Microstock Calendar

I am betting that most photographers out there have a website in the making and not even know it. To get a website going, templates are available for minisites. Minisites can be sold online as products. The further along each minisite is developed, the better. People buy domain names every day on the speculative hope they can assign value via search results for that name. Doing this starts with site content and images.

Minisites can make the same kind of micro-revenue stock photos can. Topical and generic forms are desired. I went to Tradebit.com and purchased 20 templates for 99 cents. Then all I had to do was pick one. The image files get anchored inside the HTML file of the template and then uploaded onto a companion folder online to launch the website.

As it always the case, a neutral design is the best pick because the images must shine and complicated colors can overshadow the content. I had about 5 short text files ready with paragraphs concerning property management. I then started paring my chosen photo files to sizes that would complement the available spaces inside the template. Things like apartment lighting, parking garage doors, and signage kept popping up.

But where a lot of domain name and industry Internet professionals fall short is the ready supply of low cost legal images. But if you have been roaming on photo walkabouts, you have the necessary material. You may have a suite of photo images that could fill a website and don’t realize it. if you started planning what kinds of photos you would liketo have to fill a certainwebsite, you might be able to finish the group with a short picture taking jaunt.

I just started work on a realty website with property management and landlord responsibilities as its main prose topics. For the exercise below, fill in your own topics or picture types. or follow along and make a website just like this one. Buy a domain name, get a hosting account, and voila, you are a site designing webmaster. Get your own Google code and wait for the payments. Use your creativity to see which image can work best.

The images I ended up using were part of several image series that I had archived. I used the most generic images I could find in uniform sizes. i put the txt blocks in, and uploaded the site. I’ll check back in a few weeks to see what visitor traffic the statistics show I have received.

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Stung by plummeting ad revenues, Newsweek is still losing millions of dollars every quarter. The news magazine and its smaller sibling Budget Travel have burned through over $25 million this year, according to a Washington Post Company earnings report released today.

Some of the losses are due to one-time costs of cutting staff. But even with those costs excluded, the magazines lost more money in the first half of 2009 than they did in the first half of last year, the company says.

Newsweek changed strategies in the second quarter, announcing a big circulation cut and a major redesign. The change was supposed to result in higher ad rates, according to the Washington Post Company's last annual report:

"This will change Newsweek’s competitive set, making it the largest premium news and ideas magazine, aligned more closely with The Economist, New York magazine, New Yorker, Wired and The Atlantic. Newsweek, Inc. will increase the subscription price of Newsweek and its national advertising rates to reflect a more valuable subscriber base."

Despite the change, ad revenues at Newsweek were down 40 percent last quarter compared to the same quarter of 2008—a steeper drop than most other magazine publishers. The magazines posted a $5 million loss in the second quarter of 2009, compared to a $3.7 million loss in the second quarter of 2008. Newsweek had been profitable until last year.

Newsweek has been cutting jobs to try to keep costs under control. In the first quarter, 44 Newsweek employees accepted voluntary early retirement. Newsweek reduced its photo coverage of the White House. The magazine has moved at least some its New York City staff out of Midtown, sending them downtown to 395 Hudson Street.

Magazines are a relatively small part of The Washington Post Company, which generates more than half of its revenue from Kaplan, its educational division. The Washington Post newspaper division is also losing money—$89 million in the second quarter, slightly better than last year. Read more about the company's overall results at Editor & Publisher.

From Wednesday: Ad Revenues Down Less Steeply at Time Warner

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is doing press interviews following a policy speech she gave earlier this week. Her message is that everyday citizens, as well as law enforcement agencies, need to be vigilant. In an interview this morning on Fox News, she said this could mean calling the cops when you see someone photographing "critical infrastructure":

"One of the things that we ask people to do is when they see something unusual, if they see, for example, somebody continually taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure that doesn't seem to make any sense, or a package left unattended on a bus platform, to report that to local law enforcement so it can be followed up on."

(The quote is about 50 seconds from the end of the clip. If you can't play the video above, try playing it here.)

We could explain (for the hundredth time) how police investigations of photographers are very unlikely to expose terrorists, and far more likely to waste everybody's time. But instead we'll borrow some of Napolitano's own words: Her advice "doesn't seem to make any sense."

July saw more than it’s fair share of action in the microstock and stock photography business. Big brands Google and Time Magazine also contributed to the landscape of the evolving marketplace.

