Microstock Calendar

Images of spa related mood and environments can be big big money makers for micro stock photographers as the website makers for spa type products range from surgery to skincare to aesthetician services to getaway travel. Any soothing, relaxing environment that looks like spa travel can also double for real estate or condominium or apartment related project. Real estate and home pictures can be very lucrative just now.

The value of a spa is the release from care, the absenting from everyday schedule, the escape from main residence existence and vacation to the location where no connection to work or responisbility exists. Many people who desperately need a spa visit may never even have seen a brochure. Pleasing cool fountains and dry crisp air, racket sports or yoga, hiking and cosmetology services may provide micro stock photography ideas.

To draw business to a spa, the creation of the two dimensional atmosphere online and in brochures is necessary. These types of micro stock shots will images of spa premises and amenities of spa visits and what types of things people would see on a visit to a spa. Micro stock images that are not site specific can be provided for mood. This can support some pages describing spa services or directions or menu items or

People will want to imagine themselves somewhere that is a release from worry and strain, a pressure valve letoff if you will. The aesthetics of these type of micro stock shots are extremely important because the attractiveness of the image is what is being assessed as well as the services that lie behind it. The image of a spa sells the spa services. So premium spa micro stock images will sell to a spa.

The setting of a spa geographically is important. Spas pay a lot of money to locate their spa in a palce of total relaxation and separation from civilization. The kinds of services they have will involve private sauna rooms, elaborate plumbing, mud baths, and exotic floral arrangements. If you do get into a spa, take some pictures.

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Getty Images today announced a deal to syndicate celebrity portraits by Los Angeles Times photographers.

The newspaper's "high-end contemporary celebrity portraiture" will be available through Getty's celebrity portrait division, Contour, Getty said in a press release (published below).

Few newspapers are known for celebrity portraits, but the Times is unique because of its proximity to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The deal does not involve the rest of the Times' photo archive.

The Times is owned by Tribune, which is in bankruptcy.

Photo: Angelina Jolie, © Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Contour by Getty Images

PRESS RELEASE
Contour by Getty Images Partners with the Los Angeles Times  

August 31, 2009 -- New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA --- Contour by Getty Images is honored to announce a new partnership with the Los Angeles Times, one of the most prestigious and influential newspapers in the United States with unprecedented coverage of Hollywood.

Contour by Getty Images will now represent the Los Angeles Times’ high-end contemporary celebrity portraiture including photographs of some of Hollywood’s biggest names such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, and many more. The collaboration between Contour by Getty Images and the Los Angeles Times will give publications worldwide a unique opportunity to access their extraordinary exclusive celebrity archive.

“The Los Angeles Times offers one of the premiere archives of celebrity portraiture in the world thanks to their long-standing and in-depth coverage of Hollywood,” says Elodie Mailliet, director of photography for Contour by Getty Images.

About the Los Angeles Times
The L.A. Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California and distributed throughout the Western United States. Founded in 1881, the newspaper currently has a circulation of 739,000 and more than a million readers on their 24-hour news website latimes.com.

About Contour by Getty Images
Contour by Getty Images specializes in the licensing and syndication of premium celebrity portraiture. Our diverse roster of world-renowned photographers includes David LaChapelle, Nadav Kander, George Holz, Mark Seliger, Michael Muller, Lorenzo Agius, Wolfgang Ludes, Julian Broad, Mike Ruiz, Steve Pyke, and many more.

Contour by Getty Images offers a boutique experience for our editorial clients worldwide. Some of the most respected names in the publishing industry use our imagery, such as  Vogue, The Telegraph, Bunte, Der Spiegel, London Sunday Express, FHM, Empire, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Total Film, Scotland on Sunday, Cine, Premiere, InStyle, People, Interview, GQ, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Time, Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Paris Match, Amica, Elle and Harpers & Queen.

The good news: Somebody is making a reality TV competition about photographers!

The bad news: It's the Playboy channel—which means the show might as well not exist, since nobody will ever admit to having watched it.

