As the flow of news coming out of the stock photo industry major – and not so major – players keep on pushing one press release after the other, it is always good to take a step back and analyze trends. It’s been a hectic first six months of 2016 and if its any indication, … Read More →
An Interview with Ulf Schmidt-Funke by Stefan Hartmann for PICTORIAL Magazin 04/2016. It was – actually – a discussion about an entirely different topic. But Ulf Schmidt-Funke was just about to travel to the USA, where he planned to meet with major market players – including Reuters, New York Times and Shutterstock – on behalf … Read More →
Some place its origin to mystic Egyptians trying to capture the quintessential field of vision while others are convinced that it has a mathematical relation to the golden ratio so favored by renaissance artists. But in reality, it is nothing of the sort. The creation and subsequent standardization of the rectangular format in photography have … Read More →
The issue seemed simple enough: Find a photo of a green landscape with a clean blue sky, add the company’s logo and tagline and post it on the homepage of the site. Sure, they could easily find an inexpensive photo that matched their need but after that, emptiness. For a small company with no in-house … Read More →
I was recently invited to speak at B&H Photo Video . Here is the resulting podcast: “Anyone, I mean, anyone can submit their photos for sale in the stock-photography market. (Are you a foaper?) But the question remains: is it worth it? No doubt, the industry has been transformed by corporate conglomeration and digital technology but, while … Read More →
Photographers and anyone involved in the professional photo licensing business have a love/hate relationship with social media. Great marketing tool to display their latest photographs but with no revenue. Worse, social media platforms generate millions on the content being shared. This might change. Tsu.co ( pronounce “soo”) is a recent newcomer in the crowded world of … Read More →
By now, unless if they have been living under a rock, everyone has heard- if not experienced- bitcoin. Some photo agencies have even experienced accepting Bitcoin in payment for licenses. However, what few know is how the technology behind Bitcoin could one day change the world of photography. Reduced to a very simple explanation, blockchain … Read More →
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau As the world of photography inexorably advances into the grasp of advanced computerized processing – filters, computational imaging, deep learning, A.I, multi-lenses and more- we start to doubt its ability to properly represent reality. In a world dominated by computational enhancements, can we … Read More →
Although they circle at different speeds, have different sizes and even differ in their composition, some planets happen to periodically align themselves so perfectly that it is possible, from earth, to see them on the same horizon. This is what happened a few weeks ago with Venus, Jupiter and Mars. In a rare coincidence, the … Read More →
While there has never been so many photos taken and shared online, the world of professional photo licensing is not striving. In fact, most legacy companies have seen their revenue freeze or decline in the last decade, with rare exceptions. While at first contradictory, a closer analysis reveals that part of the issue seems to be linked to … Read More →