Brazilian stock photo agency Diomedia recently found themselves in need of a creative advertising campaign. They were debuting a National Geographic Collection, and they needed to share this news in a way that would resonate with today's culture.
What they came up with is a creative and fun campaign featuring (what else?) the almighty selfie.
Photojournalistic ethics are serious business. While there are many styles of photography where heavy post-production is not just acceptable, but commonplace, the world of news demands accuracy and truth, and it is accuracy and truth that some are claiming were given a backseat to shock and sensationalism when The Daily Mirror decided to use a stock photograph to illustrate a front page story.
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.
Last night, Getty Images made a huge announcement that could forever change the way high quality images are shared on the Internet. Like Flickr before it, Getty is introducing an embed feature, essentially creating an "easy, legal, and free" way for people to share the majority of the agency's images in a non-commercial context.
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.
Among the many forces holding women back in our world -- poverty, reductive religious attitudes, lousy child care, etc. -- you may now add another tool of oppression: stock photography.
Earlier today, 500px announced that it would be getting into the licensing game with a new commercial licensing site dubbed 500px Prime.
Yuri Arcurs, the world's top-selling microstock photographer, will go to great lengths to prove he's right, and the video above is a great case in point for that. He wanted to prove that he could flash freeze a fighter jet at full speed, and he got that shot. All he needed was approximately 30,000W of fill flash... no big deal.
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.
About a week ago, the stock photography website Dreamstime got in touch with us to offer us some exclusive information. Having recently added a "search-by-camera" feature, they had compiled a huge amount of statistical data on the most popular cameras being used by their 150,000+ contributing photographers.
Well, keeping in mind that Francis Bacon once said "knowledge is power," we told them to go ahead and send the stats over. What we received was a veritable smörgåsbord of interesting (and perhaps useful) information.
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.
AlmapBBDO, the ad agency behind the touching Getty ad "From Love to Bingo," are at it again. Last time they spent six months picking 873 stock photos out of 5,000+ options to create an award-winning one minute video.
This time Getty asked them to do the same thing, only using the agency's massive video archive instead. The resulting video is, dare we say, even better than the "Love to Bingo" ad.
Photographer Remi Thornton recently terminated his contract with Getty after finding out that the agency was allowing online retailer CafePress to use his images on potential merchandise without paying an up-front licensing fee.
In fact, according to Thornton, CafePress has an exclusive agreement with Getty, which allows them use any of the agency's Royalty Free stock to populate their store, while only paying the photographer if the merchandise featuring their image actually sells.
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.
A new controversy is brewing in the world of stock photography. Just last month, it came to light that Getty had agreed to license 5000 of its stock photos to Google while paying the creators of the images a meager one-time fee of $12. Now, one of Getty's most successful stock photographers is claiming that his account is being terminated in the aftermath of the first hoopla.
Over the last couple of years, smartphone photography has gained a lot of credibility. Many stock photography agencies, however, have managed to keep their "no smartphones allowed" signs proudly on display even as all of this was happening.
Due to the required megapixel counts and the high quality standards most stock photo agencies try to maintain, smartphones have, for the most part, been kept out of that particular business. Companies are starting to cave though, and the most recent of these is international stock agency Alamy.
If you’re trying to make some side money by selling photographs as microstock — or are trying to do …
After seeing hashtags for a TV show featuring a "Psychic Wayne" all over Twitter, Irish student Alan Rice decided to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, within a few minutes he had already decided that the show was, in his words, tripe. But after watching a little while longer he noticed something else: the pictures of the other off-air "psychics" that people could call looked a lot like stock photos.
Here’s an interesting, if not a little specific, idea that someone over at the stock photography website …
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.
From Love to Bingo in 873 Images is an amazing short film created by …
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.
Copyright laws get pretty specific. A photographer can not only give a green light on a work, he or she can license a work for use only during specific years, or in a specific area, or for a specific publication medium (i.e. print vs electronic); and now it looks like massive publisher Pearson Education is in trouble for breaking these sort of terms one too many times.
This is probably the strangest and most awkward thing you'll see today. It's a short 5-minute video titled "The World's Most Downloaded Man" that chronicles photographer Fernado Martins' journey to meet Jesper Bruun, the world's best-selling stock photography model.
"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.
This card company must feel pretty good about itself — they managed to save 50% on the stock photos …
In the past week or two there has been an interesting controversy regarding the use of stock photography: vegan blogger quarrygirl.com published a post on April 13th accusing the nations leading vegan magazine VegNews of using non-vegan stock photos to illustrate its vegan recipes. An example presented is a "Vegan Spare Ribs" article that uses a Photoshopped iStockPhoto image of actual barbecue spare ribs (shown above).