March 16, 2010 by pmelcher.

Dear Copyright Advocates,

The Obama Administration is asking to hear from YOU, the creative backbone of our country, about how intellectual property infringement affects YOUR livelihood. The Administration is also seeking advice on what the government could be doing to better protect the rights of artists and creators in our country.

  HERE’S A CHANCE FOR YOU TO BE HEARD!

BACKGROUND:

Last year President Obama appointed and the U.S. Senate confirmed Victoria Espinel to be the first U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. Her job is “to help protect the creativity of the American public” by coordinating with all the federal agencies that fight the infringement of intellectual property, which includes creating and selling counterfeit goods; pirating video games, music, and books; and infringing upon the many other creative works that are produced by artists in this country.

As you know, the unauthorized copying, sale, and distribution of artists’ intellectual property directly impacts the ability of artists and creators to control the use of their own creativity, not to mention their ability to receive income they have earned from their labor. This impacts U.S. employment and the economy, and our ability to globally compete.

As required by an Act of Congress (The PRO‐IP Act of 2008), Ms. Espinel and her White House team are preparing a Joint Strategic Plan that will include YOUR FEEDBACK on the costs and risks that intellectual property infringement has on the American public.

Here’s how to make yourself heard!

1. Send an email to Ms. Espinel and the Obama Administration: intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov and copy the Copyright Alliance on your email: info@copyrightalliance.org

2. Begin your letter with “The Copyright Alliance has informed me of this welcome invitation from the Obama Administration to share my thoughts on my rights as a creator.”

3. Include in your email: your story, why intellectual property rights are important to you, how piracy and infringement affect you, and what the U.S. government can do to better protect the rights of creative Americans.

4. Also include in your email: your name, city, state, and what type of artist you are 5. DO NOT include any personal or private information as all comments will be posted publically

on the White House website. All comments must be submitted by Wednesday, March 24 by 5:00 p.m. EST.

Don’t be shy! Take two minutes today to make your voice heard, and don’t forget to spread the word to everyone you know. Forward this notice using this short URL ‐ http://bit.ly/cjDZJt ‐ by email, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and more!

Best,

Lucinda Dugger

Posted in license, copyright, technology, google, web 2.0, news, law, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

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 »

March 2, 2010 by pmelcher.

How to iTablet the Ipad ? Microsoft is about to reveal something that could bypass the need to carry yet another big thing just to read magazine, newspapers or surf websites. Called the “Mobile Surface” and only to be shown to employees for now (must be extra beta), it is a small portable box that will project an interactive image on any surface.

Look :

 Of course, there is a lot of questions left. Mainly, will it not crash. However, this technology could be integrated in your cellphone ( the smart kind) and, while keeping the size small, allow for higher viewing real estate.  One will have to see how editing an image on a blue table will work out, or keeping your email private in an airplane.

This is however a very interesting development for E-publishing  ( just think of a 3D video or immersive photography) as well as computing in general. More stuff here

Posted in technology, lens, Newsweek, E Reader, magazine, multimedia, slideshow, photojournalism, web 2.0, newspaper, editorial | Print | 1 Comment »

March 2, 2010 by pmelcher.

You know there is a problem when a company selling you a service treats you with superiority and disdain. Somewhere in the sale cycle, someone hates the fact that they should be at the client service and not the opposite.

Take software solution companies, for example. They usually work in a vacuum creating  some software solution that they decide is very cool and once finished, look around to see if there is a market for it. There’s usually a market for everything. Once they find the market, they approach the “non software” people in a attempt to sell it. Because they usually fall on non technical people who have no clue on how difficult it has been to design and implement what they are trying to sell, they are quickly branded as “idiots”, “retards”, or “useless”. Nevertheless, the software company still needs to make money to cover the costs of creating and maintaining there operation. So they reluctantly continue  selling their product/services to the “incompetent idiots” that are not understanding the genius behind the applications they are buying.

The software companies stay very very close to their software peers in order to compensate and gather as much praises from them. After all, a praises from a peer is so much better than one from your clients. They couldn’t care less what their customers say about their products and what improvement they would like to see, as they see them as inferior that are only there to pay their bills. Like monkeys trying to explain to you how to operate your car. They come to really disdain this relationship whereby they have to take money from “idiots”. All they want is to be recognized as the new Google, get millions in funding and be admired by other programmers.

