We’ve created a system that rewards work that is increasingly unknown to anyone outside the business. We have become connoisseurs of esoterica. And in the process, we’re becoming more about us, and less about changing the world.
Read the rest on Advertising Age.
Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft have confirmed they want to hear your feedback on this decision. It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
What’s the best way to do that? Twitter of course.Visit fixoutlook.org to see how you can help and what the community is saying right now.
This is a guest post by Olivier Laude.
I have been staring at hi-res scans of my 8×10 work on my Apple 30″ inch LCD display for a number of years now and wondering why the same displays have not yet been made to accommodate large display sizes. Thin museum quality LCDs, LEDs or better yet, OLED displays to display our work in larger sizes, 40 x50, 60×50 and bigger….
Anyone who has had the pleasure of watching a well mastered Blu-ray disc on a good quality 1080P HD screen will come off the experience a better man or woman and wonder why this technology is not being put to good use in the world of photography. I am convinced that there is a large market for high end electronic displays where photographers and other artists can show their work in a way that completely bypasses the “Print”. Personally, I have been very frustrated by the process, one fraught with difficulties, work flow hick ups, expense and many other such issues which crop up when faced with the task of producing large prints for gallery or museum display.
Often the end product is nice enough, or close enough to my creative intentions, but the greatest frustration is that the last step in the making of images is left to a printer (not to me), and to one who may or may not care about my real intentions. The limitations of their technology, skills, experience, and increasingly scarce geographical locations often prevent or limit my creative choices, not to mention the cost of a C-41 printer.
I work very hard to produce an image which pleases me, but I often find myself frustrated by that last step…a final step many photographers struggle with: The exact and brilliant reproduction and display of one’s work. Even-though, the print has served us well for well over a 150 years, I believe it is time to explore and demand that a niche market of high end large flat screen displays be developed for the photography market.
My original idea was to use 16:9 ration LCD TVs but the aspect ratio does not fit the average aspect ratio of many cameras(8×10, 4×5. 6×7 etc…). This led me to believe that there would be a market for high end LCD or OLED flat panel displays for fine art photographers, as well as other artists who might wish to display their work in a format other than regular TV panoramic formats. The ability to buy a high end barebones display, that is one without broadcast tuner or other electronic components needed to display moving images, would open a new medium for display and appreciation of photography as a whole.
Many photographers, unlike myself, did not grow up with film and digital cameras and have become very adept at manipulating and producing digital photographs and other works of art. These growing communities do not seek out the traditional print and to date, contents themselves to viewing their work on PC screens and on the internet. A new product catering to their needs, and to mine would be extremely successful and well received by a new, as well as older generation of photographers and visual artists.
The ability to frame this display with conventional frames, as well as sophisticated and functional color, contrast and multiple viewing interface (contrast, luminosity, back lighting, etc..) would render this product a versatile and more easily accepted new format. For example, the photographer might wish to approximate the look and feel of a C-print which could be achieved, as well as many other results.
A photoshop compatible display, one easily calibrated with common and sophisticated ICC profiles would go a long way to express the photographer’s vision, as well as provide him or her with a versatile, cheaper, more user friendly and better adapted product than the traditional C41 print. This display would be a sharper, more detailed version of their digital original.
I am convinced that this generation of photographers, as well as subsequent ones will demand a product better attuned to their digital abilities and aptitudes, not a product which is becoming increasingly scarce, expensive and monolithic. A product found only in major metropolitan areas, but who’s market share is shrinking and becoming more difficult to purchase and review. Most photographers who print for a gallery, home or institutional display do so long distance or through Fed-ex, a process which is rife with expensive reviews, slow and archaic.
There are many types of displays but personally I think the OLEDs are starting to look increasingly like the display to be. Their contrast aspect ratios are extraordinary, as well as their incredible thinness. Samsung’s latest 40″ OLED TV is an astounding piece of technology and produces a brilliantly sharp and amazingly detailed image, one much closer to what I am used to when I stare at my 8×10 commercial drum scans. Another interesting technology which to some degree is still in its infancy are E-readers(electronic paper). These albeit small displays have a very interesting way to mimic the book page and a visually tactile texture which I personally would like to see incorporated into larger color or black and white electronic display technology.
To conclude, here are other potential uses for Electronic Fine Art Display (EFADs, just made that up):
1-Ability to wirelessly control the content of the display. For, an artist or photographer might upload and change a show over a period of time by adding or removing work over a network.
2-The same principle could apply to a collector who might wish to “subscribe” to an artist’s work and receive a photography subscription. New images would be uploaded based on a specific delivery contract with galleries, musems and collectors.
3-Work would be sold and downloaded in any number of electronic formats and uploaded into the display. Some high end TVs allow the user to transfer their family photos to their screen for viewing but a more high end and flexible system would be easily devised to allow the artist or photographer to fine tune the image on a screen or allow for laptop and PC connectivity.
4-Imagine a show of 40x50s or 50x60s and larger EFADs in a darkened room, gallery or museum setting. Personally I cannot imagine a more impactful way to display my personal work.
5-Re-usable. Price wise these displays might cost more up front than a typical print but large, archival quality frames are extremely costly; making a EFAD competitive and attractive.
6-Matt and glossy screens…and even touch screen technology.
7-…..I am purposely leaving this list short and open sourced as I think it would be best if my fellow photographers and artists could add their own ideas and suggestions. An open source submission will make for far more ideas and suggestions, as well as other concepts than I could possibly come up with. Some of you might well be far more technologically inclined than I am and that knowledge might lead this idea to further developments, as well as serve as a way to push this concept on manufacturers and make this dream a possibility somewhere down the line. Have at it…the discourse will create its own weather and further refine this burgeoning concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_display_technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_light-emitting_diode
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/blackandwhite_ebooks/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_ratio
The Atlantic has an excellent story (here) on retooling the newsweeklies to compete in the internet economy.
In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.
Bottom line here is that advertising used to be sold on a “hits” basis, but now that hits are practically worthless (blame the ease at which juvenile humor, celebrities drinking starbucks and vitriol can produce millions of hits) it’s engagement and finding or slashing circulation down to an audience that is passionate about the product you produce. This also means they can start discarding all the junk they put in the magazines that caters to a more general interest crowd. Sounds good to me.
“They are brands that may not be considered cool by the often elitist and self-absorbed standards of New York media,”
via- NYTimes.com(here)
Men’s Health becomes the first magazine and media company to launch a paid iPhone app (here). According to Advertising Age the app contains workout instructions with photos and the ability to track your progress.
I really think this will do well for them and in general repackaging the content that already exists into easy to use, easy to carry with you applications will work well for all magazines. There is so much great service content that is printed once and then heads for the recycling heap, but if it can be packaged together and purchased when you suddenly need some reliable information from a trusted brand I think most people would pay 99 cents or 2 dollars instead of spending 45 minutes googling for results.
I can already hear editors calling meetings, “we need an iphone app show up with your 5 best ideas.”
The first time a previously expensive good or service is made free, we’re drawn to it precisely because of the freeness. The fifth time or tenth time, not so much.
– via Seth’s Blog: Too much free.
I was reading some commentary around the story in the NYTimes (here) about illustrators turning down an offer from google to provide free artwork for their new web browser in exchange for exposure (I also posted it on the sidebar yesterday). The commentary follows the usual lines where the tech side argues the value of exposure (links) and the artists argue that you can’t pay the rent with links. Of course it’s much more complicated than that, so when I ran into this very intelligent comment on Tech Dirt I couldn’t resist posting it here:
by Jerry Leichter
Anyone who sells his work – as an artist, writer, consultant – has to face the tradeoff between getting paid what the market will bear, and accepting little or no monetary compensation in trade for visibility. This isn’t new to the Internet era. People starting out in any such business rarely have a good feel for what their own effort is worth. A few think too much of themselves; most undervalue themselves and will all too readily buy into this kind of deal.The tradeoff is complicated. For one thing, like many tradeoffs in business, it’s about current versus future expense or income. These are always hard, because future expenses/incomes are inherently uncertain, while current expenses/income are certain – and sometimes you just have to pay the rent.
If you look at the actual Times article, the clear impression is that all the artists approached have a significant audience and business already, and certainly the ones who are refusing to let their work be used for free appear to be doing quite well. To stand on the outside and tell them how they should run their businesses – with no knowledge of where they actually stand – is incredibly presumptuous. Some of the artists who are refusing to participate are likely making a mistake. Others who are *agreeing* to participate may well be making a mistake, if the publicity they get ends up garnering only requests for more free work, rather than paying contracts.
