Tag Archives: photography

Google+ gets a new lightbox

By Michal | Published 19/12/2011

Yeah, eat this, Facebook. Oh, and Flickr: keep looking on, with your hands in your pockets. This does help, sure.

New features include:

- full-screen photos
- improved layout
- better tagging
- new look and feel

If you’re not on Google+, you’re probably laughing now, after all “nobody uses Google+”. Allegedly.

But if you are a G+ user – and you share a lot of images – you’ll probably think twice before renewing that Flickr Pro account…

More on the recent Google+ changes here.

Posted in photography, social media | Also tagged , Leave a comment

My changing habits

By Michal | Published 31/08/2011

I’ve been travelling a bit recently, so to make up for the long silence on this blog, I’ll be writing a few travel-related posts on here over the next couple of weeks. Things I’ve learned, noticed and photographed. Maybe a video or two too, but don’t hold your breath.

One thing that has become very obvious is my relationship with all the social platforms I’ve been using to post my images.

Until recently, it’s been just Flickr and this blog. And Twitter, but it mostly helped me - among other things - direct others to my images on other platforms, rather than publish the images themselves. (Facebook to a degree too, although I never upload my photos directly to Facebook as a rule, except for some mobile pictures).

Nowadays however, I increasingly use Flickr to post an image or two from a particular session – maybe a few more, if they’re good enough – but publish larger galleries on Google+.

Flickr hasn’t moved on for years. As a basic sharing tool it’s still good, despite the permanent chorus of complaints. Yes, it’s clunky, inflexible, but still serves its purpose.

500px.com is stunning, but it also doesn’t have certain features I’d like, like albums. I also don’t think my images are artistic enough to feature there. I’m simply not interested in this kind of photography.

Google+ however combines the social aspect of Flickr with ease of use and certain functionality that’s missing from Flickr. It’s easier to upload – and share – an entire album or just a single image from it. It’s more lively and I find it easier to connect with other photographers on there than I do on Flickr. I wrote about Google + soon after I joined and I guess most of that is still true.

Yes, I know, it does come with its own baggage (real name issues, multiple Google account fuck-ups, copyright issues etc.), but for now it’s winning over Flickr for me. Your experience may differ.

BTW, if you click on the above image, you can see the rest of my Valencia set on Google+. And while there, why not say hello….

Posted in photography, social media | Also tagged , Leave a comment

Google+ for photographers

By Michal | Published 05/07/2011

Should you move your portfolio? Will Google+ kill Flickr? Is it better than Facebook? Well, who knows.

All we know for now is that Google+ has been open to a chosen few for just over a week and generated a lot of excitement – or frustration, if you haven’t been able to join it yet.

Let’s agree about one thing. The service is impressive, but predicting the death of Flickr and Facebook at this stage might be a bit premature. This is the very beginning – Google+ has barely left its starting blocks. Let the service grow and gain critical mass first.

So I won’t tell you whether this is the next big thing for photographers, whether it’s going to revolutionise the way we share images or any other crystal-ball crap. Instead, let me list the things I do like about Google+ (from a photographer’s perspective) after a week of playing with the service.

1. Picasa integration. I never thought I would go back to Picasa, but here I am. I used it ages ago as a desktop application well before it was bought by Google. Then, when it became a part of the Google app package, I used it occassionally, mostly to share some private photos with friends and family.

But now Picasa – soon to be known as “Google Photos, formerly known as Picasa” – has become a very attractive proposition for G+ users. Here is why:

