Last year we told you about this custom birthday cake designed as a Nikon D700 and now here's the inevitable Canon 5D Mark II version by Studio Cake. Our only question is: how many pixels per byte?
(Via Daily Front Row from Pretty Foods & Pretty Drinks.)
Ken Light, the San Francisco photographer who won a judgment in February against Al Gore's cable TV network for unauthorized use of an image, now has to fight to defend his rights again.
Current TV has appealed an order from a small claims court to pay Light $500 plus $88 in court costs for publishing a 1994 image of Texas death row inmate Cameron Todd Willingham. He was the subject of an award-winning New Yorker article that cast doubt on the evidence that led to his murder conviction and eventual execution. After the article appeared, Current TV downloaded and published Light's portrait of Willingham on its Web site without permission.
Light tried repeatedly to collect a retroactive license fee for the use. He was eventually rebuffed by a Current TV lawyer who told him in an e-mail that "the use of your photo was authorized under the legal doctrine of fair use."
Light said he sued in small claims court on a state law claim (unfair business practices) rather than charge copyright infringement in a federal court because small claims are easier, faster, and less expensive to prosecute.
Current TV has appealed to San Francisco Superior Court, where its lawyers will be able to mount a more vigorous defense against Light's claim. That will cost Current Media a lot more than simply paying the small claims judgment. But the media company has a self-interested principle to defend: the right to use news photos at will without permission, and without payment.
A trial date has been set for April 14.
Some interesting developments in the microstock market this month.
123rf did a substantial website redesign this month, as did Bigstock, both on the same day. Both updates included new logos and Bigstock also included a minor name change.
Amos Struck and I launched Microstock Charts, a free service for microstock contributors to track and (eventually) benchmark their earnings and other metrics. Amos later launched a handy news aggregator service called Microstock News, this time partnering with everyone’s favorite Italian microstock blogger, Roberto Marinello, of mystockphoto.org.
Well on the way to automating the entire submission process with a few key agencies, iSyndica released some handy tools to manage model and property releases. Log in to your iSyndica account to check it out.
The Vivozoom affiliate program commission increased from 5% to 15%, with recurring commissions for 1 year.
Fotolia added payment options to their free photo website PhotoXpress. Paying customers get higher download quotas for the free image collection, but also limited downloads of the “Premium Collection” – images from Fotolia. Subscription prices are slightly cheaper at PhotoXpress than at Fotolia.
© Marc Garanger
New York Photo Festival organizers announced the exhibition plans of curators Vince Aletti, Erik Kessels, Fred Ritchin and Lou Reed today.
Submissions will be taken through July 15, 2010. Entry details can be found here.
AP Photo/Ed Bailey, Courtesy of AP
The Associated Press reported this morning that photographer Marty Lederhandler, who worked for AP for 66 years before retiring in 2001, died last night at age 92. He had suffered a stroke February 17. He passed away at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, NJ.
A full obituary written by the Associate Press is available here.
The funeral service for Marty Lederhandler will be held Sunday, March 28 at 9:30am at:
Gutterman Funeral Home
402 Park St (corner of Passaic Ave)
Hackensack, NJ 07601
Ph: 800-522-0588
We'd don't want to tread into the always controversial waters of who makes the better cameras, Canon or Nikon, but when it comes to official (and unofficial) tchotchkes and collectibles lately, Canon's the hands-down winner.
First there was that 70-200mm Canon lens coffee mug that our readers went crazy over. And now an artisan at Etsy has created a vinyl decal of the Canon DSLR mode dial to lay over the Apple symbol on your MacBook or MacBook Pro.
Pretty geeky for sure but your photographer friends will likely be jealous. (Though it's worth noting that the "green" dummy mode on the decal clearly marks this as a consumer DSLR dial replica.)
Unfortunately, last we checked Etsy, the $15 decal was sold out. Hopefully they'll restock soon before the Canon trademark police crack down on it.
(By the way, if you come across any cool Nikon collectibles, please leave a link in the comments below.)
