Month: June 2010

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Albany Bulb Photowalk for the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk, July 24, 2010

The Quest

I’ll be leading a photowalk on July 24th at the Albany Bulb near Berkeley, CA as part of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk. The walk is limited to 50 participants first come first serve and has 19 spots remaining of the 50 at present. You can register at the link I just posted. I’ve set the photowalk up to start at 6pm to take advantage of the sunset over the Bay. We’ll shoot until about 8:30pm or so when the sun goes down and then head over afterwards to Spenger’s to grab some drinks or food.

I attended the San Francisco Kelby walk last year and had a great time. This year there are already 897 photowalks set up with over 18,000 photographers participating. After the walk photographers will be able to upload their shots to the Worldwide Photowalk website and be eligible for prizes.

The Albany Bulb is an interesting Bay Area shooting spot with great views of the San Francisco Bay and Bay Area bridges. There is also a lot of art and natural beauty out there. You can find out more about the Bulb at the wikipedia page for it here. Here is a set of my own images from the Bulb. Looking forward to hanging out with everyone who is able to make it.

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Varyag

Varyag

The fully armed Russian warship Varyag left San Francisco earlier this morning. The warship was the first Russian surface warship to visit San Francisco in 147 years and was sent here in the “spirit of friendship,” according to Russian Rear Admiral Vladimir Kastonov.

The warship’s visit coincided with Russian President Dmitry Medvedv’s visit this past week to Silicon Valley where he met with a number of technology companies and executives.

Ships like the Varyag are known as “the killer of aircraft carriers” as they can launch very large explosives or tactical nuclear warheads up to 300 miles away. The ship has sixteen distinctive missiles in four pairs on both sides of the ship.

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Bill

Bill

You can read more about my $2 Portrait Project here.

This past weekend while shooting in downtown L.A. with my pal Marc Evans, aka Clearlight 1971 on Flickr, we ran into Bill outside Kindle’s Donuts at the corner of Century and Normandie near Inglewood close to midnight on Saturday night.

Kindle’s donuts was the original home of the very first Big Donut Drive in in Los Angeles back in 1950 and we’d stopped by to shoot it when Bill approached us about buying one of the most outrageous pairs of platform shoes I’d ever seen for $5. He said he needed the $5 so he could buy his girlfriend a dozen donuts.

Marc told him that the boots were too amazing to be sold but offered him $2 to participate in our $2 portrait project. Bill quickly and easily agreed.

Bill told us that he was from Inglewood and that he’d found the shoes cleaning out an old apartment. The conversation quickly though changed from the boots to this long diatribe about how people were abusing the pharmaceutical process by getting too many refills on the same prescriptions and then selling all of these drugs for more money out on the street. It seemed very important to him that we understand that this was going on and that it should stop. He’d rattle off many different drug names, many of which I was unfamiliar with one right after the other, explaining how people were pulling this scam.

Bill told us that he was unemployed and on disability. Marc told Bill that I had a blog and Bill asked me if I could help promote him on the internet, maybe even get him some sort of a job. He said that maybe if people read about him through my blog that they’d be willing to hire him. He told me to direct people to soundlift.com/billengelke where they could find him online. He said that he had his own version of Stairway to Heaven on his site and his own version of the Rolling Stone’s “Spider and the Fly. I told him that I’d do a blog post about him and he was happy about that, “you just never know what might happen if people knew about me,” he told me.

Bill also told us that he’d created a GEICO commercial and posted it to YouTube. He said he had produced it on a PC using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator software and made sure to point out that the clips he used were in the public domain. This seemed important to him. So that people would know that they were free to reuse his commercial if they wanted to. You can actually watch Bill’s GEICO commercial video on YouTube here.

We chatted with Bill a little more and then both Marc and I each gave him $2. He seemed really happy that he could now buy his dozen donuts from Kindle’s. He went straight to the counter and ordered an assorted dozen telling the donut cashier to include “as many creme filled as possible.”

You can check out Marc’s photo of Bill here, and even better, Marc’s photo of Bill with the platform shoes that he’d originally tried selling to us here.

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Flickr Redesigns Their Photo Page

Flickr Redesigns Their Photo Page

Today Flickr announced a new preview version of their main photo page.

The most significant difference is that photos will now be shown at 640 pixels default on the Flickr page rather than 500 pixels. Flickr has also added a lightbox option where you can simply click on a photo to enlarge it to an even large size on a black background (you can also press the “f” key on your keyboard to toggle back and forth between lightbox view). It is interesting that they are using an old version of the Flickr logo (without the “from Yahoo” tag) in the Lightbox view. They’ve also significantly enhanced the geotags associated with photos, offering three different map views far away, closer, even closer as you move your mouse over the geotag thumbnail image.

Additionally Flickr has consolidated many of the view and functions associated with an image into “action menus” at the top of the page above the photo and integrated favorites into the comments section.

Flickr's New Lightbox View

After playing around with the new page for about a half hour or so I have to say that I think I like it. It feels much cleaner, slicker and easier to navigate. I like the keyboard commands you can use to advance through a photostream. Some of the small differences will take some getting used to, but I think showing off photos bigger is *great.* I think I’d like to see the thumbnails in the sets link slightly bigger, but that’s a small complaint. Overall I think that this refresh of the photo page is a welcome improvement for the Flickr experience and am happy to see it.

There is a “gut reaction” thread where Flickr users are expressing their opinions on the new page design that you can check out here. Right now it feels like initial reaction is trending positive on the change over negative by a meaningful margin from the Flickr community.

What do you think? Do you like it? Hate it? Not care either way?

Update: TechCrunch has a review on the new redesign as well including comments from Flickr Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg here. Rothenberg is apparently saying that with the redesign pages should load “greater than 50% faster in almost all cases,” according to TechCrunch.

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So is the New Flickr/Getty Request to License Feature a Good Deal or Bad Deal for Flickr Photographers?

So is the New Flickr/Getty "Request to License" Feature a Good Deal or Bad Deal for Flickr Photographers?

While I was out of town last week, Flickr/Getty launched the latest new twist to their stock photography arrangement, “Request to License.” Already Getty images is representing more than 100,000 flickr images on Getty for Getty’s customers to purchase. I’ve participated in this stock offering since it launched, and Getty currently represents 190 of my images (that you can see here).

The new twist is smart from Flickr/Getty’s standpoint. As many, many, many of the photos that buyers are finding online are being privately negotiated between buyer and seller, Flickr/Getty are looking to get a piece of this action. With this new “request to license” feature, Flickr/Getty is allowing you to post a link directly to Getty images on all 100% of your Flickr photos. If a potential buyer sees this link and wants to license your image, they can click the link and license the image through Getty. Getty/Flickr keep 80% of the money and you get 20% of the money.

So why am I declining to participate in this new venture? Simple. I don’t think I’ll sell 5x as many photos through Getty this way as I’d sell myself from private inquiries. I get inquiries about my photos all the time. Every week at least I get someone wanting to purchase one of my photos. These buyers have been magazines, text books, newspapers, websites, advertisers of every shape and form. I’ve been offered money for Holiday cards, billboards, television commercials, whatever. In fact the single largest source of my photography related income comes from people contacting me directly after finding my images on Google Image Search, my blog, Flickr etc.

Most of the time when people want to license one of my images it’s for a very specific photo, for a very specific reason. Last month Outdoor Magazine contacted me about using this image of the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland for $250. The photo’s not particularly great, but I suspect that they are running an issue on Groveland or something and it’s a very specific image that they wanted to buy. Now, as it stands, I simply sold them a license to the image and emailed them a simple invoice for $250. Pretty easy. Had they seen the same image of mine and chosen to license it through Getty for the same amount, I would only have gotten $50. So why would I want to get $50 instead of $250?

You might be able to argue that people will feel more comfortable negotiating directly with Getty, a known and established provider of images who has a strong reputation in clearing images. You might even be able to argue that this comfort factor would allow you to sell twice as many images through Getty as you would directly. But 5x more image sells? I seriously doubt it. Other than me advertising for Getty on over 40,000 images of mine on Flickr, what are they doing exactly to earn their 80%? Are they promoting these images in search on their website? No.

Images that I presently license to Getty are indexed in their search engine and promoted by them. Even then I think the 20% payout is too small. But to simply redirect commercial inquiries on my images from me to Getty for an 80% cut? This doesn’t make sense to me at all.

I’ve also found that people respond very differently to images when I post them online non-commercially vs. offering them for sale. Many of the images in my stream never would be able to be licensed by Getty. They are of people without model releases etc. So why advertise for Getty on images that I will never be able to sell that also might send the wrong message to a subject who is in a non-commercial photograph that I’ve taken?

I can see where this deal might seem great for Getty/Flickr. I suspect that there is a big pot of money that they both are missing out on right now in terms of privately negotiated licensing between buyers and photographers directly and they’d like to get their hands on this money. But I think it’s a bad deal for photographers and I personally won’t be participating in it. My advice to Flickr/Getty would be to bump the payout up on these images to 50/50.

Here’s a link to a discussion from Flickr members on this new offering from the Flickr Help Forum (where I’m permanently banned). It seems that most photographers representing an opinion on this new offering there are also negative about it. Oh, and Google? If you’re listening, I think there’s a great opportunity in all this for you. Eliminating the middle man is one of the things that you do best. I like the 68% payouts I get on my Adsense ads with you a lot more than the 20% payout I get from Getty.

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More Police Harassment for the “Crime” of Photographing BP’s Offices

Drew Wheelan runs the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Blog. He’s also the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association. As part of his documentation of the problems around BP’s oil spill, he went down to Houma, LA to try and talk to a safety officer at BP. During his visit he tried to film a segment in front of BP’s offices when he was approached by a police officer who asked for his ID and “strongly” encouraged him to leave the area as BP did not like people filming their offices. He captured part of his exchange with the police officer in the YouTube video above.

While Wheelen insisted on his legal rights to film BP’s offices from off of their property, after he finished he says he was pulled over by the same police officer, this time with a BP security officer in the car.

From Mother Jones:

“It was the same cop, but this time he had company: Kenneth Thomas, whose badge, Wheelan told me, read “Chief BP Security.” The cop stood by as Thomas interrogated Wheelan for 20 minutes, asking him who he worked with, who he answered to, what he was doing, why he was down here in Louisiana. He phoned Wheelan’s information in to someone. Wheelan says Thomas confiscated his Audubon volunteer badge (he’d recently attended an official Audubon/BP bird-helper volunteer training) and then wouldn’t give it back, which sounds like something only a bully in a bad movie would do. Eventually, Thomas let Wheelan go.

“Then two unmarked security cars followed me,” Wheelan told me. “Maybe I’m paranoid, but I was specifically trying to figure out if they were following me, and every time I pulled over, they pulled over.” This went on for 20 miles. Which does little to mitigate my own developing paranoia about reporting from what can feel like a corporate-police state.”

Filming BP’s offices is not a crime and the officer involved should not have followed Wheelen or made an illegal stop and allowed him to be interrogated by BP security. Wheelen was doing nothing illegal and I’m disappointed that taxpayer money would be wasted on the police trying to play PR for BP and harassing photographers trying to legitimately document BP’s role in this horrible environmental disaster. I hope that the cop in question here is both named and disciplined over this incident.

Thanks to Nikki for the heads up!