  • Unlimited storage. If you are Google+ user, you can store an unlimited number of images up to 2048x2048px in size. Anything larger than that will count towards your standard 1Gb storage. Also videos up to 15 minutes long will enjoy unlimited storage. Anything longer than that will again dent your 1Gb limit. There are no guarantees of course that this won’t change in the future, but for now this is pretty awesome.
  • Editing. If you have been using Picasa, you’ve probably seen or used Picnik for basic image adjustments. Google+’s adjustments are even more basic and are limited to rotating the image and applying six basic filters. So you’re probably better off working on your images before uploading them to your albums. But still, compared to Facebook, your editing options are slightly more robust.
  • Tagging people. You can tag people, who will then be notified and will have the ability to remove the tag. If someone else tags you in a photo, you can reject or approve the tag, but if you do approve, the image will be associated with your profile, i.e. visible to people in your circles.
  • Comments. A simple but smart solution – comments display not underneath the image, but in a column to the right of it, which means you don’t have to scroll down to read them.
  • Lightbox. When you go to an album, Picasa smartly redistrubutes the images within it on the page so that they form a nice mosaic. Like it or not, it’s neat. Clicking on a single image opens it in the lightbox (“on black”, in Flickr-speak) and offers a nice clutter-free experience. Frome here you can navigate to other images in the same album and perform all the actions described above.
  • Data. Each G+ photo comes with some basic EXIF data (if available), the date the image was taken and a clickable histogram.

2. Mini-portfolio. That’s my name for it. Not sure what the technical term is, but when you create or update your profile, you have the ability to upload 5 images that will be displayed underneath your name every time someone reads your profile info.

Quite powerful if you want to highlight your best work or, say, define your photographic style in five thumbnails.

3. InstaGram. If you’re using InstaGram and wish you could display your images on a larger screen, why not transfer all IG images to Picasa/Google+?

So far I’ve come across two different IG solutions, one which allows you to import your InstaGram archive into Picasa and another one, which updates your existing InstaGram Picasa album with every new IG image you take.

Both solutions are a bit clumsy at this stage, but remember the service is brand new and we’ll probably have to rely on many hacks before a more seamless integration of external services becomes a reality.

I realise that this post will probably feel dated a few months from now. Google+ is very likely to evolve and become very powerful very quickly. It may even become a threat to other photo-sharing services, but it’s much too early to predict to what degree, if at all.

So instead of playing with your crystal ball, spend some time discovering how you can use Google+ to your advantage now.

Posted in photography, social media | Also tagged , Leave a comment

500px.com – where quality meets simplicity

By Michal | Published 09/05/2011

Remember when you saw Boston.com’s The Big Picture gallery for the first time? Did you like the big format? I did. I also wished more sites went for big bold images. Including photo sharing sites like Flickr, which only added some much-needed functionality like the ability to view large version on black background, last year. But the rest of the site has remained largely unchanged. Which may be bad news for us users, but great news for those who want to create the next Flickr.

Like 500px.com, a Canadian photo-sharing website which has been around for a long time (hence the name – when they started 500-pixel images were considered optimal for web display), but in its latest incarnation – relaunched two years ago – it began attracting photographers with passion, people who put a lot into their photography and people who produce and admire big, bold and good quality images.

The site was born thanks to Ian Sobolev and Oleg Gutsol, who seem to have created a holiday snaps-free zone, an elegant place where photographers can share their work, critique others’ output, but also create portfolios, blogs and interact with each other. No messageboards, no camera reviews – just photography of the highest calibre. I caught up with Oleg, who is also the site’s Technical Director, to find out more about the site, its purpose and plans.

I asked Oleg to define 500px.com’s unique selling point:
There is a number of things, but to point out just one, I would say it’s the quality of the photos on 500px.

The quality is indeed high. Many images look very artistic. Is your site aimed at artists then?
I believe everybody is an artist. Everybody sees the world differently and that vision is unique. Everybody can pick up a camera and take a photo. Our site is for people interested in photography, people who want to share their artistic vision with the world.

I discovered 500px.com a couple of months ago. Since then I’ve noticed more and more people started sharing images from it. Why do you think it’s happening?
Indeed, more and more people visit 500px lately and we are receiving pretty good feedback from them. I think this has to do, in part, with the desire to experience the beauty of the world, see the unknown, the unseen. Humans are drawn to and fascinated by beautiful things, and a photograph is a great medium to capture and convey beauty. Also, people want to share what they see on our site, which can be easily done in our age of social networking, so the word about us spreads fast. The other factor I would mention is the community itself — there is this certain distinct vibe to our site that attracts people, I think it has to do with our users. We have very talented, friendly, loyal, tolerant, open and helpful people on 500px. Also, we (the 500px team) try to keep friendly relationships with our users, we know some of them personally. And we are always approachable and try to help anybody who has questions, problems or concerns. We stay on top of our twitter feeds and emails, at time we get a bit overwhelmed, but we aim to respond to everybody as soon as possible.

