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

Some photo agencies want to play with the big boys with no understanding of the fundamentals of business. Take Miami based photo agency PR photos. Right on the heals of the Getty Images announcement that they would charge $5 per image for cell phone usage on images of a certainContinue Reading

One of the hardest and most lucrative task in photography, is editing. It is hard because it is not a science with clear established rules. Trends, fashion, moods, seasons, local culture, a lot can interfere in the process of finding the best image. It is lucrative, not because it’s aContinue Reading

There is something very puzzling about this whole Orphan works bill and what is implied. The gist of it says that if a user cannot identify the owner of an image, he/she can legally use it without suffering a huge penalty. In a nutshell.  Hear me out. One of theContinue Reading

If you are at CEPIC this week, in the lovely city of Dresden, Germany, here are few people you HAVE to see. If you are not going, no problem, they all have a website too. WorldAssignement.com: Brainchild of Pierre Pankotay, serial entrepreneur , WA is a new platform that finallyContinue Reading

Here are a few of the most revolting persistent aspect of the photo Industry: – Blogs that get people fired – Blogs or magazines written by people that have never ever worked in the Photo Industry yet consider themselves experts on all it’s aspects. – Photo agencies that do notContinue Reading

There is no standard in photography captioning and metadata. That lossless group of taxonomist geeks who have been mismanaging the IPTC organization  have made a mess of the whole thing and its getting worse. Someone should get fired for good. Not only IPTC is not a standard, it is nowContinue Reading

“Copyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. AContinue Reading