June 6, 2008 by pmelcher.

Great gallery from MSNBC.com this week. Drop by and enjoy if you have time  : Photos of the week

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July 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

NowPublic, a Community driven web 2.0 Canadian website has scored $10.6 million in funding in the hope of becoming successful. If a traditional photo agency, with an existing and proven business model, with photographers under contract would try to get such funding, they would be escorted out the door while hearing laugher in the background.

So what makes NowPublic so special ? Or any other Crowdsourcing powered site so special to investors ? well, part of it is the free labor. In the case of NowPublic it is unclear what percentage they will offer if and when they license an image. Images seems to be held in the Flickr happy Creative Common arena right now. Maybe those “news ” photographers will be happy just to see their credit, and why shouldn’t they ? Or license via AP, as NowPublic offers as an option. But then, why send your valuable images to NowPublic when you could send them directly to AP and cut the middle man ?
What amazes me is that publishing news images taken by amateurs is as old as the photo agencies business. It is called “pick up” in English, and “recup” in French. What everyone seems to forget about the now infamous London bombing images is that, if wasn’t for the professional photo agencies that licensed them, no one might have seen them. It is one thing to get an image, it is a whole different world to know how to license it.

Even NowPublic, who has a licensing deal with AP, knows that.

But no one ever thought of making “pick ups” their unique revenue stream, and for a good reason. Events of a magnitude big enough to justify hunting down an amateur for coverage are rare and few. Certainly not enough to run a business.

Photo agencies have been aware of this for a long, long time and thus have paid professionals to cover the more regular news. Apparently this information has not hit Canada, nor some venture Capitalist. However, the fact that they can sell the company to a Getty or a Corbis as did Scoopt.com could be the motivation behind the investment.

Once again we see the continuing trend of building a website where everyone can participate, make a lot of marketing noise, get some venture money and hopefully sell it to someone before it crashes: that is Web 2.0.

Photography is a prime target since Yahoo bought Flickr. It is also very easy to set up and operate. There is plenty of freeware that makes it cheap and available to anyone.

I suggest the next multi million dollar user generated, community driven platform should be one where users can exchange images of cows.

NowPublic article

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July 24, 2007 by pmelcher.

“community driven” is another word for free labor. What was once a nice idea for online collaboration between designers, post and use images from each other, has become, thanks to the whole Web 2.0 false aura of mutual benefaction, a form of workers abuse.

While the business world is trying hard to find ways for their workers to have more say, control and protection from their companies, Web 2.0 and their photographic association, microstock, are doing quite the opposite. At 20% to 40%, at the most, on images selling on average for $2.50 a piece, with absolutely no job security, the only winners are the new robber barons of the photography industry.

Sure you hear stories of housewives liberated from the constraints of their horrible cheap husbands making in the $100,000 of dollars a year. At 30%, the company makes $300,000 of pure, unaltered, organic and fat free benefit. Considering the low cost of bringing these images to market, as everything as automated as possible, the profits are extremely high. Isn’t the idea of community to share EQUALLY ?
If a company were to do the same to its workers, even its free lancers, especially in Europe where the social laws are stronger, we would have a revolution in our hands. And for a good reason. It is no big surprise that these so called community sites flourish in the United States where social laws are almost inexistent.

The real question for these businesses, relying on user interaction is how long will the users will be willing to play the game. After all, would you start a car factory where workers come when and wherever they want to ? Sure you would pay them less, but what happens if no one shows up ? Once the novelty of making a few bucks a month out of a pass time dies down, where will these micro stock companies will go for images?

Granted, the ones now owned by big publicly or not held companies can also be a trash can for existing images ( ie Getty, Corbis) . Others will have to increase their compensation plan if they really want to remain freshly fed with new images. Because $100 a month, even for housewives, as we are taught to believe, is not enough to feed a family. And they spend almost as much time as a pro to deliver images.

Or international worker legislation might interfere, especially in Europe, as they start smelling a quite rotten fish in the beautiful kingdom of photography. In France, for example, a photo agency is required to pay social security for every free lancer that submits images, out of their commission. A company like Fotolia, created in France, probably gets away without paying by declaring itself a software company. How long before other photo agencies scream unfair competition and drag them, and other microstock companies, into court. Both Corbis and Getty images have offices in France too.

We are in the medieval ages of photography, after all, with its serfs and lords. And we are living the same worker’s abuse that we had thought our civilized western world had abolished.

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June 27, 2007 by pmelcher.

