Farewell Kodachrome
June 22nd, 2009After 74 years, Kodak have pulled the plug on Kodachrome: http://bit.ly/6qvtA
There will be photographers working today who have never used it.
They give us those nice bright colors, they give us the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day. I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph, so mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.
But as it now accounts for “a fraction of one per cent of our film sales” and everyone knows no one buys film any more (oh yes they do) they’ve rather emotionally decided to drop it.
Despite Paul Simon’s “greens of summer”, Kodachrome wasn’t particularly good with greens. Red and yellow was its forte, like its logo and packaging. Rich red, vibrant yellow, and the high blue skies of summer. Simon WAS right in that it made you think all the world’s a sunny day.
Being based in Wales, a land so beautiful the sun dare not show his face, I found that Fuji Velvia captured the greys and greens of my homeland more accurately.
So we based the cost of a fotoLibra subscription on the price of a roll of Fuji Velvia. I wonder how much it costs now?
But Kodachrome was a classic film. It was great in the way a ’56 Chevy was great, and sadly just as relevant to today’s world.
fotoLibra in the Telegraph
June 16th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’ve always wanted to see fotoLibra featured in the Daily Telegraph, because we know that Telegraph readers would love the fotoLibra site.
But for 3 years it’s proved impossible — they never responded to my imprecations, never answered letters, emails or phone calls. I used to be a good publicist, but it is hard to publicise one’s own baby.
So imagine the hurt and despair I felt when Dan Smith forwarded me a link to a Telegraph story about how anybody could make money from their photographs. Exactly what I’d been banging on about for years. And here was our story — but instead of being about fotoLibra, it was about American giants Flickr and GettyImages. And they were offering a selective deal, nowhere near as good as fotoLibra’s open offer.
But because fotoLibra is British, and small, we’re not sexy copy. Unlike Digital Railroad, we never raised $15 million, and also unlike Digital Railroad we’re still in business, selling our members’ pictures and paying them.
The Telegraph relented, and the übercritical but nonetheless wonderful Bash Khan blogged about fotoLibra today: http://is.gd/13kr7
Bash is in the Top Ten of London Tweeters, a dubious honour but an honour nevertheless. She is far from fawning in her assessment of fotoLibra. I accept it, because I know I’m the major part of the problem. I write too much, and people prefer to read less. And what I see as cutting edge design is suddenly three years old.
Chin up! We can improve. And we will. Let me know of any sites whose design you admire. And we’ll try to copy them slavishly.
If you agree with this statement, why not join our group on LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/1HAsKC ?
Photoshop is the tool of choice for most fotoLibra members. At the last count 7,227 fotoLibra members were using Adobe products. If one in ten of you can add your name to this petition we’ll soon have over a thousand.
A substantial constituency. Yet one that is treated with disdain by the Adobe corporation. Pound for dollar, Adobe products have always been around 20 to 40% more expensive in the UK than the US. They claim that support and marketing is more expensive over here.
I don’t believe that. Americans are higher paid and taxed lower than the Brits.
Come on Adobe. Show some respeck, man!
A heritage in photography
May 27th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I mentioned in a recent blog comment that I’d been a (bad) photographer for 58 years.
Someone had the effrontery to query the claim. Well here’s the proof:
Gwyn’s first camera
Hang on. Maybe they were querying the use of the word ‘bad’.
Hey — I sold a photograph today!
What can we do?
May 21st, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I’ve just had Jacqui Norman almost in tears.
Jacqui sends out our Picture Calls. She tries to be as precise and as accurate as possible.
On May 12th she sent out a call for aerial portrait format photographs of the North York Moors. This is what she wrote:
The TOUR series are all oblique aerial shots. You will need access to an aeroplane or helicopter. Even if you don’t have one, this is not impossible if you have enough chutzpah. Yvonne Seeley blogged about how you can do this yesterday on the fotoLibra Pro Blog.
The next image needed is a TOUR map series image of North York Moors, wanted by Monday, May 25th.
The images that have been submitted so far? Every single one of the 22 images submitted so far (4 days still to go to the deadline) has been taken with the photographers’ feet solidly planted on terra firma. And four of them are even landscape, not portrait.
None of these images will be shown to the client. They’re not what she asked for. We might as well send her pictures of the Great Pyramid At Giza for all the relevance they have to the precise requirements Jacqui laid out.
What can Jacqui do? How can she make the brief any clearer?
Our photographers aren’t stupid, so clearly Jacqui is, or we are, doing something wrong. I asked Nick Jenkins what he suggested and he came up with the idea of colour-coding these OS calls. So we’ve tried that, and it hasn’t worked.
Any more ideas?
