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

You have to love the French !! This is a good one: Here is the latest. In an attempt to be more convinient and user friendly, I presume, the French governement has decided to  put free automated passport machines in all the city halls ( 2000 nationwide). The idea isContinue Reading

Who owns the news ? The ongoing debate between news outlets ( AP, NYTimes..) and mash ups ( Google news..)  has made this question surface. Is the first one reporting the news the owner of that news ? That used to be the accepted tradition. Now with Twitter, Facebook, imContinue Reading

  Getty made a huge mistake in blocking Flickr to create its own stock outlet. All they were concerned about was not allowing Flickr to become the biggest commercial stock agency overnight. So they could keep there dominance on distribution. But just imagine, if you will, if Flickr had movedContinue Reading

There used to be something called “digital rights”. That is, when a publication wanted the right to publish a copy of an image to use in a digital format, it would pay an additional license fee. At first, like the internet itself or CD ROM (remember those ?) circulation, itContinue Reading

Recent Webby Award winner MediaStorm is offering a FREE course  on Advanced Multimedia Reporting Workshop to 8 lucky participant. But before your rush to sign up, please be aware that this is not for beginners. You have to already have a solid understanding of multimedia and its tools. More informationContinue Reading

Some people just do not know how to speak photo. You look at their images, and they are fine, properly exposed, nicely framed, perfectly lit. However, the images are just borderline of boring. They do not speak, do not convey any message, or meaning. They are flat as a lineContinue Reading

No..it doesn’t have the swine flu virus. But it does contain some photojournalism archeological evidence. Surely, photojournalism archeology is a brand new science that does not date back as far as human archeology, but it is just as fascinating. The famous suitcase believed to contain Robert Capa negative of theContinue Reading

Pro Photographers should organize themselves into a guild. It is past overdue. Back in antiquity, craftsmen who were proud of their art protected their trade by helping and protecting their future replacement.  Clients would always know that hiring a guild member was a sure sign of guaranteed exceptional results. UnlikeContinue Reading

There is something amusing about photography. You can see it mostly in “fine art” ( why is it called “fine”, BTW?.. as opposed to what “brute” art ?). It goes something like this. Take a seat and read on. If you shoot something ( it can really be anything) eitherContinue Reading