Frankly, it seems to me that the biggest mistake here was Google’s. I’m reading between the lines here – I don’t know what Google actually said – but they appear to have been insensitive to how these artists see their businesses. It was only after the fact that they appear to have made it clear that they would be happy with existing work – most artists at the level they were approaching probably assumed they, like most customers, wanted something unique done just for them. Rather than casting this as an honor – a kind of on-the-web art show – they let it look like commerce. Well, if it’s commerce – why shouldn’t the artists expect payment? Perception and setting are essential in determining how people view a request.
More (here).
The bottom line is this, you can’t estimate the value of exposure, especially for things that haven’t been tried before. We all do stuff for free in hopes of generating future income but when a billionaire comes knocking sometimes it feels good to tell them to take a hike. I would argue that for your everyday consumer most browsers work just fine and choosing one comes down to, if it was bundled with the computer you bought and possibly how it looks. Covering a browser with artwork probably adds more value than people think.
Stuart Pilkington, founder of the 50 states project–which I think is such a fantastic idea–is launching a project for 2010 entitled “What Is England?” He’s looking for 46 photographers, each based in one of the counties in England he’s got listed, to take 6 images in 2010 that will represent the photographers style and the county where they live.
“Both of these jobs were high-profile and gave my work great exposure but both clients still paid me.”
Melinda Beck, an illustrator who is based in Brooklyn, wrote in an e-mail message to Google rejecting its offer for exposure instead of cash (right here).
At first glance burn Magazine seemed to be a collective of hard line photojournalists and documentarians but the selection of Alejandro (website (here) entry (here)) who photographs fictional scenarios signals that maybe the people who work in that field (see the judges list below) are ready for some changes. Good for them for pushing the boundaries. The grant is given by the Magnum Foundation but the rules state that purely artistic endeavors are welcome.
The Judges:
Maggie Steber – Photographer
James Nachtwey – Photographer VII
Carol Naggar & Fred Ritchen – Historians-Authors-Analysts
Eugene Richards – Photographer
John Gossage – Curator
Scott Thode – Deputy Picture Editor Fortune Magazine
Gilles Peress – Photographer Magnum
David Griffin – Director of Photography National Geographic Magazine
Martin Parr – Photographer Magnum
“As our visual education and proficiency continues to increase over time, it will be important for newspapers and magazines to captivate us and draw us in by using photographs in even more powerful and creative ways, let’s hope they are up to the challenge.”
via « Horses Think.
John Harrington is filing video reports from the Look3 Festival of the Photography in Charlottesville, Virginia (here).
David Alen Harvey’s online magazine burn has a $10,000 grant that they’re giving out for the first time to one of 11 finalists. They just posted the last photo essay (here) on the magazine site and they’re announcing the winner at the Look3 Festival Of The Photograph this weekend.
Go have a look, there’s some good work on display and it’s amazing to see how David and his raucous group of photographers have built a strong presence for photojournalists and documentary photographers online.
Good luck finalists.
Ben Zlotkin is the founder of Edition One Studios, a company that makes books for photographers (here). I wanted to ask him a few questions about publishing short-run photography books, because I feel like there’s not a lot of good information available on the subject. Also, I was curious if it really is that hard to satisfy a photographers needs when it comes to DIY books.
APE: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your business?
I completed an MFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute a number of years back. I wanted to put my final project into book form as I thought the sequential presentation worked best and the intimate proximity of a book vs. a large print on the wall seemed to articulate what I wanted to say best. I looked at some online options and ended up with a local vendor. In the end, the books were a hit, but very expensive and the printing was poor at best. I shoot black and white medium format film and anyone who prints digitally can tell you that B&W is tougher than color. A year later I was teaching photography off and on and decided I could make a better book, that felt more like those I was buying from established publishers. So I did.
APE: You’ve probably read online that many photographers are not happy with the quality and consistency of the cheaper print on demand companies?
The big complaints in the digital book world come from ‘serious’ photographers. Many of the online options make excellent consumer products, and we often send clients looking for one-off family photo books, or travel books etc. to Blurb, Apple or Lulu. We think all of these companies are perfect for that.
The mistake made by these vendors is that they market to professionals whose demands are greater than the average consumer and in the end more than they can handle.
We think professionals and serious amateur photographers want the following:
Accurate and consistent color- we own our own printers and calibrate hourly. Plus, we’re photographers.
Better built books- stronger bindings, more decoration options such as true foil stamping and dust jackets.
Custom books- no preset formats, page counts and cloth color options.
Control- we need a PDF and that’s it. Most people use InDesign or something similar to get that done. We don’t offer template software, and have learned that people really like that. If they do not have the tools to layout their book, often they know someone who does.
