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Articles from June 2016
A couple weeks ago I wrote an articles asking
“What Is ‘Commercial’ Stock Photography.” I questioned how big the demand is for “candid,” “natural” and “real life” grab shots of what happens in front of the photographer rather than staged shots that look real but are carefully posed with great production values. A reader suggested I contact Jerry Taven who founded Nonstock about a fifteen years ago.
One of the biggest problems with stock photography licensing today is that there is often no clear logic behind why a higher price should be charged for one image and not another. In this article we explore how the industry's marketing strategy might be improved to generate more revenue for creators and distributors, as well as making the image search process more user friendly for customers.
Photographers choose to sell their work as RM for three reasons: (1) They believe that everything they produce should only be licensed for prices higher than those charged for RF, (2) They dream that one, or a few, of their images will eventually be licensed for an extremely broad, major use. Customer who make such uses are willing to pay multi-thousand-dollar prices for exclusive rights to such images, and (3) Such high value sales can only happen if images are always licensed based on use. There are several fallacies to these arguments.
Getty Images has taken action against a serious copyright infringer who was discovered to have improperly accessed, downloaded and distributed Getty Images content through social media.
Skilled digital artists don’t need more photos.
Everything needed to recreate many of the world’s most famous masterpieces already exists. Adobe challenged four digital artists to recreate four lost, stolen or destroyed artistic masterpieces using only Adobe Stock. If you’re a photographer, and not a Photoshop expert, you need to take a few minutes to watch the four time-lapse videos that show how these digital artists worked. See
Make a Masterpiece
robertharding has unveiled an innovative new portal for photography contributors to upload work to their site.
Alamy has been chosen as a distribution partner for photo content from international news agency Reuters. The deal will give all of Alamy’s customers in the UK, US, Canada and Ireland access to millions of images that span over 20 years of incredible news photography.
Adobe has released a host of new features and performance enhancements for its Creative Cloud users. Of greatest interest to stock photographers is the addition of an all-new
Premium Collection of over 100,000 high quality stock images. Images will be available for single download purchase and priced between $100 and $500. In addition, there are other key enhancements to Adobe Stock that provide a deeper integration with Creative Cloud apps.
Editor's Note: I recently asked Chris Ryan of
CAIA Image to explain how their company came into existence as a stock photo production company, and how it operates. He sent me the following and said, "we are always looking for new contributing artists whose work we think is truly outstanding."
ZUMA Press, has announced that it is now offering images from top wire service Reuters through its news feed. ZUMA proudly becomes a distributor of Reuters images in the United States and Latin America as of today.
Have we lost sight of what commercial stock photography is? Have we become so obsessed with “real life” and “natural” the we think that anything that is arranged or posed is bad? Does an image have to shock to be good stock?
Image Brief has made some changes in its terms and conditions. One of the major changes is that they are introducing Social Media Pricing. Photographer may op-out of social media pricing for their RF images, but if they don’t act within 30 days they will automatically be opted in.
Munich-based
StockFood GmbH is now part of Hubert Burda Media´s network. StockFood is one of Germany’s most respected photo agencies. As market leader, it carries works by more than 1,000 food photographers from around the world. StockFood will retain its current workforce and its independence as a company. Hubert Burda Media is one of Germany´s largest media companies and market leader in food media.
Does licensing images as RM make sense anymore? If you’re licensing your images as RM the following are a few things to think about from both the customer and the image creator points of view. If you really want to license your work you must consider why fewer and fewer customers are buying RM images.
National Geographic Creative is looking for a new Senior Photo Editor. Based in Washington, DC this person will review submissions from National Geographic Creative talent, assess which assets would be of commercial value and make determinations as to how they can best be directed for monetization.
Visual China Group has provided a
list of the third party image collections it represents. The combined totals of RM and RF images in these collections is over 10.5 million images. It has been believed that VCG represents all the images in the Getty Images collection, but that appears not to be the case.
On April 22, 2016 Google and Microsoft
announced officially that they had buried the hatchet. Reflecting a changing relationship, the two sides drop complaints to regulators around the globe. Why should stock photographers care?
At the recent CEPIC conference one attendee asked, “Why do customers continue to buy RF images? Don’t they already have enough? If they get unlimited rights to everything they own, why don’t they just use the images they have already purchased and never need to buy another image again?”
Getty Images has launched the
Getty Images Virtual Reality Group, a new business dedicated to the creation and global distribution of virtual reality (VR) content.
Pond5, the largest provider of royalty-free digital video assets, announces the
Pond5Million Sweepstakes celebrating the company’s milestone of 5 million videos uploaded to the platform and its growing community of more than 40,000 artists.
According to
Getty Images CEO, Dawn Airey, “Over 97 per cent of visitors come to our websites to look at – not purchase – amazing imagery.”
ACSIL has announced the panelists who will be speaking at its ACSIL FOOTAGE EXPO 2016 in New York next week. The event is being held at the historic Prince George Ballroom at 15 East 27th Street, New York City on June 9, 2016. This one-day event is a chance to meet with footage distributors from both Europe and the U.S. and to hear discussions about the latest trends in the stock frootage industry.
Graphics Detective (GD) in Belgium has developed a strategy for chasing online infringements that photographers may want to check out. There is no cost to the photographer unless there is a settlement. In the event of a settlement Graphics Detective pays the photographer 50% of whatever it collects.
Shutterstock, Inc. has made its visual search features,
first introduced for desktop use in March available for mobile use. Reverse Image Search for mobile invites users to capture the world around them on their mobile phones, and then upload them via the
Shutterstock app to search Shutterstock’s collection of over 80 million images for similar content and style.