About Free, Freemium and Losing Focus

Everywhere you look, someone is reviewing one or two books on Free or Freemium. Even today’s NY Times has a rather negative review of 2 books on the topic.

But to be honest, the “FREE” debate for professional photographers is just a diversion from the important topic of who is actually shaping the market and how they are doing it. You see no discussion about some very subtle changes that will greatly affect the future of the pro photo industry.

The brutal economic answer is that the Internet does in fact change other people’s businesses because of this massive distribution. We should just acknowledge that and not hide from it.

so said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.

Google owns Picasa, an image “sharing” service.

At one time it seemed designed to allow you to share your personal photos with your family and friends. Recently a new option cropped up in the Picasa search function: Search by Copyright Status: Commerical, “Remix Allowed,” or assorted Creative Commons licenses. You can also search by size. Do you want the full file size from a camera to use as a free stock shot in a national ad campaign? Just pick “creative commons license” and “extra large” size.

This blog is hosted by Blogger.com, which is owned by Google. The photos I upload to this blog are now in the Picasa database. Probably so are yours if you use Blogger.

And just as quietly Google’s image search has added the same functions under the “Advanced Image Search” selection.

So Google has cataloged almost every page and image on the web and now you can search by size and whether or not it’s “FREE” for anyone to use

You can’t stop technology. But you can ask for a piece of the pie.

If you know anyone at a trade association, please ask them what they are waiting for.

Professional Photographers as Road Kill

Google wants to publish your images and make revenue from the uploads*. Your share: nothing.

Orphan Works is back again and it doesn’t look any better for photographers.

A building falls down in Brooklyn and the NY Times reports it. In their online report there are photos crediting Google's Street View for a photo of the building and crowd-sourced images and videos. No professional photographers.

The NY Times also posts a blog suggestion that people download photos and print them out to create inexpensive wall decor. The resulting chaos shows that few people actually understand the copyright laws.

Summer is here and professional photographers are looking more like collateral damage every day.

We’ll try to start a discussion here about new business models for photographers because we don’t see this discussion happening anywhere else.

It seems that the trade associations are putting the bulk of their energies into teaching “good business practices.” And therein lies the rub. Many of these practices are outdated. While they do cover what every business is required to know to be profitable, and teach how to promote work using the web, they don’t teach how to actually earn money off the web, or how to cope with the crowdsourcing movement.

So in the days ahead, we’ll try to show how some leaders actually imprisoned the whole industry with their own success and how difficult it is to change the industry’s status quo.

Our goal here is not to criticize, but to get people thinking , to get debate going and to reboot the industry.

Stay tuned.

* Have you seen the sample of Google's new scanning of million of magazines? Did you grant Google or the publisher permission to publish your photos online?

"When Passion Meets Math"

The NY Times has a new blog directed to small business people. In today's post there was a statement from a small business owner:
I’m an artist. I want somebody else to do that stuff.

The author's response to that statement was: "There’s a word for people who get to take that attitude; the word is employee."

There's too much going on out there. It's time to continue the discussion of the business side of being a photographer.

Stay tuned. . .

Inside the Polaroid Archives - Pt 3

By now you've probably all seen photos of the 20" by 24" Polaroid Camera. Some of you have also seen the actual Polaroid photos with the unbelievable detail that they display.  Below is my portrait of a young John Reuter, director and "Keeper of the 20x24 Flame."

But here are some shots you've probably never seen.  An ad that features a bald guy and a gorgeous model's photo. This was 1980, well before bald was popular. Polaroid was the first to to use sexy bald men as a device to attract viewers:This guy's modeling career took off after this.

Here's another unique shot. It was done in Maine on an outing to photograph for Bill Wegman and Man Ray:An example of how this turned out is here.

In any event, we wish John Reuter and his crew best of luck with the new 20x24 Studios. You can read all about them here.

Inside the Polaroid Instant 40" x 80" Camera

The 40" x 80" Polaroid camera was basically a room with a hole in it for a lens and a large vacuum easel, inside the room, on the other side of the lens.  There was one built in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Others were built around the world, on the fly, with the "room" usually created out of rolls of black vinyl supported by scaffolding.

