dispatches

They have your back

I am biased. I can't think of a more important thing to do than join your professional society. They have educational programs to get you up to speed in best business practices, and they conduct essential advocacy for us as a class.

A story. I have been a general member of ASMP for over 20 years. Years ago, the printer for a job I shot lost the slides. With the backing of my client, the printer fessed up. I had paperwork, thanks to what ASMP taught me. I collected a lost slide fee, $1500 per slide, for three slides. There was no argument. They just paid.

This would never had happened without a professional society that had made this lost slide fee the standard.

Yes, the national politics of ASMP have always been petty and annoying. So what. It doesn't matter. They still have my back. With all the assaults on copyright and ownership and access, it is more important than ever to belong to an advocacy group.

Join the society that fits what you do.

American Society of Media Photographers

North American Nature Photography Association

Professional Photographers of America

Wedding and Portrait Photographers Association

Celebrity hour

The celebrities are complaining about how they have no control over the hordes of cell-phone wielding fans who take and post their photos without permission. Here is my contribution to their dilemma.

The trivia questions; How many of them have appeared on the Simpsons? How many have been whacked on the Sopranos?

(l-r: Tim Daly, Joey Pants, Ernie Hudson, Rhys Coiro, Joe Mantenga and Eric Alterman)

Some quotes

"What's happening is a massive scale of increase in the number of people empowered to create images. One number: if you look at the number of cameras of all kinds sold 5 years ago, it was 85 million. Next year is over a billion. That is going to change technology in ways, if you think there's been a revolution so far, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's very important to look at how the whole society is being impacted, and what your strategy is." Alexis Gerard, Future Image

"We may as well hold back the tide folks. Those of us who are pros who are going to need to raise the bar and differentiate ourselves from the rabble. How are we going to do that?" Dan Lamont

"This is a chilling statistic. The Bureau of Labor Statistics last year showed, for the first time, that the number of full time professional photographers is decreasing. The number of people reporting part time income from photography is increasing." Patrick Donehue, Corbis

Day two Pro Photo Summit: Still vs. Video

I remember when the only people using digital cameras were the photojournalists. Once again, they're at the forefront of the next big technological and business revolution. In five years, photographers who shoot only with a still camera may be as rare as one who only use film today.

The Still vs Video panel was weighted with journalists, who don't think of themselves as photographers anymore. People like Colin Fletcher at Fox, William Snyder at Dallas Morning News, Robin Hood from MSNBC. They in the "storytelling business" now. Chuck Westfall from Canon supported this: " The technology is moving forward. The demand for convergence type device is growing. If you've been watching us, within the last year we've brought CMOS into HD video. This is a major step toward the kind of device that can do a high quality still and video at the same time. "

Robin Hood commiserated with those of us in the audience who feel threatened by this: "I completely understand people's emotional investment thinking of themselves as a still photographer. I used to be about the picture. That level of emotional and intellectual investment allows us to confuse video with television news. And I've been out there, I've seen how it's made. Its sausage making, you don't want to see it. "

The future transition could be brutal. This from Colin:
"What is going to happen is that Robert Murdoch is going to buy the LA Times. He is going to replace the still photographers with video guys. That will happen."

Dennis Brack from the White House News Association was in the audience, with another scary perspective:  "You're going to be shooting video because there's going to be another guy coming to your client shooting video and still. We have no rate struture for this. "Shoot a little video". It's on their website. Who has the resale rights? We all have to get together about  what were going to charge for this. We thought PS and editing was time consuming. Try this one. We're going to have to find something very quickly. Within a couple of years, your clients are going to come to you and say, hey, we need this for our website, can you do it?"

It will be someone a lot younger than you too. "For the last several decades photographers have owned the creative space. The problem is, there's a lot of people for the last 20 years who think of themselves as a photographer, not a creative. These people coming up in the new era don't distinguish between photo and video. They won't be one or the other."

It's the relationship, stupid

From the "Business of Photography" panel.

Every client that calls my office, we send them the estimate, and if we don't get the job, we send them a hand written thank you note for their interest, and a $5 Starbucks card. We thank them for considering us. And it's got my little sticker on he Starbucks card, and it's in their wallet. They're associating my name with something pleasurable.

John Harrington

Now it's getting interesting

Want  to poke a stick into a hornet's nest? Bring up orphan works. 

The ideal, from Maria Pallante of the U.S. Copyright Office: "Think about the person who wants to do the right thing. They want to pay that creator money to use that image. How do they do that? That's what were trying to solve. This is the credibility of the copyright system at stake."

The reality, from the audience: "We're talking about powerful corporations that are going to use these photos for financial gain. You cannot ask someone who has motivations that are diametrically opposed to mine to do a diligent search. Good faith does not exist in corporate culture."

From a Getty representative: "We do $20M in unauthorized revenue. We miss a lot more. The consumer has no incentive to pay for their use."

From Jonathan Band, a lawyer on the panel: "I'm amazed at the level of hostility you have for your customers."