The first thing you notice about your site is its elegance, simplicity and large format images. In fact, a few days ago someone tweeted: “I’ve used Flickr all my life and Im still not used to it. I’ve used 500px for 3 days and I am so familiar with it. It’s so satisfying.”
Yes, we want the site to look good and we want the photos to look good. It’s 2011 and photos should be displayed large, not scaled down to a bento box size. Nowadays we have big monitors and cheap file storage, so we can definitely afford to show large photos.

So do you think one day you’ll be bigger than Flickr? Is that your aim?
Flickr is a great photo website and a large successful company. Their team did an awesome job at creating the destination for all your personal photos.Our goal is to be the destination for the best photos in the world, and if that becomes bigger than Flickr — great. My dream is for 500px to become the best and the biggest photo website online. But quality comes first, size comes second. Although sometime ago I put a Flickr sticker on my fridge to remind me daily of the Goliath we are dealing with :)

Explain your voting system. Do you think people vote for the images they really like or for the people they know and like. This is what often happens on other photo-sharing sites.
Our voting system is pretty simple — you can either like or dislike the photo, you can cast one vote for each photo and you cannot change you vote afterwards. You cannot vote for your own photos.
Also, we want to promote positive feedback, so the number of negative votes you can cast a day is limited. Most of our users vote for photos they like, it’s just hard to resist giving a positive vote for a good photo :) There is a small number of people that vote for their friends’ photographs, but the community at large is very well balanced, so if anybody asks their friends to vote up a photo that is not so good — the others will quickly notice and some will dislike it, which will bring the score of the photo down. Very few people try to cheat our system and we catch and stop this activity very quickly.
Overall I can say that if your photo is good — it will rise to the top, even if you are new and don’t have any friends on 500px to help you vote it up. At the same time — if your photo is not so great — it will be nearly impossible to cheat its way up to the top, I have never seen this happen.

You are much more than just a photo sharing site – $50/year gives users so much more. Are photographers who currently use sites like WordPress for their portfolios more likely to switch to 500px.com?
Most of the things we have on 500px are free, but we also offer premium services — our Awesome accounts. They are $50 per year and give you the ability to create you own portfolio website, multiple galleries, various design themes, custom domain, Google Analytics, higher resolution RSS feeds and faster customer support. With our Awesome accounts we want to take away the trouble of designing, hosting and maintaining your own photo website. Periodically, we add new themes to our premium accounts, later this year we will integrate blogs and custom pages into portfolios as well. I think the ease of setting up your personal website on 500px platform may take some people off WordPress.

Are you planning international expansion?
Yes, we want our services to be available internationally. We have already started the translation process and 500px is currently available in English, German and Russian. We are adding French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese translations next.

So where are your current users from?
Our users come from all over the world, the top 10 most active countries are: US, Russia, Germany, Canada, UK, Romania, France, Italy, Turkey and China.

What’s next for 500px.com?
Next is getting a lot of things done :) We recently moved to a new office and are expanding our team. There are many new features planned — new themes, a mobile version of the site, public API, more flexible portfolio customization, export plugins for popular image editing programs like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, and many more. Stay with us and you will see for yourself :)

I most certainly will. If you are on 500px Oleg’s fantastic images can be found on his page: http://500px.com/cyberguss, and his 500px portfolio can be found here. Oleg is also on Twitter as is the site itself, of course. My own profile can be found here: http://500px.com/michald.

Posted in photography, social media | Also tagged , 1 Comment

London Street Photography at the Museum of London

By Michal | Published 02/03/2011

As soon as the medium of photography was invented, people started taking photographs in the street. Mind you, initially they didn’t have much choice. The first cameras were so bulky and exposure times so long that it perhaps made sense to stand in the middle of London and take advantage of natural light.

