What is new is not always good. While everyone is trying to figure out where the world of licensed photography is going to, others are taking advantage of the void by figuring out parasitical way to profit from it. We already do know that Google has figured out how to make money, and huge sums … Read More →
The surf wizard. the Photo bot. Give a keyword to a bot, it comes back with the image. Better, enter a concept, or a description. it will then surf the whole wide web and return with an image. Whether from an amateur or pro, it won’t matter. Because the image matters. Like information, the image … Read More →
For those who still think that Google Images is a great tool to find images and that it is somewhat the savior photography, I suggest they perform a simple search for “Michelle Obama“, the first lady of the United States, and apply a “face” filter. This is what you get on the first page: regardless … Read More →
While everyone is searching for what commercial stock might become in the future, the Chinese might have one solution and it is quite revolutionary. Researchers from TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University along with a Singapore based researcher, have put together Photosketcher, previously called Sketch2Photo. The principle is quite simple : you … Read More →
20 minutes to better understand what my earlier post was about. Chimamanda Adichietalks about literature but photography is as much a guilty member of this . We should no longer be the instruments of intellectual colonization. Next time you embark on a photo shoot, think of where your story will fit in the perception of … Read More →
It is amusing to see that the photography world, especially those who persist in shooting for commercial stock, have yet to use the tools around them. Up the now, the only intelligence gathering tool that has been used ad-nauseum, has been the mighty Excel sheet with pages of past sales. Does a past criminal has … Read More →
Google just released a white paper on image pattern recognition, yesterday, in Miami. Not really a new concept and already developped by a few companies, like Imense, in the UK, this however is a sign that Google is going beyond text tagging to retrieve images. In brief, this technology uses the “knowledge” of Picasa, Google … Read More →
Can Photography exist outside of its current boundaries ? Is it possible for photographers to create and to sustain on a market that they create and manage directly. Lets step back for a bit. Photography has always been accessed through gatekeepers, or otherwise called magazines. It has evolved through other forms of publications but the … Read More →
It’s all in the way you search. Stock photo agencies, now having reached a point where they are all pretty much offering the same content for the same prices, are desperately trying to make themselves relevant with different search engines. After all, Google’s success is made on search and not content, so why not stock … Read More →
Google is thinking about changing its Image search algorithm. Currently it has a convoluted way to return results. As you probably already know, its a basic “text” search which looks at the file name, “alt” comments and words around the image to declare an image a valid candidate to a search. Meaning that if you … Read More →