fotoLibra Blog

We’re always asked if we want model releases with the photographs we sell.

The short answer is Yes. It’s much easier to sell a photograph with a model release than without one.

But given that the great majority of fotoLibra’s images sales are for editorial use, it’s not always absolutely essential. It merely restricts the possible markets for the photograph. You don’t generally need a model release for an image used editorially.

Now here is a terrible example, an awful warning. Someone took a picture of a very photogenic Greek shepherd complete with luxuriant beard. It was uploaded to a picture library. No names, because I don’t know them.

A Swedish yogurt manufacturer bought the photograph from the picture library and plastered it over his pots of “Turkish” yogurt. Unfortunately the shepherd’s cousin happened to be living in Stockholm and spotted his kinsman being passed off as a Turk. This is an offensive concept to many Greeks.

What was more offensive is that the subject of the photograph hadn’t given his permission for it to be used in advertising. He hadn’t signed a model release. Almost all shepherds have smart cosmopolitan lawyers these days, and the yogurt company was slapped with a £4.5 million lawsuit.

Our simple, bucolic countryman apparently settled later for £150,000, which is a lot more expensive than buying a properly licensed image from a company such as fotoLibra.

You can read more about this story (and see the offending yogurt pot) on the BBC site (so it must be true) and you can download and print off as many fotoLibra Model release forms as you like from here, and of course property release forms from here. When you use these, keep the signed piece of paper as a record of your contract with the subject and tick the ‘Model Release’ and ‘Property Release’ boxes on your Edit page with a carefree heart.

We will of course double check with you should we be about to sell one of your images to a yogurt pot manufacturer or other commercial organisation.I don’t know where the fault lies here — if the yogurt company had revealed the end use of the image to the picture library and they had authorised the sale without clearances, then the library is to blame. If the yogurt company just bought the picture without revealing what it was going to be used for, then the yogurt company is to blame.

The shepherd and the photographer would seem to be the only two innocent parties here. Unless the photographer misrepresented the image to the picture library, claiming it was model released.

Oh, I don’t know. Just be careful, that’s all.

This is the Index to the fotoLibra Pro Blog postings since January 2010.

If you’re new to fotoLibra, welcome! — and may we suggest you read through the HINTS & TIPS section, and if nothing else read Great Expectations from the 2009 blog. It still holds true.

In fact there are a lot of interesting posts in the 2009 blogs, and you can see an Index to them here.

Comments are welcome, even on old posts, and will be read and often responded to.

HINTS & TIPS

• 10 Hot Tips For Selling Your Photographs
• Mountains Into Molehills
• Why DPI Does Matter

ABOUT FOTOLIBRA

• autoFocus

ADOBE

• Two Trick Pony
• Adobe Still At It …

CUSTOMERS

• Picture Perfect
• Types Of Buyers

E-BOOKS & PUBLISHING

• eBook Pricing
• Kindle For The iPhone

IT

• Up to 20 Mbps Broadband
• Where Does iPad Fit In A 3 Screens World?
• Chopped Pork & Ham

LAW

• Guidance From The Met
• Privacy
• The Future Of Online Advertising
• Curioushints & tios, Adobe, ebooks, about fotoLibra,

MICROSTOCK

• Microstock: Why Would A Reputable Company Do This To Themselves?
• More Microstock Moans
• Selling Photographs Through Flickr And Getty

MISCELLANY

• Here’s What We’ve Got
• The Keyword Poem

NETWORKING

• Links You May Have Missed
• fotoLibra 2009 Pro Blog Index

PICTURE CALLS

• Guitar Porn

… is better known as SPAM, a sort of tinned meat. It’s a strange foodstuff, something I thought of as a product of the irretrievably grim British food rationing of the 1940s and 50s. But it turns out to be American, and some people eat it because they like it.

When Monty Python satirised the unimaginative British cuisine of the 1960s, they did a sketch in a restaurant where every dish was spam-based. This tickled the funnybones of early computer folk, and they would type “SPAM” over and over again to edge unwanted visitors off their primitive bulletin board sites. Once the verb “spamming” was coined, the force was unstoppable.

The key word of course is “Unwanted”. I do not want endless emails from China offering me Canadian pharmaceutical products (can’t see how that works) nor do I need any more chances to enlarge my manhood.

But if I sign up to an organisation, register with a business, give a company my details, join a club or become a member, I would expect to hear from that organisation. Especially if I’d paid a membership subscription. If I didn’t, I may simply forget about it — but if I’d paid, I’d want to know why I hadn’t heard from them.

Enter fotoLibra. It’s not compulsory to sign up to fotoLibra, just highly recommended. If you do, we will email you. And as a picture buyer or seller, what we send will be of interest to you. If it’s not, there’s a link at the bottom of every email which you can simply click on to be removed from our list. It also has our address so you can write and complain if we fail you.

What I’m saying is that we do not send out spam. People have signed up to fotoLibra, and we email them. Our problem is that a LOT of people have signed up to fotoLibra, and we simply cannot write to everyone individually, so we have to do what computers and email clients are very good at — sending one message to lots of different people.

Surprise, surprise. Lots of our innocent, requested emails get classed as spam. Of course we are to blame for some of it — we should never type the subject IN CAPITALS (apparently that’s popular among real spammers); HTML formatted emails (which ours are) send out alerts; bulk mailings are an obvious no-no. Trigger words such as ****, !!!! and %$%$ will often lead to blocked mail, even if used innocently.

Someone who will remain nameless recently sent out a fotoLibra Picture Call for photographs of guitars. Unfortunately she added an extra word commonly used in the publishing world to describe such books. Bang, bang, bang. Down came the shutters. The vast majority of ISPs blocked the mailing. As a result we only have 12 pictures of guitars to answer the call. Memo to self: get her to resend the call today WITHOUT the funny words.

Nevertheless it’s frustrating for us to mail people with information they genuinely want and then find our mailings are rejected. Some filters seem to be fairer than others, and I was particularly impressed by one company which sent us this message:

Your message was waitlisted.
Please add yourself to my Guest List so your messages will be delivered to my Inbox. Use the link below.
Click here to deliver your message
Boxbe (www.boxbe.com) prioritizes and screens your email using a Guest List and your extended social network. It’s free, it removes clutter, and it helps you focus on the people who matter to you.

Now that really does seem to screen out the professional spammers. HOWEVER — and this is a big HOWEVER — a quick search on the internet reveals a lot of people slagging off this company for spamming people themselves. I won’t be using it as a result, but it may suit some people.

So. Here’s our problem. Where is our solution?

Man joins fotoLibra as a Seller at 12:45 and uploads four photographs.

Another man in another country on another continent joins fotoLibra as a Buyer at 17:15 and immediately buys one of the new seller’s photographs for £140, paying by credit card.

Why am I suspicious?

Nobody has joined and made such a quick sale as this since last year, when a Brazilian signed up and uploaded five photographs, all of which were bought within two hours for comfortably large sums of money by another Brazilian who had just signed up the same day. He too paid by credit card. 89 days later the bank snatched back the money, all of it.

Have I the right to be suspicious?

Last week my credit card was refused (I was trying to buy several litres of Pimms). We contacted the card issuers and found a payment of £10 had been made a couple of days earlier to Oxfam. Not by me it hadn’t been. This was followed up by an attempt to pay a large Southern Electricity bill with the card, which had been rejected. We don’t have Southern Electricity. So the credit card was compromised — how? — and quickly cancelled. A replacement arrived yesterday.

If this transaction turns out to be fraudulent, we stand to lose £70. It’s not a huge amount of money, though God knows we could all do with it. If they are fraudsters — and how can I tell? — they’d have to do it many times over to make a living out of it.

There’s been much contention recently over the  deal made between the snapshot sharing site Flickr and the behemoth of the picture library stock agency world Getty Images.

A couple of years ago the companies agreed that Getty could have their pick of the millions of images uploaded to Flickr. Of course not all of them are snapshots — some probably approach professional standards. But now Flickr has announced their “Request To License” programme. This is what they said:

“Starting today in the Flickrverse [bleagh!] Flickr members and visitors can work with each other through a new program with Getty Images called “Request to License”. We’ve built this program on the success of our launch of the Flickr Collection on Getty Images just over one year ago.

