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Messages - Xanox
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176
« on: August 07, 2013, 14:20 »
I've said this before and might prove it some day, but you could photograph a brown stick on brown sand, with brown rocks and it's it's sharp, properly exposed and has no flaws, it will get accepted.
Has nothing to do with WHAT the image is. This goes along with the people who believe that Microstock should not judge on Commercial Potential, and I agree. Low Commercial Value is an opinion and assumes in advance what a buyer wants or is looking for. Kind of strange? So they tell the buyers what they can get, because of the opinion of the agency, what has commercial viability.
Alamy doesn't reject for content, which we should applaud, not criticize.
actually a stick of incence with sand and rocks could be a super duper buddhist temple in a top asian destination, how can these QC guys know any possible world locations etc ? or maybe it could be part of the tomb of a famous celebrity, who knows .. that's stuff that usually goes along many news articles, getty has plenty of stuff like that but if anyone looks at the single image without the caption it would be worthless. or .. a horrible snapshot of a random blond girl .. but then the caption "the LAST living blond girl in Nigeria !" ... hahaha now that's an archival photo, and also commercial value !
177
« on: August 07, 2013, 14:13 »
Nothings changed with alamy but there's still people complaining that their QC is too harsh  They need to go Mostphotos exclusive.
or Flickr ! but those guys shoot with compact cameras, what do they expect ? anyone could pass QC in most agencies shooting with a 500$ DSLR with 18-55 kit lens at F8 in daytime in ISO 100 or 200, it's not rocket science. i've no idea how they get so many rejections for shots that would come out good even if done in auto (green) mode.
178
« on: August 07, 2013, 14:07 »
well, maybe i'm the only one archiving my photos based on a geographic gerarchic tree ?
like ... "Asia / China / Shanghai" with subfolders like "Pudong / Skyline" or "Subway / Remin Square"
that way you can't forget the location, but for keywording i create a different file system as in many cases the location is irrilevant.
179
« on: August 07, 2013, 12:02 »
man, what's wrong with you ? actually it's ranking nr.1 for "Fall Greetings".
why should you ever rank higher for such a short and common keywords as "fall" ? moreover, considering your vector file has nothing related to Fall (season) !
there's no reason you should rank for "fall" at all, the keyword for you is "fall greetings" because it's a greetings card, anything else would be keyword spam.
180
« on: August 07, 2013, 11:12 »
but what's the matter with this GPS mania ? will you make more sales because of the few GPS addicts ? i don't get it but maybe i'm an old fart.
181
« on: August 07, 2013, 11:10 »
post the link of your files so we can see.
182
« on: August 07, 2013, 07:57 »
^^ They've been doing that for a while, but to be fair, if you need that particular street, where else would you get it?
in a perfect world they would send someone on assignment
exactly, and now, we just google it and lift the image from google maps. I have used the plain version of google maps many times on website (constituting commercial use) without a thought, but when I saw that © on the photography bit... I must confess I laughed. do they seriously expect anyone to care?
technically it's correct .. the image is (C) Google as it was done with their "google car", problem is they have no property/model release so you'll be legally liable if the owner of the house in the picture wants to sue you. which is also another gray area : the image has been shot from a public road so probably most of the judges will laugh about the need for a property release of a random low cost home in a godforsaken town, different story if it was the megavilla of some rich hollywood celebrity, in that case you're F'ed.
183
« on: August 07, 2013, 03:20 »
^^ They've been doing that for a while, but to be fair, if you need that particular street, where else would you get it?
in a perfect world they would send someone on assignment
184
« on: August 06, 2013, 22:52 »
by the way, i've just read this today's article on BBC web site and they're crediting one of the image to "Google StreetView" !  Rural France: A tale of two villages http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23586037
185
« on: August 06, 2013, 10:20 »
Note in particular the post from the lady who got damages from HuffPost Canada and note the response from her US attorney. This woman says (in many previous posts) she pursues all the infringements she finds, apparently for well over the asking rate. She has a legal background and, possibly 'mates rates' but certainly personal contacts with legal representatives in the US, Canada, UK and Australia.
Actually she only pursues in western countries, in the old forum she said she doesnt even waste time with infringers from india, china, middle east, africa etc As for the US, i think his lawyer reasoned that sueing AOL wasnt a good idea without being backed from photos registered to the copyright office but i remember she won many cases in the US despite the lack of CO registration, there was also another female photographer asking big bucks to bloggers and site owners, she was using ImageRights i think but they only deal with cases where the minimum billing is 3-400$, so cheap bloggers are out of question.
186
« on: August 06, 2013, 10:06 »
Let me rephrase that. "I didn't make any money" or "I'm a non-profit" does not qualify one for a "fair use" exemption from copyright infringement.
in many cases it does, why else fair use has been invented ? first of all for trivial, non-profit stuff like schools and education. problem is, what is exactly accepted as fair use is a bit complex, there are the basic 4 required rules but lots of exceptions too and it only creates further confusion .. and for starters it was never meant to be used on digital.
