I have this project I’ve been working on for a few weeks now. It is a conceptual portrait commission for one of my clients. The goal of the image is to create something with the feeling of “The Dutch Masters” -- something with a painterly feel, but not necessarily with visible paint strokes.
I finally got the image to a point where I was ready for some feedback, so I uploaded the image to get some critiques from my artistic tribe.
So you want to be on a book cover. Perhaps you’ve seen other photographers accomplish this but you’ve never quite known how. Maybe you walk through the stores scrutinizing and studying every book. I know I did.
It has always been a dream of mine to be on a book cover. Growing up, I was very shy and never had a lot of friends, so instead I read. Getting lost in each character was a comfort. I lived for the smell of the old paper pages.
Stock photo service Dreamstime announced today that it has been selected as a "beta provider of stock photos for Google display ads." Through the agreement, Dreamstime contributors are initially paid roughly $2 per image for use in Google's ad network. Some photographers aren't too happy about the terms of the new arrangement.
Stock photography giant Shutterstock announced today that it has agreed to acquire the UK-based press photo agency Rex Features for $33 million in a mostly cash deal.
Hello fellow photographers. My name is Joshua Resnick. I am a stock photographer, but what I am going to tell you potentially affects all photographers. I wanted to bring to your attention a lawsuit I am involved in that I think could put the whole industry at risk if things don’t go well.
I am being sued in federal court for hundreds of thousands of dollars by a model I worked with in January 2013. This is a model that I paid, and who signed a release allowing me to sell her images through stock photo agencies. Why I am I being sued? It revolves around images that got misused or were just outright stolen and the model is blaming me for it.
Adobe has acquired stock photo giant Fotolia to add a serious stock photography and video marketplace to the Creative Cloud. The price it paid is roughly $800 million in cash.
Photo-sharing platform EyeEm has officially inked a deal with The Huffington Post that will allow the AOL-owned publisher to use EyeEm's growing archives to find relevant imagery for its content.
Yesterday, the moment for which GoPro has been preparing for the last several months arrived: CEO and Founder Nick Woodman rang the bell on the trading floor, and the company went public.
The story of GoPro's humble beginnings is an interesting one, and if you've not heard it we definitely suggest you click on this link and watch the video there before going on. But today's news isn't about those humble beginnings. It's about the meteoric heights to which the company has climbed.
Announced at market close yesterday, the former one-man surf camera operation and current action cam king has officially filed for a $100 million IPO.
Last week, Nikon released its financial results for the last fiscal year (ending in March) and things aren’t looking good. The company missed financial forecasts yet again, closing at a three-year low that, it seems, has prompted Nikon to do some serious restructuring within the company.
There’s no doubt that stock photography and the market’s methods of operation are much debated and often criticized. However, as part of it’s efforts to celebrate Small Business Week in the United States – and also likely in hopes to change some public opinion of such services – the Getty-owned iStock marketplace is dedicating an entire day to giving 100% of royalties to photographers.
After his first successful Kickstarter, Jerome Daksiewicz is back at it again. This time around he's working to create a neat collection of screen-printed posters based on the boxes and containers of film stocks past and present.
The past few days seem to be filling up with more and more stock photography drama. From the announcement of Getty's new embedding tool to 500px Prime's change in payment, things keep getting more and more confusing. Well, to add to this confusion, we have yet another piece of news, this time from iStock... a company owned by none other than Getty.
When 500px announced that it was introducing its own photo licensing feature, 500px Prime, the company received a lot of backlash from photographers who thought a 30% cut was far too little.
Well, it looks like 500px was listening. Because Prime went live yesterday with a significantly more favorable payment breakdown.
A reader over at Gizmodo sent a tip their way yesterday pointing to an embarrassing situation involving PayPal's use of a certain stock photograph.
Although it has since been removed, a photo of a small pocket watch over on PayPal's Political Campaigns page with a "donate" button located over it was found bearing a rather obvious iStock watermark... oops.
Nikon's stock is down, and down bad, according to a report by Reuters. Although the report starts by saying that Nikon is currently up 0.8%, it continues on by revealing that:
Nikon is down 23.6 percent year-to-date and is the worst underperformer in the Nikkei this year, while the benchmark has rallied nearly 49 percent.
Art directors Andrew MacPhee and Bart Batchelor are intimately familiar with Getty Images' massive stock photo library. Over the course of their careers, they've had to dig through tens of thousands of photos to find ones that would do for whatever campaign they were working on.
But for every "right one" they found, there were hundreds of "wrong ones." And for every hundred "wrong ones" there were at least one or two that were downright hilariously absurd. It seemed only right that these ridiculous stock photos be shared with the world: thus was born Getty Critics.
You do not have to be a professional photographer to profit from selling your photos for use online, on mobile devices, and traditional publications. Just ask Google. Starting with the big names like APImages, Reuters, Sipa Images, Getty Images, Corbis, Fine Art American, Wireimage, Jupitermedia, Shutterstock, Depositphotos, Istockphotos, Veer, Dreamstime, and seemingly not finding a final search result -- the market has ballooned. Or you can also ask Corbis.
There's something to say about the curious nature of journalists. Some spend all of their hours researching a particular subject, others go out into the field to experience first-hand, and some others quit their job and take up coding classes.
Wait -- what?
It's true. Just ask Benji Lanyado. This once full-time Guardian writer and contributor to other publications decided to quite literally quit his day job to pursue building what he thinks is the next big thing in stock photo buying and selling.
If you're an active participant in the stock photography industry, you've likely heard of the big rumblings as of late. Earlier this month, bestselling microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs announced both a $1.2 million investment in Scoopshot (a crowdsourced photo app) and a new exclusivity agreement with Getty Images/iStockphoto.
If you dismissed the news the first time around, you might want to take a second look -- it may be bigger than you thought.
Most stock photography websites and agencies work the same way: photographers upload their work, set prices, and let clients browse for what it is they're looking for. If the client wants a photo of a family on the beach, they'd better hope someone came through. And on the other end, the photographer has to hope that they're putting work out there that people will actually want to use.
Advertising creatives Cassandra Nguyen and Grazina Snipas' new website PicoImages does away with that model, replacing it with more of a "stock photography to order" sort of system.
I recently began contributing to Stocksy United (AKA Stocksy), the new(ish) stock photography agency that is headed up by Bruce Livingstone of iStockPhoto notoriety fame.
Dear Getty Images: I quit.
I just sent Getty Images the email above, which, I think, is how I terminate my relationship with them. Hopefully. I’m not 100% sure, but I can’t seem to figure out any way to do it online, so I’m hoping that email works.
Bruce Livingstone knows his way around the stock photography industry, and he's doing his best to shake things up. After founding iStockphoto in 2000, he turned it into a microstock juggernaut, finally selling it to Getty Images in 2006 for a whopping $50 million. Now, as both Getty Images and iStockphoto are mired in a licensing controversy, Livingstone has a new stock photo business that may rock the boat even more.
One of the big stories in the business world today was that Nikon's stock took a historic fall of nearly 19%. The company is weighted so heavily in the Nikkei Stock Average that the news had a rippling effect across the market, causing most Asian shares to drop.
There's a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That's what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram's Developer API entirely -- problem solved.
Respected stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha doesn’t think too highly of the …
Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world, has agreed to acquire Demotix, a crowd-sourced citizen journalism photo agency that was founded in 2008. Corbis had already picked up a piece of the young agency through an investment last year, but now it has decided to purchase the whole company outright. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.
We don't know how they do it, but College Humor's sketch videos often have famous celebrities making fools of themselves in the name of comedy. Above is a parody infomercial they released today featuring actor Patrick Wilson. He states that prior to his acting career, he worked as a stock photography model and was featured in over 133,000 stock images.
If you’re trying to make some side money by selling photographs as microstock — or are trying to do …
Businessmen around the world are watching Facebook's plummeting stock closely, but perhaps none more so than the folks over at Instagram. The world was shocked back in April when Facebook agreed to purchase the tiny startup for $1 billion, but one key fact is that the price was to be paid in a mixture of cash and stock. Due to the decline of FB stock, hundreds of millions of dollars have been wiped from the purchase price, which is currently valued at somewhere between $700 and $800 million.
American private equity firm Carlyle Group announced today that it has agreed to drop $3.3 billion to acquire Getty Images from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. H&F purchased Getty Images just four years ago for $2.4 billion, so it seems that the stock photo company is doing decently well.
Wanting to shed its image of being "old media" and "old fashioned", Getty Images has unveiled a new watermark that does away with the annoying logo in favor of short links. Rather than plaster the words "Getty Images" across the front of photos, the new watermark is actually useful: it provides a short link that directs viewers to the webpage for that particular image and also gives credit to the creator of the work. Inspired by the plaques found at exhibitions, the new watermark is offset to the side rather than smack dab in the middle.
This past Monday, stock photography behemoth Shutterstock filed documents with the SEC to have an IPO and list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The process requires Shutterstock to reveal its financial details, so the document provides an interesting look at how the company ticks and the state of the stock photography industry.
Early last month we reported that Shutterfly had agreed to buy Kodak Gallery for a meager $23.8 million. The process, done by way of a "stalking horse bid," meant that another company was allowed to make a competing bid for the gallery by April 20th.
"Fake People Suck" -- now that's a tagline. In 2009 David Katzenstein and Sherrie Nickol began a fine arts project that involved asking people off the street to come to their studio and photographing them against a white background. The idea was to capture the striking diversity that's commonplace in New York. But after photographing about 50 people -- and due also to a steady drop in commissions from commercial and corporate projects -- they realized the potential the project had as a commercial venture. Thus was born Citizen Stock.
German broadcaster Deutsche Welle produced this interesting segment on photographer …
Crippled by its recent financial scandal, Olympus is in need of a bailout and has been open …
Kodak was warned by the New York Stock Exchange yesterday that its stock …