Getting Ready for e-Books and Graphics
May 15th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Amazon’s Kindle is now allowing blogs to be posted. Here’s one user’s experience, which can be read in full at http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4341.html:
When I looked at the preview of what my blog looked like in the Kindle after adding my first blog to the system, I was shocked at the terrible quality.
First of all, it was black and white. My blog has pictures and on the Kindle they were not just black and white, they were low resolution black and white. It changed my carefully chosen font to a Times New Roman. In short it looked horrible. Sure, you can get away with a black and white eBook Reader for books, but if you are going to add other content, you need it to be full color or it just looks ghastly (or you are asking bloggers to come up with a special Kindle design, which is an unreasonable expectation).
It was at that moment, staring at that horribly ugly preview of my blog that it hit me. This is clearly a job for Apple.
Rumours of Apple working on an e-book reader have intensified over the past few months. Would it be like a big slender iPhone? Will it actually come? Or is this just wishware?
To many people, me included, the look and feel of a thing is as almost as important as the content. If I see my work in Times New Roman (a wonderful typeface, drowned by ubiquity) I feel physically sick. Fonts are the clothes words wear, as I quoted in my Encyclopaedia of Fonts.
And from fotoLibra’s point of view, the sooner we have colour e-books the sooner we can sell images to e-book publishers.
It will happen. So we are preparing for it.
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Pilots of light aircraft are passionate about flying. In clubs all over the country you’ll find private pilots just longing for a reason to take to the air. And the passenger seat of a Cessna or other high-winged aircraft is perfect for aerial photography … you can even open the window to avoid the plexiglas blur you get in most low-winged craft.
So, one sunny morning when it’s not too blustery, take yourself off to a flying club near to the landmark, view or whatever else you fancy shooting from the air and start chatting up the friendly pilots in the clubhouse. And before long, as long as you have a head for heights and a calm disposition, you’ll be up with the birds.
— posted by Yvonne Seeley
Search Engines and fotoLibra
April 30th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We had an email from fotoLibra member Jon Lees this morning. He wrote
I uploaded a image (Belfast Duck Tours) on Tuesday, supplied several keywords and a title. I ran a Google search on the subject matter this afternoon and did not get one fotoLibra hit. In fact there are not many hits on this subject matter, the business website and old newspaper article from an earlier press release, so in theory finding my picture should be very easy? Similarly searching for my photo of the Marine Current Turbine fails to generate any hits without mentioning fotoLibra in the search. Is this then a failing of the website, or are sales not generated this way? I must admit I know little about how search engines generate their information, but surely there must be a way of raising the site profile?
Given that the Google search robot alone uses up 4 gigabytes of our bandwidth every month trawling the fotoLibra site, we asked our Technical Development Manager Damien to respond. This is what he wrote:
What we aim to do is to improve the fotoLibra user experience for both buyers and sellers.
Search engines have hundreds of thousands sites to crawl every day, and many of them have thousands of pages. Though we give them instructions to help them find pages or combinations they would not necessarily guess, and try to add and present as much as possible relevant and descriptive data — we recently added metadata, categories, and collection names, which they would not have guessed — we can’t force, or even suggest to them, what they should do.
So they sometimes crawl aimlessly. They simply visit, so to speak.
But they usually have something precise in mind, and will query terms they know they don’t have enough relevant data about. And they do the same on other websites. Once they’ve gathered data, they are the ones who finally “decide” what and who is to rank higher, using complex algorithms.
This process can take weeks.
We can’t force them. They might feel we’re trying to fool them.
So what is important is: relevant and correctly spelled keywords. Informative, concise captions AND descriptions, in good English. Search engines just can’t analyse what’s in a picture, yet. They rely on the surrounding text which is expected to be descriptive. And search engines “prefer” good English, and tend to ban what they call “keyword stuffing”.
Another crucial point: other sites have to link to fotoLibra. We have to be the site people talk about.
Photographers’ sites have to link to us. fotoLibra has a wide range of very professional and specific pictures: specialised sites have to link to pictures on this particular domain too.
And so should forums, blogs, articles or anything that deals with picture researchers.
Because people interested in the subject read them, and they’re crawled by the search bots as well.
So, if anyone wants his pictures to be more likely to rank higher, he also has to post on forums or blogs or whatever he likes and uses to share his passion, and to tell people that he’s got amazing, rare, high quality pictures on that given subject, and that they are available at this place which has got hundreds of great pictures of his: fotoLibra.
There is no magical receipe. We’re trying to present and emphasize what’s good in it. If it helps the user finding images he’s looking for, the search engine will feel it does too. We’re targeting the improvement of user experience rather than being rigidly search engine compliant, like a porn site. The pictures are getting increasingly accurately described. The Pro Search tool is always improving. Then it gets better for everyone. That’s part of our job.
