August 5th, 2007
I was recently contacted by travel e-guide publisher Schmap because they wanted to use one of my photos on my flickr stream for their guide to the city of Calgary. I quickly declined their offer of no pay whatsoever, especially after reading that they were asking for a world-wide, royalty-free perpetual license. That’s mighty generous of you, but no.
It’s always flattering to have someone appreciate my work enough to use it for a publication, but it’s hardly fair for this commercial publication to be making money from my photos.
A quick google search of Schmap later and result number six lead me to this piece from EPUK that nicely sums up my feelings on the issue.
If the first Dotcom bubble was all about selling imaginary businesses to stupid venture capitalists, Dotcom 2.0 seems mostly to comprise ingenious new methods of grabbing free photos from gullible amateurs on the wide-eyed web and re-purposing them to make a corporate mint.
The comments of the article are also worth reading as they contain a rebuttal from the editor of Shmap. In a series of points, he argues that the inclusion of a given photographer’s photo in a Shmap guide is a marketing opportunity. I’m not sure how telling people that I give away my work is a means of monetizing my images, but there you go…
And by the way, I have not linked to the Shmap web site not only because I disagree with their practices, but also because, when I visited their page to see if any of their guides might be useful, Shmap crashed my browser!
July 25th, 2007
One could probably start a daily blog on cases of unlawful uses of photos, but in the case of travel photog Robert Burch, this one has a happy ending for the photographer. His photos were unlawfully used by a US travel agent and when the case went to court, he won a $64k settlement.
This story from PDN states that, “A federal judge recently awarded Burch a $63,866 judgment against a New York City travel agency, finding that the site used four of Burch’s photographs on its Web site without permission.”
The story says, “[Burch] is confident he and his attorney will be able to collect on the payment.”
It’s nice to see one of these infringement cases quickly resolved in favour of the photographer.
May 15th, 2007
A couple of sites have taken up the case of photographer and flickr user Rebekka Guðleifsdóttira who claims to have had photos stolen from her by a London-based print selling company called Only Dreemin.
Read more about Rebekka’s plight here and here. Hopefully Rebekka can come out on top in the legal battle that is bound to ensue from this and that she gets what’s due to her for her photographs.
May 9th, 2007
Sigh. Another doom and gloom article about how amateurs and hobbyists are making life difficult for professional photographers.
The Demise of Professional Photographers from Mail and Guardian online takes a quick look at how photojournalists and stock photographers are seeing declining business due to the rise of the amateur (but somehow manages to do it without mentioning the penny stock agencies and only focusing on flickr).
While it is true that things are a bit more difficult now, the article also points out the following:
These developments may have diminished the value of a professional photographer’s skills. But they couldn’t eliminate the need for professionalism: the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones.
A talented, hardworking and lucky amateur can produce wonderful pictures on the best days. But that will be one picture in a hundred. A professional can produce something that is nearly as good as their best 50 times in a hundred. That’s why they are worth employing.
Some skills are difficult for the amateur to and it’s there that the pros can excel. Whether it’s through technical accomplishment through lighting, logistical savvy, or just general dependability, pro photographers should remain the choice for those customers who want to be sure they get the job done and done well.
April 21st, 2007
The ever-informative Strobist has begun a series of articles on the future of flickr as a business platform for photographers that should prove interesting.
Every week, there seems to be more and more buzz about flickr’s role in giving someone their big break and how image buyers are finding new material there. Add to that the speculation of flickr developing a licensing model for its users’ images and it becomes hard to keep up with the site’s developing importance. All this makes me think I should start putting a bit of effort into my tiny photostream - who knows who might be lurking there.
April 12th, 2007
If you have a NY Times password, this article details some of their plans for the future including the following plans from Gary Shenk, president and incoming chief executive at Corbis:
In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model.
“More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty,” said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. “If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us.”
Here’s another example of the line blurring between professional and amateur. My only hope is that the photographers that end up being a part of these arrangements get a fair deal (and that they are licensing their photos for more than a dollar a pop.
