Month: September 2006

Think In Pictures: Adventures in Visual Education: Picasa 2 Goes From Beta To Live, Gets Numerous Fixes, Now Supports RAW Files, Geotagging Jeremiah McNichols has a short review on Google’s Picasa coming out of beta today.

Included in their new features are geotagging for Google Earth as well as RAW format support. Cool stuff. I’ll try to spend some time on it myself and write something up when I get a chance.

The official Google Blogs post on the release as well.

Yo, yo, yo! Check this out. Moo.com is offering to print up 100 unique flickr cards for you for $19.99. You point them to 100 of your favorite flickr images and they print up cards with those images on one side and your flickr contact info on the other side.

Extremely cool.

You can try out 10 for free if you own a Flickr Pro account.

Thanks, Superchou!

Dahl-Beck neon sign, San Francisco

Las Vegas City Life Las Vegas City Life, a newspaper in Las Vegas, interviewed me last week regarding my difficulty in obtaining permission to photograph the Neon Museum’s neon boneyard, a collection of old and historic neon signs in Las Vegas.

I attempted to shoot the signs on a recent visit to Las Vegas and my request to shoot was denied and I was told that the museum did not want images of their signs on photo sharing sites like Flickr and Zooomr due to potentially “unscrupulous” use.

I originally posted on this here and Cory also published the story over at Boing Boing here.

My own opinion is that by attempting to restrict photography and photo sharing of their collection that the non profit museum is in direct conflict with their stated mission to:

“collect, preserve, study and exhibit neon signs and associated artifacts to inspire educational and cultural enrichment for diverse members of our international community.”

Photography and photo sharing represent perhaps the single best vehicle to in fact share their neon signs with the “international community.” It is difficult to see how making someone fly from India or China to Las Vegas to see the signs in person vs. allowing them the ability to view them on Flickr or Zooomr supports their claimed mission statement.

Las Vegas City Life’s coverage of the issues surrounding this museum is fair and balanced. In addition to interviewing me they also interviewed Nancy Deaner, the Museum Board Chair.

I found it ironic that Deaner brought up the subject of copyright as a potential reason for restricting photography of the signs. This objection was never brought up to me in my initial rejection. I find it difficult to see how when these signs were originally designed to be on public display, with the full knowledge that anyone could take a public photo of them, how now, after the fact, the museum feels it their job to somehow enforce copyright issues.

The museum’s stance towards photographers is both backwards to cultural enrichment and antithetical to their stated mission.

As a non-profit the museum enjoys favorable tax exempt status. This fact makes their collection something that ought to be of public interest and for the public benefit. By restricting their collection they work against cultural enrichment of an international community. I would hope that the Board of Directors of this museum would reconsider this position.

I have long been a fan of neon art and have a set of neon images up on Flickr here.

Google Video could be headed to Apple’s iTV TechCrunch has a post out saying that Google is reportedly in talks with Apple to allow Google Video to work with the new iTV widgety thing that I’ve decided to call the iDongle. You remember the iDongle of course — that little gadgety thing that Apple thinks they will be selling for $300 next year.

I previously wrote about the $300 iDongle here suggesting that someone needed to check Steve Job’s pipe because he’s probably pretty high if he thinks people are going to pay $300 to have the privilege of buying less than DVD quality movies at $10-$15 each when you can get a monthly subscription to Netflix for far less than the cost of two movies a month from Apple.

So will Google Video become the long tail savior for the $300 iDongle? I don’t think so. You see the problem has to do with people’s expectation of picture quality and Google’s picture quality sucks. Can Google Video be successful on a PC? Sure. Can it be successful on a handheld device or laptop or even a cell phone? Probably. We’ve grown to accept mediocrity in terms of picture quality on the PC, cell phone, handheld device, etc. But YouTube, Google Video, and the whole host of other companies can’t afford to store and serve HDTV content yet and this is what people want on that new fancy plasma sitting in their living room.