“So, how does it work? Under the Additional Information heading on your public photo pages you’ll see a “Want to license” link. Only you see this link. Visitors to your photos won’t.”

There is whipped up concern that Flickr members have no idea how to value their images and that Getty will rip them off. This is very, very unlikely.

Our concern at fotoLibra is that it’s Getty who have no idea how to value their images, as this week a Getty spokesperson was quoted by Amateur Photographer as saying:

“Flickr contributors will receive 30% of the fee and the average price for Rights-managed images is around $500 (£335). Royalty-free images are licensed at set prices based upon the file size the customer purchases. Flickr contributors will receive 20% of the fee and the average price for RF is around $200 (£134).”

(Incidentally fotoLibra member photographers get 50% of the sale fee and Platinum members get 60%.)

Well, that’s news to us. Getty’s ‘average’ prices, that is. I have lost count of the number of potential clients who have refused to deal with fotoLibra because “you’re so much more expensive than Getty Images.” Yet our average price for Rights-managed images is around $76 (£51), compared to their quoted $500 (£335).  So maybe someone isn’t telling the full, entire, unvarnished truth here. And it’s not me.

If those quoted prices really are true, why hasn’t fotoLibra been swamped with buyers? Our photographers are every bit as good as theirs, and our average price is 15% of their quoted average price. That is a staggering difference.

I very much doubt that Getty Images averages $500 per rights-managed image sale. How I wish that were true! Perhaps it’s all smoke and mirrors, like those famous microstock offers of a dollar for a picture.

I will not yield to anybody in my admiration for Adobe’s Photoshop. It is a stunning piece of software, and anyone who uses a digital camera for anything more than snapshots must have a copy — and use it.

I am less enamoured with Adobe, the corporation. It’s well known that I and many others abhor their commercial decision to charge 37% more for their recently released Creative Suite 5 in the UK than in the USA, as I argued in a recent blog.

Last week I went to a day-long presentation of Adobe CS5 in London, presented by Adobe Evangelists. This is not my opinion of them — this is the genuine job title they carry on their business cards. And they live up their titles: fervent, enthusiastic, excitable, missionary; they tried their level best to whip a somnolent English audience into paroxysms of frenzy with whoops and hollers, at one stage encouraging us to yell “Yee-HAW!” if a particular feature of CS5 caught our approval.

We didn’t. Not because we weren’t impressed, but because we were British. We don’t do “Yee-HAW!” especially when we have to pay 37% more than the Americans to shout “Yee-HAW!”

We just sat there, mute, unresponsive, like London pigeons ignoring the strutting, flaunting cock bird. For, like the pigeons, we all knew that we would end up getting screwed.

In the morning, we were shown the exciting new features in Photoshop CS5. And, in case we weren’t paying attention or we really were dead (as I swear the morning evangelist believed we were) they showed them again to us in the afternoon in a separate seminar. Still, we eventually got the point.

And yes, the new Photoshop has a fabulous new trick called Content Aware which looks at the background of an image, and if you delete something in the foreground you don’t have to be left with an empty hole as you would expect — it will guess at what’s behind and fill it in. You have to see it work, and you can here.

There’s another feature that enables you to pick up hard-to-select parts of an image such as flyaway hair. Very impressive.

But I had other more important concerns. Another new featurette (maybe this was in the page layout package in InDesign, part of CS5) allowed you to attach the Caption (or Keywords, or Description, or other parts of the IPTC dataset) directly to a placed image. Earlier versions of Photoshop have notoriously stripped out the IPTC metadata from an image, not the most useful feature for stock libraries and professional photographers, which are perhaps the audiences at which Photoshop is primarily aimed. So I asked our afternoon Evangelist Terry White if this sinful aberration had been rectified. He blinked cautiously, but then a mouthful of American teeth flashed a “Yes.”

If Terry told me the truth — and how could I doubt an Evangelist? — this is the strongest possible argument for the world upgrading to Adobe CS5. Forget the party tricks; this is what we need from a professional tool. It’s not before time.

Neither I nor anyone else asked if they’d built a more robust version. We didn’t have the heart, after Adobe Bridge crashed twice in the morning sessions. We Brits don’t like to embarrass people.

The relationship between Adobe’s Evangelists and their British audience reminds of the old story of a Frenchman who was caught having sexual relations with a corpse on a beach.  Les flics pulled him off and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. “Mon Dieu!” he answered in some shock, “I thought she was English”.

Three male members wrote in to complain about Jacqui’s “sexist” depiction of male readers in the GUITAR PORN Picture Call (read it here) sent out earlier this week. She was prepared to stand her ground, but on my advice she unreservedly apologises for any upset she may have caused. It was clearly an improbable assertion; the story was meant to be funny, and she is sorry people were unable to read it as such. What amuses some will offend others.

The fault lies with me. I told Jacqui about Guitar Porn, saying there was a sector of the book publishing market which aimed books at people who preferred to look at pictures rather than read too many words. This sector is overwhelmingly male, and subjects they enjoy are big breasts, Harley-Davidsons, guitars, farm machinery and so on. More granular market research reveals that these books are generally bought by women for their menfolk. What Jacqui wrote was based on what I said, and I fully approved it.

Despite some confusion about my name in foreign parts, I am a man, and I know the markets these books reach. I feel it’s perfectly reasonable to poke fun at them — unless we can’t poke fun at anybody ever again for fear they’ll take offense.

Nevertheless my comments as interpreted by Jacqui were seen as sufficiently offensive for three people to complain. That means there were at least thirty who felt the same way but couldn’t be bothered to write in. I’m sorry that I (for it was my doing) upset these people, but it was meant to be light-hearted. A flat announcement for photographs of guitars is too dull for fotoLibra.

That said, another three people wrote in to say how much they enjoyed Jacqui’s sense of humour.

That argues at least another 30 do too.

You, I thank.

The great American adman Leo Burnett (he of the red apples in reception)  memorably defined advertising as saying to people, ‘Here’s what we’ve got. Here’s what it will do for you. Here’s how to get it.’

This is a lesson conned by every marketing student since Leo first formulated the thought.

But now this tripod trope has evolved into a biped.

Advertising now is only about ‘Here’s what we’ve got. Here’s what it will do for you.’ People no longer have to be told how to get it.

We got it. We have credit cards, broadband, Google and Amazon. We all get it.

1. Pluck the low hanging fruit first by photographing the subjects people want to buy. You can indulge your hobbies later.
2. Make sure people can find your photographs by keywording them well. Buyers search for words, not images.
3. Put them on a busy street which professional picture buyers walk up and down. Like fotoLibra.
4. Get your exposures and white balance right. Out-of-focus may be artistic or deliberate, but under- or over-exposed is just wrong.
5. If you’ve taken 20 photographs of the same thing, choose only one — the best. Don’t upload all 20. You will weaken your appeal.
6. But take it in portrait AND landscape. Offer empty space such as sky and sea so designers can envisage room for text.
7. Got a favourite local building, tree or landscape? Take it in summer, winter, autumn and spring. Take it in storm and sunshine.
8. Don’t be the same as everyone else. Be as good or better.
9. Become technically proficient. Taking a photograph should be instinctive. Post processing is as, if not more, important than pressing the shutter.
10. “Everyone is capable of making at least one great photograph in their life.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Every day hundreds of thousands of innocent fotoLibra photographers are hauled off the streets of London and incarcerated in foul, dank dungeons with no hope of release for simply snapping a cop brutalizing an illegal immigrant, or some other harmless pastime.

OK, that may be a mild exaggeration but it’s nothing to what might happen if [insert name of your most loathed political party here] comes to power.

In the event of this happening — or in any event — fotoLibra members might like to read the Metropolitan Police’s official line on taking photographs in public places.

It is not what the scaremongers would have you believe. In general, you’re allowed to do pretty much what you like. And the police have NO POWER AT ALL to delete your photographs.

All the same, if you’re taking photographs in London, better print it out and keep it in your camera bag.