Archive for the ‘General’ Category
SSL Certificate, One Year On
September 23rd, 2019
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
fotoLibra users will have noticed the site has been difficult to reach over the past few days, peppered with warnings that This Is An Insecure Site.
It’s because we didn’t have an SSL Certificate. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and is a digital code to prove that we are who we say we are on line. It costs about £100 a year. We bought ours from a company called 123-Reg.
They sent me a questionnaire to ask what I thought of their service. Here’s how I replied:
To Ben Law
123-Reg Brand Director
Hello Ben
Are you sure you want to read this? It’s not very complimentary. But then I’ve never had such bad service from a company in my working life.
We bought a two year SSL Certificate from you in September 2017.
In August 2018 you summarily revoked it, and our website was down for five days. No reason was given and no admission of guilt was made. The certificate was stealthily renewed after five days.
In order to prevent this happening again, I contacted you on August 16th 2019 to get our SSL, which was due to expire on September 13th, sorted long before I went on holiday on September 1st.
It happened again.
Here is my increasingly desperate correspondence with 123-Reg, attempting to renew or replace our SSL Certificate.
I have removed your boilerplate “If there’s anything else at all I can do for you please let me know and I’ll be very happy to help” from the following correspondence as it’s not true, and is intensely irritating,
Also the slogan ‘We Make It Easy’ appears on your home page. After reading through this correspondence, please tell me if you honestly believe that to be a valid claim.
AUGUST 16th
Gwyn to 123-Reg
gwyn.headley
16.8.2019. 12:51
We received the following email from you.“Don’t risk losing your services (www.fotoLibra.com)
Gwyn,
The product(s) listed below are due for renewal. We’ll attempt to take payment from your PayPal account on or around 30/08/2019 to ensure the continuation of your service. You can view and update your payment settings here.
Organisational SSL www.fotolibra.com £191.98 two years
SSL certificates need to be renewed 14 days in advance of their expiry date in order to avoid interruption of your service. An SSL renewal goes through the same process as the original SSL setup, so we urge that you log in upon renewal and confirm that all settings are correct.”We bought a two year organisational SSL from you in September 2017, which will expire in September 2019. In August 2018 you mistakenly revoked this SSL, with the result that our company was off line for five days through your error.
We do not want this to happen again this year. I have logged into 123-Reg and ensured that I have two active payment methods set up for you. We would like you to deliver our renewed SSL certificate as soon as possible to avoid the inevitable complications.
Also, when we click on our SSL Overview on your ‘Dashboard’ we read
www.fotolibra.com Organisational SSL Expired 13/09/2019
If the renewal date is not due until 13/09/2019, how has it expired?AUGUST 17th
Mihai-Marian
17.8.2019. 23:34
Hi Gwyn,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
I’ve made a few checks on the Organisational SSL certificate assigned to www.fotolibra.com and in our systems this shows as revoked, however, I’ve checked the status of the SSL certificate with our Certificate Authority and in their records, the SSL certificate shows as active until the 13th of September 2019.
Also, to double-check this, I ran a test here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.fotolibra.com
It may be best that in this specific situation to purchase a new SSL certificate and apply this to www.fotolibra.com
You can purchase the SSL certificate from https://www.123-reg.co.uk/ssl-certificates/ and apply it to your domain as per https://www.123-reg.co.uk/support/ssl-certificates/how-do-i-apply-an-ssl-certificate/.
Here https://www.123-reg.co.uk/voucher-codes/ you can find a voucher code for a discount on a new SSL certificate.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Kind Regards,
Mihai-Marian
123 RegAUGUST 20th
gwyn.headley
20.8.2019. 10:10
Thank you. How can your system possibly show our SSL Certificate as revoked when by your own admission it isn’t?
Gwyngwyn.headley
20.8.2019. 10:30
Thank you for the voucher code for the discount on renewing our SSL Certificate with you. On reading the small print it says “This offer shall expire on 31st January 2019.” Can you send us an update please?