And indeed, the first images you see when you visit the superb “London Street Photography” exhibition, which has just opened at the Museum of London in the City, are quite blurry thanks to long exposure times. It’s fascinating to see that, in terms of the subject matter, what London-based photographers and visitors to the city upload to Flickr or capture via Instagram in 2011 doesn’t differ that much – broadly speaking, of course – from what the forefathers of street photography captured 150 years ago.

The crowds, the buzz the city generates, the odd characters, the various social classes and behaviours have always attracted crowds of people wanting to capture all that for posterity. This hasn’t changed much. But what has changed is the perspective.

The 19th century “early adopters” documented the city itself – its vastness, grandness, its architecture and vitality. Some of them also already tried to document certain aspects of London’s life. As you progress through the exhibition you notice how the focus shifts from large scenes to more intimate moments, where London – while still recognisable – defines and shapes the subjects and their behaviours, but doesn’t dominate the scene.

I’m still mesmerised by a mini-collection of images by Wolf Suschitzky. There were just three images of Charing Cross Road he took in 1937 and I absolutely loved them. Make sure you spend some time listening to Suschitzky himself, who talks about street photography in a video played in one of the rooms.

The Museum of London has collected these street photographs over the years and eventually decided to share some of them with the wider public this year. Strangely, many people didn’t even know about this exhibition, which is a shame. But it’s open till early September, so there’s plenty of time to visit. Do so.

Posted in inspiration | Also tagged , , Leave a comment

Why I swapped The Best Camera for Instagram

By Michal | Published 23/02/2011

 

I’ve been resisting it for months. Instagram, the iPhone app everyone seems to be using at the moment. (I was tempted to say “Instagram, the latest fad” here, but I’m sure it would come back to bite my ass.)

I thought I didn’t need yet another photo app on my phone, yet another way of sharing my images. But a rapidly growing number of friends and online contacts have been using the app over the past few weeks and I was simply curious. I knew it combined the ease of use with a social aspect and some funky visual effects a la Hipstamatic. I also knew there were other similar apps like the Best Camera or Camera +, which offered similar functionality, but which never managed to achieve the critical mass Instagram has probably already achieved. And I was curious why the Best Camera, a precursor of Instgram, never really managed to do what the latter did in less than 6 months. So I installed it.

Do I need to explain what it does? Wired described Instagram as “Twitter for your photos” or “a mashup of Hipstamatic and Tumblr” last October and that was pretty much spot on. You sign up, you follow some people, or not, you take pictures, tag them, apply filters and publish. Then you also cross-post to other services like Facebook, Twitter, Posterous or Flickr, favourite other people’s images, leave comments and look at the most popular images from all over the world.

And that’s, pretty much what Chase Jarvis’s The Best Camera does too. I’ve been using this app for almost two years and enjoyed it so far. So why is Instagram better?

The most obvious answer is the social aspect, which is missing from The Best Camera. Chase Jarvis enabled voting, but that’s as far as the social aspect of that app goes. Instgram allows you to automatically follow all your Twitter and Facebook followers who’ve also installed the app, it scans your contacts to see who else has signed up. Comments, likes and the ever-changing sets of ‘popular’ images make the whole social experience complete. Pity Chase Jarvis didn’t add such features to his otherwise great app.

But the social aspect in itself is not the only reason why Instagram is spreading like wildfire.

The Best Camera offers users several simple filters. Each of them does one thing. One makes an image warmer, another increases saturation. Yet another allows you to add a vignette or crop your image. You can apply just one or a number of filters in many ways. Therefore, from my experience at least, the Best Camera has appealed to photographers or people who love experimenting with their images.

Instagram, like Hipstamatic, assumes you just want your image to look funky and simplifies the process by giving you a choice of filters. You choose just one, you can’t combine them. So, rather than thinking which individual aspects of the image to change, you are presented with several versions of the image and you just choose one.

