Category: Blog News

Lucky Oliver shuts down operation:

“We spent the last year looking for the funds to grow LuckyOliver because, without the addition of significant capital, the return on investment for LuckyOliver and its contributors would not be satisfactory. After reviewing the options, the investment team decided that it was in the best interest of all stakeholders to shut the company down.”

John Harrington comments:

“I am not convinced that there will always be a robust microstock industry. How many redundant servers can continue to run with a significant staff to take orders and collect $1 here, and $4 there? I expect that iStockphoto will, in some shadow of it’s former self, remain. Jupiter will likely collapse under it’s own weight – and the fickle demands of shareholders who no longer see this industry as meeting the growth that they want for their own return on investment. Further, the novelty will wear off for many of the amateurs, and the demands for releases and indemnifications of Corporate America by judgement proof individuals, followed by the lawsuits that inevitably will quash this field, will just poison the well.”

Read all about it at the Photo Business Forum (here).

“Writers are sensitive souls–generally intelligent and hardworking but easily bruised. Treat them right, though, and you will be rewarded. Writers shape words into luminous sentences and the sentences into exquisitely crafted paragraphs. They weave the paragraphs together into a near perfect article, essay or review. Then their writing–their baby–is ripped untimely from their computers (well, maybe only a couple of weeks overdue) and turned over to editors. These are idiots, most of them, and brutes, with tin ears, the aesthetic sensitivity of insects, deeply held erroneous beliefs about your topic and a maddening conviction that any article, no matter how eloquent or profound or already cut to the bone, can be improved by losing an additional 100 words.”

“Writers, they say, are whiny, self-indulgent creatures who spend too much time alone. They are egotistical, paranoid and almost always seriously dehydrated. Above all, they are spectacular ingrates. Editors save their asses, and writers do nothing but bitch about it. ‘If anyone saw the original manuscript from …’ (and you can insert the name of your favorite Pulitzer Prize-winning writer here) ‘… that guy wouldn’t get hired to clean the toilets at the Stockholm Public Library. Say, the Pulitzer is the one they give away in Scandinavia, isn’t it? I better remember to change that in a piece we’re running. The stupid writer says it’s the Nobel. What would they do without us?'”

“On the Internet, they don’t have editors. Or they don’t have many. Writers rule, and a thought can go straight from your head onto the Net. That used to sound hellish. Now it sounds like heaven.”

Michael Kinsley at Time Magazine (here).

“Of course people would say ‘you’re not as good as your mother’ and I just thought that was pretty unfair,” Arbus recalls.

“The bottom line is that nobody is as good as my mother,” she says with a laugh that seems half levity and half melancholy.

At the age of 53, she feels she has at last found her place. “This work to me is really mine, finally. I feel like it took me a long time to find my voice and I finally did.”

Amy Arbus, via AFP (here).

“CBS, the home of the most celebrated news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.”

Read about it (here), NYTimes.com.

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY — Reuters’ Adrees Latif for his photograph of a Japanese videographer, sprawled on the pavement, fatally wounded during a demonstration in Myanmar. See it (here), Reuters.

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY — The Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor’s Preston Gannaway for her chronicle of a family coping with a parent’s terminal illness. See it (here), via PDN.

Hilarious lolvantgarde (here) discovered by Rachel over at Shoot the Blog (here).

Sports Illustrated releases 54 years of writing, photography and video in a searchable online database for free (here). I’m actually surprised by this move. Most magazines possessing that kind of archive and audience usually sell a set of DVD’s with the complete digital archive for a huge profit (i.e. National Geographic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone).

I have my suspicions that there were major copyright issues (in offering a complete archive) so instead of trying to clear that hurdle they went online, with everything they have rights to, in an attempt to catch up with ESPN’s online presence.

Either way it’s great for consumers.

In response to consumer complaints (I sent an email to the publicist) Adobe has revised their Terms of Service for their free online photo editing program (here).

“Adobe’s Rights – Adobe has retained only those limited rights that allow us to operate the service and to enable you to do all the things the service offers. If you decide to terminate your Photoshop Express account, Adobe’s rights also will be terminated. We don’t claim ownership of your content and won’t sell your images.
Shared Content – We clearly state the rights you’re granting other users when you choose to publicly share Your Content.”

Via, John Nack (here).

“The question is not really whether the Internet creates the only possible justifiable medium for distributing text to readers. Late capitalism is built on unjustifiable expenses. They’re called luxuries. The question is whether the reader in the Internet Age will regard a print magazine full of reporting that took months to gather, printed on the world’s diminishing supply of paper, as a luxury rather than an indispensable requirement. And whether that will change what gets written about, and how.”

“…the Internet won’t replace magazines, but it might replace their readers.”

Read it at The New York Observer (here). Thanks Steve.

Taco Bell gives you the opportunity to shoot swimsuit photos for SI. Go ahead and see for yourself why it’s so difficult (here).

Via, Bohemian (here).

Deadline for the free promo is 11:59 pm EST today. Thanks for all the entries. I haven’t been editing photos lately and I’m stoked to look at all the images. Should take me a week to get the post up.

Originally noted by Andrew Hetherington (here)–gonna start calling you radar–Fishbowl NY (AKA mediabistro.com) (here) claims the photographs by Nick Waplington in the April issue of Wired are proof positive of the reason why magazines exist. What no 1/8 page photos? BTW, Christopher Anderson, who wrote that article on FREE is the editor of Wired. That’s not a coincidence.

Ok, I’ve said it before so it’s only right that Jackanory (AKA Andrew Hetherington) calls me out (here) on the FREE promotion. Perception is everything, so acting like you’re too busy to submit a couple photos to the free online promo or pretending like you have too many clients so it’s not really worth the effort could oddly be considered a good strategy.

I’ll counter that by saying this is where all your existing clients can see some new work. Along with all the other photographers who are too busy to update their websites. There. It’s a chance to show new work because you’re too busy working to show it yourself. Extra points for camera phone photos of polaroids that will eventually make it into your book if you ever get the time.

Adobe launches a free web based photo editor Photoshop Express (here).
Thanks for the tip Mike (here).

Matt Stone says, “Basically, we just got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.”

Check out the latest, “Britney’s new look” to see death by photography (here).

Via, Boing Boing (here).

“The country’s third-largest advertiser is getting ready to shift fully half of its $3 billion budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years. And as GM goes, so goes the entire automotive industry — the leading advertising category that pumped some $9.42 billion into the ad economy last year.”

“…In the last few years GM has shifted several hundred million dollars from TV and print to digital and one-to-one, and that trend will accelerate…”

“Online is getting to the point where it may be more important than the 30-second TV spot.”

Via, Advertising Age (here).

“Philip enriched all our lives with his courage, his empathy, his passion, his wit and his wisdom; and for many he gave to photojournalism its moral soul.”

-Stuart Franklin

Visit his work at Magnum (here).

Judge in Florida considers and then rejects Chicago judges earlier ruling on photographs of copyrighted material and in the process explains to everyone that photographs of copyrighted objects are simply new authorships presented in a different medium not derivatives of the original so it’s not possible for them to infringe on the original.

Via The Patry Copyright Blog (here).