A press release seeking contestants for the new series declares: "Playboy Shootout offers aspiring photographers the chance to have their work appear in one of the world's most iconic magazines, not to mention a shot at every man's dream job."

Female photographers need not apply, apparently.

Less than a week after Stars and Stripes revealed the Pentagon was reviewing past work by embedded journalists—rating some of their reporting as "positive" or "negative"—the program has been stopped, the newspaper reported Monday.

A story today revealed that the U.S. military planned to end its contract with The Rendon Group, which had been conducting the reviews of media embedded in Afghanistan.

"The announcement follows a week of revelations by Stars and Stripes in which military public affairs officers who served in Afghanistan said that as recently as 2008 they had used reporter profiles compiled by The Rendon Group," the story added. The newspaper first reported on the program Aug. 24.

The Pentagon had initially denied it was conducting such reviews, but high-ranking officials later admitted they had been used in overall reviews of embeds. Stars and Stripes eventually found that at least two journalists had been denied embed slots, at least in part, because of information found during their reviews.

August was a slow news month in microstock. Business as usual for most.

Getty Images had the biggest microstock news in August.  They made their most bold move towards competing for buyers “similar” to microstock buyers to date. Introducing a new Web & Mobile license, all photos from Getty Images are now available from $5 for the small 170 pixel version. Even Rights Managed images are available for $15, though with the usage restrictions that come with such licenses.

Two years ago when Getty Images introduced a $49 web-only license, the traditional stock photography market reacted with uproar. Even though these new web and mobile licenses are cheaper and less restrictive, the industry response has been muted. These two years have seen a massive shift in the context of stock photo pricing, including a recognition of the typical microstock buyer as a market worthy of supplying.

Interestingly, a ‘key benefit’ on the Web & Mobile page reinforces the superiority of Getty Images photos over their own iStockphoto and other microstock agencies:

All our images come with indemnification – unlike most microstock – so you don’t have to worry about copyright ownership of our images.

Cutcaster launched a tongue-in-cheek dig at iStockphoto’s recent launch of the first microstock collection, Vetta. The new Cutcaster collection was titled ‘Betta than Vetta’, a play on both a famous ‘betta than chedda’ marketing campaign and the iStockphoto’s Vetta brand. It was renamed to just ‘Betta’ after a couple of days.

Fotolia announced that their new free photo website, PhotoXpress, overtook SXC in image quantity.

Dreamstime’s Facebook application which launched last month was cleared for official announcement this month. Shutterstock are also seeing enough results from social media to invest further. They launched Shuttertweet, a facility for contributors to connect their Twitter accounts to Shutterstock. The service tweets the quantity of images accepted and sold for the day to contributors’ Twitter followers with a link back to their portfolio. Like the Dreamstime Facebook application, Shuttertweet incentivizes use of the system by including affiliate codes in the links.

New microstock utility iSyndica also expanded their service with support for vector files and third-party login as detailed in my recent review.

Yuri Arcurs released a new microstock contributor tool in the form of an income projection calculator. Based on data of historical sales trends for different days and months, it calculates the anticipated monthly earnings at various microstock agencies based how much has been earned so far in the month.

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

There is some stunning photography happening around the Southern California fires, and as the temperature has been holding in the triple digits I can’t imagine the heat the camera would have had to take to get some of these pictures. The firefighters must be 115 degrees inside those fire fighting suits. It’s been triple digit heat in Southern California, which is really pre-earthquake seasonal warning.

 

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Smoke Nimbus fromBuena Vista and Olive Ave in Burbank at 5:00 pm Saturday.

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I was saddened to hear of the drug overdose death of DJ AM, a young man who had been somewhat influential on the Los Angeles music scene and had recently died in a New York hotel room. My first instinct was to type in the url of a website called “the Cobrasnake“, a photo website that has functioned as a gung-ho gallery of clubby scenester nightlife.