We have great quality images that people won’t find because they’re poorly captioned or keyworded. That’s the responsibility of fotoLibra’s members.
Good images must be advertised and talked about. People have to spread the world around the web, and elsewhere.
And that’s a part of all our jobs.
Great Expectations
April 29th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
On Monday we received a cancellation notice from a member. He had joined fotoLibra in February, uploaded five images of sunsets, and quit because he hadn’t sold any in nearly three months. It didn’t cost him anything, but he quit all the same.
Do we raise people’s expectations too high? We don’t promise the earth. fotoLibra was never a Get Rich Quick scheme. It was always a Get Slightly Better Off Over A Long Period Of Time operation, although Von wouldn’t let me use that as a slogan for the company. Nor would she … oh, I’ll leave that till later.
What’s a reasonable expectation? The most famous example is a guy who heard about fotoLibra on a Wednesday, uploaded a single picture on Thursday, we sold it to an ad agency the following Tuesday and 30 days later he received a cheque for £1,100 / €1,228 / $1,619. OK, that’s happened once. But it can happen. On the other hand it is possible to be a fotoLibra member for years and never sell an image. But for the great majority of members, once the upload number passes 250, fotoLibra provides a small but steady income.
The big bugbear, which we have yet to figure out a way around, is the etiolated delay between uploading a picture to a Picture Call and getting paid. Here’s the process, and if anyone has ideas on how the workflow can be improved, we’d like to hear them.
1. Picture researchers send us a list of images they want and when they want them.
2. Jacqui Norman sends out a Picture Call to our members, along with a deadline on the same day the researcher wants to see lightboxes.
3. We prepare anything up to 10 lightboxes per Picture Call, working at high speed to get the images on to the researcher’s desktop the day she wants to see them.
4. She makes a selection and shows them to her client (an editor, an advertiser, whoever). This could take anything up to 3 months, and it’s out of our hands.
5. The client makes a decision. This may take another three months. It is not final, but the researcher comes back to fotoLibra and downloads the hi-res images. We still do not know if the images are going to be used.
6. The book — let’s say it’s a book — is written, edited, designed, made ready for the printers. This takes at least 6 months.
7. The book goes to press, and we are sent a list of the photographs used and which we can invoice for.
8. 10 minutes later the invoice is sent out from our offices.
9. With a few very honorable exceptions (step forward, John Wiley & Sons, and receive the fotoLibra Plaudit) we get payment between 90 and 120 days after our invoice.
10. Once the money has been received, only THEN can we assure our members that a sale has been made. We pay everyone within 30 days of net sales receipts.
A simple addition will show that this process can take anything up to 18 months, with our member not knowing a thing about failing or being successful until 30 days before he receives his money.
It’s not good. But we can’t see a way round it. We can’t say a picture has been sold before we receive the money, because it hasn’t. We can and sometimes do say it’s been optioned, if it’s to a rock solid client like John Wiley & Sons.
Customers who buy off the site with a credit card are a different matter. That’s always a nice surprise to the member, when a cheque arrives with no warning. That can be 30 days after the picture’s uploaded.
All this is simply to warn new members that this is a long, drawn-out journey. So don’t join and take your images down a few weeks later. Let them mature. After all, we are a picture library, and items shouldn’t disappear from a library.
Cheap Photographs
April 24th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Anyone who’s read more than two or three of my posts will know what I think of the microstock system. There always has to be a loser, and in the case of microstock the loser is the creator, the artist — that is to say, the photographer. But as a responsible company we have to evaluate the business model and see if it could work for us. It could only work if the photographers knew EXACTLY what they were letting themselves in for. fotoLibra would have been a lot richer a lot quicker if we’d promised untold riches to our members from day one. And who knows, maybe that’s the right way to untold riches, riches beyond the dreams of aviaries, as Jimmy Edwards memorably said.
At the London Book Fair I stopped by a stand where they were displaying lots of illustrated books. The conversation went something like this:
“Hello, I’m from fotoLibra, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of just the images you need for your books.”
“What price?”
“Well, it rather depends on the usage. You see …”
“What cheapest price?”
“Ah, if you buy lots of images I’m sure we can offer a most attractive deal …”
“You tell cheapest price!”
A figure was mentioned. A laugh was heard.
“You see dat book?” An encyclopaedia was indicated. “Dat book, I buy all picture in dat book ten pound. Not one, all picture in book.”
WHAT I SAID
“Oh, well done you. Jolly good show! Very clever.”
WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID
“Well, you certainly get what you pay for, don’t you? I’ve never seen such unadulterated, badly printed crap. You should be prosecuted for first degree murder to trees. And if that’s the care and attention you devote to your images, I hate to think where the text originated, or what awful, erroneous message it’s getting across.”
But I’m British.
So I didn’t.