Articles by Jim Pickerell
With the growing success of Masterfile’s Master Creative campaign, the
stock image company has released yet another challenge to the creative
community – Photo Adjustment Mastery.
AIGA, the professional association for design, announced an exclusive
partnership with Shutterstock, the world's largest subscription-based
provider of royalty-free stock photography, illustrations, and stock
footage. Shutterstock is also offering AIGA members a 15 percent
discount on anything purchased from its more than 14 million image
library of photographs, illustrations and vector files.
The stock photo industry has evolved in many interesting ways in the
last 50 years. This story looks at the changes from mostly editorial rights-managed, to the 1976 copyright law change, to the print catalog era, to CD-rom delivered royalty-free, to the Internet and finally to microstock. We identify some of the key drivers of these changes and show how some unrelated developments made the changes inevitable.
Alamy has reported that in the last eight weeks it has added a record
1.2 million images to its collection which now exceeds 22 million
images. In January alone the collection grew by 620,000 images.
A year ago
the company had in the range of 18 million images on its site.
Over 20,000 photographers and 500 picture agencies have contributed mages to the
Alamy.com site.
If you license rights to your photos for textbook use then here are a few articles you should read.
Emily Chow, a photojournalism student at Northwestern University's Medill School, posted a story on Black Star Rising (
see here) which basically takes the position that photography students should ignore what experienced professional photographers are telling them and forge ahead with determination to launch careers in photography. I had to respond. Be sure to read her story first.
Newspaper publishers, almost universally, believe the iPad and other
tablet devices are possible saviors of the journalism business since
they are a much more cost effective news delivery system than print and
more than 50 million devices are expected to be in use before the end of
2011. However, given the way payment for content is structured European
publishers are very concerned about loss of control of their
businesses.
For over 30 years Tom Grill has been teaching photographers how to take
marketable stock shots. In mid-November last year he decided to take at
least one stock photo a day for a year and post them to
this blog.
These are not images from his normal, planned stock shoots. Rather they
are grab shots from things he is exposed to daily. Some will be taken
while he is on one of his normal shoots, but all the shots will only be
happenstance, not anything planned in advance as part of his regular
shoots. He is also supplying information about the techniques used to
create some of the images.
Hawaii photographer Douglas Peebles is exploring a new market for his
images – iPhone Apps. During his more than 30 years of photographing the
Hawaiian Islands he has produced
18 books
and a number of pocket guides to the various islands. He currently has
seven iPhone apps which give him another way to reach consumers.
Photographers who license rights to their images based on how the images
will be used tend to be adamantly opposed to microstock. The principle
reason for such opposition is that microstock images are licensed for
use at very low prices. With microstock there are a few price variations
depending on how the images will be used, but they are minimal compared
to those used by rights-managed sellers. All other aspects of the
microstock business tend to get ignored. I want to examine some
of these other aspects of microstock licensing and point out how
traditional agency photographers might benefit if their agencies would
adopt some of them.