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 Read More →

It is not because you know nothing about technology, and for some reason sound proud of it, that you should let your business be run by geeks. As much as they can be nice and helpful, geeks only know how to communicate with two entities: computers and other geeks. You are just an annoying, albeit Read More →

Filing in the blanks. Stock photographers fill in the empty spots of an agencies collection. I really want to know, who gets up one day and decides to become a professional stock photographer ? “my job”, I would assume they are thinking “will be to shoot for an archive”. Hopefully for them, they will be Read More →

It seems that these days, the main difference between a pro and and talented photographer is the quality of the keywording. Having no experience, and certainly no coaching from an agency, the amateur can find some relief and help in microstock sites. But if you look at the photo sharing sites and their tagging, you Read More →

There is something fascinating, even quite mesmerizing about this site, Flickervision. It  displays, using Google Map, every new image added to Flickr and where it was uploaded from. While I do not see any immediate  professional application for it, it could be an interesting marketing tool for an editorial photo agency looking to highlight the Read More →

I don’t understand. When images first started to appear on the internet way back in the 1990’s, photographers and agencies were up in arms about how web browser had to cache images in order to display them. It meant, and still does, that a copy of the images is downloaded into a computer, thus making Read More →

One of the best kept secret of this industry is how agencies work in foreign markets. In the prints days, an agency would work with a sub agent in a specific country. Photographers would send process or unprocessed film and the agency would take it from there, paying for processing, editing, captioning and duping. The Read More →

Wikipedia : “Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. It Read More →

Photography used to be about creating that one image that would sell over and over again. Film, processing, archiving, duping was expensive enough that editors would harshly cut through a shoot to find the quintessential image. As we all know, with the advent of digital, both photographers and agencies have reduced their editing efforts in Read More →

I hear a lot of talk about agency size. Not about how many employees they have, or how many square feet they occupy, or even the size of their profit but rather how many images they have in their database. Agencies, these days, are caught in a numbers race to see who has the most Read More →