While most of the photo community seems to have been trapped in the launch of Corbis ‘ microstock extension like a deer into headlights ( did anyone asked them how much it cost to launch? another $500 million ?), while others find it funny and amusing when people explicitly steal images for monetary gain ( freedom of speech should NEVER be confused with freedom to steal images), Google unveiled yet another product with a soft launch.

It is a sort of news photo portal, where images take a large part (half) of the page. You can now read headlines by selecting an image you like. It is a very interesting approach, as it clearly puts photography at the same level as text. The very first impression one gets is that of the poor quality of images used to illustrate stories.

What would be captivating, however, would be to see the percentage of stories that are read because of the images rather than the headlines. If it is a majority then maybe news outlets will finally put some more effort in selecting compelling images.

see it for yourself here

Google News

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June 5, 2007 by pmelcher.

According to aboutheimage, Shutterstock is flying, eyes closed, into the editorial space. Sometimes, these microstock seem so eager to innovate that they will throw themselves into anything the competition has not done yet. Except that all new idea is  not always a good idea.

A few simple lessons in editorial photography :

- It is very hard to get a credential to cover an event, especially red carpet event . Furthermore, the space is limited by professional photographers who only cover those for a living. I know them well, and I can tell you, either in LA or New York, let along in other cities of the world, I doubt that they will happily greet an amateur within there rank. Did I mention London? I can just imagine someone in a line with those brit photogs saying, “hi, I work for a microstock agency”.

- Forget the model release. Celebs do not sign model releases. They make more money in product endorsement than making movies, so why would they sign a blanket release ? Furthermore, a red carpet is really not the appropriate place for rushing a celeb and ask them to sign a release. oops .

- Magazines are not looking for any images at any price. For a magazine to pay a subscription fee you have to have a similar offer than AP,Reuters, Getty or EPA.

However, I did write an entry a while back about editorial royalty free, a pay once, use multiple time licensing option. At the time, I thought a traditional celeb/editorial photo agency would be the first to play around with this model. I guess I was wrong. It happens.

Shutterstock might feel the pain, as the cost(excluding the cost of human lives on the carpets turning red for other reasons) of creating those editorial images might exceed the price they are being licensed for. They are obviously going after the Fans site / Myspace market, which is, in itself, not a bad idea.

But since they have no way of monitoring the usage, whose to say that someone will not use a photo of Julia Roberts for a brochure for womens shoes ?

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May 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

Not quite there yet but O so much closer. Google has very quietly introduced a face recognition algorithm to their image search. No,no,no, it doesn’t recognize who is in a photograph yet. However what it does, it recognizes if there is a face in the photograph. Baby steps.

Here is how it works. In Google Image, do a search on any subject you would like. Type in “blue” for example. You get as a result a series of blue skies and in your url something like this :

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=blue&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

all you have to do now is add “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL and your result will only show faces, human faces.

like this:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=blue&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&imgtype=face

Obviously, since there is no options on the interface to generate this filter, it is not ready for launch yet. And all it currently does is recognize the shape of a face, not who is in the picture. That is still in the works but not very far from being ready.

A life saver for editorial photo agencies, a complete face recognition system with identification would reduce the key wording time to almost nothing and accelerate time to desktop.
Since Google sets the standard in search, you could expect image buyers to soon come to your website expecting the same ability.

from : Google Blogoscoped

NEWS UPDATE :

Bob Roberts who had more time to play with it adds:

I tried changing “yellow” for “blue” in your posted link and got a result
that gives an idea of just how close it is,
and how far they have yet to go:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=yellow&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&imgtype=face

or try “queen” to see it really be useful

better still substitute “martin+luther+king” for “blue” and you can really
sense the potential.

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May 30, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just when you thought Microsoft wasn’t an innovator anymore and that Apple had the monopoly on cutting edge innovation, the Redmond based company is about to come out with the new digital light box.

A coffee table size touch screen allows for multiple users to manipulate images as easily as prints on a table. Mounted on a wall, it could easily be used by art directors to compare and work on photo shoots. Editing will become more humane and less of a lonesome occupation. You can see a nice demo at PhotoMechanics.com.

This is only the beginning and the tip of the iceberg on how human interaction with computers is about to change. And for photo agencies and photographers, how the digital age is finally coming to maturity. In not too long, on line database of images serviced by a web browser will appear as obsolete and inadequate as the first automobiles and those who will survive will look back a these steam powered engines with wet eyes.