GwynDanny
20.8.2019. 11:01
Hi Gwyn,
On the page https://www.123-reg.co.uk/voucher-codes/ it says that the voucher code will expire on the 1st of January, 2020.
Please rest assured that the voucher code is active and will work.
However, you have made a confusion. My colleague advised that it is best to purchase a new SSL certificate. The voucher can only be used on a new purchase and does not apply for renewals.
As per the email sent to you, we will try to renew the current SSL certificate on the 30th of August.
If you want to benefit from the discount, I can set the current SSL certificate to not auto renew and you can purchase a new SSL certificate around the same date, 30th of August.
If you wish to keep the current SSL certificate, we will attempt to renew it for you on the 30th of August.
Regards,
DannyAUGUST 23rd
Gwyn
gwyn.headley
23.8.2019. 16:29
OK, as I understand this — if you take money from my active PayPal account on or about August 30th then the SSL certificate will automatically renew for two years and we don’t have to do anything. Is that correct?
However if we buy a NEW certificate from you within the next week as you recommend, we get a 25% discount for the first year, but then we have to get a new certificate from you and install it, which has previously led to astonishingly unnecessary complications and a random cancellation and improper revoking of our certificate this time last year.
An additional problem is that I am away for the first three weeks of September and our Technical Development Manager who would have to install the new SSL does not get any emails, data or, of course, the SSL certificate from you.
What do you suggest we do?
GwynAUGUST 24th
Support Agent
Mihai-Marian
24.8.2019. 18:11
Hi Gwyn,
As you have PayPal selected as the 1st Payment method, our system will try to automatically renew the SSL certificate on/about 30th of August 2019.
If you purchase a new SSL certificate, the same type with the same billing period of two years you would actually benefit two discounts, 20% from purchasing this for two years and 25% from the voucher code as per the simulation we ran on your account as you may confirm from the attached screenshot (we left this in your basket just in case).
The total cost including VAT would be £115.19 for a new SSL certificate while the renewal cost is £191.98 including VAT.
In both situations (either a new SSL certificate or a renewal), the issued SSL certificate will have to be installed again on your server.
If you opt for a new SSL certificate, you would also have to pass again a vetting process with our SSL certificate provider Starfield, this is due to the degree of trust it provides.
In regards to the “Technical Development Manager” query, this won’t be something we can advise on.
Kind Regards,
Mihai-Marian
123 RegSEPTEMBER 1st: I GO ON HOLIDAY with limited email access
SEPTEMBER 3rd
gwyn.headley
3.9.2019. 16:03
Hello, have you taken the SSL renewal fee from my PayPal account? Whe can we have the renewed certificate?
ATB, Gwyn HeadleySupport Agent
Gabriel
3.9.2019. 19:20
Hi Gwyn,
The renewal was not yet made automatically.
Currently, the old certificate is still available. You can wait for the renewal to be made automatically or purchase a new certificate, using the discount my colleagues have provided with you.
Kind Regards,
Gabriel
123 RegSEPTEMBER 7th
Gwyn
gwyn.headley
7.9.2019. 08:37
PLEASE take my money and supply the renewed SSL Certificate as soon as possible! Gwyn Headley7.9.2019. 10:35
Hi Gwyn,
I have checked and I’m to let you know that it is not possible to renew the current SSL certificate for www.fotolibra.com.
As such, I kindly ask you to purchase a new SSL certificate and assign it to www.fotolibra.com.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Regards,
Danny
123 RegSEPTEMBER 10th: I BUY NEW SSL CERTIFICATE FROM 123-REG
SEPTEMBER 13th
WWW.FOTOLIBRA.COM SSL CERTIFICATE REVOKED. SITE WARNING APPEARS.
This site can’t be reached
The connection was reset.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
ERR_CONNECTION_RESETgwyn.headley
13.9.2019. 09:40
Hello, I bought an SSL Certificate from you on 10th September. Where is it?
