One would think that after so many years, as big and talented as a company like Getty has become, they could out pace, outsmart and out perform anyone on the market today. But not quite so. look at the celebrity space, for example. First they bought Online USA, than ImageDirect,Continue Reading

A fascinating blog entry about face recognition and face detection by Sebastian Marcel on Google Blogoscoped. For those, obsessed like me by the future of image classification, key wording, intelligent search and automated work flow, this is a must read. You can even try out the algorithm and result onContinue Reading

Cultural differences between countries are not just limited to the content of the image. Sure, in commercial stock, an image buyer from a certain country will look for people of the same race/origin as the country the image will be published in. We just do not look like each otherContinue Reading

It is not because you know nothing about technology, and for some reason sound proud of it, that you should let your business be run by geeks. As much as they can be nice and helpful, geeks only know how to communicate with two entities: computers and other geeks. YouContinue Reading

One of the best kept secret of this industry is how agencies work in foreign markets. In the prints days, an agency would work with a sub agent in a specific country. Photographers would send process or unprocessed film and the agency would take it from there, paying for processing,Continue Reading

Photography used to be about creating that one image that would sell over and over again. Film, processing, archiving, duping was expensive enough that editors would harshly cut through a shoot to find the quintessential image. As we all know, with the advent of digital, both photographers and agencies haveContinue Reading

I hear a lot of talk about agency size. Not about how many employees they have, or how many square feet they occupy, or even the size of their profit but rather how many images they have in their database. Agencies, these days, are caught in a numbers race toContinue Reading

Those who continue to believe that volume compensates for intelligence are heading for a painful awakening. I understand that social interaction and User Generated anything is very trendy these days, especially on the West coast of America where any new idea is a Great!! idea. But this belief that thereContinue Reading

While everyone is trying to find things to bury, form the death of photojournalism to the end of vertical images ( yes, I read that somewhere), in a desperate competition to be the first to announce “the end of..”, there is good news to report. The launch a new photoContinue Reading

Can an agency survive by itself anymore ? Can one create, nurture and maintain a client base of its own, like it used to be, without any fear of competition ripping through your front door and luring your precious income away ? One of the least understood evolution generated byContinue Reading