Business
SEO and Stock Photography Research
How do we compare SEO (that's search engine optimization if you're living in the dark ages) between the industry behemoth Getty (and their ankle-biter brands) with Digital Railroad, PhotoShelter, and, for kicks, our own SEO efforts.
It gets interesting fast.
(Continued after the Jump)
First, let's look at the results from a search for "maryland tobacco farmer":
Notice that Jamd is Getty's consumer media website (About the Image - reported here, 7/11/08). Jamd appears in position #1, #3, and #13.
On that same page, and for the same search, Flickr returns:
Flickr returns images in positions #6, #17, and #20.
This is a remarkable way to leverage the search tool that people are already using. So, how am I doing?
Several years ago, I obtained several URL's for this purpose. One of them is www.Stock-Photography-Research.com. Going there, you can browse though several thousand of my images, but they're not designed for you, the individual, to browse. They're designed in a way to maximize their ability to be returned on the search engines.
Suppose you were working on a travel book on Prague, and were looking for an image of the nightlife there - specifically the Music Park nightclub. A Google Images search would return:
Yes, that would be my image, in position #1.
Of great importance is the contact information that is not only embedded in the metadata of the image, but also added to the bottom of the large version of the image, as seen here:
Of critical importance to any client visibility and marketing service is for online services like PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad to do the same thing. So, how are they doing?
First up, Digital Railroad. Criticised here previously, they're doing well with SEO placement. Maris Berzins, President of Digital Railroad commented "SEO is a key focus area for us. Buyers have told us that they are increasingly using search engines to source photographers and images for licensing. As a result of our efforts and evolving buyer behavior, a growing percentage of traffic to the DRR platform— Member Archives and Marketplace— as well as competitor sites comes from search engines. Here are just a few examples of how DRR is driving buyer traffic to both our member archives and Marketplace." Here's a link showing that over 56,000 images on the DRR system are indexed:
So too, here, is a PhotoShelter 1st place result:
According to Grover Sanschagrin: "Search engine providers have told us that heavily watermarked images provide a 'poor user experience,' and they receive a lower search ranking or are not included in search results at all. They've also told us that larger images receive a higher search ranking.
So, photographers who insist on adding watermarks to their images, and
photographers who are making their images small, and especially
photographers who are doing both, are doing themselves a disservice if their goal is to show up high in search engines."
To that end, you can see how PhotoShelter (above, on the "man fixing his bicycle" search) and Digital Railroad (left) are unobtrusively watermarking their images with information.
DRR's watermark appears with a center- aligned one, while PhotoShelter has the photographer's copyright information, and PhotoShelter ID# in opposite corners.
Here are several #1 results from PhotoShelter:
- eggs on counter (beats Corbis)
- Skateboarder doing wallride (beats Flickr)
- Plane approaching landing strip
- scene from a motel
- man fixing his bicycle
- somewhat crowded beach
- commercial shrimp fishing trawler
- Alghowaizi Tower (returns 9 of the 12 on the 1st page!)
Digital Railroad has respectable results as well - check this link for "beijing Cheering practice" which returns this result, for example:
So, how deep does Google go into them? "well before the end of Q3 our total number of images indexed by Google is expected to well exceed 2.8 million images," said Tom Tinervin Sr. Director of Platform Sales and Support for Digital Railroad, and Sanschagrin reports that "Right at this moment, 41% of all the pages on PhotoShelter's site map are indexed by Google."
Sanschagrin went on to say: "We take search engine optimization very seriously. Over 25% of our traffic on the PhotoShelter Collection originates from search engines, and we monitor the efficacy of our SEO efforts on a daily basis."We've taken several step in order to allow the pages and images for the PhotoShelter Collection to be indexed by automated web spiders. Most importantly, all images on the site can be reached from pages without the use of Javascript or Flash via our photographer and term directories. Many sites that use AJAX to power their sites do not include the information in a manner accessible by search engines.
We also provide summaries of a page in the meta-description header and, when available, include keywords about the image. Our photographer and term index pages include links to RSS and Atom feeds that provide another mechanism for finding images. We provide sitemaps to the major search engines. The sitemaps are updated on an hourly basis to provide pages as quickly as possible to search engines, and by registering our domains with the major search engines we can monitor our site for any problems that may prevent indexing.
In addition, we are working with search engine vendors to prepare other forms of sitemaps that provide more information about our images."Whew, that's a lot of information, but really shows how committed to SEO PhotoShelter is, and DRR's CEO's comments before echo the importance of getting their images to appear in the of Google Images.
So, if you're wondering just what you're shelling out your percentages of each of your sales for, SEO optimization of your images into the Google Images organic search results, and the ongoing efforts of both PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad, are a clear indication that this effort to reach the eyeballs of photo buyers continues.
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
An Important Part of Having a Great Eye is Choosing Subjects
Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of the New Yorker magazine on photographer Pieter Hugo’s “The Hyena Men of Nigeria:”
‘Some people have said to me that Pieter’s subject is so dramatic that it would be hard to take a bad picture,’ says Biondi, ‘but, you know, a photographer chooses his subjects, and that, too, is an important part of having a great eye. Photographers go where their instinct leads them and then try and work out their fascination for the subject through the photographs they take. That’s what Pieter’s doing but in a kind of extreme way.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘He has a vision and he pursues it relentlessly. He has what it takes.’
Read it (here), Via, Subjectify.
One of the more underrated skills of great photographers.
The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
A new book published in the UK and out here in September:
“The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art” (Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, $24.95)
“Willem de Kooning once said of the famed art dealer Leo Castelli: “You could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.”
Read more (here). Via, Gallery Hopper.
Panel on Stock Photography
I moderated a panel on stock photography last Sunday and met some very talented young photo editors and learned a few things too. We had Leslie dela Vega the Photo Editor at TIME Magazine, Whitney Lawson, Photo Editor at Travel+Leisure, Michael Wichita, Photo Editor from AARP Bulletin and Ryan Schick the Photo Editor at Conde Nast Portfolio.com.
Here’s what I discovered:
Travel + Leisure, loves film. All their regular contributors shoot film so if you’d like to shoot stories for T+L you’d better go buy a film camera (or fake it somehow). Whitney was careful to point out several times that the deep rich blacks achieved in film are very important to the pictures they run. Additionally what separates a good travel photo from a brochure photo is the amount of information that’s in the frame. A brochure photo will take great pains to show the view and the bed in a hotel room, the flower on the nightstand and all the little details that are all perfect plus it’s lit like the land of a thousand suns, so you can’t tell what time of day it is. That’s four different pictures in a travel story.
