I've not got a single sale of any type for Feb 28, which seems a bit improbable. Are others seeing sales for the 28th - any sales, PP, subs, ordinary. Was the site down that day?

Errm - isn't "white balancing" all about adjusting the colour balance to replicate what the scene would look like under white light?

You can use it to do other things, of course, but tungsten-balanced film in the old days had a strong blue cast to balance the orange of the lights, and the 81A filter (if I remember the name correctly) was created to do the same thing if you were shooting with daylight balanced film in a tungsten lit environment.

A poor month pretty much everywhere.

Art may have been excluded from embellished sales practices so it's a surprise to see someone applying it to art.

You must be on a different planet!  Unmade beds and rotting sheep worth the price of a house? An entire industry where everything is valued not on how good it is but on who made it? An industry where success or failure depends on whether you have friends in the establishment who will publicly swoon over what you produce? An industry where one "expert opinion" can change the value of an object from $100 to $1,000,000. And that's leaving out watercolour societies that can't tell the difference between an injet print and a "hyperrealistic" painting, or where everybody is copying LS Lowry and putting his name on the bottom and even more people are copying your photos and mine to sell on the same microstock sites?
The whole art industry is about deceiving people into thinking things that have little intrinsic worth or merit are worth a fortune. But it's not usually the person who creates them who creams off the cash, so good luck to those that do.
Look at Banksy, setting up a stall in NYC and offering original, signed prints to the sophisticated New Yorkers passing by for a few dozen dollars. Scarcely any of them could see enough merit in his work to be bothered to buy it but I bet a good many of them would kill to have one of his works on their wall. Everything in art is illusion and trickery.

So it's just a question of what colour light is on your screen? If you have a properly callibrated screen for the light you are working in you will see overexposed blue and black (which is what I did see the first time I encountered this dress)?

Oh, no, now I'm going mad because the original version I looked at has turned white and gold, too.....

That chat between the infringer and Alamy retroactively licensing an image to them while the photographer was pursuing them for payment is remarkably sleazy. Isn't that falsifying documents, offering to go in and change the dates on the license after the fact to "undo" the stealing of an image? If I were the photographer I'd continue to pursue the infringer and go after Alamy as well.

Forget the new terms...that act alone is enough for me to decide not to place images with them. Now I'm glad their "two weeks" for uploading vectors stretched into years.

I doubt if that license would be valid once legal proceedings had begun, it would probably amount to a criminal conspiracy, and I don't think it's clear that Alamy knew anything about there being an existing legal action at the time they were being asked for a backdated license. The e-mail made clear that they were going to mark it as newly issued but to cover an earlier time, so it couldn't be presented in court as being issued prior to the illegal usage, so I doubt that the court would accept it.
 
I think we all knew that if Alamy tracked down, for example, unpaid usage by an established client they would simply charge for backdated usage rather than trying to get damages. I had a case of a sale that wasn't credited long after the usage and after I reported it to them they chased-up and I duly got a payment shortly afterwards. Do we object to them doing that? Getty Images also had a habit of invoicing (admittedly at punitive rates) rather than suing if they caught an illegal use.

It's quite amusing to go back less than 18 months and see Bunhill and Tickstock telling me that the evidence I cited of falling iStock sales was completely meaningless and I was reaching absurd conclusions:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/the-%27new%27-is/msg351483/#msg351483

Quote from: Teddy the Cat on February 26, 2015, 07:00

The problem with Getty is a shortage of ready cash (liquidity) so the answer is hang on to the cash for as long as possible.

Let's go back to the water through pipe flow analogy. The same amount is still coming out of the end. So it makes no difference.

But it's a longer pipe, so it's holding more water and coming out in a different place. That's increased the amount of liquid-ity. The length of the pipe is equivalent to time in this equation.

You only benefit once from extending the pipe. But it does mean an insolvent company could continue trading for longer (not that I'm saying iStock is about to go bust).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-26/getty-images-outlook-blurs-as-photo-rivalry-triggers-price-war

Another story about Getty's difficulties. This glosses over how much of this has been an own goal on Getty's part, IMO. Certainly Shutterstock deserves some credit (and no one would even be mentioning Fotolia if Adobe hadn't purchased them), but they have benefitted hugely from Getty's eff-ups and crappy treatment of contributors across their various segments.

It's interesting that they are claiming only 8 million exclusive images. As SS has 40 million it would work out at only equivalent to one extra for every 5 at SS - but, of course, the crazy uploading system and low returns must mean that SS is getting content that people no longer bother to send to IS, so it will have its own quasi-exclusive stuff. Overall, iStock seems to be claiming 20.6 million images (I assume that's what the bizarre landing page reference to "LifesizeImages" means), so SS is double its size.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 25, 2015, 12:54

Well, we told them ... etc

It may not suit many of us but the strategy likely makes sense in the context of Getty likely moving towards an IPO.

It's hard to see how adopting policies that make less money are going to help a flotation price - but I'm no business guru.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 25, 2015, 09:57

it wasn't until the mid to late 90s that colour started to be standard for many pages in daily newspapers

It was the weekend magazines which took over the tradition of the picture story (from Life, Picture Post etc). And the British and US newspapers had color pictures stories in the Sunday magazines at least as far back as the mid 60s. Eg - famously - Cartier Bresson's pictures of Eton, Tim Page in Vietnam etc in the Sunday Times.

Yeah, but those were things that had a long lead in. Colour wasn't feasible for daily papers for various reasons - the number of printing cylinders was usually insufficient as it takes three additional cylinders to get colour on a single page (or set of four pages for a tabloid, two for broadsheet), the time involved in developing film and then in getting separations or blocks made and the additional cost of plates and ink all made colour a no-no. So only feature photographers would shoot colour, or those on weekly magazines.

I hear the Wolfgang Sch�uble is to be head of Contributor Remuneration Affairs, once he's finished sorting out Greece. Requests for a pay rise can be sent to him through the normal channels, or if you need emergency funds you can reach him directly by dialling Nein! Nein! Nein!

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 24, 2015, 15:44

He's got a few bits on Magnum, though goodness knows why, with his snapshots with wonky horizons.

Are you serious ? He is one of the most significant British photographers of the past 40 years. And has also done a huge amount to promote British photography - in particular the work of Tony Ray Jones.

ETA: personally I am not so interested in his work - but I can understand its important place in the evolution both of British photography and of Magnum. And I love listening to him talk.

As someone who hasn't heard of him, I am being serious. I had a look at his work and what I saw could have been taken by any Tom Dick or Harry. But he's obviously promoted himself well, and become (apparently) famous and made good money and gone all over the place taking lots of shots .... now, who does that remind me of? Oh, yeah, Peter Lik.

But perhaps Martin Parr is mostly famous in the UK, Lik is certainly famous in a lot of places so I'm surprised if Parr hasn't heard of him since I've stumbled into references to him for a good number of years (and I'm not wild about his style, either).