There is no love in a application creator/client relationship. We have seen it and we still see it in the photo industry. Since going digital, and especially after the billions spend by Yahoo for Flickr, a little flock of software companies, mostly start ups, have knocked on the doors of this market. And reluctantly did so. From database management to image recognition, they have found and develop some interesting tools for this market. However, they disdain the fact that they have to rely on poorly technology educated photo people to make a living.

What are the signs of such companies ? Well, first and foremost, very poor communications skills. Do not return emails or phone calls or take a very, very long time doing so. Would you answer quickly to someone you despise ? They certainly don’t.

Poor or in existent sales team. Usually handled by an entry level person that has absolutely no power. He/she is obviously at the bottom of the pole at this company, and while usually very nice and understanding, a complete waste of time to communicate with.

No training or well thought out documentation. You either get it, like they do, or you are a complete moron that wouldn’t even understand a step by step instruction, so why bother ?

They want you to come to them. Since their creation is so genius, you should be begging to use it, not the opposite.

Finally, and probably the most important, they turn their creation into a “Solution”. Although they have develop an application that they thought was challenging enough to do, they will come to you as if they have found a cure to your problems. They will take the high road and declare: “we are here to save photography”. They take a superior stand to any seasoned professional and explain with a condescending air of ultimate superiority that they know what is wrong with the Photography business and that their software/app/service is THE solution. All like little messiah, they have a greater purpose than selling their companies services. They are here to save you from yourselves.

Let’s be realist. They are all in it to make money. Lots and lots of money. Nothing more and nothing less. They hide there real intention behind a mask of fake benevolence. Most have this annoying unsaid little scheme that if they can corner the market, they can turn around, raise prices, and get a choking stronghold on this universe. In the mean time they rack millions in investors money with this promise.

While technology is certainly a tool for growth, it is also full of the worst snake oil sellers one can ever meet. Their efforts are not as pure as they say. All of them are trying to make a profit , and as large as possible. So next time they ring at your door, think about their business model. How do they intend to get rich on your back. Sure, everyone deserves to be paid. But, is it worth it for your business ?.How tied up will you find yourself if they succeed in cornering the market ? Who will benefit the most ? You, or them ?

Most importantly, if they then do not respond promptly to your emails ( remember, these guys are on their computers/ smartphones 24/7 ), then you know that they could care less about you. And it’s time to move on.

Posted in technology, idee, picturemaxx, gumgum, commercial stock, copyright, license, finance, photoshop, flickr, web 2.0, transaction | Print | No Comments »

February 22, 2010 by pmelcher.

      Tired of Orphan works endless discussion ? Fed up about Microstrock, Getty and Google treating photography as a garbage dump ? Bored of reading self-proclaimed photo gurus telling you that “posterity is right around the corner “? Tired of spending gazillions hard earned dollars ( or pesos, or Euros, or Krons ?) on far away workshop with cynical and decadent reporters who need a new camera and couldn’t give a crap what your name is ? Or are you just loosing your eyesight on another overpriced piece of software supposedly made to enhance your workflow but actually puts you that much further from delivering your images on time ?

Well, if you have a Facebook account ( which, by the way, you should by now), head of to “L’apero du premier Jeudi du mois“. Apparently created by a group of French photographers who just like to have fun, and a drink, once a month  ( on the first Thursday of the month) , it is becoming the place to hang out. Why ? because they have just launched their first photo contest.And unlike PDN or other self righteous photo publication, it is free and fun.

Here are, in a nutshell, the rules.  5 images, coherent, on one topic, which is a pun in French : ” Aperitif: Contact Glasses” . You know, in France, when they go out for drinks, before dinner, they have a beer, or a Kir, or a Ricard, and they wish each other a good health ( “as ta sante”, or “a la votre”) before hitting their glasses together and slipping it away. A good way to push away a bad day and a great way to start an evening. The short photo essay for the contest that runs from March 1 to May 5, should illustrate that.  Simple enough ?

The prizes ? O yes, of course, this is what you win ( if you win):

1 prize : a Camenbert

2nd prize: a bottle of Zubrowska

3rd; Pize : a Ricoh camera

The jury ? : everyone. the images will be posted on Facebook and anyone can vote for their favorite . In June, the winner will be announce. So next time you sit down for drinks with your friends after a long boring day and let your thoughts drift into the friendship space, grab a camera and photograph this precious moment . Who knows, you might win a camenbert.

All info ( in French, for now) at the Facebook page here.

Posted in license, IPTC, copyright, magazine, technology, keyword, web 2.0, editorial, finance, slideshow, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

February 17, 2010 by pmelcher.

Wired magazine, in the trail of others, has partnered with Adobe Air, to display what their publication will look on a E reader. There are a few interesting points here.

First, for the geeks out there, it is interesting to see that Adobe, whose Flash is not supported by Apple’s Ipad, is now pushing Air  as a delivery platform. There will be a battle out there on what application will be running all these E magazines and Adobe is shooting the first salvo.

The second part is that Wired present this as an addition to their print publication, not as a replacement. As much as they are investing in the new technology, they are not ready to drop their print, web, IPhone apps just for that.

The Third, is that besides a format, there is no mention of hardware. It is supposed that this is for an Ipad, but really, it is for any existing or to be invented color tablet  ( sorry Kindle).

What about photography usage? Well, they are some very compelling statements here.

Images are a key element of this evolution. From 360 to immersible, from stop action to galleries, there are many forms of photography shown. Nothing new indeed, but a new usage certainly. Where do you find stock for 360 photography ? nowhere currently. So where will they go ?  Assignment, surely. Are you ready ? There is stock for panoramas images, but will that be enough ? And is the micro stock community going to plunge into this also ?  Probably.

However, the more important element of photography usage here is the option to share it. Either via email or social networks, almost every image can be shared with a click of one button. Now, we all know that editorial pricing has always been about placement, time and geography. What has never been appropriately addressed with web usage is now going to become standard practice for all editorial. Al thought you have  licensed your  image for a week, a month and for a small side usage, next thing you know it’s all over the web, in different format, given away for free to people you have never heard of. And never will.

Sure, you can go the Getty way. Here, pay me $49 and do whatever you want with the image. I would like to see Getty’s executives faces when one of their $49 image goes viral. Ouch. Na..not a good idea. Images should be license based on usage and usage should be tracked per number of clicks. After all, if an article or an image published on Tablet gets shared a lot, it is all in the benefit of the publication, right ? It’s free marketing. Yet, your image has been instrumental to that sharing action, so shouldn’t you be compensated ?

What do you mean you do not know how much click it has seen ? Do you know how much circulation a magazine has ? Yes, ok, well, with a link, it is even easier to track. They want a sharing option on your images, charge them either an additional flat fee, or a fee per clicks. But please, charge something. You are not Getty. You will not get back in volume what you just gave away for free. Never.

So. first thing first: Add to all your invoices  and delivery statement “NO DIGITAL RIGHTS” . If they want web usage or E Readers, then lets negotiate a different fee. Ask if there will be a sharing option . If yes, then add an additional fee. How much? well, that is up to you to decide.

Be proactive. You will be proud you did.

Posted in celebrity, copyright, license, magazine, technology, E Reader, commercial stock, multimedia, newspaper, editorial, getty, Royalty free, transaction, finance, web 2.0, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

January 27, 2010 by pmelcher.

Before we go any further ( we spoke about the Ipad here already anyways), we need to point out something extremely important. There are people in this industry, when they talk, you listen. Jonathan Klein is one because who knows what other damage he will create with his roller company  and he lies a lot ( according to Klein. “We were the first people in the world to sell an image online,”). Ellen Boughn is another.

For those who don’t know Ellen ( are they any?) , let me explain : Ellen is one of these extremely rare person that have done it all. From editorial, to commerial stock, royalty free and Microstock, she has been deeply involved in every facet of this industry. Unlike others, she has gotten herself dirty with all aspects of licensing images from production to sales, from little to giant corporation. She has seen everything and pays attention to everything. She has an insight that is only surpassed by her intelligence. There is nothing that scares her and she has the curiosity of a 10 year old. She has met everybody that is anybody in this business and yet respects everyone the same way. She has a passion for photography that would put to shame anyone. She is so good that his master himself, Henri Cartier Bresson, offered her a signed print, something that he extremely rarely did.