Now I know what some of the Appleheadish types will say. C’mon it’s Steve Jobs. He’s a marketing genius. If anyone can do it Apple can do it. Apple is so damn cool it makes me want to melt down in a puddle of tears as I weep translucently at how amazingly magical their ultra hip marketing department can name things. How nobody cares about HDTV and how people will accept inferior sound quality over at iTunes, so why not with movies.

Let’s talk more about picture quality. First off, there is a much more perceptible difference between standard definition TV and HDTV than there is between an iTunes file and a CD track. Our eyes in general are more acute sensory tools than our ears.

If you let someone hear a CD track and an iTunes track and ask them to rate each on a scale of 1 to 10 you will get very little difference between the two. If you show someone a show in HDTV though and then in non HDTV you will get a much wider differential.

Second, people are all about what is sexy with their plasmas. Seriously, CES was out of control this year when it came to HDTV sets and HD and Blu-Ray DVDs. In fact I’d go so far as to say that in my opinion high quality content and the sets that show it where the number one thing going at CES back in January. It may feel like early adopter stuff still, but take a walk through Costco and you will see that HDTV sets are selling like hotcakes.

Third. More and more HDTV content is being produced and delivered every day. And with HDTV PVRs from TiVo and soon Media Center and even cheapo PVR HDTV offerings from the cable and satellite boxes, there is going to be a lot of competition in the “what should I watch on my fancy new HDTV set” sector.

By the time Jobs and Co. get around to actually releasing the iDongle (even if they don’t have HDTV sets yet) people will not be that interested in paying $300 for something that won’t do HDTV.

Note to the Appleheads. While Steve Jobs may in fact be a marketing a genius there comes a point when Eskimos will no longer buy ice. $10-$15 for a poor picture quality movie is a bad deal. Yes, idiots overpay for things. Yes, there are a lot of idiots out there and yes Steve Jobs may be able to use the Obi Wan Kenobi trick voice with some, but I predict this thing will flop hard. You read it here first.

Official Zooomr Blog : Ciao Italia! (Hello, Italy!) Kristopher just announced over at the Zooomr blog that support for Italian has just been added to Zooomr. So in addition to the 15 other language choices out there, for all you Italian lovers out there you now have one more. Not only can you geotag your photos in Italy with Google Maps, but you even do it in your native tongue of Italian if you are from there.

We are working on some more cool features right now and hope to have them out shortly.

Well exciting things are happening over at JPG Magazine, the 8020 publication put out by husband and wife team Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ. The site has relaunched and now includes a great interactive voting feature (you have to be registered there and logged in to vote). While it’s not exactly digg for photos (the editors still ultimately choose the photographs for publication — but take the votes into consideration) this is a great move on their part as it will encourage even more participation in future issues.

They are also paying those photographers whose work they accept $100 as well as giving them a subscription to the magazine. Very cool.

I’ve really admired JPG’s print quality and have had a few of my own shots included in past issues. The quality of the photography in the magazine is very high and it’s a great way to see your work jump from the computer screen onto printed page.

Check it out. And if you are a high end photographer think about uploading your own photos for consideration there.

Is Stern Slipping? – Yahoo! Buzz Log I used to listen to Howard Stern. I found him actually a bit entertaining and also liked the live musical guests he had as well as the interviews he would do with people.

I haven’t listened to Howard Stern since he’s moved to Sirius and now Erik Gunther over at Yahoo’s buzz log is saying that his influence might be dwindling.

“The King of All Media is losing ground. Hitwise, which monitors Internet traffic, says the number of visitors to Howard Stern’s Web site has declined a staggering 71 percent since March 2005…And look-ups of Stern’s name on search engines plummeted by 90 percent in that same period…”—New York Post, September 13, 2006”

I never used to really listen to a lot of Howard Stern. My commute in the morning is about 7 minutes in the car from my house to the BART station so I’d catch a bit then and also every so often if I was driving somewhere for a meeting in the car I’d catch more.

But since Stern’s switch to satellite I haven’t listened to him once. It’s just not worth the 7 minutes I’m in the car in the morning to pay for either the satellite radio or the satellite radio service.

I do, however, listen to podcasts. And I think Stern’s content is good enough that if he offered a download service of a podcast of his show in conjunction with Sirius I’d subscribe to Sirius tomorrow — even though I don’t have a satellite radio yet.

Offering podcasts for listening anywhere, anytime, anyplace would provide a big boost to both entertainers like Stern and satellite radio in general.

I had a good time having lunch yesterday with Sam Bloomberg-Rissman (also known as Ropeboy on Flickr and Zooomr). That’s him above in tiny little photo that I took through the bottom of a drinking glass (thanks for the idea Kristopher). Here’s actually a more natural portrait of Sam as well. Last year Sam shipped out from the Bay Area to Spain to go pursue his dream of being an international stock photographer. Sam mostly sells his stuff on Alamy and has some of the most creative photography around.

You should definitely check out Sam’s stuff if you are into fine art photography. You can see his own website here and his Zooomr and Flickr streams here.

Sam and I talked a lot about the future of the stock photography business. One of the things that I believe in is that there is a big future in the stock photography business for what the market calls the advanced amateur. The advanced amateur is someone who might not be shooting for Getty or Corbis right now and maybe is not even doing photography full time, but is producing work that is right up there with the full time pros and is every bit as good. I think that there ought to be a way for these kinds of individuals to make more money on their photos than the microstock sites which I think are a complete rip off.

This is one of the things we are working on in the background at Zooomr right now — trying to figure out a way to build a system where you could turn a photo sharing site into a secondary vehicle for advanced amateurs to offer their work up for sale at much fairer prices than the microstock sites are paying out today.

A model like this would most likely represent a threat to both the high end of stock photography business as you could charge slightly less than Corbis and Getty for Corbis and Getty quality work as well as a threat to the microstock business by filtering out the best photographers who are contributing to these pools today for the peanuts that they pay.

It certainly won’t be easy creating an agency like this. There are all kinds of legal issues (photo releases and liability). There are marketing issues (even if you have a ton of great shots for sale how are marketers going to know that they are on Zooomr?). There are editorial issues (how do you best organize a collection of photos from a photo sharing site to best market stock?) And there are just plain old regular business issues (someone needs to answer the phone and take questions from potential buyers, etc.).

But the stock photography business represents literally a multi *billion* dollar market. And even the smallest little sliver of that pie to share between Zooomr and the advanced amateurs out there could be something that would be mutually rewarding and satisfying for both.

Corbis and Getty are essentially gatekeepers. I’ve never tried selling my own work through them but theirs is a system of exclusion. You have to be approved and accepted by them and it’s not easy. It’s similar to the art photography market in my opinion where who gets famous is largely a matter of what a handful of gallery owners in New York and museum curators think ought to be shown.

I think that it’s time to democratize the stock photography business in a good way. To bring down gatekeepers as only technology can do.

Right now Alamy probably has the best deal out there for the advanced amateur. Sam sells his stuff through Alamy. Alamy has some of the highest payouts out there and is generally where I point people for now who want to try and sell their work online. Alamy pays 60-70% out to the photographer depending on how you structure a deal with them and they seem to be pretty open to the advanced amateur market. But still something else even better could be created and that’s one of the things that I’m working on behind the scenes at Zooomr.

If you are an advanced amateur and take shots like Sam I’d encourage you to sign up for Zooomr and start uploading some shots. If you have a blog (and we especially love photobloggers) we are also offering free Pro accounts. We are not there yet today, but we are going to get there and it would be good for you to begin building a library and getting your work visible in the Zooomr community.

Thanks for the lunch yesterday Sam. Safe travels back to Spain and good luck with your excellent photography.