The technological solution from Microsoft: "If you tackle those problems about metadata, about identifying who owns the photograph, how they can find the owners, if those get tackled, you're essentially defining what reasonable search is."

From David Trust, PPA: "This is scary to sit in front of you and say what I'm about to say. These guys are not the dark lords. They represent some serious interests. The public is on their side. Congress is on their side. Our best friends in Congress are saying, this is going to happen. There will be orphan works this year, probably before October. We can sit here and rattle our sabers, but are you really willing to fall on your sword? Because you will. We have to accept that it's not going to be legislation that we want."

Gee-whiz! hour

Lots of flash, not a lot of content so far at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit, but here are links to a couple of Microsoft Labs projects.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm

Preview of coming attractions

The Microsoft Pro Photo Summit starts tomorrow, but tonight there was a small gathering for a social hour and group photo op at the Washington Park Arboreatum, led by John Shaw. John was the leader on a Joe van Os tour to Svalbard that I took in 2001, and it was a nice reunion for both of us.

One thing that was apparent, talking to other people this evening, is how hungry we all are for social contact with other photographers. We don't meet at the lab or the camera store anymore. That used to be how I felt connected to what was going on, and it's an absence I feel in my professional life that isn't replaced by listserv posts or the occasional ASMP meeting. This yearly gathering in Redmond seems to be becoming a kind of replacement for that kind of connection.

I'll be blogging throughout the conference, probably several times a day, so stay tuned.

The urban ecosystem

The season has tipped into the slow time for birding. On our walk around Green Lake this morning, we managed a paltry 13 species, and that had to include some “junk” birds like Rock Dove and Starling. We couldn't even raise a Robin or a Red-winged Blackbird or a Pied-billed Grebe. Everyone is busy molting (the ducks are shedding their spring finery for drab eclipse plumage) or hiding from the heat. The Tweeters birding listserv is thinner than usual—the birdwatchers have been driven from the scorched earth of Eastern Washington, and the fall shorebird migration is just beginning and nothing rare has shown up yet.

Yesterday morning we were breakfasting in the patio and heard the crows screeching even more vociferously than usual, and nearby. I investigated, and saw them dive bombing the neighbor's tomcat, as it released the young crow it had in its jaws. The crow hopped away, with one wing dragging, hobbled across the street, and, after several tries, made it up and over the curb.

Throughout the day the parents were unrelenting in their defense of the crippled offspring. The crow made it back into our yard, making it off-limits for us. I had no inclination to tend to this bird, as I am not sentimental when it comes to wild critters in general, and have a respectful antipathy towards crows in particular, as they exist in numbers far larger than they would without our intervention in the natural landscape, and they take a great toll on other native birdlife. The best I could have done for this wounded crow would have been to capture it, wring its neck, and put it out of its misery. But that would have risked being identified as the enemy of these crows, and I would have no peace ever again. Some time ago, my neighbor was thusly rewarded for freeing a baby crow from having gotten its head stuck in an Adirondack chair, and got dive bombed for years afterwards anytime he left the house. Just him. Corvids are profoundly intelligent, can identify us by individual, and have long memories.

The mortality rate of fledgling birds is about 90% or more. Nature is not in the least sentimental—that is strictly a human construct. This morning the neighborhood is quiet. There are no crows calling. A raccoon probably dispatched the youngster overnight, which is how I expected this to end, and how it should have. Cat, crow, raccoon, human. Predator, prey, scavenger, witness. These were the actors in this minor event in the urban ecosystem.

Photoshop transfer woes

One of the woes I thought I could avoid with switching platforms was to not have to buy another version of Photoshop. With a lot of effort you can switch the license from one platform to another. But did I ever hit an unusual speed bump when I tried.

The first hurdle was getting past an Adobe customer service person with an inadequate grasp of the English language (the call center was, I believe, in India). He also ineptly transferred me to the activation department, and I got disconnected after 40 minutes on hold.

When I got a live voice again, things were going swimmingly, finally. I downloaded the "Letter of Software Destruction" and was nearly all set. "You wouldn't have the serial number for your original version, would you?" he asked. Of course I did. I'm very organized. I bought Photoshop 4.0 a decade ago, and I read him the serial number off the original disk package.

"There's a problem, he said. "This is registered to a Dream Systems, at this address," (he read me a Seattle Ballard address), "a David L___ He has a number of registrations of retail copies of Photoshop. Did you buy this at a retail location?"

"There is a mistake somewhere on your end. I have never heard of this person, I have no connection to him. I bought the disk new." Of course I don't remember, a decade on, where I bought it. Maybe Glazers Cameras. Who knows?

If I hadn't done an office reorganization this winter, and thrown out my records that were more than seven years old, I could have put my hands on a receipt in minutes. But there's organized, and then there is obsessive. It would have been useful to have been more of the latter.

"I'm sorry, the back office won't grant me an exception. Every upgrade is registered to you, but the original version is not."

Is this some weird identity theft, or what?