Service – making a book is an expensive, and sometimes confusing process. We answer the phone, we know good editors, and even allow visitors.
APE: How is it possible to maintain high standards for color and printing while keeping the costs low and still make a profit?
Costs aren’t really that low for anyone involved. Our books are more expensive than some in smaller quantities and cheaper than most in larger quantities. We have spent money on a proprietary RIP for our presses and have top end calibration tools – we calibrate 6 or more times per day. More importantly, we are old-school wet lab printers, and my rule is that you cannot play with the presses unless you have worked in a wet lab with both color and silver gelatin prints. Nothing teaches you color better than burning though what little money you have wasting photo paper in the lab. We look at everything that comes off the press. If a job is 10% too magenta, we stop it and contact the client to sort things out. No one else in our industry does this that I know of.
We’re a new company, and marginally profitable with our current levels of efficiency. We think we offer solid pricing and really solid service. Most of the value we add is not ‘digital’ – the foil stamping is done by hand with a 300 degree metal plate, the custom book covers are glued by hand. There is no easy way to make nice books – perhaps this is our advantage. No everyone is as excited as we are about color, glue, and paper cuts
APE: Can you tell me on the printers side what do you do to ensure high quality?
The key thing to know is that all of the digital book makers are using the same basic tools. The printer run down is HP Indigo, Xerox Digital Presses, and Kodak’s Nexpress. All of these are really glorified laser printers with 600 dpi per color channel. What matters is the software you put in front of them, and the materials you put in them.
We use really high quality very smooth uncoated paper, and pretty cool software with lots of color control. As noted above, we look at the prints and are constantly making adjustments on our clients behalf. We make hard proofs – in fact, we offer complimentary proof prints to everyone who asks. When the book is ordered we add of a proof cost and that gets the client a complete printed unbound book for a nominal fee. We print two of them and keep one, because if changes are needed, we can then sit on the phone with the client, look at the proofs at the same time and talk about the image needs. There is no other way to do this.
APE: Can you tell me from the photographers side what do they need to do to ensure the book comes out the way they want?
Most important is to plan their book out and edit until they have a solid project. Then they should ask someone they trust to edit it again. This is the hardest part of making a book. People usually underestimate how long this will take by months, not days.
On the technical side, if you want consistent prints, make consistent files. Your target is 300 dpi, 8 bit, flattened images. Max quality jpegs work fine as do tiffs. There is no point in using 600 dpi file. All that will do is slow you down when processing the data. Once a client has a file with all of the images in the book, they need to be sure that the color profile for each image is the same. If they are from a digital camera, and all sRGB – they can leave them as is. If some are digital, some are scanned, and some are unknown, then convert (not assign) them the Adobe 1998 RGB profile in PhotoShop.
Once a potential client is this far, they should contact us and request some complimentary prints. We’ll take 5-10 images and print them out, then mail them for free.
After the images are prepared and sized as desired, then they should bring them into InDesign, Quark, Aperture or the application of their choice, and start to layout the book. In the end, they’ll make a PDF and send that to use. We’ll send them a helper file for this final and easy step.
APE: It seems like niche photography books can really serve a purpose in the market but can the photographer ever make a profit or is this entirely just a vanity project?
Making a profit is hard, but many of our clients do. I am constantly talking people into cheaper softcover books when they order a more expensive limited edition of hardcover books. The reason is that you inevitably want to give some books away, and this cuts your profits down badly. You also want to offer a product that is at a lower price point for those who cannot afford a $75+ book. If a client is a fine art photographer, then there is nothing better than releasing the book when a gallery show is up. People will buy the book who cannot afford an expensive original print, and people who can afford an original print will buy the book just to have a sampling of the wider body of work. Lastly, we encourage people to make portfolio sets. Perhaps they buy 50 books from us, and print out 25 original prints for an image that is in the book. They should sign and number those prints, then sign and number 25 of the books. Package those sets and sell them at a premium. Perhaps this set sells for $400, and the print cost them $5 , the book $45, and their time to package it al up $15. So they are out of pocket $65-70 for a $400 sale. I see this work everyday.
For the commercial photographers, and galleries, the books are really marketing tools. I’m happy to make a package price with a commercial photographer for a book set where the same contents is bound two ways, perhaps 5 cloth bound hardcover portfolio books and 45 cheaper softcover leave-behinds. The contents is the same, and we only set up for the job once. The savings can be passed on to the client easily.