Corbis, with all its potential might, as yet to come up with any innovation at all, while Getty has been flirting with the edge while remaining very traditional. Recent innovations, like microstock and visual search, have come from people outside of the industry. The real innovators and creators of new, useful technology, are not photo professionals. They are, however photo enthusiasts with a genuine eagerness to make photography, and the distribution of it, a simpler, less aristocratic process. Sometimes it leads to excesses, mostly in pricing. But the good news, the very good news is that photography has never been so much in demand, and as well supported as of today. It is up to photo professionals to take advantages of this photo tsunami.

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April 26, 2007 by pmelcher.

Green Recovery, new owners of what used to be Hachette Filipacchi Photo Group ( Gamma, Rapho, Explorer, Hoa Qui,Top) have decided to shut down their New York operation. The whole staff has been laid off. It’s a very sad thing. Gamma, among others, used to be one of the 3 great photo agencies in the world, along with SIPA and SYGMA. Under Michel Bernard, Gamma-Liaison, the New York operation of Gamma, used to be a thriving operation, so much so that Getty bought it for a cool $8 million dollars at the time. They had magnificent offices on Bryant Park and were the talk of the town. Years later, Jean Pierre Laffont, with such great names as Jean Pierre Pappis ( Currently president of Polaris) and James McGrath (currently President of AtlasPressPhoto) had revived it, only to be shut down by the upper echelons of Hachette in France.

Gamma was not killed by microstocks, nor was it destroyed by Getty or Corbis. Gamma was sunk by extremely incompetent management. Following the lead of companies like Corbis, the powers at Hachette decided to put fresh out of business school CEO’s thinking that this business is the same then any old business. Committees, internal politics, fratricide, enormous amounts of red tape, bureaucracy, conservative thinking, all added up to sucking the air of a tremendous talent pool. Obsessed by saving money rather than making money, these so called leaders forgot that the only way to make a plant grow healthy is to water it frequently, not to save on the water consumption. Great photojournalism, like great celebrity imagery, is a gamble. In order to be there at the right time you have to invest time, money and resources. If you play you cards right, you get those winning shots and get back 5, 10 times your investments. You take a part of your earnings and re-invest in the next story. If you decide to play it safe and wait for these images to come to you, it will never happen.

The second major mistake these CEO did was to ignore the digital evolution of this industry. Thus they were trying, desperately, to follow it, step by step, instead of plunging into it with one big leap. Resisting change is a killer.
In short, that is what happened with Gamma. The triumph of “the suits”, those fed on business rules that cannot and will not be applied to the photography world, those who excel at meetings and self promotion, those who cannot see intelligence and talent in other people, those who couldn’t care less about the damage they leave behind. All the CEO’s of Gamma have cozy jobs today. The hard working staff of Gamma are on the street.

Don’t believe for an instant this is limited to Gamma or / and the French. Corbis would be in the same situation today if it wasn’t for the deep pockets, and apparent dedication of its sole owner.

What really bothers me is what happens to the photographers, the images, the hours of hard and dedicated work, the passion and commitment, the sleepless nights, the tormented hours, the joys and group satisfaction, the proud and irreplaceable moments, the successes and triumphs, and those very early mornings when you finally came home from work with a tired smile of victory on your face ?

To those who have spend part of there lives at Gamma New York, past and present, photographers as well as staff employees, I salute you.

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March 29, 2007 by pmelcher.

The journalist in question here is no other than fame photographer Pete Turnley .
“Following the photo’s publication, Brinlee’s father, Robert Showler, and grandfather, Johnny Davidson, sued Turnley and Harper’s on claims of invasion of privacy, false representation, fraud, unjust enrichment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
“[Judge] Seay pointed out that the family — not Harper’s and its photographer — chose to have the casket open at the funeral and invite the press.”

One has to ponder about this event for a while. Death, in itself, is not a “private moment”, it is a full part of the life cycle. There is nothing more common then death, an ability that we share with all living things. Photographing dead people has been done since the birth of photography, from public execution to the legendary Weegee and numerous extremely talented war photographers. Death is even more an integral part of war. After all, do we not pay our soldiers to legally kill our “officially declared” enemies with the obvious risk of getting killed themselves? But then, we should mimic the three wise monkeys ?

