Archive for the ‘News’ Category
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.
Danish Photographer Off The Job
April 16th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
The snappily named website pressefotografforbundet.dk has an intriguing story (fortunately for me, in English) about an entrant in the annual Danish Picture Of The Year competition.
The judges asked to see photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s RAW files. On comparing them with his entries, they decided his Photoshopping was somewhat on the Extreme side, and they threw him out of the competition.
The competition rules state “Photos submitted to Picture of The Year must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression. The Judges and exhibition committee reserve the right to see the original raw image files, raw tape, negatives and/or slides. In cases of doubt, the photographer can be pulled out of the competition.”
You can read the whole story, and see Christensen’s RAW and processed images, here.
Frankly I think he went way over the top, and they were right to ban him. To my eye, his RAW images are preferable to the garish artificiality of the Photoshopped images.
I’d be interested to hear what you think.
The perils of publishing
April 9th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
In every society there is a need for openness and a need for secrecy.
Fundamentalists have planned and are planning terrorist attacks on our way of life. They plot and connive with as much secrecy as they can muster.
The prime function of government should be to protect its people, and the executive arm of that prime function is generally the police force.
British bobbies haven’t been covering themselves with glory recently. Running over a 16 year old schoolgirl at 94mph, batonning down a non-protesting passer-by (from the back) who died 5 minutes later, and yesterday Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, our top counter-terrorism officer, arrives at 10 Downing Street with The Secret Plan to catch these vile fundies tucked underneath his arm.
Not in his briefcase, note, but tucked underneath his arm. In full view of the world’s press. With their expensive cameras with hi-res lenses.
Getty Images, a picture library a little larger than fotoLibra, had a photographer or two on site. The images were on the wire and syndicated around the world in minutes. Then someone noticed you could actually read The Secret Plan to trap the fundies. It was there in plain view, tucked underneath Assistant Commissioner Quick’s arm, a clean sheet of A4 headed “Security Service-led investigation into suspected AQ (al-Qaeda) driven attack planning within the UK”.
Oops.
The Government issued a D-Notice, which bans British media from publishing sensitive material. It has no validity in Calais, Cincinatti or Cairo. Getty Images withdrew the images from their site.
But it had already been syndicated around the world, and they had no power to order its removal from other publishers. I bet servers in Pakistan were overloaded last night. The police had no option but to carry out the plan immediately, and eleven Pakistanis and one Brit (perhaps of Pakistani origin — we don’t know) were arrested yesterday.
This morning Quick quite rightly resigned. It was a monumental blunder.
I think with true British phlegm the situation can best be summed up in England’s noblest native verse form, the clerihew:
Bob Quick
Is a bit of a dick
For revealing his terrorist investigation
To photographers with worldwide syndication.
LIFE photo archive goes online
November 19th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Today there are over 70,000 messages on the internet shouting about this amazing new deal between Life Magazine and Google. We are told that Google is putting 10 million Life images online, 97 per cent of which have never been seen before, and about 20 per cent of it has already gone live.
The link says “Welcome to the future home of LIFE, the most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web: 10 million photos from the legendary archives of LIFE magazine and thousands more added every day. Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.”
But you can’t. There’s nothing to see there at all, other than an email harvesting facility.
They’re giving these images away for free? What are the rights situations? Will anyone ever need to consult the Bettman archive again? Or the Mary Evans Picture Library, or the Francis Frith Collection?
Maybe they’re doing it to frighten us. Well I can tell you, it nearly scares me.
You’ll actually find the images on Google Image Search, not all captioned and keyworded as usefully as one might expect:
Caption: A view of African-American integrationists attending a meeting.
| Location: | Petersburg, VA, US |
|---|---|
| Date taken: | 1960 |
| Photographer: | Howard Sochurek |
| Size: | 1280 x 1234 pixels (17.8 x 17.1 inches) |
I don’t think so.
They’re selling nice framed prints of the images for $80, but there’s no easily discoverable method of buying any image rights.
I’d love to read the business plan.
Digital Railroad Closes
October 30th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’re sorry to hear that the picture library portal Digital Railroad has had to close down.
An announcement on their web site reads:
“October 28, 2008
To our valued Members and Partners:
We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.
On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.
Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years. “
If you have placed picture requests or searches with Digital Railroad, please remember that fotoLibra has 20,000 photographers in 150 countries who are able to supply images of any description.
Please contact me with your picture research needs: gwyn.headley@fotoLibra.com, +44 20 8348 1234.
We’ll do what we can to help.
If you know of any photographers who have been affected by the closure, please tell them that fotoLibra offers the same service as Digital Railroad did, at less than half the price.
Off the rails?
October 24th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I was sorry to hear on my return from a very successful Frankfurt Book Fair that one of our fellow picture libraries, Digital Railroad, is feeling the pinch. In an announcement dated October 15th they wrote:
“For the past few weeks, Digital Railroad (DRR) has been seeking additional funding required to sustain its current level of operations.
“To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful. As a result, effective October 15, 2008, the company has initiated a reduction in staff and expenses while it continues the funding effort. Nevertheless, Digital Railroad is committed to the continued support of its customers through this period and has retained adequate staff to support both member archives and image licensing sales.”
It’s a tough world, and Digital Railroad has burned its way through a massive amount of cash since they launched with a big fanfare a couple of years ago, following the model created by fotoLibra. Alas when we started we were unable to raise anything like the prodigious sums DRR later claimed, so we had to trim our coat according to our cloth.
We made sure our site worked. We made sure the right sort of buyers knew about us. We have expanded and expended carefully. We remain poor. We’ll always be cautious, because we can only guess at what awaits us in the future, and we won’t know for sure until we get there. But we made sure our foundations were as solid as they could be before rushing into rapid world-domineering expansion.
And we’re still not rushing. We intend to be around for a long time to come. We’re not actively seeking additional funding (though a little would be nice, if you fancy it) but we are steadily growing. I believe we now have more photographers on our books than any other picture library.
Digital Railroad charges $50 (£31.15) a month for membership, or you can get a 30 day free trial.
fotoLibra is free in perpetuity, although the precise equivalent of the DRR membership, fotoLibra’s Platinum Membership, costs $24.07 (£15) a month. Which is less than half the price.
Either they got their maths wrong, or we did.
Nice one
September 24th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
There’s a fascinating photo blog called Photopreneur, clearly about making money from photographs, and they’ve just run a really good article on fotoLibra.
It’s pretty accurate as well, apart from me saying we’d only rejected four images in the whole time since we started, but when I pointed this out to the writer, it was corrected the next time I looked. Pretty impressive.
How do we go about getting more articles like that? Journalists always say they want to write about something new, different and exciting, but when they get round to filing their articles it’s the same old diet of Google, Flickr and Facebook.
Any suggestions? Or are any journalismos reading this? I’m happy to talk!