A number of stock agencies are complaining that they don’t get enough new submissions of in demand imagery. See
here. They are seeing increasing requests for "diversity," "African American," "Black Lives Matter" and say that images showing more minorities and ethnic groups are needed. For the most part they are very unspecific about what these images should show.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced its
2021 Color Trends report. By analyzing pixel data from the year’s top downloads and mapping each pixel color to a HEX code, the report reveals the three fastest-growing colors that will tell the story of 2021, as well as local favorites from around the world.
Photographers who want to earn a portion of their living in the future creating images need to quickly learn and start using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) skills. (See
this story)
The
National Geographic Image Collection, owned by The Walt Disney Company, is scheduled to close effective December 22, 2020. National Geographic
was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for $725 million in 2015. In March 2019 Fox was sold to Disney and Murdoch and his family became the second largest shareholders.
Shutterstock has announced the buyout of AI-driven music platform
Amper Music for an undisclosed sum. The move adds to a growing trend of stock image sites getting involved in rights-free music. Earlier this year, Adobe
inked a deal to carry rights-free music catalogs from both Epidemic Sound and Jamendo, while Getty Images also hosts a royalty-free music library by
Epidemic Sound.
Those setting prices for photography are focused entirely on profits for agency managers and
compensation for capital investment. They give very little
consideration to the well being of creators. Compensation for stock
photos is widely out of balance with production costs. Changes are
needed. Photographer need more control over how their work is priced and a larger share of the fees customers pay. With new technology such changes are becoming increasingly
possible.
We are living in a time when Artificial Intelligence is dramatically changing the way visual content is created. It may not be long before stock photographers are no longer needed to produce photos for commercial use. Photographers will still create photos for personal use and their own entertainment, but visual content for commercial purposes will be created by graphic artists using AI to tell the story and produce the effects their customer needs.
This story first appeared in German on
Robert Kneschke's website. Why photographers give away their pictures on platforms such as Pixabay remains mostly incomprehensible to me even after this article. Sometimes, however, the authors do not even know that someone else is illegally offering their images for free.