StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Corbis Introduces "Creativity 2.0" Blog

Written under the guidance of Corbis CEO Steve Davis, other contributors of the blog are members of Corbis senior management, like Ross Sutherland (Chief Creative Officer), Mark Sherman (SVP for Assignment and Emerging Businesses), Curtis Bowden (Global Rights Services), Dave Bradley (Global Marketing) and Gary Shenk (President). The blog runs under the Corbis domain http://weblogs.corbis.com/creativity2dot0com/ and is called "Creativity 2.0".

In his first blog post Steve Davis explains "While I am the CEO of Corbis, this is not the Corbis blog, and I will rarely discuss our business, strategy, customers or artists".

Related:

• Sport, Creative, Entertainment: Getty Images Introduces Blogs (Jan. 08, 2007)
  (Getty added the blog section "News" recently)

Gawker Media´s Consumerist Steals Again Photos, Now From Getty Images

This time not from Flickr, like they did ten days ago and publicly admitted the theft through Consumerist´s editor Ben Popken.

Instead they steal now a watermark protected image from Getty Images for a story on CompUSA, written again by mastermind Ben Popken. Thanks John for the hint, but I somehow don´t buy that "Getty opts not to pursue the infringement, because it's a free ad on a really popular site whereby their name appears prominently".

Related:

• Gawker Media: Consumerist´s Editor Ben Popken Admits Publicly to Steal Photos From Flickr´s Photographers (Feb. 16, 2007)

Gawker Media: Consumerist´s Editor Ben Popken Admits Publicly to Steal Photos From Flickr´s Photographers

Nick Denton´s Gawker Media blog network is generating a lot of traffic and money with the Consumerist blog which started in December 2005 and runs under the motto: "Capitalism is broken. We'll help you fix it".

Down to earth, Nick Denton said it´s "a shopping site". Consumerist´s editor Ben Popken explains in his brilliant post "Look At Our Flickr Faves" how this works in reality: "People are always complimenting us on our photos. The quality of the photo work shown on The Consumerist mainly stems from our preternatural ability to steal images from Flickr. Over the past few months, we´ve amassed a sizable library of favorites".

Popken then babbles that "transformative use means fair use" of images.

Magnum Photos Unveils The Magnum Blog

 

Magnum Photos today announced the agency´s new blog:

 

Alamy ... Blogs?

I was feeling a little sheepish all day yesterday as I stumbled upon their blog before the official release and announced it in the AlamyPro Yahoo group while also leaving a comment on the blog (first one, yay, though it was deleted when the blog went ‘live’). I quickly received a phone call from Alamy who were wondering how I had found out about it given that it was unreleased and unannounced. “I just followed the link on your web site”, I said. Ooops.

Photographer John Joannides on his blog Making Images. The AlamyPro group (open only to contributors) on Yahoo is different from the meanwhile starving original Alamy Contributor group, also on Yahoo: "AlamyPro forum is almost twice as active as Stockphoto.net & micropayments COMBINED!" (Jeff Greenberg here earlier).

New Stock Photo News Search Engine Online

Paul Melcher is introducing his new Stock Photo News Search Engine (Beta) which allows the search over qualified and at first sight hand-selected sources reporting about the small stock photo industry, similar to the concept of the Yahoo Directory.

United Superheroes: Black Star Rising Blogs With Jim Pickerell, Miracles Do Happen

Officially unveiled yesterday, Black Star is blogging.

Will it work this proposed way?

Sport, Creative, Entertainment: Getty Images Introduces Dedicated Blogs

I´m truly very late to mention this, since it happened already partly in June last year. Ever since Getty Images has introduced a couple of new company blogs dedicated to:

 

• Entertainment (online since December 28, 2006)
• Creative (online since October 2006)
• Sport (online since June 2006)

Gossip Gangsta Blogger Perez Hilton Vs. Celebrity Photo Agency X17: IP Attorney Notes "Impossible To Tell Who Would Prevail"

The LA Times (Robin Abcarian/Jessica Garrison) is out with a long two-page report on "Perez Hilton takes their best shots: The gossip blogger's use of an agency's paparazzi photos puts the legal spotlight on copyright infringement".

For people in the stock photo industry, the article starts with the surprising sentence: "It's hard to know whom to sympathize with in this fight".