Todd Heisler Pulitzer, NPPA, World Press winning photo essay is all about war inflicted death and how we, the living, try to cope with it. I think there was more invasion of privacy there. Yet, no one sued.
When and why someones life becomes private ? Since a soldier, like a policeman or firefighter, is paid by our tax money, shouldn’t he/she be a public figure ? We have bought their time after all. We even pay for their death expenses and after. We consider the battle ground as a public place and publish images of dead Iraqis every day. But no US soldiers? What exactly makes their death more private then that of the woman going to the market and being suddenly pulverized by a suicide bomber. And those thousands upon thousands of dead bodies washed up after the great tsunami of 2004? not private. The corpses floating in New Orleans after the Katrina hurricane. Not private.
We consider soldiers lives, even the most mundane moments, as fair game. They have deliberately walked in the modern gladiators arena whose walls are only defined by photojournalists and paparazzi. They are in and belong to the Public Eye, the same one that demands pictures of Ana Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and our presidential candidates.

The photographers are not the voyeurs, but the masses. Photographers only fulfill a need, thus a market demand, for these images, leaving the boundaries of private/public extremely blurry. What I would like to see, one day, is the masses, the ones that rush to the newsstands and pay to see these images, to be sued. After all, they are the ones who invade our privacy with their curious eyes, not the photographers. Or vote with their money, as it is so often done in this country, and cease to purchase publications, surf websites and watch TV shows that offend them. But a crowd has no moral, does it ? The photographer, along with the editors, have this responsibility. However, their ethics are only govern by one thing: money. And we all know money has no morals either.

So lets not all stand there as hypocrites. The image consumer, the viewer, the crowd, the Cyclopes as I call them, are the ones with the real moral choices. If they do not want to see more images of gladiators dying, then they should let us know. And if our society decides that the majority is not ethical, then lets create a photojournalist oath, like Hippocrate did for medicine, and let us abide by it.

But let’s cease this incessant photographers harassment.

Full article on Peter Turnley’s case here

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March 20, 2007 by pmelcher.

Stock photography has nothing to do with creativity. It is not an art. It does not try to explain the meaning of Life. It tries to communicate. It uses a language, the visual language, to transmit a message. The true and successful stock photographer is, first and foremost, a sociologist. He tries to understand the trends, values, concepts of his time and translates them into a simple image that conveys the message.

Therefore, the success of a photographer is dependent on his ability to be in touch with his time, to feel and understand what people want to hear. or view. It is his ability to be “in fashion” by integrating in his work the captured knowledge of his world and his time. For example, the US youth right now, is crazy about communities and social interaction over the internet. The idea of “exchange” is all over the Web 2.0 and has trickled to product, like the Microsoft Zune, that allow song sharing.
How does one capture such an image ? Well, one exercise would be to photograph everything you do during a typical day. from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night and everything in the middle. You can be sure that for everything you do during your day, they are multiple products associated with it. Thus, thousand of marketers trying to find an image to illustrate it. Because your personal life might be very dull and gray, the next step is to subliming it and strip it of its individuality. No one really wants to see the details of your bedroom. However, they would love to see the concept of a bedroom in the morning. So what defines a bedroom in the morning.
- a bed.
- a low morning sunlight casting shadows through a window.
- someone still sleeping in night attire or sitting on the edge.
- some accessories. alarm clock, slippers, nightgown, table, a mirror.
You now have defined a bedroom in the morning. You could go more minimalist, of course. A close up of a wrinkled pillow in an unmade bed could do the trick too. Heck !, a toothbrush on a white background would do it, since most people associate brushing their teeth with the morning. But do not forget the golden rule: Leave some space for text, at least 1/4 of the image.
Part of the microstock success is due to the fact that they offer exactly this type of imagery, more in touch with the current world, then prefabricated Royalty Free products made by the corporates in their cubicle. Microstocks companies have no control over their content yet sell millions of images per year. Istockphoto has reported 10.5 million images sold for 2005. I am sure a lot of RF and RM agencies would have liked to boast such figures. Why such a volume ? Well, partly because the content is more reflective of what is going around us than those of  conventional stock agencies.
It is important never to forget that the success of an image is in how it relates to us. and by us, I mean the social us. I will only notice an image because it speaks to me, right at me, and who I am. It will answer an immediate need. A photographer should watch all the popular TV shows, surf all the popular websites, watch music videos pay, attention to all the fashion trends and have kids of different age to talk to, all the time. If you communicate with the trend makers, you will have a better idea on what is coming . And communication is, sometimes, all about listening.

The most interesting part is that you do not have to like one of your image for it to be successful. As long as it satisfies a need, it is useful. It becomes a tool , after all, for others to reshape in the exact form they need, to fit space, time and message. It will be cropped, reformatted, smothered with text and published for everyone to see.

There is nothing creative about stock photography. It is just a complex exercise in repackaged sociology with a little dose of cynicism.

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