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Is creativity limitless? Can we go on and on creating new pictures that have never been seen or are we going to reach a point where we will start going into circles and re-shooting the same things over and over again? Is there a point where nothing will be newContinue Reading

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The current photo industry and newcomers apply a completely flawed logic to licensing images. It is too often believed that if an image is largely seen, it will be licensed. The thinking come from primeval logic. It goes like this: – if an image is not seen, it will neverContinue Reading

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One of the premises for the acquisition by Getty images of Istockphoto was that customers of the microstock site would eventually migrate to the higher priced imagery placed on the Getty images site. Instead, it has been a growing cannibalization of high end, full price paying customers to the microContinue Reading

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It is not what you photograph that matters anymore, it is how you photograph it. It used to be that cameras, processing,  access and mostly distribution was the privilege of a few, all nicely rewarded by a comfortable income. This closed “Boy’s Club” had many high level entry barriers .Continue Reading

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While everyone is searching for what commercial stock might become in the future, the Chinese might have one solution and it is quite revolutionary. Researchers from TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University along with a Singapore based researcher, have put together Photosketcher, previously called Sketch2Photo. The principleContinue Reading

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So, as it reaches $200 million dollars a year in revenue, Istockphoto is pushing the production of stock photography to its rim. The traditionally strong categories for stock imagery, like Lifestyle, Health, Parenthood, Teens, Green, Business are all being more than very well covered by the astute production of 100,000’sContinue Reading

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So the big buzz these days is all about social media. It started roughly with MySpace , followed by Flickr and now it’s all about  Twitter and Facebook.  A bit like the “Long Tail” theory has been improperly swallowed by a  lot of photography professionals, social media is all butContinue Reading

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It is amusing to see that the photography world, especially those who persist in shooting for commercial stock, have yet to use the tools around them. Up the now, the only intelligence gathering tool that has been used ad-nauseum, has been the mighty Excel sheet with pages of past sales.Continue Reading

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The PACA is about to release their stockphotofinder. Or at least a Beta version of it. For those who do not know, PACA stands for Picture Archive Council of America and regroups hundreds of RM and RF commercial stock agencies. They have recently decided, in committee, to create a photoContinue Reading

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The future of photography is exclusive content. Not exclusive as in no one else wants to shoot this, otherwise called “niche” photography. No, no. Niche photography is just exactly that : a specialized market. And with specialized comes limited. When photography was still film, print and slide, no one couldContinue Reading