 

Sigmund Freud, Alan Meckler, David Walker

David Walker: You brought up your ego, so here we go: Your blog is confrontational at times, and gives the impression that you take satisfaction in setting old scores and saying "I told you so." Is that a fair assessment?
Alan Meckler: Absolutely.
David Walker: Why? Do you feel that you have anything to prove?
Alan Meckler: Oh, I think it´s probably from growing up in a family where I got the short end of the stick ... My sister was always favored. There´s a lot of Freudian stuff going on here, probably. I´m sure that´s part of my striving to achive - I never could satisfy my father ... I didn´t make any money. I always had great ideas, but my problem was I went into too many fields. I t took me 23 years to understand focus.

[PDN´s David Walker interviews Alan Meckler in the Oct. print issue, p. 24]

American Photo´s "State of the Art" Blog Hits The Street, Getty Images To Acquire Creative Photographers Inc.?

PDN might possibly introduce blogs one day for the "Bezieherkommunikation" (the dateless and immortal expression of VISUELL´s publisher Dieter Brinzer about future developments of his magazine, loosely translated "communication with subscribers") in the not-so-distant future, but American Photo did it already on August 15th.

The immodest name of the new group blog is simply State of the Art. So far thirteen blog posts, but not all entries indicate the name of the appropriate author (contributors are David Schonauer, Jay DeFoore, Russell Hart, Jack Crager and Miki Johnson, the editors of American Photo magazine) properly.

VISUELL Releases New Media Data

In an opinion poll released today (don´t click unless you´re talking Kraut), VISUELL, the "leading magazine for the picture business", unveiled some interesting new media data.

The 2005 media data booklet of VISUELL said that at that time 130 (1/3/0) users were hitting the website daily and that around 750 readers were subscribing the weekly newsletter.

The Major Battle Arrives: Famous Celebrity Photographer Michael Grecco Sues Gawker Media

This had to happen somehow sooner or later... .

Back in summer 2004, after Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. wrote about "Fair Use for photos on the web and in blogs: a modest proposal to avoid a major battle", I had a general discussion with Jason on this topic, together with Bahar Gidwani of Index Stock ("Blogs, Photo and Copyright: "Hey, I drove that Porsche Boxster for two days, but frankly, I didn´t want to use it, I just wanted to make advertisement for Porsche!"").

Jason noted at that time here in this blog:

I think we are one of the responsible parties out there because we are researching the issue, talking to the people involved and making sure they are comfortable and even reaching out to people discussing the issue like you!

Nick Denton (founder and proprietor of Gawker Media, the company behind gawker.com and wonkette.com) is not Jason Calacanis/Weblogs, Inc. The famous celebrity photographer Michael Grecco today filed suit against Gawker Media alleging the company that one of its blogs, defamer.com, had been violating the copyright of a photo of Michael Grecco, originally published in Time Magazine (details here).

Either Perfomance Problems Or Completely Offline: Is It Typepad Or GRIPEpad?

The trouble with Typepad started back in autumn this year, when casually but recurring more and more “server downtimes” occured, the whole application went out of order for hours (together with a downright awful page speed when online again) and even stored images disappeared. This perfomance problem was getting to be a serious nuisance.

Now the service seems to fail more or less regularly and went offline yesterday for about 18 hours. Results:

• Posts made in the last six or seven days vanished

• Subscribers to the FeedBlitz service received yesterday notification emails with strange content ("403 Forbidden")

Stock Photos With A Message: How To Showcase Yourself Today As A Professional Photographer

Let´s go back to the roots, to the producers of the goods the stock photo industry is living from, let´s forget for a moment the business blabla of Who buys Who and Our technological capabilities exceed those of your company by far and let´s observe how professional photographers today build their very own business websites with blogs and the help of technological providers like (alphabetically) Digital Railroad, PhotoShelter, topixx, and other systems.

Getty Images Starts Blogging

This is Web 3.0 and Blogging 3.5 all in one place.

Deb Trevino and Jonathan Klein of Getty Images are entering the blogosphere with a very sophisticated blog and I´m proud to be a contributor:

Spam Blogs In The Small Stock Photo Industry: A Weird Phenomenon

Although we probably all feel that we´re all pretty much important individuals, this is not reflected by the overall size of the stock photo industry, which is in terms of money -- admit it -- very small, if compared to other industries.

One might add that in Central Europe a mid-sized cheese producing creamery company generates just the same annual revenues as industry leader Getty Images.

Remember that years ago Jim Pickerell of Pickphoto wrote that North Americans are spending eight until ten times more money for toilet paper than for stock imagery (quoted from memory).

Finally, a lot of investors would still be satisfied and happy people today if they had sunk their money not into some special stock imagery companies in the past 15 years, but instead in the toilet paper industry -- ok, that´s another story.

