthrough for art directors all around the world. Instead of going to hundreds of stock banks trying to locate an image that remotely looks like  the one they had in mind, they could actually build it from different bits and pieces of a variety of images. Obviously, they wouldn’t even have to hire photographers for photo shoots anymore, at least for those that have common elements in them.

But, before we get there, this is a pretty nifty tool for art directors who would like to create comps to show their clients or  the photogrpahers they are about to hire  what they have in mind.

In the paper, it is unclear where in the internet the search is performed. It seems to be  everywhere, creating a huge copyright headache. Of course, some would argue that since the end result is a composite and thus a new creation, there is no copyright due. Let’s leave the arguing to Lawheads and revue the implication of this new tool.

If the search was only applied  to Creative Common content ( Flickr)  one could probably be free of any copyright issue. Furthermore, one would have the legitimate right to register the new finished product as their own and license it. Think about it. A completely computer generated image created with bits and pieces of images from various photographers would come and take its rightful place next to work from long-time pros. Wow. And some though microstock was bad. Wait until everyone can create photographs.

Currently, the end result is very average as the selection of images does not pay any attention to light orientation and shadows. However, that could easily be an additional search parameter which would allow for extremely realistic end photographs.

What would this imply for editorial photography, especially news ? Major, major trouble. On could easily put together, in any environment, two people that have never met and look very realistic. Our news imagery could suddenly be flooded with hand-made images of events that have never taken place. Would we ever trust photography ever again ?  Doubtful. Photography will have to go through rigorous credibility checking before being branded as real news.

Finally, could this Photosketcher be a hoax ? Doubtful. Finding image via sketching is already widely operational, while automated  extracting already exist ( Adobe has a great one in Photoshop Element). Stitching, as we all know, is also very common. Thus combining all these know application together is not impossible. It is actually not too hard. The whole operation must take a pretty hefty amount of processing power but then we have no information on what type of computer these students have.

This new tool, however amazing it seems to be, has many implication for the world of photogrpahy and will have far reaching repercussions. It’s acceptance and usage will be something to monitor closely for anyone involved in photogrpahy.

See a full explanation in this video:

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Posted in license, Search, copyright, technology, commercial stock, prosumer, flickr, law, news, editorial, filter, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | No Comments »