Microstock News

Getty Images replaced StockXpert ads on Stock.xchng – the world’s most popular free photo website acquired as part of the Jupiterimages purchase – with iStockphoto ads. Search results now show iStockphoto exclusive images above the free photos. Branded as ‘premium’ images, they link back to search results pages containing both exclusive and non-exclusive content.

Shutterstock launched their Tax Center to help contributors complete the paperwork required to comply with US tax laws. The system enables many forms to be completed online and provides instructions for those that cannot.

Dreamstime further integrated social media into their system launching their own Facebook application. Once enabled, it allows Dreamstime members to have their new uploads and other site activity posted on their Facebook wall. The links automatically make use of Dreamstime’s affiliate program, making promoting portfolios extra lucrative. Don’t forget to check out their fun stock rank tool launched late last month.

Fotolia launched a ‘Premium Subscription’ allowing buyers to download images, vectors and video files with a single subscription. The commissions for Premium Subscription sales is 0.05 credits higher, and multiplied by three for vectors and by 10 for videos. Premium Subscription also provides access to the highest resolution photos which were previously excluded from subscription sales.

These commissions rates are similar to subscription commissions at other top microstock agencies for photos and vectors, but substantially lower for video sales. Contributors earn between $3.50 and $4.20 for a single full resolution video sale. The same sale earns the contributor $15 at Shutterstock, $15 – $20 at iStockphoto non-exclusive, and $5 at Pond5 if contributors set the minimum price. As Fotolia don’t have nearly the selling power for video that they do for photos, many contributors are removing their entire video portfolios from Fotolia.

Corbis officially enters microstock plan-B with the closure of SnapVillage tomorrow, August 1st. All traffic to the website will be redirected to the now fully functional Veer Marketplace. Veer Marketplace also joined the ranks of microstock agencies providing the debit Mastercard payout alternative through Payoneer.

Marketplace News

Time Magazine used another microstock photo on their cover. This time it’s a photo of an isolated coin jar with a super-ironic label which reads “The New Frugality” photoshopped onto the jar. The image was purchased from iStockphoto with an extended license at a cost of $150. The contributor received a commission of $30.

Many traditional stock photographers were quick to use the example in their criticism of the microstock business model. They cited rates of $3,000 and $10,000 for a cover photo on Time Magazine. While such high rates may be suitable for more newsworthy photos, they’re well above even traditional stock photo agency rates for the same usage. The discussion has highlighted the usage versus availability part of the stock photo pricing debate.

Google added a ‘rights’ option to their advanced image search to help identify images available for free use with Creative Commons licenses. Daryl Lang, true to form, found copyright images marked as available for commercial use.

Google does include an appropriate disclaimer in the announcement and help pages explaining that images are indexed according to how they’re marked on each website. People wanting to use the photos need to do the usual due diligence to avoid exposure to legal risks.

PS: did you know that Crestock Stock Photos has the world’s fastest upload system?

And the winner of "PDNPulse's Best Leica S2 Price Guesser of all Time" is: British photographer Andrew Mahon!

In our "Guess the Price of the Leica S2" contest from a couple of weeks ago, Andy predicted that the new 37.5-megapixel medium format/DSLR camera would retail for $22,995 which is exactly the pricing that Leica announced yesterday. The camera will begin shipping in October.

And how did Mahon get the Leica S2 price spot-on?

"Essentially my prediction was just a lucky guess," he wrote us in an email. "Canon and Nikon charge approximately $8,000 for their top of the line cameras. As a Canon 1Ds3 user, and knowing Leica prices, I simply multiplied the Canon's RRP by 4 and then knocked a little off resulting in my prediction of $22,995."

Unfortunately, we don't have a prize for Andy, but here's a link to his website if you'd like to check out his work.

Congrats again Andy and thanks for the great response from everyone who submitted their guesses.

Stay tuned for our next contest -- Guess the Frame Rate of the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV. ;-)

The image above is actually the ceiling of a Starbucks I religiously observe coffee rituals at. I noticed one of the lamps was about ready to crash down on the head of an suspecting sipper and grabbed the shot. The whirl of the blenders was so loud I couldn’t make myself heard, so I just flashed my LCD screen tactfully at the barista. His eyebrows rose and he nodded.