187
« on: August 06, 2013, 09:04 »
fair use is for NON PROFIT orgs, her blogs is selling books so how can it ever be fair use and no profit ?
Uh, no. Making a profit or not is not a requirement for fair use.
And the article is more than a year old.
she's selling her books on the same site so de facto the site is a commercial site. no judge will downplay this, and she could not claim the stolen images are just for decoration or to illustrate a point, the images are there exactly to catch the readers attention and to make them interested in her articles and therefore in her books, they're an integral part of the whole package so they're used for commercial purposes and since this the case they should be paid to the author. and in any case no one knows what a judge would rule, each case is different, but photographers can sue whenever they want, no matter what and that's exactly what happened to this girl .. letter or immediate removal + billing for the stolen photos, she talked with her lawyer and he told her better to pay ... game over !
188
« on: August 06, 2013, 08:53 »
what about property and model releases ?
These are not commercial use images, but editorial.
are you sure ? unlike in the past now they're actually making money from Google Maps so to me it's 100% commercial as the product itself is also made of photos of a specific location that never gave google any permission. no idea what a judge would rule about it but it looks like a gray area : the concept of editorial was born out of newspapers and books, to illustrate articles and not like today to be an integral part of a for-profit service where the images are most of what the product is all about. sure it's not advertising photography but neither editorial in the classic sense. if we look at any other photo sharing site they all accept complaints from people claiming they gave no permission to publish images of their homes or whatever .. so why google should make exception ? they've been already sued in the past about this and they also lost against many book/ebook publishers for the Google Book affair.
189
« on: August 06, 2013, 08:45 »
If someone screendumps the page with the image and crops it, the metadata is lost anyway.
i've still the feeling screendumps are for power users, not for random leechers. actually you don't even need addons, most of the cases just save the whole page in a directory and find the images. some have server side hotlink protection but c'mon there are many ways to skin a cat.
190
« on: August 06, 2013, 08:42 »
well it was obvious i was saying "USING CSS" rather than "AS CSS", thanks.
191
« on: August 06, 2013, 03:35 »
serves her right !
and why she's ranting about this * fair use ? everybody is talking about fair use and yet nobody ever read it !!
fair use is for NON PROFIT orgs, her blogs is selling books so how can it ever be fair use and no profit ?
why anyone is free to open a blog or post stolen images/video/warez ? i want to know.
in china you need to be registered to open a blog or buy a domain, that's the way it should be.
no freedom without responsability.
192
« on: August 06, 2013, 03:28 »
displaying the image as CSS is a lot better as the browser can't give a "save as" option !
you need some addons to save CSS images but it's only for power users, not for the lamers stealing from google images.
on the other side CSS images arent usually indexed by google images at all but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
193
« on: August 06, 2013, 03:26 »
what about property and model releases ?
194
« on: August 05, 2013, 14:28 »
As for the concept that a camera is just a tool and bla bla bla.
Fine, we all agree on that, but your artwork and your artist status depends on the media and the tools you use !
They're not so easily interchangeable as he claims.
A painter is using brushes and inks to paint on a canvas, a photographer is using a camera in order to make prints, a digital artist will eventually scan or take photos of real life and of paintings and mix them up with maybe some added stuff done on a Wacom tablet .. that's what you can get in the best scenario of "mixed techniques" more or less but if the end product is a digital print, sorry you're still more a photographer than a painter.
Now, there's a niche where painters paint over prints, ok, but to me it's still 70% photography and 30% painting.
Technically "mixed technique" of course and many people rave about it, to each his own.
The moral of the story is, if that guy left photography is because he wasn't good enough, maybe he's better try a mixed style to make a pop-art soup and see what sticks, consider that nowadays even a dog can throw an exhibition pretending to be a refined pop-artist everything is possible.
The last cr-ap i've seen recently are painting by impoverished street kids sold by greedy NGOs for big bucks to idiot tourists for what could be worth an average monthly salary.
That's a fine example of "added value" and exploitation, but i'm not sure those kids could now call themselves "painters".
195
« on: August 05, 2013, 14:19 »
As a general rule, if at least most of your monthly income comes from art, you're an artist.
Then again, there's the "pennyless artist" category but that's another story, these are recognized artists that for whatever reason (alcoholism, sickness, drugs, etc) are having it rough and cannot pay the bills but that in the past were able to do exhibitions or other ways to exchange their art for money of at least food.
What the see nowadays instead are self-appointed "artists" and "photographers" who never won any award, never sold a single image or print, but feel entitled to call themselves Pros because of some positive feedbacks and comments on Flickr and Instagram.
Don't be fooled by these clowns, either you're a pro or you're a deluded amateur.