To top it all, she is an independent thinker. She will tell you things the way they are, regardless of the consequences. She knows no camp but excellence and truth. Her incisive mind can be brutally honest  because she is not scared of anything or anyone.  She is an encyclopedia of knowledge that you will never read anywhere ( unless she publishes more books). She is one of the reason why I love this industry so much : It attracts some of the smartest, intelligent, witty, knowledgeable people on the planet. People with a vast culture and yet  constantly curious about everything.

Why do I write this ? Because Ellen has started her on blog. And if you only read one thing, that should be it. Amateur, pro, super pro, whatever side of this industry you are, this should be the first thing you read. You will never be offered such a rewarding experience, for free. So, stop reading this and go bookmark her blog and hold on to you socks.

http://www.ellenboughn.com/blog

We are not worthy..

Posted in license, multimedia, magazine, technology, commercial stock, Magnum, web 2.0, photojournalism, getty, Royalty free, corbis, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | 5 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 »

December 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

All the E-readers and tablets are fine and exciting as long as they offer something new. If magazine publishers are going to do the same mistakes as they have been doing online, that is copy and paste the print content on a digital format, then let’s forget them.

Who will want to carry an extra item if its only a digital copy of what they can get on print. The other day, Time Inc released a video of what Sports Illustrated might look on a color E-reader. Besides giving updated sports results and bigger slideshows, the rest was exactly the same. Page of text, with same layout as print, with a few lonely photographs to illustrate them. Sorry, but there was nothing exciting about that.( Bonnier released  another example of a boring Print to E Reader layout in this this video. When you are done yawing, please continue). If the format is reinvented then the layout should be too. What we need is a Alexey Brodovitch of the E reader, a revolutionary mind that will break the old tired rules of publishing and make reading magazine exciting again. Someone that will invent the continuous magazine for example, breaking away from the daily, weekly, monthly, bi monthly cycle that printing and circulation demanded. Someone that will take advantage of the new possibilities, the new format for all that it has. Simply applying cheap make-up on a dead format will not work. People are not going to purchase and use these electronic tablets just to save the environment. The salvation of the magazine is  all in the content, not the support.

Take for example photography ( mmm, wonder why ?). Up to now, publishing empires of America have used photogrpahy only as a tool to prove or confirm a point , not as a narrative. Take news magazine like Time or Newsweek. They will use photography to illustrate an article on a topic, just to confirm with a visual what is being written about in the text. Why ? because as humans, we tend to trust more what we see than what we read. The written text has authority while the visual has credibility. In the current print media, the text is always, always privileged over the visual, even if sometimes the images would be a much better tool of communication. The image is used as a punctuation point after a series of written facts and explanations.

Part of the reason for this lies in the print limitation. Photographs have a lot of color and that used to be more expensive. Also, they can take more space and print is limited in the number of pages it can offer. Finally, they are much more difficult to lay out than plain black and whit columns of text.

But E readers and Tablets have none of these limitations. They are free of all the rules and regulation that had dictated the behavior of their print brothers. They are free of space , time and cost limitations. They no longer have to be the punctuation points of their text sibling. They can now freely and openly become masters of the information, leaving a simple caption the role of punctuating their reality.

The current batch of e magazines are a boring crop of conference room challenged idea spit out by a committee of politically frighten mid managers. They come out of the mind of those who want to save their jobs rather than create new idea. Where are the great Art Directors of tomorrow? Those that will reinvent the layout and the magazine at the same time. We have the tools, what we need now are the creatives.

Same goes for photographers. It will be those that stop thinking about photography as a punctuation mark, as a one image narrative, as a quarter space or double page , those who reinvent the narrative that will pierce through the frozen grounds of the current creative tundra .

Let’s kill the punctuation mark.

Posted in magazine, Newsweek, E Reader, multimedia, newspaper, finance, photojournalism, web 2.0, news | Print | No Comments »