With this in mind, I´m astonished to notice that more and more spam blogs stealing content from other stock photo industry related websites are appearing. Apparently, there must be lots of money in "stock photo industry spam blogging".

[© Cartoon JD Frazer]

Wallstreet Journal On PicScout, Digimarc And Getty Images Possibly Offering Editorial Subscriptions To Blogs

Today the WSJ/Vauhini Vara in the article "Photo Agencies Scour the Web For Copyright Violations":

PicScout said it charges corporate clients like Getty and Jacksonville, Fla.-based SuperStock Inc. a base fee plus a percentage of the revenue they regain when they bill those who are using the images. PicScout declined to reveal further details of its corporate fees. It also offers a subscription service for individual photographers, starting at $14.95 a month to monitor 500 images.

Digimarc Corp. of Beaverton, Ore., plants a "digital watermark" on images for E. L. Woody, a celebrity photographer in Hollywood, Calif., as well as for Corbis. Photos stamped with the watermark look normal unless they are viewed using software that can be downloaded for free from Digimarc's Web site. Like PicScout, Digimarc uses an automated process to scour the Web for its watermarked photos. Digimarc sends regular reports to clients detailing where it has found their images. The company declined to say how much it charges for its services. [...]

In the first four months of this year, Corbis recovered nearly $1 million by filing lawsuits or sending letters demanding payment, but made "much more" by getting offenders to voluntarily become customers, Mr. Weiskopf said. (He declined to be more specific.) [...]

Getty, for its part, has not filed a lawsuit against a photo thief in at least four years. [...] Sometimes Getty sends warning letters to sites demanding that photos be removed. [...]

Ms. Trevino [spokeswoman Getty Images] said that the company typically does not offer editorial subscriptions to blogs, but that it is reevaluating that policy and might do so in the future. "On the one hand, you can't discount blogs. It's how people like to get information," she said. "On the other hand, are they all legitimate news-gathering organizations? No."

After Medicalpicture in 2003, Index Stock Starts Blogging

Shortly after Adobe started to blog, Index Stock has launched a new corporate blog called Index Stock Imagery.

More here.

The first company company in the picture business with a corporate blog in 2003 had been, as far as I know, Medicalpicture from Cologne. Although the company has an english website here, the blog is still in german. These germans!

Adobe Starts Blogging: "It's Not Adobe's Plan To Shut Down Dissenting Opinions"

Adobe, the new player in the stock photo industry, officially started blogging on August 15, 2005:

"Indeed, this is just the beginning of blogs.adobe.com, and it is therefore not surprising that we have only a few blogs with about as many entries. But, I personally favour this approach rather than keeping blogs.adobe.com under wraps and attempting to prime it with content.
I’ve been working towards the launch of blogs.adobe.com for some time, along with a diverse virtual team, and at least for the very near term I will continue to have a role in the care and feeding of the site. Over the coming weeks I fully expect to discover issues and areas for improvement." (Gavin McKenzie)

Currently Adobe is listing nine blogs, among them the Living Photoshop blog by Scott Byer, co-architect of Photoshop (along with Russell Williams) and Senior Lead:

"Living Photoshop is a purposefully vague title; it lets me fold many different Photoshop related subjects underneath it. It many ways I live Photoshop pretty much every day, and have been doing so for a very long time now. I'm also interested in the ways others live Photoshop every day, because it's for those people I work so hard at helping to create this beast." (And so it begins...)

John Nack, product manager for Adobe Photoshop ("What's my plan?  I'll blog as often as seems useful on things relating to Photoshop, imaging, and the Suite."), in "Adobe Photographers Directory now in Bridge":

"With all the action surrounding the launch of Creative Suite 2, it was easy to overlook what I think is a very cool new service: the Adobe Photographers Directory.  The Directory is designed to put clients in touch with the right photographer for a task (say, fine art in Chicago).

I mention it now because the new Adobe Stock Photos 1.0.3 update has just been released (check "Updates" from the Help menu in Photoshop or Bridge), and it adds a link to the Directory to the Bridge Favorites panel. For now the link launches an external browser, though in the future we plan to display the directory directly inside Bridge, as shown here.  (Speaking of which, Photoshop News has created its own little installer for ading a PS News link to the same area; see story.)"

Link to the image above. John also writes about Adobe Proxy, Adobe´s new quarterly design magazine (Issue 1 started in November 2004.):

"Anybody remember the late Adobe Magazine? Well, it's born again (sort of) in Adobe Proxy, a glossy quarterly focused on All Things Design (profiles of design shops, links to actions on Adobe Exchange--another great/totally obscure resource--etc.). Check it out at http://www.adobeproxy.com/."

