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Articles from January 2010
This is an interview with Holger Mette, an Australian photographer who's been traveling the world for two years earning his living from a small portfolio of photos he distributes in the microstock market. We discuss travel, photography and microstock, with example photos and links to his microstock portfolios.
[Source:
Microstock Diaries - used with permission. All photos Copyright Holger Mette]
Together with the Guardian, Getty Images-owned iStockphoto is sponsoring Britain iS -- a competition that captures Britain in 2010. Photo categories range from best urban image to "good stock," as in best suited to stock imagery.
SpiderPic, a division of the Israel based company Ginipic, has launched a new service to help image buyers find the cheapest source for microstock images. This is accomplished by simultaneously searching across multiple sites for specific images.
Corbis has notified photographers with rights-managed images on Veer that the company will be moving all that imagery to the Corbis site in 2010 to more "strategically differentiate their two stock photography brands." The rights-managed imagery that has been placed on channel partner sites around the world will continue to be marketed through those sites.
Hosted by the American Society of Picture Professionals and the Picture Archive Council of America on April 15-18 in Boston, participants of the Reinvention Weekend will attend presentations and panels geared to help reinvent, reimagine and reinvigorate the photography business.
November research from Ad Age says supermoms are a dying breed. "Rise of the Real Mom," a new white paper sponsored by Meredith, profiles this key consumer demographic and offers valuable insights to those planning production.
Getty Images has announced sports and music deals that included an extension of its partnership with PGA TOUR and new agreements with Gracenote and Hello Music. Chief executive officer Jonathan Klein announced the digital music deals during a keynote speech at the MIDEM 2010 conference in Cannes, France.
How to create estimates that get the job and build your business.
Photographer, Art Director and Editor Sarah Golonka shares with us her knowledge and tips on succeeding in stock photography.
"We want to make it easy to attribute any stock image to its original author, and facilitate sales," reads the Idée announcement that urges operators of large image collections to add them to the company's image search engine TinEye.
The latest trend to come out of the Corbis creative intelligence team is "One World:" an interconnected global culture.
The New York-based photographer Web site specialist PhotoShelter has released yet another free resource: the photographer guide to social media. The 7-megabyte 55-page PDF is available upon request and delivered via email.
Valentine's Day will see the launch of a boutique stock collection featuring new work and highlights from over 30 years of photography by Doug Menuez.
We have done a bad job. A terrible job. If picking a photograph is all about its price and not its quality than we, the photo industry, have made a terrible job at selling our work.
Every time an editor, whether from an ad agency or a magazine decides to use an image because it is cheaper than the others, that means we have all failed to advocate for the real value of photography. We have failed, all of us, Photographers, agents, photo agencies to make the new generation of image buyers see the real value in our images. Thus the current situation.
In the near future, the vast majority of professional photographers will be unable to earn enough from producing stock images to offset their cost of production.
Illinois-based Commercial Research Image Archives has launched CriaImages.com, which offers more historical and contemporary images at flat rates on a royalty-free basis. The archive was founded by author and historian Jay Robert Nash and thus has a distinctly editorial feel, featuring notable people, things and events throughout history.
There are two ways to approach shooting for the stock photo market. The first is to take images you love and hope that someone will want to pay you for them. The more businesslike approach is to try to determine what customers want, and one thing that is beneficial is that the subject matter in demand has not changed: what customers wanted five, 10 or 20 years ago is still in demand today.
The people behind ImagesBazaar.com say its 800,000+ inventory makes it the world's largest collection of Indian images. Since India is emerging as a leading market for a growing range of products and services, the company says it has seen a surge in demand for images that show Indian faces in local settings.
AudioMicro continues the trend of microstock sellers offering upmarket products with the launch of a Platinum Collection.
The United Kingdom is engaged in hot debate over the long-awaited legislation that promises to usher in a new and improved digital economy. The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has weighed in with objections to extended licensing and orphan-works clauses, which the organization says could have significant detrimental effects on the photo industry.
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.
PicScout and Idee have long been neck-in-neck in offering image-tracking solutions and underlying image recognition technology. The latest announcement from Idee founder Leila Boujnane suggests the two companies may continue competing on another turf: online image attribution.
With all the free information available on the Internet why would or should anyone want to pay for information?
Many consumers believe that writers should give away their work in
order to build a following of customers who will then pay them for some
other product or service they provide. Most would acknowledge that some
effort and expense is required on the part of the creator to produce
good, useful information, but often that is not deemed to be of any
economic value. Photographers tend to supply information on their blogs
as a way of getting customers to hire them for assignment work, for
paid speaking engagements or as a way of selling a book. The other way
to earn revenue is to generate enough traffic to your site that
advertisers will pay to surround your information with ads in hopes
that some or your popularity will rub off on them. Is giving away information the only way?
