Interestingly enough, every year I’m asked to bid on a still photography assignment for a tourism client. Yesterday, I received the bid packet and there was a profound change. They were not asking for a quote for still photography. They were asking for a quote for video – and not just video – but video shot on a RED camera so that they could pull frame grabs from the footage and use those “still images” in their ads. Now, that’s a game changer.
via Journeys of a Hybrid.
At the recently opened 1888 Hotel in Sydney, Australia guests can stay one night for free if they contact the media department to show their social media mettle and follow the hotel on Instagram, of course. Everything about the 1888, named for the year Kodak released its first box camera and roll film, is designed with photo sharing in mind.
via Gizmodo.
But, all the misery stuff, the public doesn’t want all the time. And that’s what I tell World Press Photo – every year they choose a conflict photo as the picture of the year, they are screwing the industry. Every time.
via Getty Images’ Jonathan Klein: “We need new economic models” – British Journal of Photography.
The model: “Here’s a picture, give me $100 and you can use it” will still continue and will still continue to be a big part of the industry. But in three to five years – no way. In three or five years, we’ll be saying: “Here’s our imagery. If you generate revenues on it, around it, relating to it, we want a piece of it.” It’s a bit like the YouTube Content ID model. And we’ve got the technology, and are building that. We, today, do not get the value out of what our pictures do for our customers.
via Getty Images’ Jonathan Klein: “We need new economic models” – British Journal of Photography.
These tech companies are increasingly becoming, culturally, a little more like media companies. They are moving that way. We found that the conversations with these companies have evolved so much over the last few two to three years – and we have to thank Apple for that as well, as they have essentially become a media company. The same goes for Amazon and Netflix. All of that is helping us.
via Getty Images’ Jonathan Klein: “We need new economic models” – British Journal of Photography.
I’ve seen this in every business I’ve ever run. I’ve seen this in every service I ever provided. Now, I’ve given EXTRA things for free in many cases. But you always want a paying relationship with the customer. Or, as Porter Stansberrry has said to me, “your free audience will kill you.” How do they kill you? They always expect good work for free. They set the bar higher and higher. And they feel comfortable dictating what free things they should get from you. I don’t know why they do this. It must be some biological thing. But it happens.
via James Altucher.
If we walk the world with open eyes and an open heart, the telling of such wonderful stories remains possible. The thought of that is enough, really, to take the cameras and put them on my shoulders every day.
via A Special 9/11 Guest Blog from Joe McNally | Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider.
As a long standing ASMP member I highly respect their opinions on the matter (see Beware Facebook’s New Terms of Service), but the alarm is really too late. They should have read the tea leaves (that were pretty well spelled out) in the class action lawsuit settlement noted above. The email alert I received from ASMP highlights how even the savviest of photographers and associations missed the boat long ago.
Read More: JMG-Galleries – Landscape, Nature & Travel Photography.
I generally prefer if the photographers do not know the budget since the estimates are often an indication as to how the photographer likes to work. If I say, “we have $100,000” then all the estimates pretty much come in at $100,000 and I don’t know if perhaps the photographer could have done it for $75,000 and they are just padding it since we seem to have the money.
via Sharing Estimating Insights from Amy Rivera of DDB LA | Notes From A Rep’s Journal.
The only reason that I can think of that other people may not do this notification [on the outcome of a job] is that some overbearing reps want a detailed description of why the job did not go their way. It just happens, and it may be awkward to explain. No one wants to say, “the client hated the work” or “the other bidder was $100 less.” The reasons may be stupid, but it is the business. If the job didn’t go your way reps just have to say, “Well thank you for letting us know and giving us the opportunity to bid. Maybe next time!”
via Sharing Estimating Insights from Amy Rivera of DDB LA | Notes From A Rep’s Journal.
Cristina de Middel used to work for a Spanish newspaper as a photojournalist until early 2011, when she had had enough. “I was disappointed with photojournalism. I’m very passionate about everything I do and when I don’t get the feedback that I expect, I’m disappointed,” she says. “I really believed, when I started being a photojournalist, that I would help change the world by taking these images. Then when I started working for a newspaper, I realised that truth is built by advertisers, political parties and corporations – at least that’s the case in Spain.
Back in the days, I used to go to New York and see everyone I wanted to see with a few phone calls and emails. Now I had to send over 2,000 emails and make hundreds of phone calls and still not manage to connect with all the people I was expecting to see. What happened? The answer is simple. The industry has changed.
Digital photography has inundated the market with photographers and all of them, me included, are bombarding art directors and editors relentlessly.
First of all, the Conscientious Portfolio Competition (CPC) is free to enter. There are no costs involved for you other than the time it takes to decide about and send in your work.
CPC is aimed at emerging photographers. We could probably argue about the term “emerging.” What it means here is that photographers not represented by a gallery will get preferential treatment. But of course, the quality of the work plays the most important role.
If we continue to think of still photography and motion as being two separate entities in the business of visual communications, it will be our demise.
via Journeys of a Hybrid.
I like business and growing things, and I love photography, so the job I had with MAC-On-Campus was the perfect job for me. It goes back to the old adage, If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Once you know that photography is what you love, if there’s something else you can tie that into, you’ll have the same situation. When other people sense that passion, they’ll want to hire you to do the things you want to do and photograph the types of things you want to photograph.
When I got back into photography about 10 years ago, I was shooting musicians and artists, and I put a top-of-the-mountain goal up: I want to shoot a cover for Rolling Stone magazine. I’ve been plugging along for 10 years now and I still haven’t shot the cover of Rolling Stone, but it’s still something I want to do. That being said, I’m fully prepared for a day when I get an email from somebody that says, “Hey Zack, I went to one of your workshops years ago. I just shot my first cover of Rolling Stone and I wanted to thank you.” I feel like I’m going to be a Mr. Holland’s Opus kind of character, but I think I’m okay with that.
I ended up failing out of UGA’s art program within a year. I was not an ar-teest—I wanted to do photography as a job—but everyone looked at me like I was a whore. I wanted to make money with photography while the other students wanted to make art. I didn’t do well with art: I didn’t take pictures of naked girls laying on headstones, or talk about the “juxtaposition of life and death” and the “cold, hard granite of the headstone.” It sucked.
It is jaw-dropping as a photographer to walk out with a wearable camera that’s almost physically and literally attached to your eye. Believe it or not, it’s just like wearing a pair of sunglasses, and it’s a lot less intimidating for subjects. Nobody has objected. Every now and then I’ll hear somebody whisper, ‘Oh, he’s got Google Glass.’ But nobody has stopped me or said ‘don’t do that.’
We live in a culture where we don’t look each other in the eyes in public all that much, and since the camera is near your eye, not a lot of people are seeing it.
via Theater of the Streets, Shot On Google Glass – LightBox.