March 5, 2008 by pmelcher.

French photo agency Gamma, now under the umbrella of Eyedea,  recently lost a judgment for the lost of 9 210 originals. Catherine Leroy, Legendary war photographer, will receive 1,381,500 €  ( that is $ 2,108,909.49). About $228 dollars an image.

Catherine Leroy died in 2006 and was represented by her mother.

Yes, you have read this correctly. That is more than twice the price company Green Recovery paid  Hachette to purchase Gamma, Rapho, Hoaqui, Jacana, Explorer and Top last year. The purchase price was rumored  to be  € 600,000.00 or $900,000.00

Sipa has also been condemned to pay € 1,200,000 ( about $1,8 Million)   to photographer Gérard Gastaud for the lost of 43,331 of his originals. ( about $42.00 per image lost)

Apparently, if you are going to have your originals lost, you are better off moving to France first.

Seriously, however, neither agency would survive if they had to pay such penalty. Both are surviving right now and certainly cannot afford to part with more than $1 million dollar. Actually, besides Corbis, I do not know of any agency that could survive such a settlement.

I am all for compensating photographers whose images have been lost or mistreated. Especially legendary photographers like Catherine Leroy . However, I will question the intelligence of a judge who puts the settlement a such a high value that it endangers the jobs of 1,000’s of innocent people. Some common sense needs to also be applied here.

Both agencies have the right to appeal, which, in this case, I am sure they will certainly do.

More on these judgments here ( In French) : Photographie.com

Posted in SIPA, newspaper, copyright, magazine, photojournalism, finance, news, law, france, editorial, corbis | Print | No Comments »

January 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

Beyond the flashy fancy mini sites that Corbis and Getty Images have throwned to press release hungry industry newsletter and blog sites, I did a little search of my own.

If you click on any or all of these icons below, you will probably find some of the most amazing and less seen USA Election coverage. There is an advantage of being a photographer from a non “accredited” agency like Reuters/EPA for Corbis and Getty/AFP for Getty: you have no rules to follow and you get to shoot what you want.

It makes for some pretty amazing images: (click on any logo below and enjoy)

These are only a few. No Press releases. No mini sites. Just hard and pure work. VII, DigitalRailroad, Magnum, Contact Press and others had not yet made anything visible as I was writing this entry. I am sure they will. There has never been an election like this in the USA before and probably will never be again. While Corbis and Getty have gone the wire service way ( 100 photos a day covering everything and nothing), these guys are going both for the historical and the emotional route. Because the next president of the United States of America, whether the rest of the world likes it or not, is going to be the major news for the next 8 years.

Minimum.

I agree with my friend Pino Granata, Photography without passion is not photography, it’s only bored microstock.

Posted in SIPA, TIME, newspaper, alexa, Cnn, magazine, keyword, google, news, corbis, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

November 16, 2007 by pmelcher.

What fundamentally matters in photography, is the image, and not who took it. The end users, that is, the guy in the street, doesn’t care if an image has been taken by someone famous or not. He reacts to the image itself.
Photographers spend a lot of time trying to brand themselves with postcards, websites, talks and blogs and spend little or no time creating the right images .
A talented photographer is one that creates, over and over, the right images. Not the one who wins a prize for the best marketing. A Sebastiao Salgado can come out of nowhere and become one of the most succesful photo journalist ever, not because he knows how to brand himself, but because his images are unavoidable.
We have created the myth of the pro photographer and have tried to sell that rather than the photographs themselves. But a magazine and its readers only care about the photograph, not the person behind it. And certainly not the photo agency.

It is almost impossible for someone to be succesful in photojournalism. It is almost impossible for one person to always come out with the most compelling images and with the right story. This is why there are so many photographers and photo agencies around, because no one can solely claim superiority over it all. Readers expect the best, every single time, from sport to news, from celebrity paparazzi to travel. And no single photographer can achieve that. Not even a photo agency can claim a dominance.
We have to return to the cult of photography and abandon the cult of the photographers. We have to admire images for what they are regardless of who took them. We have to accept that their is no excellence in the human beings that manage photography, but there is perfection in the photographs themselves.