March 29th, 2007
Finally. It took more than a month, but we finally have an Internet connection here at the apartment. No more procrastinating on emails for me!
And that means that I have spent the last little while indulging in some reading of a few of my oft-visited sites. Here’s a roundup of a few things I’ve found:
First, a couple articles from John Harrington has a couple of worthwhile articles to be found at his photo business blog. First of note is this article on the importance of valuing your own work. As photographers, we work hard and invest a lot of time and money to create images. We should be compensated properly for that (and no, 50 cents or a byline is not sufficient compensation).
On a related note, he also has an article on the value of post-production work that details the time and investment made in making those captured images look that much better.
Continuing on the photo business theme, Dan Heller has written an article that is a good starting point for negotiating prices for your photos which focuses on establishing the rights both the photographer and the client has to use the images.
On a non-business-related theme, this page gives some interesting trivia about the resolution of eyes and just how many megapixels would equal if they happened to be made of digital sensors.
And lastly, I’ll throw in a little travel article here to balance out the travel and photography sides of this site. gadling.com has an article about five ways not to get ripped off while travelling. Most of it is common sense stuff, but a lot of people seem to forget some of them anyway.
Regarding the point that you should keep your personal gadgets hidden, I met girl in Thailand who had an interesting solution to this difficulty: she had covered her camera in stickers that had gradually started to wear off. The thing looked like a piece of junk, but it was actually a decent little digital camera. If you can bear to do that to your equipment, that’s one way to keep your gear hidden in plain view.
November 28th, 2006
The Wall Street Journal has this article on companies who have used non-exclusive images and, as a result, wound up with a bit of egg on their face. It points to a few examples of situations in which different companies have used the same stock image for their promotions and, as a result, have diluted their brand identity. It’s an embarrassing prospect for marketing departments and a good reminder on why it’s sometimes a good idea to spend a little bit more on your photos.
November 6th, 2006
Digital photography has done wonderful things for some photographers, however, this article by Tony Sleep discusses how it is doing a lot to drive a lot of photographer’s businesses into the ground.
I suspect this may be a trend that continues and that what may occur is a sort of widening rich-poor gap for quality photography. Larger publishers who value photography will continue to pay good money for quality photography while mid-range and smaller publishers will be ever more drawn to penny stock and free photography. That kind of environment will make it that much more difficult for photographers to run a viable business as the only way to be profitable is to be among the top shooters (a position that is already difficult enough to achieve).
Of course, all my conjectures are just that, conjectures. I confess to being relatively new to this industry and more years of experience may make my foresight that much clearer. In fact, on this issue, I would love to be proven wrong!
June 9th, 2006
More than once a day, I wonder if I am working my way into the right business. As though the travel photography market wasn’t already terribly competitive, the rise of crowdsourcing has made the business that much less profitable for professionals.
This Wired article on crowdsourcing explores the issue of micro stock photography’s role in the diminishing profits of professional stock shooters. This is a central issue right now in the world of stock photography and I have often witnessed heated debates on message boards when the the two sides have met.
Good discussion on the issue can be found at the site of author of the above article (Jeff Howe): crowdsourcing.com. In particular, a good discussion can be found in the comments of the site’s mission statement.
As a professional photographer, I have a bias against the micro-stock sites, but it’s not merely because of the smaller profits for the pro shooters. Just as outsourcing tends to have an exploitative side to it with third-world citizens being paid a pittance for their work, the crowdsourcers, in this case the amateur photographer, gets a similar pittance. Hobbyists are content with $1 sale and the knowledge that their image has been used by someone else. What many of them either don’t know or don’t care about is that their images could fetch much higher prices for similar uses.
The amateurs, however, do not rely on the income generated by their photos. Their day jobs pay the bills. Extra dollars from micro-stock sales are a happy bonus. Too bad there seems to be so many cases where these bonuses are snatched from the hands of the professional photographers whose livelihood depends on traditional sales.
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