Now, back to OP's link ... is that guy calling himself Portraitist and Pictorialist earning 100% of his salary from selling prints or digital products ? If so, yes he's a photographer, if not sorry he's just a hobbyist and i'm not much impressed by his academic snapshots, that's the typical fake fine-art cr-ap you see on Flickr of 500px done by pixel peepers using the most expensive gear, usually technically good stuff that lacks any real creativity or artistic touch but don't dare to tell them as they all tend to consider themselves the new Ansel Adams no matter if they haven't sold a 5$ print on RedBubble.
196
« on: August 05, 2013, 03:50 »
Spread 50 sales across 50 images with similars and you could kill the search ranking of every one of them. The occasional buyer might search 10,000 images to find the perfect one but most of them will make do with something in the first 100 results.
i'm not advocating doing 50 similars for each shot, but agencies should be a bit more flexible. it's not fair to blame similars when the issue is their search engines su-ck. with their typical double standard they have zillions of images of the Tour Eiffel on sale but nobody complain, what about that ?
197
« on: August 04, 2013, 23:54 »
Remember he's not taking all, maybe not even many, of the photos himself.
While I was looking for his Bootcamp 2013, I came across this:
http://peopleimages.com/support/view/8
Question?
asked by Utku O.
Can I sell my images on peopleimages.com?
I would really like to sell my images on your site! How can I achieve this?
Official Answer
Answered by: Alessa Digsmed
Hi Utku,
This is a site selling only Yuri Arcurs' images, and images shot by photographers that have passed the Yuri Arcurs Bootcamp, so unfortunately, this is not a possibility. All images on the site are Yuri's so to speak.
So I guess in theory some iStock exclusive who has passed the Bootcamp might be selling at PI or even across many sites under the Yuri moniker. Wonder if he buys out all rights or pays a royalty?
I think it's like for any other photo studio, the assistants don't keep the copyright nor are they allowed to resell the image for stock or whatever, and this applies also to many news agencies and newspapers. His team is probably earning a fixed salary with small bonuses. Believe it or not it happens also for some famous painters, they hire a crew of art students, they learn to paint exactly as their master and then the paintings are produced in limited 20-30 signed copies by the artist, no one knows they were painted by random students, it's an open secret and it can easily backfire.
198
« on: August 04, 2013, 23:48 »
It's interesting that one of the leading "people-pic" guys puts up 40 or 50 quite similar shots of the same model from the same shoot, whereas I generally restrict myself to four or five images from my culinary shoots. With that sort of output per shoot, portfolios of 50,000 to 100,000 images are a bit less impressive than they look at first sight. Especially if you have a factory of producers handling the processing and uploading.
composition is probably the key ingredient of stock photography, it's laughable that many agencies are hellbent against "similars", many buyers need more space for the copywriting, others are ok with the subject filling the frame, and then again i could use different DOFs, different lighting, color or B/W, you just can't have it all with 3-4 images at all.
199
« on: August 04, 2013, 13:43 »
No i blame google for not implementing a program that rectifies the problem, instead of adding one that further promotes stealing. They have the money and technology. And while i am at it, i blame the agencies for stripping our copyright data. I dont necessarily have to know everyone that bought my images, but everyone who sees my images on the internet should know they belong to me and they need to purchase a license.
the problem is systemic and starterd from the very early stages of the WWW. why browsers included the option to save images with one click ? instead they dont give you a way to save/steal youtube videos unless you install some addons. neither to save flash games or flash files. it's always images and text and with google images stealing images became 100% mainstream and easier like never before. nobody in the web industry is showing the slightest remorse, if the next version of IE/Firefox/Chrome disables the "save image as" function there would be riots in the street.
200
« on: August 04, 2013, 13:39 »
if there will be no D400 and no 70D-II then the message will be loud and clear : only full frames cameras will have pro specs from now on, no more D300s or 7Ds on DX/APS-C.
however, this is absolutely a non issue if you don't shoot sport or wildlife.
cameras like the D7100 are designed to be crippled about frame speed and frame buffer but for anything else they beat a D300s or a 7D hands down in any department.
so clearly both canon and nikon want to keep DX/APS-C in a position where they don't steal sales from the more expensive full frame models.
fine for me, but it's still marketing BS for most of us, DX is still great value for money, many many famous people still use DX and D300s in particular and make the frontpages of the best magazines and newspapers.
i mean people from Magnum, VII, Panos, Noor ... and their photos make history and will be used in history books, it's laughable so many pixel peepers keep ranting about the idea that 12MP is a joke or DX is for amateurs and bla bla bla.
besides, there's a cost/danger issue, i don't see anybody traveling in poor areas with a couple of new D4s + 6-7 F2.8 lenses but if you lose a couple D300s it's no big deal.
all the Noor guys use Nikon gear, mostly old D300/D300s/D3/D700, the latest pics from Syria by Yuri Kozyrev on TIME magazine were done with a D700 and the list goes on, take a look at the ones winning the World Press Photo awards, they're either canon 5Ds or nikons 12MP, nobody is on D800 or D3x or D4.
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