If we can accept that only the photographic image matters, than we can finally understand our roles.

On a somewhat related note, for your Week End lesson and

for anyone that understand French, Photojournalism legend Goksin Sipahioglu, speaks :

Posted in SIPA, newspaper, photojournalism, wire service, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

October 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just returned from 3 days of Paca international conference in Sin city. How appropriate to have held the yearly convention in a gambling town full of hard core, die hard risk takers. Our industry, the photo industry is very similar in its model.

When we take images for stock, we purchase lottery tickets. we invest our time and money into a series of images that we hope we will license, over and over, for millions of dollars. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t . A bit like a poker game, we have some idea if we have a winning hand but we never know what the competition is holding, and if they might bankrupt you.

Furthermore, when we negotiate pricing for an RM image, we try to find out how badly an image buyer wants an image and price it accordingly. Of course, they might pass and move on to another image to satisfy their needs. So we gamble with ours quote, not completely informed of what set of card the opponent carries.

Finally, Las Vegas teaches us that to make money, you have to spend money. As I very shyly approached the slot machines, I only used the ones with one quarter. My losses where minimal but so where my gains. I lost a few quarters. The second day, I boldly tried the one dollar machines and my success rate was a little better. I came out even. I gambled $5 dollars, I won five dollars back. Mmm..what is the point of that, I asked myself. The last night, I went all out and started inserting 20 dollar bills . Things got much more exciting. At some point I was down to maybe a dollar, but all in all, I started winning 65 dollars here, and 50 there. I left with double of what I had played, extremely satisfied.

The photo business is the same. The less you invest, the less your return. You have to be a risk taker and go out boldly, both in spending and in creative investment.

It appears, and some image buyers on a panel confirmed this, that more of the same images are being offered. it is not a saturation of offer that we are seeing, but a saturation of similitude . Everyone copies each other, thanks to the visibility of everyone’s content on each others website, creating a pool of identical thus boring images.

As much as this industry is a business, it is also a labor of love, a pool of creativity. The winners are the risk takers, those who are not afraid to gamble big in order to receive big. Those who do not follow change, but created it.

The PACA Congress was overall interesting, even if the panels where maybe not very exciting in their content. I was part of one, so I can safely say this. On a question by Ron Rovtar of the Stock Asylum during our panel, who asked who was making more money than last year, the vast majority raised their hands. The others where making the same.

The marketing hub, where some companies had tables a la CEPIC, was extremely busy with intense business negotiation , and the hallways where buzzing with incessant networking, impromptu meetings, and extensive conversations.

It would be great to see next year, in New York, a panel, or even a room, entirely reserved to technology companies that can improve photo agencie’s life . To reach out to other businesses that have comprehensive solutions and ideas that will enhance this industry. Have photographers come and talk about their experiences and challenges. Have slide shows or exhibits. Invite editorial photo agencies to connect the bridge between the two very similar worlds. In a word, to open up these congress to the outside world and break wide open the doors of this little private club. Bring in some fresh thinking.

In a word, see PACA gamble.

Posted in license, SIPA, web 2.0, CEPIC, PACA | Print | 2 Comments »

July 3, 2007 by pmelcher.

If we stop for a little while and catch our breath, we can see that the stock photo industry is doing better, not worse. 10 years ago, no agencies was posting revenues of $800 million as Getty now boast. Quite the opposite, Sygma, one of the big three (SIPA and Gamma being the other two) was loosing $20 million a year, when Corbis purchased them. Gamma was not doing better and Sipa was also financially wobbling.

For all the nay sayers of the stock photo industry, this might come as a shock. But the industry is doing quite well, thank you. Cepic has passed from 600 participants to 800 in one year, and the market itself is expanding. New blogs have appeared, there is so much new information . Even granddaddy PDN had to call in “kids friendly” PDNpulse to keep up with what is now a daily mass production of industry  related news.

New business model are thriving. Microstock, whether it is cannibalizing 8 or 15 % of the traditional market still discovered millions of new image buyers worldwide. Image Buyers that pay for a RF license. what is wrong with that ?