Gwyn HeadleySupport Agent
Mihai-Marian
13.9.2019. 09:58
Hi Gwyn,
I’ve checked your account and the SSL certificate you have purchased was not assigned to any domain names.
To apply this to your domain, please follow the steps from: https://www.123-reg.co.uk/support/ssl-certificates/how-do-i-apply-an-ssl-certificate/
Also, as this is an Organisation SSL, you will have to pass through a vetting process with our SSL certificate provider Starfield.
You can read more about this here: https://www.123-reg.co.uk/support/ssl-certificates/what-is-the-vetting-procedure-when-purchasing-an-ssl/
Kind Regards,
Mihai-Marian
123 Reggwyn.headley
13.9.2019. 19:14
We did a vetting process with Starfield last year AND the year before. What is going on?
Gwyngwyn.headley
13.9.2019. 19:18
Hang about, I have looked at the vetting requirements which we fulfilled last year AND the year before:
Been a registered company for a minimum of 3 years
Be in the Dun & Bradstreet database
Provide a lawyer’s letter stating that you have a deposit account with a regulated financial institution.
We have been a registered company since 2004. We are still in the D&B database. We provided a lawyer’s letter stating that we have a deposit account with a regulated financial institution two years ago. You want another?
We did all this last year and the year before that. What are you trying to do to us?????
GwynSupport Agent
Alexandru
13.9.2019. 19:28
Hi Gwyn,
As this is regarding a new SSL Certificate that has not been assigned to your domain name, you will need to undergo the vetting procedure once more.
If this was regarding an SSL Certificate renewal, the vetting process would not have happened.
However, as this is regarding a new SSL Certificate, your request must undergo the vetting procedure once more.
Kind Regards,
Alexandru
123 RegSEPTEMBER 14th
gwyn.headley
14.9.2019. 09:06
We asked for our SSL certificate to be renewed automatically. This you failed to do, neither would you tell us why. You wrote:
“Danny
7.9.2019. 10:35
Hi Gwyn,
I have checked and I’m to let you know that it is not possible to renew the current SSL certificate for www.fotolibra.com.
As such, I kindly ask you to purchase a new SSL certificate and assign it to www.fotolibra.com.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.”
This is causing incredible inconvenience. We have bought the SSL certificate from you, but our site is down and we cannot trade and you will not tell us why it was not possible to renew our SSL certificate. We haven’t heard anything from this American outfit you collaborate with.
What is going on?Support Agent
Danny
14.9.2019. 09:38
Hi Gwyn,
When the SSL certificate was revoked last year by Sarfield, it was cancelled directly from their system.
This has caused a mismatch between our system and the SSL certificate that was re-issued.
Due to the above, the auto renewal process has failed as the SSL certificate we have in our system was actually cancelled.
We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.
Please assign the new SSL certificate you purchased to www.fotolibra.com.
Regards,
Danny
123 RegGwyn
gwyn.headley
14.9.2019. 18:03
Thank you for a partial reply. Please can you upgrade our complaint to a supervisor?
WHY did Sarfield wrongly revoke our two year SSL Certificate last year halfway through its purchased life, causing us untold problems? It was not their rôle to do that. You claim on your home page that ‘We make it easy!’ This is clearly not true. You caused us immense problems by revoking our SSL Certificate this time last year and you have managed to do it again this year.
It’s now Saturday 14 September, 18:00. We paid you for the new SSL Certificate on Wednesday 9th September, before 12:00. We still have heard nothing from your inept Americans.
Please chase them up staright away. You are seriously damaging our business. We need that certificate. If you could actually live up to your closing boiler plate paragraph “If there’s anything else at all I can do for you please let me know and I’ll be very happy to help” I would be slightly comforted.
Gwyn HeadleySEPTEMBER 15th
Support Agent
Danny
15.9.2019. 07:20
Hi Gwyn,
Last year, Starfield has discovered that the SSL certificate was not up to the latest security standards and had to revoke it and issue a new one. All was explained via emails sent to you at that time.
