StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Software Company Adobe To Chip In On Assignment Photography

Today Adobe revealed plans "to launch the Adobe Photographers Directory, a listing of professional photographers accessible directly from within Adobe's creative professional products".  ASMP states "The Adobe Photographers Directory will be searchable by geographic location and by photographic specialty, and it will include portfolio images."

"In addition, Adobe will work with the Advertising Photographers of America (APA) and other associations to ensure the Adobe Photographers Directory is a comprehensive professional photography resource." (Link)

More here and here (ASMP: "Adobe, ASMP Cooperate in Assignment Photographer Directory").

Posted by Andy

Miscellaneous

Some late Easter eggs: Yahoo buys Ludicorp/Flickr, HP intending to buy Snapfish, NPPA's Pictures of the Year 2005 are online and the near Photobloggies 2005 winners are to be announced Mar 30.
Other egss are still unhatched: are virtual photo portals for photo buyers the long-term death for classical/traditional photo portals? How will they affect the business? - More soon.

Posted by Andy

Zefa: People On The Move

The people who recently were fired after Corbis acquired Duesseldorf-based photo agency Zefa have created a job seeking webpage: "Die Agenturprofis" (site almost in german).

Posted by Andy

Yesterday At The CeBIT...

...during the Taiwanese Night at the Bavarian House: Samsung has released the 7 MP Cameraphone SCH-V770 with internal flash, 3 x optical and 5 x digital zoom, focal length of 7.8 - 23.4 mm (possibility to add a telephoto lens and wide conversion lens ) and a shutter speed of 1/2000 - 15 sec.

All this in a 180 gram device - wow.

At last met Dr. H.-Y. Wang and his researcher team (photo above). They´re developing a sophisticated technique allowing to identify faces with pattern recognition procedures for video streaming (photo in the chinese chill-out area by my colleague and renowned photojournalist FHS); great results also in footage and - somehow strange to say - old stock photography (sorry, only a link to a chinese site available).

Had to learn that Ostkreuz, a not completely unknown photo agency based in Berlin, started the Ostkreuz School of Photography a few months ago. Focus on classic photography and photojournalism. About time to start something like this in the digital age, or, as one of their photographers once said, "it´s time to decelerate the speed in today´s life" - shortly before he grabbed his cell phone again =;-)

And finally discovered that JupiterMedia has payed "a total purchase price of approximately $60.4 million" for the acquisition of the Dynamic Graphics Group (Link).

Posted by Andy

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Stuff for the weekend with a cup of hot coffee in the morning or a cold beer in the evening, a recent entry by Kevin Bjorke in Botzilla: grumbling notes on intellectual property rights, photos ending up being just so much tiny-rectangle filler, 15,000 pieces of crap in Sports Illustrated's digital workflow and

So multiple images are good — except for the raw tedium of picking through them. Whether it's flickr or photo.net, the fact is that the steady flow of middling pictures being published on web sites far exceeds the capacity of anyone to actually view it. And then services that should be cool and interesting just become another uninteresting chore, when you need to cycle through 50 or 150 web pages to see one actually complelling snap.
In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the theory is set forth that what makes gold valuable is not inherent in the gold, but that it "collects" value from all the rocks that are not gold, and the vast labor of many people that's been spent looking for, and not finding, actual gold. To a degree, finding golden shots is much the same. It's just frustrating when so much brass is published in place of the Real Deal.

Posted by Andy