The editorial space has never seen so many new agencies in the last 10 years. And some great ones too:  VII, for one, created thanks to the Corbis purchase of SABA. In the celebrity space, there are more agencies now than ever, with sales of images that topped $4 million for one set, last year. I had never seen that before.

New Royalty free production companies are blooming here and there. Photoshelter, IPNstock and multi millionaire Digitalrailroad are throwing independent photographers into the market, hoping to cash in on the surge, along with Scoopt and other Citizen Image. Even Flickr, Zoomr and other  rrrr’s are good news. The worldwide interest for images is growing. If people are taking pictures and posting them for everyone to see, you can be sure that that they look at other pictures. and they want to see more. Where and how do you think they learned to be so good.

New photo festival are opening ( none are closing) and countries with little or no photo sales in the past are now building their own distribution channel.

Certainly, some price per image are dropping but the price per photo agency is certainly not. $200 million here, $35 million there. Could you sell your photo agency for that price 10 years ago ?

On the reverse side, I read or hear little of massive bankruptcies or  monumental crashes. The nay sayers  will say it is coming. But of course, even in a booming market, companies fail. But they fail by not recognizing opportunities when they  arise and holding on to recipes that worked 10 years ago.

The photo industry has never been healthier. In an extremely rapid state of flux, yes, but healthy.

Posted in flickr, SIPA, CEPIC, corbis, getty, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

January 25, 2007 by pmelcher.

- Photographers shoot images that they think photo buyers will want to use.
- Photo buyers purchase images that they think readers would like to see.
- Readers do not know what they want to see before they see it.

The less an image is important to convey a message, because text plays an important role, the less a photo buyer is ready to pay, regardless of the originality or quality of an image.

The more important is the image to the message, the more a photo buyer is ready to pay. Double that if the image is the only message.

What is currently happening ? Most photographers take picture they think Image Buyers will be interested in purchasing. They mostly base their decisions on past sales and assume that they can use usage patterns as projections. So they add the same type of content, thus diluting the value of their images by adding more volume.They do not pay attention to the actual final use of the image.
Other photographers ignore all the rules and just take pictures of whatever they want. It’s a hit and miss game, where some images might sell a lot or not at all.Others still will try and figure out what readers will want to see. They, unfortunately, also use past usage as an indication of future needs.

Finally, some do not pay any attention to past usage and use their “instinct” (certainly not an MBA word) to satisfy the readers’ craving for images. They do very well. They create the stuff of legends.

None really pay attention to the context of usage and how it relates to the image. Or so it seems.

Readers, image consumers, create these legends and are the end users of photography. Not photo editors. Too many times I see, over and over, photographers or editors at agencies trying desperately to please the photo editors, with absolutely no interest in what the readers like and how there images could fit in.

However, the same desperately try to understand how a photographer creates a market for his/her images. Seems obvious to me.
The Internet has leveraged the playing field, these days, offering a much more direct line of communication to the readers. I am still surprised that agencies, or photographers, do not take advantage from that. After all, what prevents a Getty or Corbis, Abaca or Sipa to create their own sites, or blogs, and post the images that they like ? They do it with cell phone providers already and license images almost directly to consumers.

It will be an interesting time when an agency or a group of photographers decide to go completely vertical and own the whole process, from creation to publication.
I know that some agencies currently sell prints to consumers (sometimes in a more or less illegal way) or even to blogs. But actually adding value to their content, it has not happen yet.

One idea would be to have a weekly competition: To those “week in pictures’ edits, add a “vote here” button so that you have a much better understanding of the market. After all, the people voting are the same ones buying those magazines, books and product advertised, thus paying your bills.

There are so many ways to leverage technology in your favor with minimal cost these days that it easy to see that those who will rule the market in 5 years are the ones experimenting with it right now.
~ On a completely unrelated note, I see that Corbis, the Viking tribe of photography, is going after the Smithsonian Institute. After destroying about every collection that they have touched, they are still at it. Someone should pass a law against these guys preventing them to continue their massacre. It’s getting obscene.

Posted in SIPA, corbis, getty | Print | 1 Comment »