However, at least one of readers of the blogs has concerns how Adobe might treat discerning comments and adds about his own comment:

"This comment is a bit of a test. You posted something that is historically incorrect -- I can get 20 ex-Adobe employees to confirm what I'm saying ... If this comment remains, it means that Adobe and you will allow dissenting comments on your blog."

John Nack responds, "it's not Adobe's plan to shut down dissenting opinions." (Link)

Another reader wrote on August 19:

I've looked at Proxy a few times, but to be honest it has some of the worst design I've seen in years. Absolutely horrid stuff. After a few issues I put it out of my mind.

If Proxy were my first look at Adobe and its software I don't think I would ever consider using them.

No response so far (John Nack:"I'm running to the airport in a few minutes").

The bigger question however: if a giant like Adobe starts blogging, when will Getty Images or Corbis start? It should be easier then to respond to other blogs.

Industry Veteran John Flewin Of Footage.info Enters The Promising Press Release Business

After the Superior Genius Jim Pickerell, with a very valuable attempt to expand his business activities and to achieve a higher Google ranking, famous industry veteran John Flewin of Footage.info has decided to create a Footage Press Release Cemetery.

The tiny tot is called Footageinfo.blogspot.com and was born on July 4, 2005.

As I wrote earlier, some people are arguing that there must be some money in this Press Release Business of the Stock Photo Industry. This new business model is called TMFRPR: Take-Money-For-Reading-Press-Releases. I also wrote that the competition in the Press Release Business is getting harder and sometimes ruinous. These efforts of John, using a professional and very complex Blogspot/Blogger account, are of course one of the most stunning approaches ever, moving me and his customers to tears.

John is working as a "consultant in the commercial footage industry. Services include industry business advice, appraisals, project management, strategic planning and associated revenue-driving activities." John again has demonstrated his ability to serve the needs of his customers as a big innovator, mastermind and prophet in his industry, extending the "associated revenue-driving activities" of his business.

To no surprise, the press releases published at Footageinfo.blogspot.com are the same ones as at Footage.info. To no surprise, the links of the tiny tot refer to other sites of John:

• FOOTAGE.info
• FOOTAGE.net
• STOCKFOOTAGEONLINE.com

However, I officially declare that The Stock Photo | Press Release Cemetery has no interest in or connection to the tiny tot.

[Illustration: Robert Crump, Piggyback Trucking]

Corbis To Fire Zefa Staff And Other Stuff

Some more or less serious reading for the weekend: "Citing Redundancies, Corbis Trims Zefa Workforce" (pdnonline), "Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog, Photoblog: How Photographers Are Making The Internet Work For Them" (shutterbug), "Fotolog, World's Largest Photo Blogging Community, Welcomes One Millionth Fotologger" and finally "Photos, Blogging And Fair Use" (pdnonline).

Posted by Andy

The Digital Photography Weblog: Another Blog...

What some people were expecting: the new blog "The Digital Photography Weblog" (written by Amit Malhotra/Dallas; belonging to Jason Calacanis´ Weblogs, Inc.) went online a couple of days ago. Let´s see and wait... . The subtitle "A picture is worth five megapixels" is obviously not a too bright idea moving us to streams of tears of truly felt admiration. But maybe we all can read other and better stuff than the streamlined crap "XYZ reports today that ABC will report tomorrow that yesterday 123 reviewed the new digital camera xyz" of the other digital photography hardware blogs (which means loosely translated: "Hey, you DSOAB, click here to read the reprint of that press release I discovered yesterday, cause I gotta pay my rent with these Google Ads"). Hopefully from someone with a personality and a viewpoint and not that Copy´n´ Paste-attitude.

Another new blog (?) which recently came to our attention is "Cameras – Digital Camera Reviews, Comparisons and Ratings".

Sign The Blog Sourcing Petition!

No need to add a word. Just sign: "We endorse the Blog Sourcing Petition to The Blogosphere Community", more information here: "A Petition to Commit to Proper Blog Sourcing" (Steve Rubel).

[via Tiffinbox]

New Blogs On The Block: New Digital Image

John Schott, creator of the blog Camera|Iraq and Director for Media Studies Concentration and Media Studies (MEDA) at the Carleton College, Minnesota, recently created a new blog called "New Digital Image".
The blog -- Schott is the producer of "American Photography: A Century of Images" -- is dedicated to moblogging in general (actually to teach his class) and brings up some interesting links.