Is Flickr a place for a professional photographer to display his work and sell images? Todd Klassy thinks so. Though now he is an amateur devoting three hours a week to shooting and another six to post production and studying photography, he intends to quit his job of 17 years and start working as a photographer full-time after the first of the year.
According to Getty Images vice president of creative imagery Andy Saunders, the combination of recent technological advancements and the current economic climate has translated to the perfect storm for the creative stills end of the stock photography business. Still Saunders sees opportunities--and not just in low-priced content.
Despite the economic doom-and-gloom, Getty Images announced that its coveted grants programs will continue in 2010. Editorial grants will continue to support work focusing on social, political and cultural causes, while Getty's newer program, Grants for Good, will support collaborations between creatives and nonprofits. Some minor changes have been made to the programs' structure.
ImageSpan and Digimarc have announced a partnership the two say delivers a complete solution to manage, monitor and monetize image assets.
In light of pricing declines for textbook use and publisher attempts to avoid paying for future electronic uses, some image producers ask: "Why don't all the sellers just say 'no'? Shouldn't the producer be setting product prices?"
Digimarc for Images Enterprise Edition addresses top customer requests, says the Beaverton, Ore. company known for watermarking content. The newest Digimarc for Images release specifically targets businesses and organizations with large volumes of images by offering batch functions, such as watermarking all images in a given folder.
If Google were to get involved in image licensing, it would quickly take commanding control of the stock industry--at very little additional cost to the company. And it would not necessarily be a bad thing for creators.
On Nov. 13 at 5 p.m., the last of a 10-event series produced by the Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project will take place at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
The European Commission held hearings on orphan works during the last week of October. Sylvie Fodor of the umbrella group Coordination of European Picture Agencies discussed the challenges presented by the looming legislation to the image industry.
On Nov. 4, the motion of four creative industry groups and several individuals to join on the creators' side of the Authors Guild et. al. v. Google was once again denied on appeal. Organizations that petitioned the court to intervene in the class action against Google included the American Society of Media Photographers, the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America and the North American Nature Photography Association. Chief among U.S. District Judge Denny Chin's grounds for denying their request was its untimely nature.