A Russian photographer asks what subjects he should shoot for
microstock in order to maximize his earnings. With hard work, he feels he can duplicate the results achieved by Yuri Arcurs, particularly because shooting in Russia can be much cheaper than Arcurs' Denmark location. Yet there are flaws to that logic.
For the second year in a row, Alamy is supporting the Young Photographers Alliance
foundation. The U.K. library was the first company to pledge a
scholarship in 2009 and is renewing its support in 2010. Last year, the
Alamy Scholarship Award was presented to Julianne Jamora of the School
for Visual Arts. YPA was established last year to support emerging
talent in building sustainable careers.
Pixamba, the maker of popular
micro-contributor software ProStockMaster, has announced the launch of
a digital asset management platform to help microstock photography
users manage their image collections. Offered as software-as-service at
a starting price point of under $5 per month, the Pixamba Media
Management platform is designed to help image buyers index, store,
search, tag, back up and retrieve images for reuse.
Jim Pickerell is launching a new photographer income survey in an
effort to determine general income trends for photographers in the last
couple of years. We encourage photographers, worldwide, who have had any earnings
whatsoever in the last two years from licensing rights to their images
to answer this brief questionnaire.
The organizers of the upcoming Dublin congress encourage attendees not
to worry about potential disruption from the Icelandic volcano. CEPIC
president Christina Vaughan sent out a note stating: “The worst of the
disruption took place in April, and the authorities have now learned how
to deal with it.”
In a letter to its contributors, Corbis has disclosed it will be
seeking liquidation of the Sygma business entity in France. The company
acquired Sygma in 1999 and has had numerous well-publicized legal and
management issues with the former agency’s photographers, staff and
assets.
Getty Images has announced it has signed a four-year agreement with Sky News to license and distribute
Sky editorial footage, which significantly grows its news, sport and entertainment offering.
A large percentage of the still-photo segment of the stock photography
business is related to advertising—either licensing images for use in
print ads, or licensing them for use in editorial products that are
supported to a great extent by ads. The health of the stock photography
business is directly related to the health of the print business. To
understand what is likely to happen in the still photography business,
it is important to have some understanding of advertising trends.
I
had already been a still photographer for over 20 years when I started
exploring digital video and the motion medium ten years ago. I had
built a successful career shooting editorially for magazines like
National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure to name
a few, as well as producing annual reports for major corporations.
When digital video hit the scene in the late ‘90’s, I was already
starting to feel a slight frustration in trying to tell certain stories
with a still camera. I was beginning to think and see in terms of
movement and sound. At the same time, technology was making it
possible and affordable with digital video cameras and non-linear
editing software for me to use this medium to tell my stories. The new
tools were a means to an end.
FootageBank HD has added 70,000 stock clips to Footage.net, a comprehensive search platform for the film and video industries.