dispatches

Microsoft Pro Photo Summit: stock pricing

I'm at the 3rd annual Microsoft Pro Photo Summit, at the plush conference center on the Redmond campus. Per the previous conferences, it's not until the afternoon sessions that we get into any meaty issues, starting with a pairing of Lise Gagné, a contributing photographer and new Creative Director at iStockPhoto, and Jim Pickerell, a stock photography analyst and writer of the influental Selling Stock newsletter.

Lise got into microstock because she had a boss at her graphic design firm who didn't want to spend any money on photography. Jim acknowledged that microstock isn't going away. Rights Managed is probably dead, but microstock's problem is that they're leaving too much money on the table.  He proposes a new market pricing structure that is essentially Rights Ready with no exclusivity. Pick a usage, there's the price. No negotiation necessary.

The problem is that a more equitable pricing structure doesn't address a primary market force driving microstock. Lise's old boss didn't want to spend money for photography, period. Fair usage pricing was not part of the equation. There is now a huge market sector for whom the concept of usage pricing is wholly alien.

On a related note, the buzz around the conference is last night's announcement of a marketing agreement between Getty and Flickr. The sense I'm getting is that this is a smaller deal than it first appears.  Getty plans to cherry pick a microscopic fraction of the Flickr image library, probably a few thousand images, to make as a collection on the Getty site. Flickr has 3 million new images uploaded to it each day. The chances of your photo being picked are less than buying a winning lottery ticket. Traditional pricing structure will be in place, not $1 per image microstock prices.

Film and photojournalism: Not dead yet

Look at today's New York Times in the Week in Review section. There is amazing spread of photographs, and article by Tyler Hicks, shot in black and white with the panoramic Xpan. An even more amazing online multimedia is on the website.

The Xpan seems to be a signature look for certain New York Times features. It is a treat, and a wonder, that that they remain committed to displaying work in this format. Panoramic has a power of encompassing an environment that is attention getting and poetic, and not just because of the novelty. It is a challenging format to compose within, and Hicks is masterful at it.

Camp Wannadance -- The Movie

This is my most complex project to date, and the last one I will have shot on the Canon HG-10. Shooting happened over the course of three days (about an hour and a quarter of footage). Editing took about a week.

The video documents a Northwest dance institution: Camp Wannadance, held every March at Ft. Flagler State Park near Pt. Townsend. It is notable for being a more "old fashioned" dance weekend, in that the focus is about dance as community, as opposed to dance as a thrilling aerobic fitness regime. It was my first dance weekend, back in 1988.

This embed is from Viddler. I have the same video also on Vimeo. Blip.tv and YouTube; All have problems. Vimeo's flash compression looks jerky to me. Viddler compresses the color depth and you see a lot of banding. The YouTube standard version looks like there's a thick Gaussian Blur filter put over the footage, but if you click on the High Quality version, it's the best of the lot.

If any of you have the secret sauce settings for getting good looking on-line video, would you let me know? What I'm using: 720x404, H.264, Frame Rate: Current, Key Frame: 300, Compressor: High, Encoding: Best Quality, Deinterlace checked.