The 2011
PACA International Conference, the premier annual event in the U.S. for those interested in stock photography, will convene in a little less than a month at the New York Marriott East Side in midtown Manhattan. It runs from Friday, October 21st through Sunday October 23rd.
Stipple Marketplace, the San Francisco based company with the goal of turning editorial images into e-commerce storefronts for consumers, has developed a system that allows publishers to earn money from the images they publish, not just sell ads around those images.
If you haven’t visited the Corbis web site for a while it may be time to
take another look. In 2010 Corbis decided that it was time to update
the search technology they had been using since 1995. The
project involved a series of architectural changes with two primary aims
– improving performance (speed of delivery) and relevancy of the
search results delivered. This story discusses some of the changes and modifications.
Spaces Images is a niche agency founded by people and lifestyle Jonathan Ross about a year ago. However, there are no people in the pictures this agency represents. In tracking 13 years of sales he and his wife and business partner Amy noticed that
many of their best selling images did not include people. They then set out to build
SpacesImages.com a collection that contains property released images of
locations where man lives, works and plays, but without any people in
the images. Most of the have strong graphic and design elements.
The Image Works (
theimageworks.com) editorial stock photography agency has announced the addition to its archive of imagery from the Spanish based Iberfoto picture library. The library consists of over 1.2 million photographs, artistic works and prints, focusing on Hispanic Culture from Spain and Latin America.
Paul Melcher takes a look at where photojournalism is headed and outlines four key changes that will dramatically alter the future of photojournalism. He also acknowledges, though not with any sense of satisfaction, that the new photojournalism is taking some cues from the successful microstock model.
While fees charged customers for stock photo use have been steadily
declining, there is another issue that should be of equal concern to
image creators. That is the percentage they receive of the gross fee the
end user pays. This can be complicated and not the number many
photographers think it is.
In an effort to engage with the next generation of picture professionals,
Alamy and
Dreamstime have launched separate initiatives to benefit students.
Few stock photo tasks are as idiosyncratic as keywording. Some
photographers just use their mental vocabularies while others consult a
thesaurus. I know a photographer who has blocks of often-used synonyms
he cuts and pastes into the right place. Everyone does it differently.
In a little over a year the number of
images represented by the top four microstock sites has increased by 41%. Fotolia has had a 59% increase. The number of people contributing images to Shutterstock has grown by 37% and now totals 313,393. This wouldn't be bad if demand were growing at the same rate, but it's not. Demand seems to be relatively flat and at iStockphoto seems to be declining. How will these numbers affect everyone who produces stock images? Read more.