"Dear all,

You've been great this year so Santa has left some special presents for everyone. We've just started giving them out, hope you have your stocking ready:
All download plans are 50% OFF until midnight December 25th. Designers are welcome to claim their present here
All sales made on Christmas Day will award 100% royalties. Contributors are welcome to spread the joy of merry sales here and here below .


Everyone, Happy Holidays and all the very best in the new year to come."


Thanks Dreamstime

Very interesting map of the "Most Photographed Places".  I don't know the source but it does tell me I have a big problem living in central Europe.

more info:
"The http://www.sightsmap.com/ website is an interactive map that allows you to see which areas of the world have had the most photographs taken -- in other words, every place you should avoid if you wish to take a unique photograph. Europe is remarkably popular. North Pole not so much.

    The heatmaps are based solely on the number of available Panoramio photos for an area: both the number of photos and the number of authors is taken into account.

    The dark and the blue areas have a few photos, the red areas have more and the yellow areas have a large number of photos geotagged."

and like all Google Maps, you scale down to the street level

Because of the high shipping costs from sites like FFA, is anyone using fineartprint.de for clients within Germany/Europe and if so what is your experience.

The news letter from Panther "Important Legal Info - Rights Managed Images and our new platform PantherStock" has an inactive link (RM overview page) concerning Rights Managed Images.  After contacting them, they sent me this email with the correct link:


Hi, here is the correct link: http://contributor.panthermedia.net/cms/overview-rights-managed-licenses


Best regards
PantherMedia team

Just got a very perplexing image rejection:

Your image has been rejected
Reason: Red Cross requested us to delete all images with "red cross" signs

From my Google research:

"The red cross on a background of white is an international symbol of humanity and the use of this emblem is spelled out in international treaty and restricted by U.S. law. In accordance with International and federal law, the use of the name and emblem of the Red Cross in the United States is limited except for certain pre-1905 users - to the medical departments and to the American Red Cross"

As you can see from the attached image, the �red crosses� were not on a white background so should not have been rejected . . . . . . .  unless all red crosses are copyrighted, which is absurd.  Or am I wrong . . . . . . . .

Now comes even more change in the Photography World, refocusing after the photo is taken . . . . . .  good luck to the youngsters, I haven't mastered "old" photographic techniques yet.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576400053004293050.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

WSJ has a video showing the capabilities:

http://online.wsj.com/video/camera-start-up-offers-a-whole-new-perspective/5B23C591-FEE6-4DED-8C15-281FC74542A5.html?mod=WSJ_Article_Videocarousel_1

April numbers are in and it seems that every image was downloaded exactly 2 times . . . . . . . . .  oh my, oh my!

For those of you who are video Dreamers my son , who is into Dirt Biking, just sent me this walk through of the Phantom HD GOLD High Speed Digital Cinema Camera by Tom Guilmette.



Phantom camera line from $50,000 to $150,000 depending on specific model and features.

Enjoy and dream on . . . . . . .

Like many of you here, for each image I have a jpeg file for uploading, a layered PSD file and the original Raw file archived on multiple locations.  What is not clear to me is what file format should I use for the layered file, either a layered Tiff (16) or the proprietary format of PSD?  One mistake I have been making is not using "Backwards Compatibilty" on my PSD files, thus slowing down Bridge previews among other disadvantages.   

From Cambridge In Colour:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/archival-photo-backup.htm

�Unfortunately, many of the formats used for storing edited photos are also subject to future compatibility issues. Fortunately, this is one area where changing technology can mean you'd like to rework certain images using the latest software and techniques. Just make sure that you also have an archived version of the unaltered original photo.�
�Overall, the only fail-proof solution is to keep your data up-to-date. Every few years it's a good idea to convert file types that are in danger of becoming obsolete.�

I know this has been discussed before but the above quote tells me that it might be unimportant whether a Tiff or PSD is the choice.

Any thoughts from those of you who have thought this through?

Now tell me, is the age of FREE IMAGES finally arrived?

From Crestock:


Introducing the Crestock WordPress Plugin
Hi Steven,

We're incredibly excited to let you know that we're only one week away from launching our biggest, most powerful marketing initiative to date, and this is a special invite for you to join and to receive an additional 5% commission on all credits purchases.