APE: Now for the real test. If anyone has a book project and they’re willing to test out Edition One email Ben at: info@editiononestudios.com and put APE as the subject of the email. Ben will pick one person out and give them a $300 credit or 25% off. After you’ve printed your book you can report back and tell us all how it went.
I was pretty surprised a couple days ago to see Timothy Greenfield-Sanders starting a new portrait series on the Huffington Post (here). This is an incredibly encouraging sign as I strongly believe that photographers need to get out there and forge a path to the future. A photographer of Timothy’s caliber–contributing photographer for Vanity Fair, collected by major museums, multiple publishing deals and film projects cooking–doesn’t need to be looking for paths to the future, but those are the photographers who can really get people to take notice. I know what he’s doing may not seem extraordinarily radical to you, but these online media companies have been really slow to recognize the value of high quality photography in capturing an audience and bringing in advertising. That will change. I asked Timothy a couple questions.
APE: How did you get started contributing to the Huffington Post?
I first met Arianna Huffington in 1997 when I photographed her with the 20×24 Polaroid camera. She was extraordinarily bright and engaging and we stayed in touch. When she started The Huffington Post, Arianna asked me to blog for it and to recommend a few friends. I did both. Since then, The Huffington Post has grown into one of the most popular and important sources of news and commentary, period.
APE: I might label you an unlikely internet pioneer, because you favor a photographic process that uses ancient cameras and discontinued film, yet here you are at the forefront of the internet revolution producing original online content for a collective reporting site. What are your thoughts on photography and the future online?
I’ve been shooting large format portraits for over 30 years. In 1978, I bought a 1905 Folmer and Schwing 11×14 inch studio camera and for decades I shot black and white Kodak Ektapan film. My 1999 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York consisted of every artist, art dealer, art critic and art collector I had shot to date… all 700 of them. When Kodak discontinued my beloved Ektapan, I moved down to 8×10 and over to color chrome. I now shoot color negative, as chrome can no longer be printed without scanning. And of course, all along I shot 809 polaroid. We all know where that story ends.
But I use computers heavily, and find digital photography terrific in many ways. I also make films, so we have HD cameras and a full Final Cut Pro editing suite in the studio too. It’s just that I love the look and feel of large format. The beautiful old lenses, the shallow depth of field, the wonderful wooden camera itself, even the challenge of limiting yourself to just a few frames. I think they all contribute to my portraiture. And of course, one huge advantage shooting large format has over digital origination is the ability to print very large and very detailed.
I think my photographic style lends the work a certain elasticity that allows for a variety of sizes and contexts. The images are readable as thumbnails all the way up to 58 x 44 inch exhibition prints, regardless of whether the context is a book, magazine, blog, film, or museum show. What’s interesting is that a viewer interacts with different sizes and contexts in completely different ways. The work doesn’t change; the viewer does. But of course, these days, the media is changing too. The web audience is simply huge. Far more people will see my Sandra Bernhard portrait on Huffington than they would have in a magazine. To me, it’s just another avenue. I don’t see why there can’t be beautiful portraits on the web.
APE: I’ve just openly criticized Photo District News (at the prodding of several observant bloggers) for picking an all white jury for their 2009 Photography Annual awards. You’ve just finished a book project and film called the Black List where you feature prominent African Americans and tell their story. Do you think the media industry still has a long way to go in giving African-Americans equal opportunities and coverage?
Observant bloggers are best! I find it disappointing and sad that Photo District News would pick an all white jury for its 2009 Photography Awards. I’ve spend the last 3 years producing and directing “The Black List: Volume 1 and Volume 2” (as well as photographing all of the subjects in the film). 40 remarkable, gifted, unique African-Americans, from Toni Morrison to Colin Powell to Chris Rock to Angela Davis, to name a few (see the project here). Working on this project has really opened my eyes. I remember showing “The Black List: Volume 1” at a prominent film festival last year and after the screening we did a Q & A with the audience, which was about 50/50 black/white. To my amazement, the festival director only acknowledged questions from the white people in the audience. It was as if the African-Americans sitting right in front of him were invisible. There’s been some mumbling about “post-racial America” since the election in November, and maybe that’s the attitude PDN had when picking their jury. But having done The Black List, let me tell you, we’re not there yet.
If you want to see more work from Timothy visit his website (here) and keep an eye on the Huffington Post. His agent, Stockland Martel has a blog (here) where I discovered his new publishing venture.