We are truly sorry for the troubles this has caused.
Starfield has not contacted you until now for the new SSL certificate as you have not yet assigned the certificate to a domain.
Please either assign the SSL certificate yourself or let us know that we can assign it for you with the same details as the old one.
Regards,
Danny
123 RegGwyn
gwyn.headley
15.9.2019. 09:28
No, not explained last year by email. If Starfield had to revoke it because the certificate THEY issued was was not up to the latest security standards why then did WE have to suffer a five day hiatus in our service?
The domain, as you might have guessed, is www.fotoLibra.com, as it has been since 2004.
Please assign it for us with the same details as the old one. As quickly as you can, please.
Gwyn HeadleySupport Agent
Danny
15.9.2019. 09:59
Hi Gwyn,
I have now assigned the SSL certificate to www.fotolibra.com. You will be contacted by Starfield for the vetting process at gwyn.headley@fotolibra.com.
Regards,
Danny
123 RegSEPTEMBER 19th
STARFIELD RINGS US TO VERIFY THE TELEPHONE NUMBER WE HAVE HELD SINCE 2002
gwyn.headley
19.9.2019. 14:08
We have received an email from you:
MUST BE INSTALLED ON YOUR WEB SERVER:
Your Intermediate Certificate
– – – – – –
Your SSL Certificate (Formatted for the majority of web server software including IIS and Apache based servers):
—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–
MIIGfzCCBWegAwIBAgIIGDU9LSDnSrgwDQY etc etc etc
It’s blank underneath ‘Your Intermediate Certificate’. Should there be one there? Or is your message simply confusing and ‘Your Intermediate Certificate’ and ‘Your SSL Certificate’ are one and the same thing?
Gwyn HeadleyHey, Ben, if you’ve read this far, do let me know. Or are you a robot?
Yours,
Gwyn Headley
Our vaild, working SSL Certificate was finally received and installed today, September 23rd. We have been offline for ten days entirely due to the ineptitude of 123-Reg.
And you know what? There hasn’t been any reply to my correspondence with them.
I apologise to all fotoLibra users for this outage which as you can see was beyond our control.
SSL Certificate
September 3rd, 2018
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Apologies for any strange warning notices you may have seen recently. The fotoLibra website has been secure since we started 14 years ago, but last month we saw warning signals asking us if we were sure we wanted to go any further exploring this ‘untrustworthy’ site.
The site is secure, safe and solid. So what was the problem?
In order to be classed as safe and secure, a website that trades online has to have an SSL Certificate. This stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and we have to buy this certificate from a Certificate Authority after we’ve proved that we exist, that we are a real company, that we are legitimate, that we are solvent, that we are established, that we are registered with our national authorities etcetera.
We buy our SSL Certificate from a British company, 123-Reg.co.uk, and we have to renew it every two years. We renewed it last year, on 25th August 2017, for two years.
Three weeks ago our certificate was revoked. 123-Reg.co.uk denied all knowledge of it, saying the fault must be with our servers, and that our account was up-to-date and in good standing. We went frantic, checking our servers, our server farm, our domain names, everything.
It was 123-Reg.co.uk’s fault after all. They arbitrarily revoked our two year certificate after less than a year.
By cancelling our paid-for SSL certificate 123-Reg rendered our trading website untrustworthy in the eyes of the public and therefore unusable for seven days.
After a week of complaints they supplied us with a new SSL Certificate, so the warning signs have now gone away, and once again we are a Trustworthy Site.
We told them we would be looking for compensation. They refused to even consider compensation.
That’s no problem. We just write a letter to the MD telling him that if we don’t get satisfaction we’ll take them to court. We’ll let the law decide.
From Russia With Love
August 8th, 2018
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We were excited when Russia Today showed interest in a fotoLibra contributor’s images.
