After over twenty plus years working in and observing the photo industry, one conclusion is clear: One of the worst enemies of the photo industry is its own members. While the forces of business, technology, and social trends have had some profound adverse effects on photography, nothing has been as eroding as the constant self-deprecating, … Read More →
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau As the world of photography inexorably advances into the grasp of advanced computerized processing – filters, computational imaging, deep learning, A.I, multi-lenses and more- we start to doubt its ability to properly represent reality. In a world dominated by computational enhancements, can we … Read More →
Erosion takes a long time. Memories not so much. There used to be two groups of photographers, the casual, memory grabbers and the pros. The memory grabbers pick up a camera for family occasions or social events in order to compensate for everyone’s poor memory. Unimportant is the image quality as long as the information … Read More →
Earlier this week, Mediapost published an article on the rising demand for original content by brands. Citing recent research, the article states that “estimated budgets for producing content have grown steadily from 12.6% two years ago to 23.3%, today — and are on track to surpass 33% by 2017 — according to new research from … Read More →
What the image sharing culture has revealed is that non-pros are much better at taking pictures than anyone thought. In an analog world, everyone kept for themselves: Pros shooting for large distribution periodicals and amateurs shooting for friends and family.With the advent of Flickr, we started seeing a large volume of non pros with high … Read More →
The world of professional photography has been scratching its head trying to figure out why so many casual photographers are having as much success, if not more, than they are. After all, on one side you have experience, adequate equipment, preparation, knowledge and on the other, well, we don’t really know. No … Read More →
Instagram knows more about photography than Getty Images does. Or Corbis. Or Associated press. Or even Shutterstock. In 3 years years, it has aggregated more information about which photograph works better than the combinations of the best photo editors at any photo agency. It is not just Instagram. Flickr does too, although they might not … Read More →
During this period of the year, like many of us that write about photography, I receive many well wishes from a wide variety of photographers, photo galleries, photo agencies and pretty much anyone involved in the photography business. They all come via email mostly from people I have never communicated with in my life. Under … Read More →
I organized a panel at the recent PACA ( the Digital Media Licensing Association) conference around mobile photography and image licensing. I invited 4 companies representative of what is going on in this space, in an effort to show and explain that the next major disruption in the professional image licensing world will come from your mobile … Read More →
Publications are no longer the place where photography is consumed, social media is. The so called professional market has become an infinitesimal portion of the marketplace. The big Internet companies have understood it and are waging a take no prisoners battle to control it. They want it all. They want to be the place where photographs … Read More →