I don’t claim to hobnob with the Los Angeles party animals on any level, but as my scoping out of the site’s photo galleries increased, I began to feel I knew the players somewhat. these photos communicate a lot about the Los Angeles scene, and since I had been watching reruns of Entourage I remembered the episode DJ AM got the last pair of kicks Turtle wanted.

I was so used to the way the website resonated the scene, I was shocked to see there was no lead graphic of DJ AM, as i knew he had been featured in many of the Cobrasnake happening photo galleries. the photo galleries on this site are formed like diner receipts, each with that hardline number and check tab.

I emailed the admin for the site, letting him know I was disappointed not to see a bunch of DJ AM photos there. Later I typed in the address again and there was a landing page full of great images of this young man who will be missed and shuffled off the mortal coil way too soon. I was pleased to see they chosen happy ones, with DJ AM full of life and picture in the images with friends.

This is one of those moments when you know that photography transcends mere commerce and becomes a statement and a communication. Don’t think I didn’t notice that the color photos had all been transitioned to black and white. excellent work Cobra Snake. Way to micro stock the perfect greeting card for a new media kind of guy.

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There comes a time in the life of every photographer when they realize that the art of the hobby photograph has left them and that their habitual way of looking at images is part of a money earning, career growth concern. The path to riches is lined with…pixels! This is what makes the micro stock photographer a professional instead of an amateur.

There is nothing wrong with the habitual assessment of the image file as a commercially saleable item, or the constant revision of an image to make it more profitable. The world we live in, and the world we grew up in, was illustrated by hired images. The pictures we saw in our first books were commercially drawn or purchased in one manner or another.

The talent to review the potential of an image through the camera viewfinder and then capture that image in a manner to convey that idea is an artistic talent, one that often gets pushed to the back of cinematography or music recording because the finite end sum gain is a still two dimension object competing for attention in a three dimensional world.

A restoration of the world of photography has taken place with the advent of the World Wide Web. Since the computer screen on any size desktop or laptop is two dimensional, once again the most avidly used and sought medium of communication is two dimensional. the world of the television screen and the era of the motion picture has been replaced by the two dimensional framework which favors photography best.

When books were first made, only incredibly rare versions were made for the wealthiest of merchants and the most holy of learned priests. Little by little, over the centuries the book as a form of adventure and creative exploration has developed into something people take for granted. But once upon a time the decision to include an illustration was a momentous honor.

Today, there may be a website online for every human being that exists. there may be more than one, or dozens. but the decision as to what illustration to put on that one web site, or those dozens, is a privilege taken lightly. The honor of being able to determine what people experience online can be mastered, marshaled, and manufactured for those with the freedom and inclination to do so.

If somewhere in this mix of total commerciality of images for sale and low cost legal images some beauty and fire and spirit of the life we live can slip past, it’s all to the good. So keep working on your craft, in whatever field it happens to be in. Because the privilege of being able to deliver art, and personal vision, is a rae one to cherish and enjoy.

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It's a dangerous world out there. Maybe it's the late-summer heat, but several violent altercations between journalists and subjects have been caught on tape this month. Here are three of them, including a scary incident yesterday in Pennsylvania involving several photographers.

* * * *

Yesterday at a courthouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a man attacked several members of the press outside his daughter's court hearing. The man is the father of Bonnie Sweeten, who had just pled guilty in a case in which she was accused of faking her own abduction. Here's the video from WPVI-TV in Philadelphia:

NBC Philadelphia has another angle.

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Last weekend an angry woman in Cocoa Beach, Florida, went after two TV news crews with a garden hoe, landing a direct hit on a video camera. The journalists were covering a story about teenage girls who were arrested for allegedly dancing at a strip club. Here's the video from WOFL FOX 35:

And another angle from WESH 2 News.

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Last week, a reporter and two photographers from a TV station in Norfolk, Virginia, were shoved when they tried to interview the owners of an employment services company accused of running a scam. After the incident, the TV reporter and the owners of the company were both pressing assault charges against the other party. Watch the video from WTKR-TV and see for yourself: