And neither it is cool to be ALWAYS POSITIVE even when encountering BS, unfairness, injustice etc.....

I'm surprised they're still taking seriously all this "think positive" rubbish propaganda that is going on since decades.

There are so many things going totally negative in the West i wouldn't know where to start, and i consider myself a positive guy, go figure.

The "millennials" are a lost generation, i wouldn't like to be born now and facing a future with no hope like they do now, that's maybe why they're so addicted to games and social networks as a way to escape reality.

You guys need to step into the 21st century. Really. You can't keep hanging on to the past. If you ignore mobile technology you only will hurt yourself in the end.

Mobile is just a way to access data thru wireless technology, i can do the same with a laptop and pretty happy about that ... i'm losing nothing sticking with a legacy phone since it does voice calls and SMS and that's all i need and that's what a phone should be all about.

they are not ashamed of being fools with their money being parted, only ashamed of not being identified in the crowd ie crowd of mob iphone notebook tin cans headphone users.
google favoring them is pretty obvious because they are the least money aware.

exactly, that's the living example of the herd menthality which is dominant especially among the youth and women in general.

people are shocked when they hear i'm still not on WhatsApp or Line or Tango or Twitter or whatever ... and i barely use FB if that matters.

i remember years ago parents worrying about giving mobile phones to their kids, now it's all gone, parents are actually encouraged to give phones to their kids as young as 4-5 yrs old with the excuse of "security" but we all know this is BS, it's because every kid now has a phone and they're scared to make their kid stand out of the crowd ... next we will be microchipped at birth and nobody will complain.

and by the way, how ridicolous are all these guys walking in the street with huge BEATS headphones on their neck is it me being too old or what ?

You are categorically against anything new and/or established 

yes, i was totally against smartphones and tablets from the start and i've yet to see a single reason to change idea on this subject, it's a textbook case of how marketing can exploit the dumbing down of mobile users.

This says it's available as Lightroom 6 as well

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/21/8459127/adobe-lightroom-6-release-available

I'll give it a month or so for other people to have fun with the bugs before I upgrade. LR 5 is working well and I have no interest in being an early adopter in this case

as a product it was already mature with version 4.xx

they should allow for a lot more customization of the GUI but Adobe seems to be pretty strict about it, personally i like Capture Pro a lot more than LR for many things.

i don't think they've any killer feature to add in the future, speed won't improve and you will still need many 3rd party addons to make even basic things work for instance the export with tree-folders which should be a given nowadays ...

RawTherapee was also a promising app but for whatever reason it's still full of problems and their dev team were talking about a complete rewrite so good luck with it .. it's a shame as now we're left with just LR and Capture Pro.

hint : another way to sneak in is to join an agency that is distributed by Getty.

by the way, if we talk about sales i'm hearing better things about Corbis recently.

it would be easy to dismiss Alamy's management and their sales force as clueless but on the other side considering they survived the switch to digital, the internet, microstock, and much more ... you know so many other agencies went bust including the big ones like Jupiter, it's a miracle Alamy is still in biz if we think how much everything changed and how much the industry became less profitable in just a few years.

said that, doubling their archive year on year won't make Alamy's profits increase too much but it will soon kill the sales of most of their contributors and it's just a matter of time before we reach the point of non return.

agencies know VERY WELL that for a contributor to make steady sales he must have at least xxx photos on sale and the whole archive must maximum yyy photos .. it's math ! they know it, but they won't care as this doesn't clash with THEIR sales !

but a domino effect will come, it's only a matter of when, not of IF.
people will upload only as soon as it's profitable, simple as that, and this is true for any other micro agency as well.

citizen journalism failed because the money is just not there, once photographers can't make money with stock the same result will be achieved ... and look at Beatport, iTunes, PODs, and much more, same logic, same trends .. i mean even Walmart killed the market and forced small shops to close down ... this is the future for pretty much anything sold digitally in one way or another.

i understand that nowadays people dont want to OWN things but want the ACCESS to digital things.
it's OK ... i get it !
but ... where . the money is coming from in this scenario ? i can't play live gigs with my editorial photos, either someone pays for it or i'm done with it ...

I don't do street photography, but I would have thought that no interaction between the subject and the photographer would have some value. Especially in the context of historical records of our times.

The Hawthorne Effect says that subjects will modify their behavior if they know they're being observed.  That seems like an argument in favor of covert street photography for the purposes of objectively recording events..

interaction can be the subject looking at the photographer, it doesn't need to turn into a staged shot.

covert street photography is like picking up a frame from a CCTV video camera, nobody see you, nobody notice you're shooting .. where's the beef ? where's the skill ?

Quote from: Hobostocker on April 14, 2015, 06:51

street photography it's 100% ethical, especially if done in your face as Bruce Guilden,  there's nothing immoral or unethical on it.

200% quote.

unethical may be the use of these pictures... but that's another story

50 yrs from now all these street photos will be an invaluable treasure trove depicting our times, without street photographers covering all these obscure and non commercial subjects we would have no way to know how the past looked like.

said that, of course images can be used unethically but that's not our fault and on top of this if reality su-cks is not our fault too, all we're doing is documenting what's really going on without bells and whistles.

copyright has no meaning in asia, unless you violate their copyright.
my experience with asians in general is they have no respect for copyright. in their mind you either copyright or you copywrong.

i remember a crackdown in bangkok's chinatown many years ago about pirated THAI music, of course nothing was done about foreign pirated music.

the problem is, unless you live in japan/korea/hongkong/singapore it's still a wild west, the police won't move a finger unless you pay, many expats are killed every week in south east and the cops close the case as suicide or heart attack ... just to give you an idea.

if they make crackdowns against piracy is usually because the shopowners refused to pay a bribe to the cops, they coudn't give two sh-its about copyright or whatever.

they will raise our fees only when they will get a substantial benefit from it, like they do with the Offset collection.

Quote from: stockastic on April 09, 2015, 14:02

That's why I said "capable".  Yes, anyone can now record a track and offer it on the web.   "Independent" doesn't necessarily mean "great".

Exactly, but exactly the same goes for the photographers.

Snapping a good photo, now and then, doesn't make you an artists or even a good photographer. But a lot of times this is exactly what some customers want.
The competition among photographers has increased a lot since the explosion smartphones and all those continuous DSLR improvements.
With so many decent photos produced every day, how can you not expect the price of the photo to go down?

Simple economics.

Embrace the trend, adapt to it, or sink slowly.

and by simple economics the only way to stay in the stock business is to own a large portfolio, precisely because it's oversaturated and you can't compete too much on quality since the fees are miserable.

the immediate consequence of this is that newbies will give up since there's no return on investment, and sooner of later this will be acknowledged by the agencies.

agencies had a free lunch so far but it won't last forever.
lots of people are leaving Alamy for lack of sales, others gave up with second and third tier micro agencies, this is just the beginning and the final outcome is obvious, just give it some time ...