Tha AARP Bulletin is different then the magazine, they’re more focussed on the issues and not as lifestyle or a slick as the magazine. Michael said that he never gets enough stories pitched from photographers and they pay good money, so that should be incentive for photographers to send him a pitch or two. He also said finding pictures of seniors with different ethnicities is nearly impossible.
Portfolio.com seems to be headed in the right direction. They have a photo editor, they’re buying stock and assigning stories. Ryan told us about how a photographer who’s work he enjoyed pitched a story on high end bone fishing and was given a 5 day assignment. Also, he showed a few of the recent stock purchases they had made and all felt fresh compared to your usual business metaphors.
Time magazine is an industry icon and heavy user of stock in the front a back of book sections of the magazine. It was interesting to hear Leslie talk about how photos get approved at the magazine. She will meet with her section designer and go over the line-up to see what stories they want to find photography for then she’ll go get a handful of images for each one from which the designer will mock up 4-5 approaches. They then take that to discuss and pick the final selection with the Editor. Also, I asked her about stories that were difficult to find stock for that they always encounter. Major issues facing youths like drugs, pregnancy and drinking we’re always hard to find pictures of because all the underage people depicted and the releases they would need from parents. In fact she recently used craigslist.org to find kids with party photos for an underage drinking story and found the perfect frame where someone was passed out face down and surrounded by beer bottles.
Everyone said they had purchased photos from Flickr or amateur photographers from time to time but they kept their standard usage rates because it was not an issue of finding something cheap just finding an image the stock sites didn’t have. Most are using micro stock for those tiny throwaway shots (worst design trend ever) in the front of the book except Whitney who had no idea what micro stock was. Also, everyone seemed very excited about Photoshelter’s stock offering and I know the feeling because if you’ve searched the big stock houses enough you become very familiar with the limitations of their collections so a new player who’s actively adding imagery and photographers to the system is a very welcome addition.
UPDIG - Why It Is Important
Well, to put it simply - we do - and essentially all the anagrams that represent photographic organizations are on board with UPDIG - UPDIG is short for Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines.
Before you think you know how to handle your images, stop and think that you might learn a little (but more than likely, a lot) by reading through the information they've put together.
(Continued after the Jump)
Late in the Fall of 2004, David Riecks was tasked by Susan Carr to see about forming a group consensus on digital standards, and the auspicious project was formally started in early 2005 amid a vacuum of information on best practices guidelines for digital imaging. David Riecks, stepped up to created UPDIG's first website, and in the Spring of 2005 Richard Anderson, who is on the national board of ASMP came on-board to organize and write The Guidelines, along with Greg Smith, who is the Business Practices Committee chairman for the NPPA. The consortium continued to grow (see all the organizations that are a part of UPDIG here), as noted on the ASMP website here - "when leaders and representatives of nearly a dozen photographers groups from around the world gathered for a "Digital Summit." They agreed that Guidelines and Best Practices were needed, should be easy to understand, and should offer options for different workflows aimed at different outputs...". APA heralded the effort here "...15 clear and understandable guidelines as well as a best practices document prepared by the the UPDIG working group of photographic international trade organizations...APA is proud to play an active role on the UPDIG working group." Even John Nack of Adobe wrote here "UPDIG describes itself as "A working group of digital imaging professionals and allied trade groups and manufacturers, dedicated to promoting worldwide standards in the commercial application of digital imaging....If that describes your trade, the site is well worth a look."
So, well, what are the 12 guidelines? (Note - there were 15 to start, they were boiled down to 12.) I think you'd be best served to read them directly on the UPDIG site, (here's the executive summary - Quick Guide) and here are the 12 guidelines:
- Color Management
- The best ways to use and embed ICC color profiles (and what they are if you don't know)
- Monitor Calibration
- The importance of hardware calibration and profiling; as well as information on monitor soft-proofing
- Color Spaces
- Understanding the various camera settings for color spaces as well as the color spaces for image editing; offset printing; CMYK conversions; and photo lab prints
- File Formats
- Why should you shoot in your camera's RAW mode; the value of DNG, and the various formats for the web and for printed output
- Naming Files
- Best practices for cross-platform file naming; and avoiding duplicate file names
- Resolution
- How to describe; optimizing for the screen; for inkjet prints; for continuous-tone printing; for offset printing
- Sharpening
- Capture sharpening; process sharpening; sharpening tools; dealing with noise; output sharpening
- Metadata
- IPTC Creator and Copyright; keywords; the importance of metadata
- File Delivery
- Media; methods; file info; ReadMe files
- Guide Prints and Proofs
- Print and proof viewing
- Archiving
- Who; what; where
- Workflow
- Matching to needs; what it should do; choosing the right tools
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
Surviving the Downsizing in Photography
What does this mean, exactly? And more importantly, what should current members of the freelance community do as those that are the talented photographers that are a part of these layoffs enter the freelance world?
(Continued after the Jump)
For staffers, your first thing to do will be to have a website. I know of several current staffers who have their own websites. that means having your own business cards to hand out where appropriate. This means knowing how to send a contract and figure out rates and rights.
Oh, and if you're one of those staffers who used to look at a $200 freelance job as gravy to complement your meat-and-potatoes staff job revenue, and now you're out of a job - those clients you have expecting you at $200 you can no longer afford to work for. This alone should be an argument for why you - as a staffer - shouldn't be doing these jobs at side-job rates, not to mention how doing this affects your freelance brethren's ability to charge a living rate in your community.
What must be done by the freelance community these photographers are joining? I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but you need to get them work. Really. The question is - how?
If your normal rate for a wedding is $3,500, or a press conference coverage is $750, or your family/pet/child portrait sitting rate is $350 and an enlargement is $950, then rather than trying to convince your newfound friend to charge those rates - book the job on their behalf - at those rates. By doing so, your friend will soon realize that that is what they're worth, and will apply that same rate structure to people calling them directly. Everyone, from time to time, gets a call for a period that they are double-booked. Don't forward on the job, and hope your friend does things right - do it right for them by taking the job and then you hiring your colleague to do the assignment, and you passing through the assignment fee to them. What chance to do it right do they have if they've never negotiated an assignment rate, or a rights package, before?
By embracing, and helping these talented people out, not only are you doing a nice thing, but you're also ensuring that your community will remain robust and survivable amidst the constant downward pressure on rates.
Here's a partial list of where they might need some assistance:
Contracts - If a photographer has been a staffer for awhile, it's likely their last agreement to provide photography was done on a handshake. If a photographer has only been on staff for year or so and came straight from school, they too don't understand the importance of a contract - signed by them and the client. Offer to give them a copy (prefably in a Word document so they can edit it) of yours to get themselves started.
Equipment - They likely need help getting their equipment setup. They may have been given their old equipment from their place of work, but in most cases the gear is on it's last legs. Redundant camera bodies, and lenses ranging from ultra-wide - 14-24mm Nikon, or 16-35mm Canon, all the way to 200mm lenses for each, plus two strobes, and a Jackrabbit/Quantum battery pack will be sufficient. In the rare case that they are going to do sports, or major news events, a 300mm with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter is useful, but freelancers headed that direction with a need to sustain themselves are not going to find a lot of success chasing sports.
Software - They may have their own laptop, but are unclear about the importance of backing up their images, and acquiring legal copies of the software they'll need. Don't start them off on the wrong foot by giving them copies of your software. We recommend they get full versions that are registered in their own name of Photoshop, Photo Mechanic, FotoQuote, Microsoft Office 2008, QuickBooks Pro. They should also read: © Infringements - Don't be a Hypocrite.
Dealing With Clients - Send them this link - Lies, Lies, and More Lies , Traitors Among Us?, and this link - Top Ten Lies Told to Naive Photographers, and encourage them to read the posts - the first two are mine. Then, be sure to tell them that when the client says "oh, you're the first photographer I've talked with that has a problem with __________....", where the blank is either "work-for-hire", "wanting to be paid", "charges for post production", or "wanting a contract signed"; they they're being dishonest at best, and more than likely, lying.
Marketing - This one's tricky, because if you're not careful, you'll teach your newfound freelancer to compete for your own work - and will be doing so without the understanding of the true costs of being in their new shoes as a self-employed person, and so may well undervalue themselves (they did just get laid off, remember? Their self-worth wounds likely need a bit of time to heal before they remember that they're worth a lot.) About two weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled Getting Clients - A Few Options, that could be helpful. Most important is to get a website that you can get online fast, and is easy for you to make changes to - Effective SEO - Please Welcome liveBooks, talks about the solution we recommend highly (and yes, they're an advertiser here too). Once they get a website, they can begin their marketing campaign. The notion of having a printed portfolio these days applies maybe to 10% or less of the assignment work out there (much of which is in the advertising field) so the online version of that is the best route to go.
Pricing and Rates - The FIRST thing you should do is send them to the NPPA's pricing calculator. This calculator works for the vast majority of photographic fields, and gets your colleagues thinking about the true costs of being in business - which in turn, will assist them in calculating what they should charge. Reading Good, Fast, and Cheap - Pick Two, that I wrote in May is probably a good place to send them, also Selling Something You Don't Own is a cautionary tale. Cautionary to the person doing the helping is that neither of you say "we'll agree to charge $X for this..." because that could get you in a bit of hot water with the anti-trust folks. Discussing what an assignment could cost is one thing, agreeing what you both would charge is another. The biggest problem with photographers rates is not that they've been artificially inflated to a price that's too high, it's that photographers fail to contemplate the total costs of being in business, and thus price jobs too low.
Longevity - I sat at dinner three nights ago with a colleague who had thought he'd gotten his golden ticket - a staff job at a community newspaper. Just under three months later, he was laid off. Guess what? He wasn't eligible under the rules that applied to him, to even collect unemployment. Everyone is replaceable. No one is safe.
Then there's Where Does All Your Time Go?, that's all about time management and why $100/hr does not multiply by 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and 52 weeks in a year to become a photographer that's paid $208,000 a year, and how $100 an hour isn't enough.
Lastly, I'd suggest they read: The Conundrum of Doing Nothing, that I wrote about how to get things going, and getting a few of the books that are at the right of this page - they are the tools that I used as I was growing my business.
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
TinEye - Oh My!
I wanted very much to try it - it being in beta right now, I just hadn't gotten around to it. Though, just yesterday, on a whim, I clicked the "request an invite" link. A few hours later, I got accepted, and was curious to see the results. Some I expected, others I'm upset about.
(Continued after the Jump)
First, the expected. I looked for the first image that I had on my desktop that had seen the light of day outside of my office. And, as I've done the past two years at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit, I was a speaker. Part of being a speaker means providing a headshot of myself, and that image was on my desktop. So, it was an easy image to choose.
All I had to do was click the "Upload Image" button, select the file, and TinEye immediately processed the image into it's digital fingerprint.
The results were as I expected. Of the over 701 million images (amongst billions and billions of images on the internet), two authorized versions of my headshot appeared - one when I did blogging for Amazon, and one for my recent talk at WPPI in Las Vegas. Both results were fine by me. Whew, I thought.
Then I got upset.
I thought next to my headshot, what other image might I have made that could be in circulation and was sitting on my desktop. The image that came to mind - and the first one I thought of, was an image of a Harrier jump jet (it can be seen here on the second page, lower left thumbnail corner). A search for that image yielded no results, which wasn't what upset me - it was what happened next. The second image I thought of was an image I had made for a defense contractor for a helicopter that was to be very high profile.
I uploaded my image, and TinEye, in under a tenth-of-a-second, returned my image as a part of a montage on a foreign government's website for their military. I was immediately and simultaneously blown away by TinEye's capabilities - applied in my real-world application, and angry because this was an infringement of my work. Grrrrr.
Next, I penned a brief, and friendly e-mail to my client asking them how this might have happened, and providing them with the URL. I am awaiting their response still.
Oh, and the best part? TinEye is free. They've got a gallery of really cool examples they've found here, but this gallery shows just how many derivations of an image can still be found using TinEye, and TinEye is constantly crawling the web - adding the fingerprints of images to their database at a dizzying rate of 3,000,000 images (give or take a few hundred thousand!) a day.
All around impressive! TinEye is your very own private investigator - scouring the internet for the visual pirates of the high seas and giving you the information to take responsive action.
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
Advanced Common Sense - E-Mail Edition
I encourage you to spend an hour of your time watching Merlin Mann give a talk at Google about managing e-mail. (Video for Merlin's "Inbox Zero" talk, 7/25/07). The good folks at Google don't waste a lot of time on numbskulls, and this guy's got an amazing approach to solving your e-mail inbox woes.
By watching the "43 folders" presentation, I spent an hour of my life saving exponentially more down the line by LEARNING about how to manage my e-mail. Inbox Zero is the source.
One citation that Merlin made was about David Allen, and his book - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity he talks about "Advanced Common Sense" - it could not be any more obvious, but the trouble is we don't always do the obvious.
Processing - that is, doing something, isn't about checking your e-mail, it's about taking action on every e-mail, from deleting it, to responding to it. Yet, the next step is to not respond to 200 e-mails, it's processing them, and decide what it means to you - what actions do I have to take as a result of this e-mail?
Five things can you do with the e-mail:
- Delete (or archive)
- Forward/Delegate (give yourself a reminder to make sure the delegated task happened)
- Reply/Respond
- Defer - this can be tricky
- Do - if it's something you can do, do it now.
Now, watch the video.
(Comments, if any, after the Jump)
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
MagCloud Tested
Jonathan Saunders got after it and has a magazine available on MagCloud for anyone that wants to see how the printing looks (here).
The Dangers of Oversold Stories
Assigning photography to oversold stories is a very painful lesson to learn in this industry. All stories are sold to some extent, because no one is sitting around in a pitch meeting carefully outlining all the reasons why something might not work but some bear the onerous distinction of an idea that only looks good on paper. The subjects who are sold as good looking, young, healthy and fit are actually quite flabby and boring. The conceit the whole thing hangs on was more theory than fact. The Shangri-La like location is criss-crossed with power lines and it rains every single day.
Early in my career, I’d blissfully go about making assignments to match stories without even a peep in the editorial meeting, assuming all the while that the editors fully grasped the difficulties that might be encountered and that they had an inkling what the person, place or thing they just assigned looked like.
Wrong.
I quickly discovered after a series of meetings where crappy pictures were delivered to match the crappy story and I was left holding the bag, that it was my job to investigate the realities of what was being pitched. I unfortunately turned a few photographers I liked into persona non grata as I bumbled along handing out steaming piles of shit, expecting gleaming diamonds in return. A few figured it out or lucked out but many like me got run over by the fertilizer truck and had to take a lump or two to realize what was going on.
I quickly developed a method in meetings of questioning the kind of pictures we might get in return if we made that assignment and challenged the editors to confront this reality: great stories aren’t just words, they need great pictures to go along with them otherwise they’re just plain crap.
Orphan Works - FAQ's
Engraved beneath a statue on the north entrance to the National Archives on Pennsylvania Ave, is the phrase "What is Past is Prologue", and that surely applies to Orphan Works legislation. Whatever changes are affected this session will be fodder for the resurected version of the legislation when everything starts anew in the next session, sometime in January or February. That's one thing you can count on when it comes to Orphan Works. It will rear it's ugly head again and again - it's the werewolf of legislation.
To that end, the Illustrator's Partnership has sent out a missive with a great many Q&A's - their version of a "Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) for Orphan Works.
With their permission, I am posting here what they wrote:FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS' PARTNERSHIPWe've had word that the House Judiciary Committee may mark-up the Orphan Works Bill this week. This is the session where Committee Members will propose, accept and reject amendments to H.R. 5889. After markup, the bill could be reported out of the House Committee and go to the floor for a vote.
We've submitted several critical amendments for consideration: These would limit the scope of the bill to affect only true orphaned work. Unless such amendments are adopted, we believe the bill should not be reported out until its impact on small businesses can be determined. Here's our summary of the issues at stake in the House version of this bill:
(Continued after the Jump)
Q What is the Orphan Works Act?A: A proposed amendment to copyright law that would impose a radically new business model on the licensing of copyrighted work.Q: How would it do that?A: It would force all creators to digitize their life's work and hand it over to privately-owned commercial databases or see it exposed to widespread infringement by anyone, for any purpose, however commercial or distasteful.Q: How would it hurt me if I didn't register my work?A: The bill would let infringers rely on for-profit registries to search for your work. If your work is not in the databases, it's a potential "orphan." Q: What about my unpublished work?A: The bill would apply to any work, from professional paintings to family snapshots, home videos, etc., including published and unpublished work and any work ever placed on the internet. Q: How would these databases work?A: No one has yet unveiled a business plan, but we suspect they'd operate like stock houses, promoting themselves as one-stop shopping centers for licensing art. If you've registered your work with them, they'll probably charge you maintenance fees and commissions for clearing your work. If you're a publisher or art director, they'll probably charge you search fees. If you're an infringer, they'll probably charge you a search fee and issue orphan certificates for any unregistered work you'd like to infringe. We assume different registries may have different terms, and any start-up terms will of course be subject to change.Q: How will the bill affect the market for commissioned work? A: It will be a gold mine for opportunists, favoring giant image banks over working artists. Some companies will probably sell access to orphans as royalty-free work -- or they'll harvest orphans and bundle them for sale as clip art. Other companies can harvest orphans, alter them slightly to make "derivative works" and register the derivatives as their own copyrighted product. Freelancers would then be forced to compete against their own lost art - and that of their colleagues - for the new commissions they need to make a living. Q: But the bill's sponsors say the bill is just a small adjustment to copyright law.A: No, it's actually a reversal of copyright law. It presumes that the public is entitled to use your work as a primary right and that it's your legal obligation to make your work available.Q: But isn't the House bill an improvement over the Senate version?A: Only for those who intend to operate commercial databases. These registries will exist to make money. To make money, they'll have to do a lively business in clearing work for infringements. That means making their databases infringer-friendly. Q: But isn't the House bill better because it requires an infringer to file a Notice of Use, documenting their intent to infringe? A: The House bill creates a very low threshold for infringers to meet. They'd only have to file a text description (not the image itself) of the work they want to infringe, plus information about their search and any ownership information they've found. Q: But won't that let artists consult the archive to see if their work has been infringed?A: No, as currently written, the Notice of Use is a dark archive, which means you won't have access to it. If someone infringes your work and has filed a Notice of Use, you wouldn't know about it. Q: Then how would I know if my work is in the Dark Archive?A: You wouldn't, unless a.) you discover you've been infringed; b.) you sue the infringer in federal court; c.) the infringer asserts an Orphan Works defense. Then you can file a request to see if the infringer has filed a Notice of Use to infringe your work. Q: Then what good does it do me for the infringer to file a Notice of Use?A: It's of no probative value to you at all unless you go to court. And if you do, you'd better be sure of winning because otherwise, without the possibility of statutory damages and attorneys' fees, it will be too expensive for you to sue. If the Notice of Use helps anyone, it actually helps the infringer: it lets him prove in court that he followed the prescribed protocol to "legally" infringe your work.Q: Then shouldn't we ask Congress to change the Dark Archive to an open one? A: This would still place an impossible burden on you. Can you imagine routinely slogging through a "lost and found" containing millions of text descriptions of works to see if something sounds like one of the hundreds or thousands of illustrations you may have done? Q: So should the infringement archive be changed to display images rather than text descriptions? A: If so, you'd have a come-and-get-it archive for new infringers to exploit works that have already been identified as orphans by previous infringers.Q: The bill's sponsors say the House version includes specific instructions on the requirements for diligent searches. A: No, read the bill. It's full of ambiguous terms like "reasonable" and "diligent" that can only be decided by courts on a case-by-case basis. That could take a decade of expensive lawsuits and appeals. How many millions of copyrights will be orphaned before we learn how the courts ultimately define these vague terms? Q: Then what can we do to improve this bill?A: We don't believe the bill can be patched up to mitigate its harm to creators. The Orphan Works matter should be solved with carefully defined expansions of fair use to permit reproduction by libraries and archives, or for family photo restoration and duplication. Narrow exceptions like these would also meet the needs of other orphan works usage without violating artists' rights as defined by the 1976 Copyright Act, The Berne Convention and Article 13 of the TRIPs Agreement. These copyright-related international trade treaties are not just a matter of law. They codify longstanding business practices that have passed the test of time.Q: What can we do now to oppose this legislation?A: If you're opposed to the House bill in its current form, contact members of the full House Judiciary Committee. Ask them to adopt our amendments limiting the scope of the bill to affect only true orphaned work. Tomorrow, we'll email you a short basic letter which you may use as a template.--Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators' Partnership
Over 60 organizations are united in opposing this bill in its current form. Illustrators, photographers, fine artists, songwriters, musicians, and countless licensing firms all believe this bill will harm their small businesses.