The photos here were shot by me in Boston's  MFA.

The photo on the right shows the process of focusing the lens. Ideally the room would be dark and the light hitting the subject being photographed would be projected onto this film plane. One operator, outside the room, would focus the lens by listening to the shouts of the operator inside the lens looking through the loupe.

On the top you see the brown film negative that will be pulled down the vacuum frame to the floor prior to the exposure. The white paper is used as a spacer to verify focus around the image area.

When it's time for the exposure, both operators are inside the camera, in the dark, wearing infrared goggles. You see the infrared light source on the extreme right of the frame in the yellow lamps. The operators pull the negative down to the floor. They expose the film, then create a sandwich of the negative, the white roll of positive "sheet" material at the bottom and the "pod" developing chemicals. The sandwich then goes through the stainless steel rollers, seen below the frame, at the bottom.The sandwich was then suspended inside the camera as shown above. The film was developed for about two minutes and then peeled apart.

Below you see the sandwich being peeled outside the "camera," under the lens.

Here we have a 1:1 shot of Monet's "Water Lilies I, 1905" with as much detail and texture as the original. In the mid 1980's it was offered for sale by Polaroid,  framed, for $ 935.

Next time, The Polaroid 20 x 24 Camera.

Part one, showing the film plant is here in: Inside the Polaroid Archives Pt. 1

Inside the Polaroid Archives - Pt 1

Not theirs, but mine.  With all the talk about the death of the company, the film and the folks at The Impossible Project trying to reinvent the film, I went into my deep archives for today's "Show and Tell." 

Polaroid was one of my first, and one of my best, photo gigs. John Reuter, Rogier Gregoire and I started Polaroid’s “20 by 24” studio.  After that, I did some internal and PR photography for Polaroid.  

One assignment was to photograph the inside of the Waltham, MA film plants.  They were supposedly secret because of their proprietary processes, but now that this plant is on its way to become a shopping mall, I guess we can ignore the secrecy and show what a film manufacturing plant looked like.

 These shots were actually taken on Type 55 Polaroid film.  They wouldn’t tell me much about the process because it was so secret.  This first shot was of the chemical reactors and mixing machines:  I don’t know if this is where the pods or the film emulsion was created. 

The shot below was the emulsion coating and drying machine.  The room was usually a darkroom.  The roll of negative is shown being coated on the left and drying in the center. It's then spooled before being sliced. 

The negative would be cut later into 8 x 10", 4 x 5" or 2 1/4” peel-apart film. I was told that the early 8x10" film was hand assembled, in the dark, by sightless employees.

There was a camera that used this film uncut: the 40” x 80” camera.  We’ll take you into that camera next.  But here’s the lens on the front of the camera and a Polaroid instant print from it being peeled:

Yet more business models based on using your images

Now that imagery is readily available on the web, there seems to be a flood of new business models based on re-using your images, without your permission. We last brought this up last March here.

Here are three of the new, more popular, social network image "sharing" sites:

FFFFound where you can "Find, bookmark and share your favorite images !!
FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!"
and
vi.sualize.us - "Have you ever dreamed of freely bookmarking the pictures you love? Well, you're not alone! Welcome to visualizeus: no strings, no invites, no waits. Just bookmark . . . Show to everyone. Don't keep your lovely findings only for you! Full powered feeds, a badge to embed on your site, and more coming, are available to share with your friends your favorite pictures."
and
We Heart It "We see many great images on blogs and websites around, and now you can put everything you saw and liked on the same page to look again whenever you want"

So here we have companies that are taking images found on the web and re-purposing them. People are proudly showing pictures that they have found, not that they have actually created. Rarely is there a mention of who actually created or owns the image and rarely a mention of copyright.

This growing trend is why we started asking 2 years ago for the trade associations to set up systems to develop revenue streams off of these uses.

The authors worked hard on this and did it. The photographers? They're still forming committees. What a shame.