(Via Gizmodo.)
Earlier this month Bigstock introduced a major redesign of their website. New logo, new branding, new navigation, new tools and new search! It was not just a minor visual update. Let’s take a closer look.
The first and most obvious change is the visual re-design. The new look is more modern and professional. The navigation is easier and more logical. The new logo is modest in comparison to the glaring 80’s looks of the old logo.
The buyer interface is greatly improved with search results filling full browser width, primary actions highlighted on search result and image detail pages, and a logical advanced search processes with popups so buyers don’t lose their position when refining a search.
The submission process has been enhanced with a more logical flow, improved batch editing tools, and some nice shift-click & double click actions.
Significantly, a new API (buyer functions only) will open up selling opportunities beyond the website itself.
Two cool new blogs, separated for buyers and sellers, are also showing promise with content that demonstrates more than a token effort at blogging.
SEO is greatly enhanced, using methods that are now standard across microstock agencies. The image title and description now become the meta-title and meta-description in the page code.
The company has been renamed to Bigstock (with lower case ’s’), which is what everyone was calling them anyway. There was a short period during launch of the new site when the bigstock.com domain name was used. The old bigstockphoto.com redirected to bigstock.com. While consistent in branding, it meant the company lost all their SEO benefit so bigstockphoto.com was quickly switched back to the primary domain of the site.
As a bonus feature, we can now change our username, and easily, which wasn’t possible before (not that it’s visible on the site).
See the complete list of new enhancements on the new ‘upload’ blog for sellers.
While there were many significant enhancements to the design, structure and layout of the site, there’s still some aspects that photographers have come to expect from microstock agencies that are still missing from Bigstock:
Showing earnings on the sidebar or header like all other top agencies (except Shutterstock) would save us some clicking and save Bigstock some bandwidth. Bigstock say’s there are plans to update the visibility of earnings and improve the display of the details. This re-design was just the first step.
Model release management could show photos attached to each release and total earnings for each model. While most microstock agencies still don’t require new model releases for each shoot, the earnings data per release is a valuable metric.
The list certain doesn’t stop there, but this was a website redesign, and not a policy redesign. Bigstocks relatively weak affiliate program, clunky data reporting and the inability to remove files without going through support, would all be towards the top of the policy redesign list for most contributors. The company has lots of planned enhancements but is keen to hear from contributors about what they’d like. They recommend using the feedback@bigstock.com and support@bigstock.com email addresses for suggestions and concerns.
The redesign is a direct result of Shutterstock’s acquisition of the company. This enabled teams to be combined and the intelligence from both companies to be shared.
It demonstrates an investment in the business and the brand, indicating that it won’t be closed down any time soon. Shutterstock had made in clear they planned to develop Bigstock, so it wasn’t a widely held concern, though confirmation is always welcome.
The new design places emphasis on the photos. There’s no elaborate designs, just a simple and clear website, highlighting great photography.
Including an API and enhancing SEO shows where the market is going and how critical technology is to success. Parent company Shutterstock is now the only agency among the leaders without an API (it’s still in development).
A new advertising campaign was launched at the same time of the redesign starting with Bigstock’s participation at SXSW. Some microstock contributors are reporting noticeable increases in sales performance already, which is hopefully a sign of improvement for the agency.
The search engine in the new site is substantially more sophisticated. It now supports Boolean operations AND and NOT, searching within search results, and algorithmic ‘variety’ in the search results. As the microstock market continues to become more competitive, delivering fast and workable search results becomes a bigger factor in customer retention.
In addition to these changes, tweaks to the algorithm (weighting of keyword relevance, popularity, editorial rating, etc) have substantially improved the balance of quality, relevance and “freshness” of the search results.
Clearly a lot of thought and work went into this update. It brings Bigstock closer to the more successful agencies in terms of branding and website experience. Let’s hope that combined with the boost in marketing and promotions it translates into higher sales volume.
What do you think about the redesign?
Have you seen Microstock Charts yet?