Don't Let Congress Orphan Your WorkTo use the Orphan Works Opposition Website just go to this link, put in your zip code and follow the instructions. Your letters will be addressed and sent automatically. It takes less than 2 minutes to fight for your copyright.
The Illustrator's Partnership has asked that you please post or forward this message in its entirety to any interested party.
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
The Prix Pictet Award
The short list for the new $100,000 (!) Prix Pictet Award has been announced (here).
The Prix Pictet is a major new global prize in photography that focuses on perhaps the greatest single issue of the twenty-first century: sustainability.
Editorial Boot Camp
I’m giving a talk at the Photoshelter event this Sunday (Shoot The Day) that I’m calling Editorial Boot Camp (press release here). I ‘m calling it that because I’m gonna teach photographers how to kick down the photo editors door, put the CFO in a sleeper hold and throw concussion grenades into the editors office… metaphorically, of course.
If you’re attending I’ll see you there. If not I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.
Intern for Chris Buck
If you want to see how someone perfectly balances the editorial and commercial worlds of photography and you’re majoring in a photo program in the final or next to final year then send Chris a resume and cover letter (chris(at)chrisbuck.com) because this is an incredible opportunity for aspiring photographers and photo editors to get their feet wet in this business.
The rest of the details are in the comments.
There’s No Shortage of Great Photography
There’s so much great photography out there and sure, if the budget and pages are unlimited and you only answer to god then you can go about your merry way picking from the vast variety of photographers but, under a given set of circumstances where you want a specific genre and someone versed in a particular subject matter and then you throw in any number of limitations with budget, pages, location, time frame and then add to the mix the tastes of your editor, creative director, publisher, owner and the reader… well, the group to choose from can become very small. Sometimes there’s only one who fits the bill.
For many photographers it’s about finding that group of photo editors and art buyers who love your work and enjoy working with you and know you’re a perfect match for the assignments they have to make.
A Tool For Finding Out Where A Photographer Really Lives
Telephone Prefix Locater (here).
Update: This one is even better (here).
I’m honestly stunned at how often I have to use this website to figure out where somebody lives.
Outdoor Sports Photographers
UPDATED, Outdoor Sports Photographers List.
Some of these guys have moved on and most can shoot more sports than I’ve listed but all will blow your mind with crazy action or travel photos.
Jackson Hole, WY
Wade McKoy- Skiing
Andrew McGarry- Climbing
Chris Figenshau- Skiing
Greg Von Doersten- Climbing, Skiing
Greg Epstein- Skiing
Jimmy Chin- Climbing
Gabe Rogel- Climbing, Skiing
Jeff Diener- Outdoors
David Stubbs- Outdoors
Jonathan Selkowitz- Outdoors
Cody, WY
Bobby Model- Climbing
Northern, CA
Amy Kumler- Surfing, Travel
Dan Patitucci- Climbing
Bill Stevenson- Skiing
Corey Rich- Climbing
Desre Pickers- Kayak
Christian Pondella- Skiing, Climbing
Jeff Pflueger- Kayak
Chris Burkard- Kayak
Jerry Dodrill- Climbing
San Francisco, CA
Martin Sundberg- Windsurfing
John Dickey- Climbing
Val Atkinson- Fly Fishing
Rod McLean- Outdoors
Southern, CA
Steve Casimiro- Skiing, Adventure
Kevin Zacher- Snowboarding
Embry Rucker- Snowboarding
Danny Zapalac- Snowboarding
Art Brewer- Surfing
Jim Russi- Surfing
Tom Servais- Surfing
Robert Brown- Surfing
David Troyer- Surfing
J. Grant Brittain- Skateboard
Scott Soens- Surfing
Jack English- Surfing
C&J Turner Forte- Travel
Tom Carey- Surfing
Chris Straley- Surfing
Mike O’Meally- Skateboard
Scott Pommier- Skateboard
Jon Humphries- Skateboard
Atiba Jefferson- Skateboard
Salt Lake City, UT
Matthew Turley- Skiing
Scott Markewitz- Skiing
Will Wissman- Skiing
Andrew Burr- Climbing
Lee Cohen- Skiing
Tim Kemple- Climbing
Adam Barker- Skiing
Mike Tittel- Outdoors
Nathan Smith- Climbing
Moab, UT
Whit Richardson- Climbing
Boulder, UT
Ace Kvale- Mountaineering
Portland, OR
Mark Gamba- Outdoor
Ty Milford- South Pole
Didrik Johnck- Expeditions
Jeff Curtes- Snowboarding
Justin Bailie- Climbing
Bend, OR
Ben Moon- Climbing
Brian O’Keefe- Fly Fishing
Seattle, WA
Jock Bradley- Kayak
Aaron Huey- Climbing
David Samuel Robbins Adventure Travel
Steve Macaulay Adventure Travel
Colin Meagher Mtn. Bike
Boulder or Denver, CO
Lucas Gilman- Kayak
Topher Donahue- Climbing
Brooks Freehill- Outdoors
Keith Ladzinski- Climbing
Daniel H. Bailey- Outdoors
Cary Jobe- Outdoor
Jad Davenport- Outdoors
Dunbar Hardy- Kayak
Marc Piscotty- Skiing
Durango, CO
Kennan Harvey- Outdoors
Randy Barnes- Outdoors
Chris Giles- Bike
Aspen, CO
Gregg Adams- Outdoors
Tyler Stableford- Climbing
David Clifford- Climbing
brian bailey- Skiing, Outdoors
Peter McBride- Adventure Travel
Telluride, CO
Ken Redding- Outdoors
Doug Berry- Outdoors
Brett Schreckengost- Outdoors
Vail, CO
Scott Cramer- Outdoors
Chris O’Connell- Skiing
Santa Fe, NM
Michael Clark- Climbing
Jen Judge- Outdoors
Flagstaff, AZ
Geoff Gourley- Rafting
Kyle George- Rafting
Dawn Kish- Rafting
John Burcham- Climbing
Missoula, MT
Noah Clayton- Outdoors
Heath Korvola- Outdoors
Bozeman, MT
Kristoffer Erickson- Mountaineering
Tony Demin- Outdoor
Cameron Lawson- Climbing
Marchesi Photo- Fly Fishing
Lynn Donaldson- Adventure Travel
Coeur D’Alene/Sandpoint, ID
Woods Wheatcroft- Outdoors
Doug Marshall- Skiing
Kirk Mastin- Climbing
Boise, ID
Chris Butler- Outdoors
Glenn Oakley- Outdoors
San Antonio, TX
Holly Wilmeth- Adventure Travel
Minneapolis, MN
Layne Kennedy- Dog Sled
Per Breiehagen- Outdoors
Scott A. Schneider- Mtn. Bike
Newport, RI
Onne Van Der Wal- Sailing
Michael Eudenbach- Sailing
Sandy Nesbitt- Kiteboarding
Ashville, NC
Harrison Shull- Climbing
McNair Evans- Outdoor
Tampa, FL
Chris Brown- Climbing
Atlanta, GA
Andrew Kornylak- Climbing
Portland, ME
Briget Besaw- Environment
Dennis Welsh- Kayak, Outdoors
Nick Lavecchia- Surfing
Burlington, VT
Skye Chalmers- Outdoors
Justin Cash- Outdoors
Hanover, NH
Chris Milliman- Mtn. Bike
Joe Klementovich- Mtn. Bike
Boston, MA
Heather McGrath- Outdoors
New York, NY
Alex di Suvero- Adventure
Samantha Moranville- Mtn. Bike
Michael Turek- Mtn. Bike
Tommy Snapwater- Surfing
Anchorage, AK
Matt Hage- Mountaineering
Hawaii
Erik Aeder- Surfing
Kanoa Zimmerman- Surfing
Sean Davey- Surfing
Brian Bielmann- Surfing
Scott Aichner- Surfing
Vancouver, CAN
John Gibson- Mtn. Bike
Ilja Herb Photography- Skiing
Kevin Arnold- Outdoors
Kari Medig- Skiing
Blake Jorgenson- Skiing, Mtn. Bike
Stephen Wilde- Mtn. Bike
Sterling Lorence- Mtn. Bike
Ian Hylands- Mtn. Bike
Rich Wheater- Climbing
Dano Pendygrasse- Snowboard
Rossland/Nelson, CAN
Steve Ogle- Outdoors
Derek Frankowski- Mtn. Bike
Canmore, CAN
Andrew Querner- Climbing
Calgary, CAN
Mark Gallup- Snowboard
UK
Steve Razzetti- Adventure Travel
Ian Parnell- Climbing
Interlaken, Switzerland
Thomas Ulrich- Expedition, Mountaineering
Bali
Dustin Humphery- Surfing
Queensland, Australia
Tony Harrington- Surfing, Skiing
Ted Grambeau- Surfing
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Melvin Redeker- Mountaineering
Menno Boermans- Mountaineering
Tahiti
Tim McKenna- Surfing
Singapore
John Callahan- Surfing
Stockholm, Sweden
Christian Aslund- Skiing
Vincent Skoglund- Snowboard
Daniel Blom- Snowboard
Göteborg, Sweden
Fredrick Schenholm- Snowboard
Åre, Sweden
Mattias Fredriksson- Skiing
Johan Ståhlberg- Skiing, Mtn. Bike
Hamburg, Germany
Lars Schneider- Outdoors
Munich, Germany
Christian Brecheis- Snowboard
Chamonix, France
Rene Robert- Climbing
Natalie Mayer- Outdoors
Martin Hartley- Expedition
Olivier Renck- Climbing
Linz, Austria
Hermann Erber- Climbing
Hong Kong
Matthieu Paley- Culture
Zaragoza, Spain
Mike Randolph- Outdoors
South Africa
Gary Perkins- Mtn. Bike
New Zealand
Joe Harrison- Skiing
Outdoor Sports Photographers
I love great outdoor sports images and as much time as I’ve spent focussed on photo journalists, portrait, lifestyle and still life photographers I still get giddy as a school girl when someone sends me a big day at Teahupoo or neck deep in Jackson Hole so, I’ve always kept a pretty tight list of outdoor sports photographers who I rely on when I need something killer.
There’s a few people on this list who no longer shoot outdoor sports because the pay is low but I keep them on anyway just in case I need someone with outdoor skills. Speaking of which I listed the sport I got to know them with first but most shoot all the outdoor sports so if you’re looking for a kayak photographer don’t hesitate to ask a ski photographer if they kayak. Most do everything. If I’m missing anyone drop a comment or send me an email and I’ll add them in.