But they contacted him direct (how DID they find his address?) so he put them on to us, and this is how the exchange went:
Hello Sima
D— T— has asked me to contact you regarding your enquiry about using some of his Soviet Era Russian images.
fotoLibra handles the licensing, invoicing and image file supply for our contributors, so if you tell me the image rights you require and for how long, we’ll be able to confirm a price.
Regards
Yvonne Seeley
Dear Yvonne, thank you for getting in touch with us.
We’ve been interested in using a few images of Soviet Moscow in photo gallery on the RBTH.com platform with description.
Unfortunately the budget isn’t planned for publishing material RBTH, so I was wondering if there any option we could publish few photos of D— T— with his and fotoLibra.com courtesy fee free?
Thank you for your time!
Kindest regards,
Sima
Hi D—
I’ve just looked up Russia Today and it benefits from annual government funding in 2016 of $307million. That they claim to have no budget is clearly nonsense.
I’ll reply accordingly.
Best
Yvonne
Hello Sima
Thank you for your reply.
No, we will not supply Russia Today with free images.
I imagine you get paid for carrying out your job as do your journalists and website developers. Photographers need to be paid for their work too.
If you find a budget, do come back to us.
Regards
Yvonne
She is so polite! I would have started mentioning Novichok and other such gifts from the Russian people. But this is the way the world is going, not just Russia. You do all the work, they don’t expect to pay. Remind Yvonne to tell you about Sir Peter “I don’t pay anybody for anything” Hall one day.
Elvis & Hirohito — the proof
April 1st, 2016
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Tags: Boy Scouts, Elvis Presley, Emperor Hirohito, funeral, Hawai'i
When we ask fotoLibra contributors to rummage through their attics to find old photographs that can never be taken again, this is what we hope they’ll come up with. FOT3028 is just an average, everyday shot of a mass funeral in Hawai’i.
Boy Scouts funeral Hawaii
It was taken by the grandfather of our next-door neighbour in London. He was a travelling organ builder, and this was taken from his organ loft at the funeral.
But look carefully at the yellow circles. What he wasn’t to know, and which has only later been uncovered by posterity and diligent research, is that this is the only known photograph showing Elvis Presley and the Emperor Hirohito of Japan in the same picture!
Elvis Presley
Emperor Hirohito
What a find. This will rewrite history.
London vs. Bradford
March 18th, 2016
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I’m London Welsh, fiercely proud of both Wales and London WGC*, but even I sometimes get the feeling that Great Britain Ltd pays a little bit too much attention to the Great Wen.
London Wasps play their rugby in Coventry, 100 miles from Charing Cross. When Yvonne was flying, she flew me into London Lydd, which is 80 miles from Charing Cross in the opposite direction. That is a BIG city.
Wouldn’t it be easier for all concerned if England was renamed London? Just a thought. After all, the rest of the world knows this sceptred isle as England, with not a thought for poor Wales or Scotland.
I was driving through Belgium last October when I heard a radio sports announcer previewing the forthcoming Belgium – England Davis Cup tennis tournament. I wondered how the Murray brothers would like that.
Where am I going with this? It’s the news that the Royal Photographical Society’s archive is to be moved, along with 400,000 other photography-related items, from the National Media Museum in Bradford to the V&A in London, to be replaced by a light show.
Whatever the merits or demerits of this move, we can be sure that the 400,000 objects out of the NMM’s 3 million strong collection being taken from Bradford will be the pick of the crop, leaving behind assorted knurled focussing knobs from a few old Thornton Pickards and a couple of Box Brownies.
When the NMM opened in 1983 it was called the National Museum of Photography, and it was hailed as a brave new initiative to devolve a part of Britain’s artistic heritage out of London. I worked with them on a number of projects, notably with Brian Coe and the Kodak Gallery (there’s a Harlech connection for you — Kodak’s first UK boss George Davison built his summer house in Harlech).
Now the best of the best is being shipped to London, which already has more and better museums, theatres, art galleries and entertainments than anywhere else in the world, leaving Bradford with a light show, an IMAX and a couple of curry houses.
As a proud Londoner, I say it’s simply not fair. We’ve got enough down here. Why do we have to have more? Make Bradford a destination for all photographers!
London’s got it all. It doesn’t need this. Bradford does need it. Please think again.
*World’s Greatest City
$ocial Media
March 15th, 2016
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Not being a great user of social media personally, I find it mildly offensive when people bump into me in the street because they’re too intent on reading their screens.
However when I was their age, I used to bump into people as I hurried down the street with my nose buried in a book — so where’s the difference?
The difference is that the boors who bump into me today are communicating with their own user-defined communities, which definitely does not include portly old gentlemen meandering down the street.
But as the great New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner pointed out, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’e a dog.’ So I don’t know if these hurrying, bustling, busy people might be picture editors, photographers, or any other members of a community which could be interested in fotoLibra, in the wonderful variety of images we hold, and in the great opportunities for reaching picture buyers around the world.
Shortly after we started up fotoLibra we approached what we recognised as social media blithely and without fear. We set up this fotoLibra Pro Blog, we set up Facebook and LinkedIn identities, we fed them with content and … not a lot happened. So we asked around, and people told us “Oh, you should be on
- Picasa
- Google +
- Tumblr
- Snapchat
- Flickr
and so on and so on and so on.
Keeping a visible profile on a dozen or or so social media sites (all American, of course) is hard maintenance for a small English-speaking (as opposed to American-speaking) business. In fact it’s almost a full-time job.
But it’s not impossible. So I started checking them out. The first one I looked at was Picasa.They closed it down today, Tuesday 15th March, after 13 years.
That would have been annoying, pumping thought and effort into something which has the cord yanked just as you get it up and running.
All these SocMed sites seem to follow the same pattern — smart young entrepreneurs start them up, they achieve quick success, a larger corporation buys them out, it doesn’t have the same drive and vision as the founders, the division lurches from new initiative to desperate new initiative until the enterprise is quietly remaindered. Whatever happened to Bebo? Myspace? They still exist, albeit as husks of their former selves. Friends Reunited? It was closed down 18 days ago.
When Facebook went public, 18% of the listed value of the company would buy you Belgravia. At the time, I commented I’d rather have Belgravia. Now more teenagers are signing up to Snapchat than Facebook, and who knows what they’ll be joining in 25 years time? Whereas Belgravia will still be there.
All this was partly prompted by coming across a New York photographer who started taking photos in 2008, now has 400,000 followers on Facebook and no, she doesn’t post naked selfies. I am lost in envy and admiration. My NYC chums have never heard of her. fotoLibra rather fewer followers on Facebook. Our challenge is to multiply ours a thousandfold.
Whether the SocMeds are on the rise, or in graceful decline, the more people who are aware of what fotoLibra offers, the better it will be for contributors, picture buyers and of course us.
We’re asking around again. Naturally, all advice will be gratefully received!
Eat Chocolate Now.
March 8th, 2016For over 40 years psychologist Merrill Elias and his team has been tracking the cognitive abilities of over 1,000 people in the north-eastern United States. The study basically observes the relationship between blood pressure and brain performance.
There have been seven waves of research so far, each one lasting five years, and in the sixth wave, 2001-06, Elias’s team decided to ask participants what they ate.
Researchers compared cognitive tests on participants who reported eating chocolate at least once a week with those who ate less.
The results were remarkable. The chocolate eaters had significantly superior visual-spatial memory and organisation, working memory, scanning and tracking, and abstract reasoning.
In other words, people who eat chocolate are better at multi-tasking, looking at things, remembering numbers and a host of other benefits.
“Our study definitely indicates the direction is that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability,” says Elias.
It’s clear that if chocolate consumption enhances visual awareness, then photographers and picture editors should be bolting the stuff down.
We are well known in the picture business for handing out large bars of chocolate at trade fairs to picture editors in exchange for their business cards. It seems we were doing right all along.
