According to a press release of this morning, Getty Image board has agreed to be bought by San Fransisco based private equity firm Hellman and Friedman LLC for $2.4 Billion dollars. That is more than the estimated total size of the stock photo industry as per Getty Image itself . They had, as many others, Read More →

London, UK, Feb. 20, 2008. Designers, advertising creatives, web designers and editorial picture editors can now get top quality images to bring their creative work to life for ‘whatever they want to pay’ through innovative new UK-based online stock image library www.moodboard.com Moodboard, the company with the cool website that invented the 20% , 10 Read More →

The most World Press awards this year and not a buyer. Shows that photojournalism doesn’t pay. It is quite ironic that the company that has grown through so many purchase cannot sell itself. But then again, it never said it wanted to. Johnathan Klein and the official voices of Getty Images never confirmed the selling Read More →

A great story out of France today. You remember the Frenchman who made the world market crash ( I know, I know, just joking), Jerome Kerviel, responsible for a 7 billion dollars loss at the Societe Generale? He has become a superstar, especially in his native country. However, he has been very illusive and only Read More →

“By posting user content to any part of the site, you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence … to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such user content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise. … Facebook does not Read More →

A rather big parallel universe to the photo industry is the copyright industry. According to the Copyright Alliance, “The U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.” That, of course, includes music, graphic, video on top of photography. One has to assume Read More →

One thing that has always bothered me is why the commercial stock companies always offer discounts on their images and never the editorial photo agencies. Hold it ! I am not saying they should. If you go on Royalty free websites, there is always, always a promotion going on. Get 2 images for the price Read More →

  “Digital Disciples make up the second-largest group (35%) and consider themselves serious amateur photographers“. According to The Kodak Photo Futures Report, the same Disciples are “the most likely to explore photo editing software and have ambitions to make money from their hobby”. Who knew? First who knew that Kodak was still in the photo Read More →

The next big thing in the web 2.0/prosumer/crowdsourcing will be the user generated photo agency. It has become quite easy to purchase software, of the shelf, that will anyone with little programming skills and a lot of patience to create a mini photo agency. Obviously, the first market to be targeted will be Royalty free Read More →

In an interview to PDN magazine, master blogger Dan Heller offers the photography world a new idea : Create an Ebay of photography. People, that is everybody and anybody, would upload images to a site where image buyers, other people, would purchase them for an settle upon price. That would allow for the overhaul market Read More →