Jackson Hole, WY
Wade McKoy- Skiing
Andrew McGarry- Climbing
Chris Figenshau- Skiing
Greg Von Doersten- Climbing, Skiing
Greg Epstein- Skiing
Jimmy Chin- Climbing
Gabe Rogel- Climbing, Skiing
Jeff Diener- Outdoors
Northern, CA
Amy Kumler- Surfing, Travel
Dan Patitucci- Climbing
Bill Stevenson- Skiing
Corey Rich- Climbing
Desre Pickers- Kayak
Christian Pondella- Skiing, Climbing
Jeff Pjlueger- Kayak
San Francisco, CA
Martin Sundberg- Windsurfing
John Dickey- Climbing
Val Atkinson- Fly Fishing
Southern, CA
Steve Casimiro- Skiing, Adventure
Kevin Zacher- Snowboarding
Embry Rucker- Snowboarding
Danny Zapalac- Snowboarding
Jim Russi- Surfing
Tom Servais- Surfing
Robert Brown- Surfing
David Troyer- Surfing
J. Grant Brittain- Skateboard
Scott Soens- Surfing
Jack English- Surfing
Salt Lake City, UT
Matthew Turley- Skiing
Scott Markewitz- Skiing
Will Wissman- Skiing
Andrew Burr- Climbing
Lee Cohen- Skiing
Moab, UT
Whit Richardson- Climbing
Boulder, UT
Ace Kvale- Mountaineering
Portland, OR
Mark Gamba- Outdoor
Ty Milford- South Pole
Didrik Johnck- Expeditions
Jeff Curtes- Snowboarding
Bend, OR
Ben Moon- Climbing
Brian O’Keefe- Fly Fishing
Seattle, WA
Jock Bradley- Kayak
Aaron Huey- Climbing
David Samuel Robbins Adventure Travel
Boulder or Denver, CO
Lucas Gilman- Kayak
Topher Donahue- Climbing
Brooks Freehill- Outdoors
Keith Ladzinski- Climbing
Daniel H. Bailey- Outdoors
Cary Jobe- Outdoor
Jad Davenport- Outdoors
Dunbar Hardy- Kayak
Durango, CO
Kennan Harvey- Outdoors
Randy Barnes- Outdoors
Chris Giles- Bike
Aspen, CO
Gregg Adams- Outdoors
Tyler Stableford- Climbing
David Clifford- Climbing
brian bailey- Skiing, Outdoors
Telluride, CO
Ken Redding- Outdoors
Doug Berry- Outdoors
Vail, CO
Scott Cramer- Outdoors
Santa Fe, NM
Michael Clark- Climbing
Flagstaff, AZ
Geoff Gourley- Rafting
Kyle George- Rafting
Dawn Kish- Rafting
Missoula, MT
Kristoffer Erickson- Mountaineering
Heath Korvola- Outdoors
Bozeman, MT
Tony Demin- Outdoor
Cameron Lawson- Climbing
Marchesi Photo- Fly Fishing
Sandpoint, ID
Woods Wheatcroft- Outdoors
Boise, ID
Chris Butler- Outdoors
Minneapolis, MN
Layne Kennedy- Dog Sled
Per Breiehagen- Outdoors
Newport, RI
Onne Van Der Wal- Sailing
Michael Eudenbach- Sailing
Ashville, NC
Harrison Shull- Climbing
Tampa, FL
Chris Brown- Climbing
Atlanta, GA
Andrew Kornylak- Climbing
Hawaii
Erik Aeder- Surfing
Kanoa Zimmerman- Surfing
Sean Davey- Surfing
Brian Bielmann- Surfing
Scott Aichner- Surfing
Vancouver, CAN
John Gibson- Mtn. Bike
Ilja Herb Photography- Skiing
Kevin Arnold- Outdoors
Kari Medig- Skiing
Blake Jorgenson- Skiing, Mtn. Bike
Stephen Wilde- Mtn. Bike
Sterling Lorence- Mtn. Bike
Ian Hylands- Mtn. Bike
Rich Wheater- Climbing
Nelson, CAN
Steve Ogle- Outdoors
Canmore, CAN
Andrew Querner- Climbing
Calgary, CAN
Mark Gallup- Snowboard
UK
Steve Razzetti- Adventure Travel
Interlaken, Switzerland
Thomas Ulrich- Expedition, Mountaineering
Bali
Dustin Humphery- Surfing
Queensland, Australia
Tony Harrington- Surfing, Skiing
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Melvin Redeker- Mountaineering
Menno Boermans- Mountaineering
Tahiti
Tim McKenna- Surfing
Stockholm, Sweden
Christian Aslund- Skiing
Vincent Skoglund- Snowboard
Åre, Sweden
Mattias Fredriksson- Skiing
Chamonix, France
Rene Robert- Climbing
Natalie Mayer- Outdoors
Martin Hartley- Expedition
You Suck at PhotoShock - Iranian Edition?
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
Microsoft Pro Photo Summit 2008 - Recap
- PDNPulse - Microsoft Targets Pro Photographers With Summit: Who Is Listening?
- PDNPulse - Is The Amateur The New Professional?
- PDNPulse - Pirates and Money and Bears, oh Microsoft!
Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection - Report - Robert Scoble - The mesmerized audience
(Continued after the Jump)
Yet, Jeff's question was an informed one - as Jeff perceives that a professional is one who's profession is photography, and one's profession is defined by, I'd think, what you do to earn a living. Let's take the question first to Merrian-Webster:Professional - "participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs (a professional golfer) b: having a particular profession as a permanent career (a professional soldier) c: engaged in by persons receiving financial return (professional football)"By that definition, and let's consider that an old-school definition, possibly in need of updating, she might not have yet achieved "professional" status. However, she's among the "new school/new paradigm" photographers that are emerging, so, looking to a possible new-school definition, turning to Wikipedia for a slightly more verbose definition, Wikipedia details Professional, in part:A professional is a person in a profession which requires certain types of skilled work requiring formal training or education...A professional(Kamal Shanmugam) is a worker required to possess a large body of knowledge derived from extensive academic study (usually tertiary), with the training almost always formalized. Professionals are at least to a degree self-regulating, in that they control the training and evaluation processes that admit new persons to the field, and in judging whether the work done by their members is up to standard. This differs from other kinds of work where regulation (if considered necessary) is imposed by the state, or where official quality standards are often lacking. Professions have some historical links to guilds in these regards...Typically a professional provides a service (in exchange for payment or salary), in accordance with established protocols for licensing, ethics, procedures, standards of service and training / certification.Now, that presents problems too, because of the notion that the field of photography could certify those allowed to call themselves professionals like doctors of lawyers. That has always been a complaint of my fellow photographers - that they wished there was some certification process, a union, or some other way to "police" the profession, and to that end, PPA has instituted certifications, but few photojournalists or commercial photographers I know have them, or even know of them. They are used by the many wedding and family/school portrait photographers, but it's a start. Interestingly, New York State is trying to require a certification of Wedding photographers - likely after a legislator or legislator's staff member had a bad experience with one (Lightchasers blog entry here, entire proposed law here). ASMP has a review process for admitting members, and other organizations, like the WHNPA and APA have as a requirement the recommendation of current members.
Surely, other notions put forth question the "PRO" level of the summit - with presentions suggesting that you should give away your work for bloggers to use on the internet for the purposes of getting your name out. I questioned Lou Lesko on this, as he was the one who proposed that idea saying that this model in the analog/old-school days was called "will work for photo credit", and over the years has not turned out to be a viable business model.
This event was surely a "PRO" photography summit, and where there might be questions about the benefits to "professionals" about presenting istockphoto photographers, self-portrait artists like Ms. Aniela (Flickr site, her site) fame coming from Flickr, the notion that you should work for today's version of a digital photo credit, there should be no question that these perspectives and paradigms will continue to have an impact on those that earn their livelihood behind the lens and meet both the Merriam Webster ("participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs") and Wikipedia (a professional provides a service (in exchange for payment or salary), in accordance with established protocols for licensing, ethics, procedures, standards of service and training / certification) definitions of "Professional".) definition.
Jim Pickerell spoke on the subject of Microstock, as noted in the PDN piece, and did his best against Lise Gagne, who talked about how great it was to be among the most prolific istockphoto producers, after she herself was used to paying several hundred dollars per use for images during her time as a designer - a job she got fired from because she was spending so much time making $1 images for microstock. As she kept talking, I kept thinking "I know that that image that you sold for $1 left so much money on the table you'd be retired in Fiji with what you could have earned licensing even a tenth of those images for traditional rates".
I was asked to speak again this year and update attendees on the subject of Orphan Works, and I was asked to present opposite Vic Perlman, General Counsel and Managing Director of ASMP. I thought twice, and then three or four more times, about that idea, but since my proposed presentation topic on the state of search engine optimization in our field, and how things are evolving (I had a great plan to talk about some of MSN's value to photographers) got nixed, I accepted, after trying to talk to two other people about being there instead. Given my serious criticisms of the ASMP position, and my otherwise appreciation for the work they do in so many other areas, I preferred to talk about SEO, but it was not to be. I felt that much of the audience, albiet experts in the field of photography's many facets, likely knew little about the legislative process, so I opted to spend 3-4 minutes of my time giving people a primer on it, and then get into all the problems of the current version of Orphan Works. Both Vic and I agreed that the chance of the final bill getting all the way through and headed to the President's desk for enactment was highly unlikely, we did disagree on the extent to which the bill will look different in it's final form from what it looked like now. Backstage Vic and I discussed other issues on copyright unrelated to this, yet there were a few folks (and I'm guessing from ASMP) that expressed a concern that I might attack ASMP onstage, as if, somehow, I am an unreasonable person. Hmmm, not sure why those that had those concerns felt that way, but that had never been my approach. In fact, with the vast number of problems with the current version of the House bill that I believe are fixable, and my interest in conveying the legisltive process primer, I had my hands full with talking about that. So, if you were among the two or three people reading this that had that concern - I'm sorry that I didn't live down to your expectations. Of note was almost the complete absence of panel discussions this year - the differing perspectives Vic and I presented on the status of Orphan Works could have been augmented with the perspective from the other side - someone from the libraries or museums. Yet, in the end, I felt that people's attention was drawn to this serious issue of Orphan Works, and that has a net positive benefit in the end. If you're interested in the changes that I discussed, and how they would take the form of amendments to the 5/8 version of the bill, send an e-mail to orphanworks-AT-photobusinessnews.com and an autoresponder will give you a link to download the PDF. It's a fairly extensive and exhaustive 30 page document.
One of the things that was presented here were visual stimulation and insights from Frans Lanting, reknowned nature photographer and Melina Mara, from the Washington Post. Against a heavy backdrop of mind-overfowing information on the state of the industry, and peeks into the future, both presentations provided a left brain break to allow the right brain to get in some exercise, and both were appreciated by me.
The audience seemed to be made up of about 20% full-time photographers who rely on getting and keeping paying clients to pay their bills (as differentiated from people who produce products or services to be used by photographers but also are photographers themselves) and a presentation by Skip Cohen, of WPPI on marketing to photographers was engaging and entertaining. I am guessing that the CTO's, company Presidents, and CEO's on hand were not as engaged as I was. I certainly enjoyed what Skip had to say. He said he was condensing into 10 minutes or so a four hour presentation he normally would do on the topic, so that tells me to tell you that if you're somewhere where Skip is doing that four hour presentation, make sure you don't miss it.
Other things that were amazing was the demonstration of the PhotoSynth application, which it was said, could be released as early as this Fall. I will be among the first to get my hands on it - it's an amazing application that would cause me to upgrade my aging PC and just so I can install and use it - for that reason alone. I also concluded that adding a Windows Home Server (currently only available in the US through HP) is on my to-order list when I get back to the office. A $599 or so cost for the ability to access my data back in the office - even in parallel with Apple's Back to My Mac capabilities - is a small price to pay, in my opinion.
Also something that I really enjoyed was the impromtu breakout session (that actually happened during lunch on Thursday) with half of the Expression Media team. They talked about the current version, and listened (and took copious notes) from the feedback that was provided. If you're a Lightroom or Aperture evangelist, don't count Expression out - they have some amazing plans as they move forward.
Also of interest was the presentation by David Reicks, on behalf of the Stock Artists Alliance, on metadata, and how it is being handled by several of the big agencies. I'll write more on this later, but suffice it to say that it was an eye opener on a Thursday afternoon that kept my attention.
Josh Weisberg did an excellent job of shepherding the speakers along (including me, when I ran 3 minutes over), posing good start-off questions of each of the presenters after each presentation, and minimized the "we're running behind" issue that so often arises at conferences like this - that was no small feat.
I was able to have about 80% of the offline conversations during the breaks and reception that I wanted to have. As I was leaving for the airport, Neil Latham, who was the ever-so-patient speaker liason, thanked me and said he looked forward to seeing me at next year's summit, if not before. Me too, Neil. I look forward to the next Summit - it provided an abundance of insights into the future, and learned perspectives on the state of our industry.
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
digg_bgcolor = '#161d23';digg_skin = 'compact';Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.Questions? Please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads. Comments are turned off for this welcome posting. _uacct = "UA-1155986-1"; urchinTracker();