The whole app comes with a visually pleasing interface, which also helps a lot. And its very easy to use. What not to like about it.

So, against my better judgement, I have just added yet another tool to my dangerously long list of social and/or photo apps. If you want to follow me on Instagram, I’m there as michald.

For now, at least.

Posted in photography, social media, software | Also tagged , Leave a comment

Saved by the phone. Again.

By Michal | Published 21/10/2010

Typical. You schlep a bag full of gear hoping to take a couple of decent shots and the world conspires against you. (It doesn’t, in fact, it’s all in your mind.)

Then one day you walk to work early in the morning, bleary-eyed and in need of a really strong coffee, when you spot a fantastic photo opportunity. That heavy bag would come in handy but, sadly, it’s having a day off…

If you need yet another proof that a decent camera phone (I’m ignoring its obvious technical limitations here) is as good as many entry-level DSLRs, here it is.

I took the above picture with my iPhone on the way to work yesterday. The only thing that bugged me was the fluff on my lens, which I cleaned with my fingers (try that with a standard DSLR lens). But other than that I was quite happy with the outcome.

As I was rushing, I only took two pics and posted one of them, the better one, on Flickr.

“Wow, gorgeous! Which app?”, asked my friend, a photo editor for a well-known magazine, when she saw the picture. None. No tweaking. No Hipstamatic or Camera Bag. Just as it came out. OK, a pure coincidence, but hey, that’s how many pictures we like are taken.

Londonist chose the image for one of its posts, and some of my Twitter followers and friends seemed to be impressed too. Which always feels fantastic.

Another proof, as if one was needed, that it’s not about – or at least it shouldn’t be about – the gear. In some circumstances at least. But I’m not telling you anything new, you knew that already, right?

What’s probably more interesting about the picture is the bike. As someone pointed out in comments on Flickr, the same bike was there a couple of days earlier.

Part of the installation or a coincidence? Answers on a postcard…

Posted in photography | Also tagged , , Leave a comment

The joy of photographing… well, anything and everything

By Michal | Published 16/09/2010

For reasons I don’t necessarily want to discuss here and now, I haven’t had a chance to play with my DSLR as much as I would like to over the past several months. Yes, there has been the occasional iPhone shot, but there haven’t been many opportunities to play with different lenses, long exposures and all the other functionality we take for granted when we enjoy our DSLRs.

Yes, taking pictures is fun regardless of what tool you use, but I sometimes missed the ability to take a shot in very dark conditions or with a different depth of field.

Until my recent holiday, that is. At last, after months of photographic celibacy I was able to go wild and enjoy my camera again. I even schlepped three different lenses with me in a naive belief that I would use all of them all the time. (I did, to a degree.)

And what joy it was to go on walking tours of small Greek island villages with my Canon to photograph anything and anyone. I was like a puppy whose owner has just come back home to feed him – salivating at every photo opportunity and behaving as if that was my first time holding a DSLR. I refrained from humping it, I hasten to add.

This is such a nice feeling – being able to find joy in photographing even the most mundane of objects. I remember when Scott Bourne once mentioned how he admired Rick Sammon’s ability to enjoy everything he photographs. If my memory serves me right, Bourne’s implicit point was this: routine can kill the passion.

For me it was rather a case of absence making the heart grow fonder.

So here I was, happily snapping away in the scorching Greek sun. No complicated shots, nothing too strenuous, ambitious or challenging.

There were the ferry shots to remind me why I love travelling out of season:

- fellow passengers seemed to be pretty excited about the journey too:

Then there were the obligatory “oh-remember-the-sunsets” shots:

and the omnipresent white and blue Cycladic churches and chapels:

All pretty standard, sometimes dull and mostly taken to remember a particular place or moment. But I swear, I haven’t had so much pleasure taking random pictures in a long while. I partly blame it on the fact this was my first holiday after many very long and very stressful months, so I guess having the opportunity to take pictures without worrying about the world was simply therapeutic.

Although I did try to experiment with my camera a little again, most of the images I took were just very private holiday snaps. With no intention other than to remember (and now share) all those simple, but always flavoursome meals we had:

and the nice and warm people who served them

and the little bastards who were all too keen to share those meals with us:

Unless they just thought I was an oversized, salivating puppy and simply couldn’t stop gawking.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in photography | Also tagged Leave a comment

How to protect images online

By Michal | Published 29/06/2010

I remember doing an image search a few months ago and seeing a copy of a picture I own. The image was posted on a site I didn’t recognise, so my first reaction was anger – somebody stole my picture! On closer inspection it turned out it was my friend who posted it on his Posterous blog with an appropriate credit.

So I was lucky. But how many of you have had your images stolen? I take thousands of pictures, but I don’t publish thousands online. Neither am I a professional photographer living exclusively off the income from photography sales. But if you are, how do you protect your images online?

You can make them small and reduce the quality to prevent people from printing them. You can use watermarks and overlays to minimise the risk of republishing your images online. You can built Flash-based galleries to bypass the right-click “save as” issue. But if someone wants to steal your picture, they will. Then you need to track it down somehow. A needle in a haystack springs to mind.

There are services like TinEye which help track down your images, but yesterday another site, Image Rights, already present on the market with its paid-for tool, joined the game with a free version of its powerful image tracking service.

I caught up with one of the co-founders of Image Rights, Ted VanCleave, to find out more about the service. I’ve asked him to explain in simple terms what Image Rights is:

ImageRights International, Inc., is a company that helps professional photographers and illustrators discover the illegal use of their intellectual property on the Web.

Our advanced visual search and crawler technology continuously scans websites and blogs to protect images for professional photographers and illustrators. The crawler indexes millions of new images every month and uses powerful image recognition technology to compare customers’ photos and illustrations against images found on the Web.

It then detects where the customers’ images have been used, even if the stolen photos have been altered, cropped, rotated or color adjusted. The customer receives a full report, including a picture of the original image, its use online, and the URL and ownership information for the website where it was found.

Nobody has come up with a really convincing way of tracking stolen images. Are you different? What is your unique selling point?

ImageRights was built from the ground up to help photographers find instances of their images being used on the internet and then helping them recover fees for unauthorized use. It’s is an extremely easy to use service. We have multiple web crawlers browsing business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Europe looking 24/7/365 at images on these types of web sites.

I’ve been using Tin Eye to track down some of my images, last time a ran a search through TinEye they went through over 1.5 billion images for free. Why would I switch to Image Rights or even pay subscription?

Tineye is a reverse search engine. That’s their term. You can only load one image at a time.  And they don’t help you recover lost revenue, which we will with the launch of our Recovery program in July. While TinEye has 1.5 billion images in their database according to their site, they don’t say where all of those images came from.  It’s a good service but of limited use since you can only upload one image at a time. With ImageRights, you can upload 10,000 images and we’ll send your reports all year long as we find matches.

Do you differentiate between published and unpublished photos and if so, are you able to track down the latter too?

We don’t differentiate between published and unpublished. We don’t actually track images, we are pulling images randomly off of business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Western Europe.

What happens when you actually find an image that has been illegally used, do you provide any legal help too, or just point to the website which violated a photographer’s copyright and leave it up to him to chase the culprit?

We have developed a recovery program for the USA to start, launching it in July. We will help any photographer from any country collect lost revenue from an image of theirs that has been used without authorisation, without a licence in the USA. We will also be rolling out this recovery program in different countries throughout Western Europe over the next 6-12 months.

Who is behind Image Rights?

ImageRights was co-founded by myself and my business partner Joe Naylor. I’m a photographer and entrepreneur and I have found my images being stolen on a regular basis. Joe is the former President of Web Messenger and comes from a technology background. Over the last two years we researched all of the best technologies available to help stop image piracy. ImageRights is the result of our research and findings. Even if one of your images has been cropped up to 80%, rotated, colors stripped out of it or it’s used in a collage, we can still match it against your original image.

You’ve partnered with, among others, American Photographic Artists and American Society of Picture Professionals. What does it mean to you? What kind of support or endorsement are you getting from them and your other partners?

Each partner chooses what level of partnership is right for them. Many offer discounts to their members for paid subscription services at ImageRights. All of our partners are strong advocates of photographers rights and would like to help stop image theft and help enforce copyrights and educate the public about the need to license images to use them.

So that’s what Ted has to say about Image Rights. I have to admit that it’s great that someone offers a service allowing users to bulk upload their library for free, even if it means giving up 50% of  their compensation if they choose to participate in the Recovery Program Ted mentioned (it drops to 35% if you pay for the service).

I’d like to hear from you if you are a photographer and are worried about image theft. Would you use a service like Image Right? Is this a solution for you? Have you used them – or any other similar service before? Do you think anyone is able to create a database big enough to provide meaningful and robust support? Really curious to hear what you think.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in photography, software | Also tagged , , Leave a comment

Bland, tired, clichéd. Welcome to the world of stock photography

By Michal | Published 21/06/2010

Everyone is complaining that it’s more and more difficult to make money on photography and that the stock photography market has become too competitive. Stock libraries spring up every five minutes and they all overflow with images.

Yes, that might be true. But when you really need a good picture, micro stock libraries disappoint.

In my job I often need to browse for images to illustrate various stories. The subjects vary wildly, but in many cases the requirements are not too taxing: a picture of a child using a laptop; or an image of nice garden; or a messy room. You know the score – no latest Reuters shots from Afghanistan or galleries of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Just some interesting, clean, fairly generic, but hopefully inventive images. The last bit – inventive – is however the source of my frustration.

Photographers submitting their images to stock galleries seem to have a problem with thinking outside the box. They either repeat the same bland – and often detached from reality – clichés which over the years have become a norm, or go for very artistic images, which, although technically perfect, are hardly usable.

This morning I was looking for an image of a car with a few rust spots. Had I known I would need one, I would’ve snapped my own rusty car as it combines the two things I was after: it’s relatively modern and working, and it has a few rusty spots. But try searching for a such a car on a certain well-known stock image website and all you get is numerous images of old rusty Dodge trucks, abandoned somewhere picturesque and artfully photographed in HDR. It ticks all stock library boxes, so it gets accepted, yet from an editorial perspective it’s mostly useless.

Next one: knitting. Here’s where all those predictable clichés come out in force. Because if you were to believe in what stock libraries have to offer, you’d have to conclude that knitting is for old frumpy pensioners in rocking armchairs. Therefore, a story on young trendy mums meeting in gastropubs to knit and chat simply cannot be illustrated by a stock image.

And don’t even get me started on corporate photography. Or rather, don’t get me started on images with keywords ‘meeting’ and ‘office’. Seriously, have you ever been to a meeting, mr stock photography? Do you really think that all meetings involve extremely good-looking people in blue shirts, pointing at a laptop screen or shaking hands or gazing at a whiteboard graph?

I recently needed an image to illustrate a story about tackling challenging meetings. The choice was between a group of happy suits gazing at a graph/laptop/whatever else or a room full of snoring office workers. All looked very corporate because yes, in real life meetings only involve airbrushed 30-somethings in Armani suits, sitting in sterile air-conditioned office towers.

Stock photography now appeals to a much wider audience, the rules have changed a bit. It is no longer just a repository of clinical images for brochures and PowerPoint presentations, or at least it shouldn’t be.  Media outlets use stock images to illustrate their content because it’s cheaper. This creates more demand for more original imagery. Stock photographers must start thinking like journalists to differentiate. There is no point reproducing the same old crap – find out who your audience is and do some research on what works for them.

I know there are people who probably make a fortune on those clinical corporate images – and I agree there is and probably will always be a market for those. But budget cuts and/or smarter thinking have forced many newsrooms to rely on cheaper alternatives. Therefore standing out in a sea of blandness is the only way forward.

Maybe the new Flickr-Getty deal will provide editors with more ‘real’ images? But I should deal with that can of worms in a separate post perhaps…

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in photography, photojournalism | Also tagged , , , Leave a comment
UA-5427288-6