Stand by therefore for the fotoLibra Enhanced Visual Perception Chocolate Bar, coming as soon as the highly qualified fotoLibra team has conducted extensive empirical research by scoffing as much chocolate as we can find.
The Russians Are Coming!
March 12th, 2014
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Tags: $1, 25 million, Belgrade, Chattanooga, dollar, El Paso, fotoLibra, Fresno, images, Kazan, Knoxville, Kotor, Minsk, Montenegro, Odessa, picture library, pictures for a dollar, Rochester, Rostov, Russians, stock agency, Williamsburg
25 million images for a dollar each!
Yet another ‘stock agency’ has bulk-emailed the world (why should spam trouble them?) to tell us we can buy images from them for a dollar each.
Of course you can’t actually buy a picture from them for a dollar, despite what they promise. You have to start by paying a minimum of ten dollars, at which point they’ll throw in nine extra pictures (which you may or may not want) for free.
The pound, the euro, the yen and the rouble don’t concern them; they only want your dollars.
The business model is to blind buyers with price and quantity, and gloss over content and quality. Pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. It’s a well-used model.
But talking of content and quality, the balance of image subjects seems wrong for a website which appears to be US-based and aimed primarily at American buyers. Compare these eastern and western cities, all with populations around the million mark. Here are the number of images Pictures For A Dollar (not its real name, natch) has of each location:
As for my headline, I have no idea if this site has anything to do with our Russian friends. But there does seem to be a definite Eastern flavour to the content. As the table above demonstrates, there are ten times as many images of former Soviet bloc cities than of American cities. Which is very useful if you are publishing to the Eastern European market.
Check out these two tourist destinations:
Where did this Pictures For A Dollar site acquire its images, do you think? From all the figures quoted, it certainly looks more Eastern than Western.
I assume they own all these images, so they don’t have to pay the photographers. Therefore all the business costs are pumped into marketing the static stock. There is no indication that there will be new additions to the 25 million images they hold — the website baldly states “Pictures For A Dollar is not accepting contributors at this time.”
Why does this upset me? Because this has nothing to do with photography. Photographers are not welcome on this site.
This is a commodity sale, which will directly affect the livelihood of yet more photographers. I very much doubt that the photographers who supplied the majority of images which ended up on Pictures For A Dollar are going to see a cent for their work. And I don’t think that’s fair.
What worries me is how can a picture library (British usage) or stock agency (American usage) like fotoLibra compete?
I hope it will be by providing well-keyworded, precise, high-quality, up-to-date AND historical images that people actually want and need, not a dubious flytip of cheaply acquired bulk collections that might pass at a pinch.
Or do you have other ideas?
Why do stock photos look like stock photos?
February 28th, 2014
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Quora is an interesting web site. Questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its users. And its users seem more intelligent and less abusive than the average troll one encounters online.
Here’s a good one: What are some of the reasons that stock photos look like stock photos?
This is an excellent question. Alas, so far there are only four answers, none of them particularly illuminating.
Let me have a go. First of all, let’s forget photography and look at economics — the law of supply and demand. The four basic laws of supply and demand are:
- Demand increases, supply remains unchanged: a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.
- Demand decreases, supply remains unchanged: a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
- Demand remains unchanged, supply increases: a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
- Demand remains unchanged, supply decreases: a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.
Unfortunately in the picture library / stock agency business we have involuntarily created the fifth law of supply and demand:
- Demand decreases, supply increases dramatically: a massive surplus occurs, leading to a far lower equilibrium price.
That’s where we stand at the moment. Twenty years ago if you wanted a sunny photograph of a couple running happily down a beach hand-in-hand, you either commissioned a photographer at considerable expense, or you trawled through transparencies at a picture library (and paid a hefty fee for doing so). Now they’re so common you can scarcely give them away.
