Articles by Jim Pickerell
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a 2012 decision from the Southern District of New York absolving
Photobucket.com, an internet photo-sharing service, from violating Sheila Wolk’s copyright in her fantasy images paintings.
Paul Melcher’s latest on the “
New Photo Agencies” is worth reading. He discusses the Community Builders, the Scrapers, the On Demanders and the Hybrids, and notes that “the barriers between pros and casual photographers are going to completely vanish.”
Everyone agrees there is an oversupply of images. In spite of this fact many professional image buyers claim they can’t find good images or at least the images they need. As I look at what is available online today I think there are more good and great images than there ever have been, but often they are buried under piles of mundane images and images that are irrelevant to buyers needs. The problem is curation.
Footage.net recently asked David Peck, President of
Reelin' in the Years Productions (RITY), the world's largest library of music footage and the exclusive representative of all footage from the Merv Griffin Show, to walk us through the basic steps involved in licensing entertainment and performance related footage.
Is stock photography about making money or just about learning how to take better pictures? There are different ideas on the subject and a variety reasons why photographers take pictures. As editor of Selling Stock, I thought I should make my position on the subject perfectly clear to my readers. The business of photography is changing dramatically. Part of the reason is that money is not a primary driver for many very good photographers that have easy access to image users.
Every year CEPIC brings together picture agencies from all over the world and becomes, for a few days, the Center of the Picture Industry. This year's Congress had over 500 participants from 35 countries and 280 agencies. It was held in the heart of Berlin, a few blocks away from the Brandenburger Tor.
A lot of attention is being given to finding a better way to search for photos. Those who believe technology can solve all the world’s problems are trying to build algorithms that will instantly find exactly the right image to meet the needs of each paying customer. With 1.8 billion photos being uploaded to the web each day and even professional sites like Shutterstock uploading more than 260,000 new photos each week there are more good pictures on any given subject than any professional user has time to look at.
PACA has just released a summary of it Sales Webinar that was conducted in May. The panel consisted of Leslie Hughes from Visual Steam, Candice Murray for Condé Nast and Sonia Wasco from Grant Heilman Photography. You can see the notes and view the power point presentation from the webinar
here.
The wonderful world of electronic tracking can have some downsides. It is great to know the exact GPS location where a picture was taken. This information can also be useful in searching for images that were taken in a particular city, country or other location.
In general, prices and revenue have been declining in the stock photo industry. To a large extent this has been due to oversupply and more and more customers finding the images they need at lower price points. Based on the information I’ve been able to collect, I have made estimates of the average 2013 gross license fee for images in the five major price categories – RM, traditional RF, Midstock, Microstock and Subscription. I want to find out if my readers think these prices are high or low.