We often hire photographers at PictureGroup for shoots all over the United States. In order to find the appropriate ones, we use a combination of tools. Our number one remains recommendations. To us, there is nothing more valuable then when an editor, or another photographer that we like and trustContinue Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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