Archives: June, 2007
News
Introducing “KIDS!” a specialist library featuring child photography
Monika Taylor recently set up KIDS!, an agency that specializes in pictures of children. As the number of such specialists in Europe, let alone Germany, can virtually be counted on the fingers of one hand, she should at least not have too much competition to worry about on the picture market. The agency documents all the phases of a child’s life, from the newborn baby and the crawling stage to schoolchildren and teenagers. As is typical for this market, it legitimately focuses on the idyllic and happy sides of childhood, such as summer holidays, playing in the snow, playing games and enjoying parties. Researchers need not waste their time looking for images of alcohol abuse, family violence, school bullying or inter-generational conflicts.
Features
Ableimages prefers to keep it small, keep it lean, and keep it keen
Stock industry veteran David Harrigan is running a stock production company called ableimages with a slightly different approach. Rather than focus on producing thousands of images to suit the needs of the many, ableimages is focusing on productions to serve the specialized needs of the few. “I did not want ableimages to be a factory churning out images based solely on ‘needs’ but a company that would work with its partners so as to create a body of carefully considered images that would perfectly suit their requirements” stated Harrigan. The small production company has been working with such partners as Getty, Corbis, Masterfile, and Uppercut Images to create images on a wholly owned basis. In addition Harrigan has stated plans to begin marketing its own images through Corbis and other channels over the course of the next few months.
News
Shutterstock is helping micro-stock photographers gain access to red carpet
In order to build a library of celebrity images the subscription based micro-payment site Shutterstock is taking matters into its own hands by using its customer service reps to help its 60,000+ photographers obtain press passes. The company is targeting red carpet events such as film premieres, award shows, concerts or political rallies where it plans to leverage the Shutterstock name to obtain the credentials in exchange for exclusive rights to sell the images created at the event. It is not clear yet whether credentials will be granted and the decision will surely be made on an event-by-event basis. Shutterstock appears to be the first micro-payment stock photography site to aggressively pursue celebrity content.
News
Kendall Higbee joins Jupiterimages as VP of Marketing
Jupiterimages, has announced the appointment of Kendall Higbee as the Vice President of Marketing. In this role, Kendall will oversee the global marketing of Jupiterimages for both direct and partner channels. Kendall comes to Jupiterimages with more than 12 years of industry experience and has held key positions in marketing at Corbis, MediaVast (owners of Wireimage) and JBGPhoto, an agency known for its celebrity archives based in Los Angeles.
News
Christian Schmidt joins Image Source
Christian Schmidt, former Design Manager for Masterfile in Europe, has taken a new position as the Creative Communications Manager at Image Source. His new company has charged him with developing a new communications plan for Image Source’s global marketing channels and sales offices.
News
Dreamstime partners with mobile content provider Boom Bucket
The micro-stock company, Dearmstime.com, has formed a partnership with Boom Bucket Mobile an online provider of content for mobile phones including wallpapers, animations, ring-tones, and video. The deal with Dreamstime will help meet a growing demand for mobile screensavers by increasing the number of available images on Boom Bucket to over 1MM.
Features
Visual case study: Burton travel bags
The Burton snowboard company was started in the late 70s by one of the sports original innovators Jake Burton. With a key demographic of young males, the company is well-versed in advertising that features lifestyle more than just a product. Snowboarding is a way of life, where snowboarders hunger for their next jaunt down the slopes after that next rush. In addition Burton’s customers are very sensitive to the sales pitch. Burton removes this barrier by applying humor and using imagery that is accessible and credible in the eyes of the consumer. Meg Asaro and Karen D’Silva from Spark Visual Research take a closer look at the images used by Burton to position its products prominently in the snowboarding lifestlye.
News
JupiterMedia acquires adsoftheworld.com and creativebits.org
Jupitermedia Corporation announced last week that it has acquired the assets of AdsOfTheWorld.com and CreativeBits.org. The two sites were created by Ivan Raszl, a Hungarian advertising creative director currently living in Bahrain. The combined traffic of the two sites exceeds 1 million unique visitors per month. Both websites will become part of Jupitermedia's Graphics.com network providing user-generated content for the creative and design community.
Features
Photography for photography’s sake at FILE Magazine
I have listened with no small amount of envy to tales from the CEPIC Conference in Florence from colleagues who attended. By all accounts, the organization put on another excellent event with over 900 people in attendance. Most of my friends reported on the usual “speed-dating” meeting frenzy, which has left their heads spinning and their minds and bodies needing to unwind. For those true fans of beautiful, thought-provoking photography, I have just the antidote to photo-business overload; a web-site dedicated to unique, unexpected and inspiring still imagery whose creators share the works of art they have discovered simply for the sake of sharing them: FILE magazine.
News
iStockphoto adds consumer video formats and additional languages
The leading microstock site, iStockphoto, Is now converting its video content to include the .wmv and .mp4 video formats to make the content easier to use without manipulation. The company has also added localized sites in Japanese, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Russian, making the Getty-owned microstock site fully searchable in 12 languages.
News
I love images
The production company I love images, which was recently established in the UK, has given itself a really evocative name. Another interesting aspect is the lady who runs the agency as its Managing Director: Kim Jackson. After studying photography, she worked from the mid-1990s onwards for quite a number of top-class firms, including IT Stock International, The Beauty Archive and Powerstock-zefa.