Fotolia has notified production companies that contribute to its Infinite Collection that in future they will only be paid 40% of sales, instead of the 50% they have been receiving. Independent contributors to the Infinite Collection retain the 50% commission rate.
London-based Image Source is making its entire collection available to users of PicScout ImageExchange. There are currently over 20 companies participating in the beta PicScout offering.
Though some editorial uses are permissible, photographs of many products and locations cannot be used for commercial purposes without a release. Blanket releases for images of such subjects are almost impossible to obtain. It is sometimes possible to get a release for a very specific, clearly defined use, but not for an undefined "stock use." Therefore, if the stock photographer's goal is to license images as stock, he or she should avoid wasting time photographing such subject matter.
Take Stock, the historic image collection founded by photographer Matt Herron, is now available exclusively through Woodstock-based The Image Works. The collection features historic coverage of the civil rights and farm workers movements.
Born in 1928 in New York, Magnum photographer Dennis Stock passed away in Sarasota, Fla., on January 11. He was 81 years old.
"Sales of $1 images continued to generate six-figure incomes for the world's top photographers in 2009," begins the Fotolia press release that highlights the company's three top-selling images for last year. Combined, the three Fotolia top sellers gathered around 10,000 downloads, so the photographers' earnings are nowhere near as impressive as Fotolia claims; however, the images themselves offer an interesting perspective into current buyer needs.
A friend who has been on the periphery of the photo industry for decades now works for a company that manages social media and search engine optimization for a variety of clients, including law firms. She said her office mates disagree on what they are allowed to do with pictures they find on news Web sites. She asked: "Are bloggers allowed to illustrate their blog entries with photos they find on news sites, such as a photo of a sinkhole? What are the rules about using editorial images in a blog post?"
Getty Images will now be the exclusive global distributor of the imagery produced by The Washington Post's team of photojournalists. The move bolsters Getty's editorial image offering.
Getty Images will now be the exclusive global distributor of the imagery produced by The Washington Post's team of photojournalists. The move bolsters Getty's editorial image offering.
California-based Zenofolio has updated is photographer portfolio Web site service with new layout options, no-coding-needed theme design functionality and better search-engine optimization tools. The enhancements are now part of the site's functionality at no additional cost.
U.K. historical specialist Mary Evans Picture Library has launched a new promotional magazine, ME & You. The first issue goes out to buyers in January.
For most of iStockphoto's best-selling photographers, the number of images downloaded per month declined in 2009.
This chart provides information for 198 of the leading contributors to iStockphoto. It shows the total number of downloads each photographer had as of May 1, 2009 and the minimum and maximum number of downloads the photographer had on December 31, 2009. We were unable to report exact figures for the period May through December because iStockphoto changed its reporting policy in June to only supply a greater than number that indicated the downloads were in a certain range. Using this data and interpolating for the first four missing months in the data we were able to make an estimate of the number of downloads each photographer had in 2009.
Masterfile president Steve Pigeon told
Selling Stock that his company was just awarded $600,000 (plus $5,754.34 in attorney's fees and costs) in a copyright infringement suit against a Georgia printing firm. Copyright compliance is a growing revenue source for the Toronto-based company, which sees litigation as an inevitable cost of remaining in the business of intellectual property management and licensing.
Photographs of many products and locations can not be used for any type
of commercial purpose without a release. Blanket releases for images of
these subjects are almost impossible to obtain. It is sometimes
possible to get a release for a very specific, clearly defined use, but
not for an undefined “stock use.” Therefore, if the stock
photographer’s goal is to license rights to the images he or she
produces the photographer may be better advised to avoid wasting time
photographing this subject matter. In some cases such images may be
used for editorial purposes.
Malaysia-based PhotoAsia has announced the addition of 22 image collections, which bring its total inventory to over 4 million images, all available online.
After great success at producing and selling traditional rights-managed and royalty-free imagery for more than 25 years, Ron Chapple started producing microstock in 2006. By 2008, he went looking for new opportunities, and in 2009 -- the year when many other photographers struggled to survive -- he doubled his income compared to the previous year.
From Pantone to JWT Intelligence, experts are predicting trends for 2010. The color of the year is turquoise, and all things aquatic are expected to be in vogue.
Marketing Daily sums up the forecasts.
As 2009 wound to a close, so did several more stock-image companies. Most notable for a couple of firsts they introduced to the industry are royalty-free sellers Zymmetrical and BrightQube, which ceased to exist in December and November, respectively.