Hotshoe magazine is opening a members club for photographers in London. It's a place to work, relax between jobs and meet other photographers. The club will open in January and will also take foreign membership. It's in the same building as their new photo gallery.

http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=2612

yesterday I  have started a project with the readers of my magazine. I have asked all photographers to answer a single question:

What is the single most important thing you have done that made you a better and/or more successful photographer? (In max 50 words). (http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=2006)

Responses are coming in quite rapidly and I will organise and publish them for everyone to look at. It would be great to get the microstock perspective here as well.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the answers and the ideas

Here are some of the responses:

Put my camera down while photographing a deadly accident

There was a key moment at the beginning of my transition from assisting to shooting for myself where I was at a party with lots of ad folks and I decided to take myself seriously, and I presented myself that way. I got my first ad gig from those connections.

Continuing Education - the more I can learn from my fellow photographers on an on-going basis the better I become

left half my gear at home. took a 5d, 24-70 and 2 fashguns

I interviewed Thought Equity Motion this week. While they are obviously focussed on motion (video) what they are trying to do is universal. They will move from being a library only to a company that provides 'contextual media'.

When applied to photography and microstock the concept of providing context around core content will create new volume and opportunity. The concept implies that if you have a central piece of content, whether it's music, a sport event, text etc you offer other content around it that gives further informaton, depth and entertainment.

For commercial photography this could mean showing travel photography (which can be purchased for prints for example) around a travel story. Just thinking out loud here of course.

Getty's partnership with Daylife also points in this direction. The article is quite long but gives insight in a company that is allready working on this. http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=1867

What do you think?

There's a bit of a fight going on here in the UK between the association of Picture libraries and one of its members: http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=1738 I'll keep on following it as it develops

I posted an article about a company called Demand Media on my magazine site and it kind of threw me of course. This company is a massive "content generating machine" that automatically produces lists of subjects that will be popular (it uses algorithms), pays contributors $15-$20 to produce it and then publishes it on their own community sites or sells it to publishers and corporations to fill up their sites with more content.

As far as I can see it's mostly text and video now but you'd think that this model can also be applied to Microstock quite easily. I'm not quite sure yet what to make of it. Do you think this is this a threat or an opportunity for Microstock?  http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=1613

I thought it would be good to know the latest on what PACA thinks about the future of the industry and some of the opportunities. I have just received the video of the keynote speech that was given last week. Maria Kessler talks about looking at changes in other industries and how to use those learnings to secure the future for Stock Photography

Here it is:

http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=1575

Let me know if you find this useful. I'll have some more video on the event later.

Marco