This image turned upside down taught me once again the power of three dimensional thinking. The black and white study reminded me of the artists’ sculptures in the movie Beetlejuice?The long funnel looks like a sandworm from Dune and the hanging light (upside down it looks like an attentive dog looking at the funnel worm).

What is the ‘discourse” between these two creatures? What do they have to talk about?

Granted, there are not many cries in the streets for black and white still life studies of HVAC systems and components. But this image result is what you get when you get used to looking at the same image in a new way. I find this photo relaxing, but I don’t know why.  Is it the lack of color? I’d like to see this image reproduced on pearlized paper to showcase the texture.

There is a dynamism present I can’t explain. This effect is completely removed the effect the shot has right side up, especially in the context of sipping humans, blissfully ignorant of the sword of Damocles lingering over their heads. The implicit animism from the shapes alone is a unusual surprise. Image captures like this one make me wonder what I missed all those years without a camera.

If I hadn’t snapped the shot,  I wouldn’t have had the option to turn it upside down.  If I hadn’t had my camera with me, I wouldn’t have had the option. Without a decent camera, the shot would have been muddy and indistinct.

These are exactly the type of photos you are looking for to fill a portfolio in a manner that expresses your personality. With your separated categorical microstock shots lined up in their albums, there will always be room for a quirk factor. This quirk factor will showcase your eye, and your personality. Commissioners of certain types of jobs will be looking for this.

Keep your eyes open.

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This picture by Pete Souza just moved across the White House Flickr Photostream. In it, President Barack Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley toast at the start of their meeting in the Rose Garden of the White House this afternoon.

The meeting was an attempt to diffuse the accusations of racial profiling and unfair treatment that followed Crowley's arrest of an angry Gates as Gates was trying to enter his own home.

More photographs are in from Stephen Crowley of The New York Times, the soon-to-retire Ron Edmonds of the Associated Press, Jim Young of Reuters and, we assume, other photographers who cover the White House.

Will these picture be powerful enough to outweigh this one?

By the way, since everybody wanted to know beer selections:
Obama: Bud Light
Gates: Sam Adams Light
Crowley: Blue Moon
Joe Biden: nonalcoholic Buckler (Huh?!)

— By Daryl Lang

Posted this afternoon on PDN: Annie Leibovitz Sued Over Loan Payments.

Our story concerns a lawsuit against photographer Annie Leibovitz by a firm called Art Capital Group. According to the lawsuit, Art Capital Group loaned Leibovitz $24 million last year. The money had to be repaid within a year or Art Capital Group could seize Leibovitz's property, including her photo archive. A rep for Leibovitz said the claims in the suit are false.

We all know Annie, but Art Capital Group? Who are they?

To find out, let's start at the obvious place, Art Capital Group's Web site, which tells us the company is based in New York City and specializes in offering loans to people who own fine art. "Unlike traditional sources of capital, we are comfortable utilizing fine and decorative art as the sole asset for securing a loan," the site says. In the case of Leibovitz, they loaned her money against multiple assets including fine art (think: prints), intellectual property (think: negatives), and real estate. A Businessweek profile notes that the company was founded in 1999 and used to be called Fine Art Lease.

Earlier this year Art Market Monitor published an interview with Art Capital Group founder and CEO Ian Peck, in which he said a typical loan from his company is for 18 months. "We’re still aggressively lending. But our risk levels have gone up; so our rates have gone up," he said.

Last February, The New York Times published a story about Art Capital Group and other art-related loan business like it. As the credit crisis worsened, these companies saw their business jump. In 2009, Art Capital Group expected to make $120 million in art-related loans—a pittance in the financial services world, but a big number when you talk about art. The Times described these companies as like "pawn shops," noting that they often take possession of the art they've made a loan against. (The Leibovitz lawsuit doesn't say if Art Capital Group has physical possession of any of Leibovitz's property.)

As Gawker noted today, Art Capital Group also claimed the right to act as Leibovitz's agent. In March, Getty Images announced a deal to represent Leibovitz on certain special assignments. A month after that announcement, Art Capital Group filed a request for judicial intervention against Getty Images. (Document here.) The request, which has not been previously reported, was filed in New York State Supreme Court, New York County. Specific details about the request aren't in the file, but if Leibovitz's partnership with Getty has born any fruit, both sides have been very quiet about it. Leibovitz also has long-standing relationships with two other agencies, Art + Commerce and Contact Press Images.

In its lawsuit, Art Capital Group sought to portray Leibovitz as willfully disregarding the terms of her loan agreement. Leibovitz's camp shot back today, saying, "This is part of Art Capital’s continued harassment and attention-getting efforts. There has been tension and dispute since the beginning. Annie is in the same shoes as many other people involved with Art Capital."

— By Daryl Lang

Simple tidying up inside a file and adjusting what elements you can of a less than ideal setting can work wonders on the value of a single image. Get adept at cleaning up your microstock photos for online and print commercial use. The fine tuning of individual images will keep your editing and honing skills sharp for when you really need them.

Advanced software suites can offer intensely sophisticated effects, but the processing requirements, access to the appropriate licenses, and computing time necessary may not appeal to everyone. And that’s after you’ve gotten used to using this or that program, and absorbed the learning curve for that particular command or procedure.

Or, learn some quick, simple ways to improve a photo without launching NASA on your desktop.

I was asked by a friend to take a look at the photo he was using to sell his (classic) car. I didn’t know much about cars and the classic car resales market, but I do know how to market with a good picture. There were some things about the picture that made me wish I had given him some advice before his independent photo shoot. Above is the “after” image file version.

1. Find the focus

The promotion goal of the image was to enhance the appearance of the car body and condition to make probable buyers come take a look. But the photo also included a lot of background “noise” that had to be cut out. Commit to the shot by focusing on the goal. We want focus on the car, not the street, the sidewalk, the lawn, or the gutters.

2. Narrow the visual path

I took away the sidewalk and grass border, fluttered the sharply defined gutter lines, and channels enough blur values into the cement area to hide the worst of the oil and grease spots. This would have been the last type of high definition photo detail I would have captured for a used car photo. Using my eyes, I lopped off sides and top and bottom until almost no visual range of the scene was left except the car.

3. Shred the background

The kind of fuzzy cutout or hazy shading normally used to fuss out the background would make this Alice blue Corvette look like a romance novel cover, (unneeded overtones for a Corvette to be sure). I weeded out some of the brighter green grass and fuzzed the plants a bit. I denatured the focus at the bitmap level using the pencil tool. We want the view to appreciate the car’s lines, not the shrubbery.

4. Leave the Texture

This car had a hard candy shell, which the camera picked up beautifully. Any filtering or sharpening would tarnish this effect or harshen it and make it look fake (and degrade the image). Photos that grab the texture, like this hi-gloss shine, benefit best without packaging and processing by the big softwares. The color needed no enhancement.

5. Get off balance

By removing the linear elements like a tree trunk right behind the car, a hard gutter line front and back, ridged grass curblines slanting above the car’s profile, and some of the cement stains, the photo tilts out of composition to the car body. But the photo is a good one because the angled perspective showcases the characteristic shape of the car and excellent color.

I grassed out the background sidewalk after eradicating the tree. I took the white halftones present against the car ’s blue tones for the bitmap edges of the car aganst the new sidewalk area, and I borrowed shadow cement tones for shadow cement stains and in the light gray tones for the light areas. About four intersecting lines were removed that let the car’s outline take precedence.

Remember, reducing attributes of size after you edit demotes visual flaws. Use constraint and save often, and any mistakes can be arrested quickly. Many photo editing “mistakes” play out and down by the time final size is arrived at.

The final image is of a bland photo that allows the eye to train itself along the outline and focus on the details. The original shot was more poetic, but cluttered, intersected, and drew the eyeline from corner to corner and prevented central focus on the subject.

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Jersey Journal newspaper photographer Dylan Wilson was assaulted yesterday outside the home where a political consultant was found dead, according to the paper.

The consultant, Jack Shaw, 61, was one of 44 people arrested last week and accused of political corruption in a scandal that rocked New Jersey politics.

The Jersey Journal reports that Wilson was one of several members of the press waiting outside Shaw's building in Jersey City when he was attacked:

"One man charged out of the building screaming at Jersey Journal photographer Dylan Wilson, 'Man, somebody just died and you want to take pictures,' Wilson said. The man then put his hand on Wilson's throat and pushed him before going back into the building, Wilson said. The incident was reported to police."

Police consider it a case of simple assault and are not releasing the suspect's name, according to the Journal.

Update, July 30: Wilson tells us he's doing fine and has the full support of his editors.