News
Science Faction image by Louie Psihoyos wins award
The Western Publishing Association, which honors excellence in publishing West of the Mississippi River, honored an image by photographer Louie Psihoyos with the MAGGIE Award for Best Single Editorial Enhanced Photo in a trade publication. Gary Halpern, publisher of PhotoMedia Magazine in which the image appeared, and Roger Ressmeyer, who digitally enhanced the image for publication, share the award with the photographer.
News
Thought Equity Motion now handling rights and clearances
The Denver, CO based footage library, Thought Equity Motion, has announced that it will now offer a full-service Rights and Clearances Department. This means that potential customers can request support to acquire proper licensing in order to use footage previously unavailable for commercial applications. The Rights and Clearances Department will manage talent, property, sports and music clearances, along with indemnification to provide clients with professional risk-free use of any cleared content.
News
Dreamstime partners with free image search engine Picfindr.com
Picfindr.com, an image search engine that pulls results only from sites that offer images free of copyright restrictions for commercial use, has agreed to add low-cost micro-stock images from Dreamstime to its search results. Picfindr will display Dreamstime images for a given search whenever the search fails to retrieve appropriate images from the various sites it trolls for free image results. Dreamstime is the only micro-stock agency aligned with PicFindr.
News
Freerangestock.com – a revenue model for free images
Chance Agrella, a professional media designer and photographer, has launched an advertising supported web-site that gives away stock images with a royalty free license and available for commercial use at no charge to the user. Google Adsense provides the only source of revenue for the site, Freerangestock.com. Now, Agrella has introduced a revenue share model with photographers who supply images to the site whereby they will receive 80% of the revenue from Google-loaded ads that appear with their images.
News
Getty Images enters music licensing business with $42 million acquisition of Pump Audio
Getty Images, Inc. (NYSE: GYI), The industry leader in image licensing has made its first foray into the world of commercial music licensing with the acquisition of Pump Audio. Getty Images a business that currently dominates the world of still image licensing has touted strong growth in its footage business recently and appears to be focused on building the business into a more comprehensive content provider for its media, advertising and corporate customers.
Editorials
Special Mention: workshop for shooters who like good food
We thought our readers might like to know about a special photographic workshop organized by our friend, George Munday of Copper Coast Workshops. Rather than in his native Ireland, this workshop will take place in the Languedoc region of southeastern France in October, 2007.
News
Xcavator pushes visual search technology with new image portal
The visual search company, Xcavator, has taken a bold step to promote its technology to the stock photo industry. Rather than seek on-line archives to license their visual search product it has launched its own image portal that employs visual search as the primary method for finding images. Having launched the beta version of the portal with 300,000 image form Photovault, the company recently added 1.8MM images from the iStockphoto, Getty’s micro-stock division.
News
SAA release free RM price calculator
The Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) has released a rights managed price calculator and made it available to download from their web-site free of charge. The software streamlines the RM pricing system called PLUS Packs™ developed by the Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS.) The software, PLUS Packs™ Calculator is an open source tool SAA created to promote the adoption of the PLUS pricing standards by more licensors and licensees of RM stock imagery.
News
Corbis launches micro-stock beta site SnapVillage.com
Corbis has become the last of the big three to enter the micro-stock business with the beta launch of SnapVillage.com. Rather than purchase one of the existing micro-stock sites as Jupiter and Getty did, Corbis has developed its own micro-stock site in-house. Having built the site from the ground, up, Corbis has included unique pricing and purchasing features that will set it apart from other micro-stock sites.
News
Shutterstock’s collection reaches two million images
Ten months ago the fledgling micro stock subscription service (launched in 2003) was proud of achieving the major milestone of ‘1 Million Images’. Little did they know that due to a growing awareness of microstock and subscription licensing the collection would double in Less than one year; exceeding two million images. In fact the company has stated that the collection is growing at a rate of approximately 25,000 images per week. This growth has been realized despite the company’s claim that less than 40% of the images submitted meet the companies standards to be added to the collection.
News
Masterfile launches ‘People’s Choice’ search refinement
It seems that the battle to improve search results is a constant struggle for any business with a significant amount of content and stock licensing companies have been trying for years to enhance the basic search techniques which rely solely on metadata to return an intuitive search result. To that end, The Toronto based Stock Agency Masterfile has announced the addition of a new search feature called ‘People’s Choice’ that takes into consideration the compiled actions performed by the sites users. The company states that it has been storing data on user activity for several years and is finally able to release the new feature which functions primarily as a means for the user to refine their search results based on over-all popularity. In addition the company also allows the user to refine their results by the ‘Editor’s Choice’ which brings images flagged by the company’s editors to the forefront.
News
Getty, Jupiter, & Zuma contribute to Mochila offering free content in exchange for ad space
Reuters is reporting that Mochila, an online content syndication portal has announced deals with Getty Images, JupiterImages, And Zuma Press to make a selection of images from each contributor available to bloggers and independent websites. Mochila will then offer the content for a licensing fee or in exchange for online advertising space. Mochila currently offers photos, video and text. Form more than 1,000 global media companies such as the Associated Press, The Financial Times and New York Magazine.
News
Corbis announces lay-offs and segment closures
In a memo to all employees that carried the subject, “Building a More Competitive Corbis,” incoming CEO Gary Shenk announced the company’s plans to lay off about 160 employees from 17 Corbis offices around the globe. He also announced Corbis’s exit from two lines of business, its assignment division, called Artists Representation, and its digital asset management service, which it called Media Management.