I went into the Spar store in Harlech yesterday, hoping to buy a packet of frozen broad beans. What they had in the freezer was:
- Frozen oven chips
- Frozen roast potatoes
- Frozen potato wedges
- Frozen hash browns
- Frozen French fries
- Frozen jacket potatoes
- Frozen Smiles (??) potatoes
- Frozen garden peas
That was the extent of their frozen vegetable range. Now I’m as anti-eating green things as any ordinary man can be (although peas and broad beans are sort of OK) but even I felt that this was an overwhelming bias in favour of potato-based products.
Potato-based products are heavily marketed, so people buy them. At first we don’t notice the broad bean chicks have been ousted from the freezer nest by these cuckoo brands.
It’s the same with microstock and rights-managed images. Microstock is heavily marketed, like supermarkets, with a loss leader — $1 for an image! And that’s all that buyers remember, until they’re suckered in to an annual deal where they’ll pay as much for their images as if they’d bought them from us without any trade agreement. They don’t notice they end up paying at least the same, and probably more.
The boon and the benefit of Microstock is that everything has been ironed down to the lowest possible common denominator. Welcome to a perfect world, where everyone lives exclusively on potato-based products and sugary drinks, yet keeps a trim figure and teeth like the grille on a Cadillac. Nothing has ever gone wrong in these people’s lives, and that’s what the client wants. So endless numbers of photographers endlessly reproduce the same image with infinitesmal variations, like this:
Happy couples running hand-in-hand down the beach
Oops — the last one is embarrassingly much better then the rest. Oh, it’s not a microstock image at all, it’s a fotoLibra Rights Managed image (thank you, Peter Phipp!).
When I was a kid we rebelled against conformity by growing long hair and wearing blue jeans. We all wanted long hair and blue jeans. We all looked the same. We conformed.
The point is that stock photos look like stock photos because that’s what the market wants. Conformity. And potato-based products.
You get what you pay for.
Wedding Cake Blues
February 10th, 2014
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Until fotoLibra Version 6.0 was launched in December our site didn’t actually say that we sold images — we just assumed that people would know.
It seems not everyone understands. In November we sold usage rights in a photograph of a wedding cake decorative topper — Personal Use (One-Off) — to a lady in the mid-Western United States.
A photograph of a Wedding Cake Topper, ©David Knowles / fotoLibra
Last week we had a querulous email from her. “I ordered and paid for a wedding cake decorative topper last November, and I still haven’t received it.”
We looked at each other in horror (although I could barely suppress a grin). She had bought image usage rights when she thought she was buying an actual item. I was flooded with pity, because I could put myself right in her place. I knew just how she was feeling.
But we’d already paid the photographer for the sale. We could hardly ask him to give the money back. So we tactfully explained the situation to her, that we were a picture library (US = Stock Agency) and not a fancy goods retailer, that it was clearly pointed out on the website, and that she now had the right to get this picture printed out as a huge poster and stuck on her wall. She accepted the situation.
We get regular calls from gentlemen with thick, impenetrable accents who are interested in the derelict petrol stations you can see on fotoLibra. They’re not interested in images of them — they want the actual sites, and they rumble threateningly when we try to explain we only sell pictures of the sites.
The nadir was reached when one man rang up to order some bollards. Once again we patiently tried to explain we sold images of bollards, not actual bollards. The enquirer was an Englishman, with a fluent and rapid command of the language, albeit with an extremely limited vocabulary. He informed us at length (in Neville Shute’s terminology) that we were Fugging Muggers and also, weirdly, Bunts. The invective was foul, sustained, vicious and a total waste of time. God knows what he was planning to do with the bollards once he got hold of them. We had a satisfying, if impractical, suggestion for him.
I’m really very sorry for the Mid-Western US lady and her wedding cake decorative topper. But we shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s mistakes, even a small amount. And after Chris Holifield of the Writer’s Services website pointed out that we didn’t say what we did, we rectified it. Now fotoLibra.com introduces itself with HOW TO BUY IMAGES | HOW TO SELL IMAGES.
No more confusion then. Thank you, Chris!