If you've been around at Crestock for a while, you know that we've been running some hugely popular Photoshop design contests every year around summer time. The idea has been to provide one of the most dominant demographics among potential buyers, the designers, a chance to get to know Crestock � and to actually try the products.

These contests have been shaped as viral campaigns and have, without failure, spread like wildfire in the design community; through blogs and forums, through social media and have even been featured on the Apple and MTVs websites.

Throughout the years, these contests have generated incredible exposure, millions of visitors and tens of thousands of paying customers. However, though viral and social marketing is one of the things we're exceptionally good at (we've actually won awards for them), we've realized that all these successful campaigns, by nature of a contest, had one big flaw � they all had an end date.


In our opinion, the Ultimate Campaign has the following treats:

No end date
Virtually unlimited scalability
Massive distribution to users
Massive exposure of individual portfolios
Massive direct and indirect sales
So what's in it for you?
The brilliance of the new WordPress plugin is that it will just keep rolling and getting more and more users as time goes by, and the whole point of the WordPress plugin is to promote each individual portfolio on a scale never seen before in the business of microstock.

I know some of you will scream bloody murder in a minute, but please stay with me on this one, because it's exceptionally important that you appreciate the enormous reach and impact of this campaign; After all, there's a reason why big names such as Yuri Arcurs, Ron Chapple (iofoto), Kirsty Pargeter, Lev Dolgachov and Andres Rodriguez (only to name a few) has already signed up for it.


This WordPress plugin will allow bloggers access to search for, and add, any Crestock image to their blog - free of charge.

There � I said it. The "F" word. Free.

But we're not going to just give away your art for free. That would be a spectacularly bad business plan doomed to fail.

For Crestock as a corporation, selling your images is what's making us the money. Incidentally this also ties in with your bottom line, so to be brutally honest, we both have at least one common interest, and that is to make you as much money as possible.

But some times you have to give some in order to get a lot in return, so please stay with me for a bit longer, and it'll all become clear:

The Freemium Business Model
The freemium business model was articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson (co-founder of Union Square Ventures, with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us and FeedBurner) on 23 March 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

What we'll give away are images with a maximum resolution of 400px width � perfect for blogs, but totally useless for anything else.


Here's how it works, and here's how you'll make money:
For starters, WordPress is the most popular blog platform on the planet, with over 3 million downloads of their latest release alone, and over 3.1 million active blogs on their own site.

Secondly, the Top 10 Plugins on WordPress has been downloaded a total of 4.42 million times � that's an average of 740,000 times for each plugin in the Top 6.

When a blogger use your images, the WordPress plugin will insert a clearly watermarked image as well as a caption with links embedded pointing to the corresponding image page on Crestock.

This is extremely important.

At this point, the different search engines accounts for roughly 40% of the total traffic on Crestock. It's so high because we've been very focused on what's called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), which is the process of improving web sites so that it ranks higher in search engines for targeted keywords.

Incoming links to a web site is one of the most important ranking criteria in any search algorithm, and simply put, you can think of a link as a vote for another website, with the link text as a description of the website you're linking to.

If you link to Crestock with the link text "Crestock stock photos" , you're telling the search engines you vote for this site, and the site is about stock photos. This will make us rank better for that phrase.

The WordPress plugin solves one of our biggest challenges SEO wise: building deep links with highly relevant link text to each of your images: The deep links to each of your images will give them a great boost in the search engine rankings, and it will naturally also drive traffic directly into the page with your image on it - Where people can buy it.

So let's summarize:
Massive distribution to millions of bloggers
Plugin will actively promote paid, high resolution versions of your images
Images will be clearly watermarked with your name and copyright sign - �

The automatically embedded image caption will contain a link to the image page:
Links will rank your images higher in Google
Links will drive click-though visitors directly to your images
But Wait � There's More!
(And it's not just rubbish being thrown at you)

Aside from the incredible boost in highly converting search engine traffic and referral traffic the links will provide you, we're also using the actual plugin interface to offer the bloggers to upgrade to a paid service. This is the Premium content.

Since we have control of the content we deliver in the plugin search interface, we'll use tracking software to monitor and calculate which offers and which approaches generates the highest possible revenue in order to exploit the potential that lies in the WordPress plugin to the fullest.

Finally, we're offering an additional 5% commission on every single credit sale you make when you join the WordPress project.

To put the awesome power of the WordPress plugin to work for you, simply activate below: