Online video represents only a small piece of the total advertising pie, but the growth in streaming ad revenue is becoming more of a threat to the broadcast medium that supplies most of the high CPM content. Hulu is a case in point, as Mediaweek and paidContent sources point out the ways the site’s ad sales team often undercuts the network media buys for both streaming and broadcast. Sources tell paidContent that some of Hulu’s broadcaster backers, which include NBC Universal, ABC and Fox, are experiencing growing frustration after hearing from media buyers that the video site’s ad sales often offer discounts on ad sales. At this point at least, paidContent is told, the situation is more of an annoyance for networks, than serious damage, since the dollar amounts remain comparatively minuscule.

via Media | guardian.co.uk.

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Not long after Monte’s came out I saw another from Caesar Lima (here).

According to this story on the WSJ Blogs (here), companies like Net Solutions in Chandigarh, Inda build apps for clients at $3,000 to $15,000 a pop.

It will be interesting to see where this ends up. I can certainly see an app from someone like Howard Bernstein being quite valuable but how many individual photographer apps can you download before your phone is clogged.

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Here’s the pitch: Offer users a year’s subscription to a “channel” where they can get premium magazine content from a series of relevant magazines, for, say, $1.99 a month, with an additional 99 cents per magazine that they want to add to the package. The publishers would keep 75 percent of the profit, and Maggwire would get the rest.

McSweeney’s, which began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines, has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals. They’ve just announced that No. 33 (available for preorder here) is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet. Yeah, a newspaper that will be 112 pages all in color along with a 112 page magazine, a 116 page books section, a pocket sized weekend guide and 3 pull out posters. The NYTimes reports:

The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a model.

“People have been saying the short story is dying for a lot longer than they’ve been saying newspapers are dying,” Jordan Bass, managing editor of the quarterly, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But you can still put out a great short-story magazine that people want to grab. The same is true for newspapers.”

As the crusty old corporate magazines continue to die there are people out there forging a new path.

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Discovered it on a blog of course, Swissmiss.

Bird — Book of Photography

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First This Documentary on Afghanistan shot by Danfung Dennis. He says “The footage was shot on a custom built rig, using a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70 f/2.8 L lens, Sennheiser ME-66 and G2 wireless system, Singh-Ray variable ND filter, and Beachtek 2XAs mounted on a Glidecam 2000 HD with custom made aluminum ‘wings.’”

The next one comes from Surf photographer Yassine (Yazzy) Ouhilal:

Since I know Yazzy I asked him a couple questions:

Did you edit, shoot and record all the sound yourself?

I shot  most of the raw footage and time lapses over 44 days in the Arctic. A couple of other members of the expedition shot additional footage as well. Since this was also an editorial photo trip, a lot of the surfing footage had to be shot by someone else as I was usually too busy shooting stills. The rest of the time, it was pretty easy to go from shooting stills to video with the 5DMKII.

The audio was pulled from video interviews and audio recordings I got from some of the expedition members. I loaned an H2 digital audio recorder to the surfers on the expedition and asked them to record their thoughts when they were alone or by themselves in order to get authentic impressions from their experience in the Arctic- which wasn’t without challenges.

A lot of the sound effects were pulled from video clips. The 5DMKII has an audio input jack which allows for hi quality mics to be used.

I edited the film myself in imovie and mixed all the audio/sound/music tracks in Garage Band, two simple yet very effective pieces of software that if properly used can yield pretty incredible results.

The time lapses were animated using Quicktime Pro (by importing image sequences of stills and exporting uncompressed movie files)

What kind of experience do you have doing this kind of stuff?

I actually have a film production background- I spent 6 years at Concordia University in Montreal doing the Film Production program there. That was just before the digital/video era so the majority of the film work I did was in 16 and 35mm using editing tables and optical printers that are a much slower process than today’s digital workflow.

After film school, I found it hard to integrate the industry as a film maker. My two options were to try and get funding for my own films or to start working as a technician on film sets and work my way up the food chain. I opted to pursue my dreams and passions as a surf photographer instead and for the last 10 years, I’ve been roaming the globe shooting off the beaten path locations for magazines and companies. This type of work has given me the freedom to work in a field that I really enjoy and has been a good balance of personal and creative freedom as I have been self funding a lot of my trips on a freelance basis and then (hopefully) recouping my investments by providing the content out to various editorial clients.

Returning to filmmaking has been a natural progression and one that I have been looking forward to for a long time now.The way technology is going now, the line between photography and filmmaking is getting thinner and thinner everyday. It has been really exciting to get to shoot with a camera like the 5DMKII. As a photographer, I really know how to compose my shots and how my glass works. To be able to translate that into a cinematic medium has been really incredible.

The experience I had in film school using a much more traditional and slower workflow, it has definitely helped  me to restrain myself and not get carried away with all the possibilities of the digital workflow.

How much time did it take you to make this shot doc?

While I probably could have put something together for this project in just a few days, I really wanted to make an authentic film about the experience of surfing in the Arctic- with all the drama and the hostility of the environment. The editing process was done over  3 months. Much like with my photography, I like to distance myself from the content so that I can approach it again with a fresher perspective. It allows me to look at the photos/footage objectively rather than to remain attached to certain shots or clips because of the experience involved with obtaining the imagery. I find that in both photography and filmmaking, being able to “let go” is an important part of the process. Maybe an image means a lot to me because I endured many hardships to obtain it, but I have to keep in mind that the audience doesn’t necessarily know that- therefore will often see less value than I do in a particular shot. Distancing myself from the content for a certain period is definitely part of my approach and it really helps to “forget” about it in order to rediscover it.

Over the first month or two, I basically narrowed down the raw footage from around 40hours to about 4hours. Then I separated all the clips into different categories, much like I do with my approach to editing my photos: scenics, action, lifestyles and interviews. I then narrowed down the footage in each category to end up with about 1 hour of footage that in my opinion consisted of the most beautiful imagery that was also the most pertinent to the story I was trying to push through.

The backbone of the story was constructed using audio voice overs and interviews. This was a very long process as well as I had to listen to hours of audio and basically pull the most important and pertinent points that told the story.

I did this by transcribing every single phrase of audio I had (which turned into around 100 pages or so). From there I edited the audio in the text file by cutting and pasting sentences and later applied that to the actual audio tracks.

Once I had the audio backbone and the best clips, it was about 4  days and nights of intense editing. I actually happened to be back in the Arctic for the editing process which I found very conducive to an inspired approach to the post production. I was really impressed with the workflow in iMovie. It was efficient and simple and compared to editing on a steenbeck (16mm editing table) and splicing film with tape, it was a much simpler process. I definitely made sure to stay away from using too many effects and transitions in order to keep this close to what could have been achieved using more traditional methods. I find in the digital workflow, it’s really easy to say “I’ll fix this in Post” or to get carried away with all the options- which can end up ruining the result. I think with today’s incredible advances in technology, a mix of using the technology along with some self constraint can produce some really interesting and authentic results.

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Alexx has an Outside cover this month (here):

And Greg Williams has Esquire’s sexiest woman alive cover (here):

So, what did these two magazines do with all the awesome technology they employed in these forward thinking cover shoots. Nothing. That’s right as far as I can tell Outside made their normal cover (the photographer made all these cool futuristic looking living covers and inside spreads in his BTS video) and Esquire made a video to go with their normal cover. It’s sort of like buying a Ferrari and hitching a team of horses to it. Beyond idiotic.

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Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:

The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved- “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”

Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

The immediate future is not good -”Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”

Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.

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Data from this survey will be shared by Jim M. Goldstein (www.JMG-Galleries.com) October 22 at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in NYC as part of the “Twitter Revolution: Changing the Photographic World, 140 Characters at a Time” (http://bit.ly/3FHUl) discussion panel with Seshu Badrinath, Jack Hollingsworth, and Rosh Sillars. The data from this survey will also be made available later to all who are interested.

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We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.

[..] If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to [journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject] we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.

More (here).

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Most Internet companies are alive only because they are propped up by cheap venture capital financing that is in the process of drying up. On a straight up basis, a traditional media company with a strong brand and digital product should be able to out-compete all but the best Internet-only companies. In the past, traditional media companies were weak online out of fear of cannibalizing the offline revenue and cash flow that sustained their valuations and debt loads. They will soon have a great deal less to lose, likely under fresh ownership and management. It’s time for traditional media to rise up and exact its revenge.

via Forbes.com.

One important thing to point out as well and this is where I disagree with the author on “re-booting” of media, is that owning media companies may not be as profitable as it once was. That doesn’t have to mean the contributors and employees get paid less either. It’s just that the owners need to love the product more than the greenbacks it delivers. That’s more of a re-booting of corporations which it feels like we may be in the midst of.

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You can read the full essay I wrote (here) and a response from Ed Freeman (here) but I wanted to discuss the conclusion I arrived at after interviewing dozens of people for the story. Photos that are faked are intrinsically tied to photos that are real. They draw much of their power from the public’s belief that photos never lie. Of course all of us know “the camera always lies” and the second you pick a lens or a place to stand you’re influencing the reality of the picture in some way. But, we can’t escape that the public still wants to believe in a photograph’s ability to tell the truth. So, people who take images that appear to be truthful but are really altered beyond reality are at some level destroying this bond.

What amounts to a forgery in photography is incredibly subjective and grey. And, like I said above I think it’s up to the media organizations to define and their audience to accept or reject. And really anything is possible now, so the “old darkroom techniques” aren’t really good anymore for guidelines. I believe very strongly that the intentions of whatever is done to the image, whether it is to represent what actually happened in front of the camera or to make what happened seem better than it actually was, help define what’s acceptable. One way organizations are starting to do that is to require photographers to submit RAW files to compare the finished images with (or what about just shooting film).

It seems helpful when thinking about this to look at writing because the same techniques that writers use to take research, raw dialogue and observation and then turn that into a story is no different than what photographers need to do when approaching a subject. So, why don’t we have fiction and non-fiction photography (I think photo-illustrations are different)? And why do we mix non-fiction stories with fiction photography. This seems like part of the solution and something other people have been indicating is a problem with the NY Times Magazine, because they appear to want it both ways. But, let’s be honest with ourselves writers stretch the boundary of non-fiction to it’s breaking point all the time. So, again it’s up to the publication to become more transparent about their guidelines and to not start blaming contributors when the readers show up with torches.

I think the place where I found this practice of photo fakery most troubling was in wildlife photography. Photographers in that genre will simply tack a “fine art” sign to their back and claim exemption from any need to replicate reality. The problem with this is that they more than anyone are benefiting from the public’s misguided belief that all pictures are real. My first interview for the piece was with Art Wolfe who way back in 1994 ignited a firestorm when he published a wildlife book entitled Migrations where a third of the images were fakes. Art was careful to point out that he didn’t misrepresent natural history and he called the pictures photo-illustrations. This was similar to a response I kept hearing from Steve Bloom when I tried to pin him down about a charge many people made to me that his wildlife images are mostly composites and extreme digital enhancements. Steve gave me incredibly evasive email answers in the vein of what Edgar Martins had to say about his dust up with the NY Times Magazine. Why can’t we just be honest and say “I did it because I wanted to make my photos look better than anyone elses”

And look, I’m not claiming I’m any sort of knight-riding-a-white-stallion either I’m just saying it’s time to start policing ourselves (starting with magazines) or else we’ll end up like the fashion industry and congress will soon be considering anti-photoshopping laws (I used to wish each month there was such a law when the owner’s of both magazines I worked at insisted we heinously paint the sky blue on the cover).

When people see an amazing photograph for the first time they usually ask, “is it real?” The answer should be yes.

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While watching the 4-H youngsters going about their business at MontanaFair in Billings this month, I was struck by a parallel. Here I am in 2009, at a fair ground: a photojournalist, making pictures of cowboys in every direction I look. Don’t any of us know that none of us are supposed to exist?”

[...]Professional photojournalists have only their eye, their experience and their work ethic to create lasting images. It has nothing to do with what kind of lariat they’re carrying.

[...] if you can’t make a great picture in your own backyard, it isn’t going to happen anywhere else.

Nice piece by Kenneth Jarecke on the Lens Blog.

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“To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, LIFE teamed up with MagCloud to release a Special Edition Woodstock Magazine. Originally released 40 years ago, this special issue has more than 100 photos of the performances and amazing community that attended Woodstock.” (here)

You can also make your own magazine from scratch using their archive:

“Life.com will partner with HP’s MagCloud to offer users a personalised “timeline”. They will get to print their own edition of Life magazine comprising a selection of catalogue images from any given date, as well as their own uploads.” (here)

It’s a cool idea along the lines of getting a picture on a mouse pad or coffee mug but I’ve had a couple conversations with people looking to make money off big magazine archives and I think the public’s ability/patience to put a magazine together from scratch is very limited. We’re on the firehose end of the information superhighway so finding someone you trust to edit everything down to something relevant is more important than having a trillion choices.

If Fred Woodward edited a copy of Life out of the archive I might actually buy that.

Found it on Magtastic Blogsplosion.

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A beautiful piece by Ohio U student Maisie Crow done as part of their Soul of Athens series.
She brings stills, video and audio together in such a simple and powerful way and tells a story that is probably all to common but you really never hear it told.

Yeah, the future is bright. So many great stories out there and young, ambitious, talented photographers ready to tackle them.

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“’Judge Sotomayor did not get that this is blatantly absurd: to treat one of the top photojournalists in the world as if he was a child who lost the snapshots he’d brought into CVS or Walgreens,’ Mr. Greenberg said in an interview on Tuesday.”

“Following up in an e-mail message, Mr. Greenberg said, ‘It was the impression of my entourage — consisting of clients, witnesses, staff and interested parties who attended the oral argument — that Sotomayor had no understanding of the historical context of the photo business.’ He continued: ‘She viewed — in my crew’s opinion — the case as the last in a line of cases concerning the loss of analog materials, an anachronism. While arguing, I personally could not read that, but others did.’”

via Lens Blog – NYTimes.com.

UPDATE: Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua sees it differently (here).

“As I mentioned in my previous post, it sucks for the photographer. However, and note these two things: 1) the court found it impossible to value the images otherwise because of the lousy record keeping by the photographer IN THIS CASE; and, 2) the ruling clearly states that it is a summary order and is NOT precedential, so other cases do NOT have to follow the ruling and so not all images will be valued at this low level.”

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I had the opportunity to ask Steve Kalalian, President and founder of Impact Digital about his new venture IC Motion, which was founded to help photographers deal with the RED camera. I think there’s a lot of potential to use the camera on a stills shoot but to me it looks like a complete pain in the ass to deal with all those gigs and of course the equipment is expensive as hell so it makes sense that you would rent a package from someone like IC Motion and they can deal with it.

I’m still a little skeptical on the quality of the frame grabs for magazine reproduction. I have a copy of the Megan Fox, Esquire that was shot on the Red and have to say the reproduction has a “video” feel to it. That may have been intentional for all I know, because I don’t have anything else to compare it to, but I hear the Bruce Willis shoot in W was done on a RED, so you can have a look at that to see what you think.

APE: Can you tell me about Industrial Color and  your new venture IC Motion?

Industrial Color is part of  Industrial Color Brands which has been around for 18 years and has offices in Tribeca, Culver City, Miami, and Williamsburg. This includes several high-end creative production entities.

• Impact Digital (founded 1991) – Retouching and CGI
• Industrial Color (founded 2001) – Digital capture support on approx 12 shoots a day, post-production, file storage, archival printing, software development, hosted web based image management and high speed file distribution, iPhone App development and now HD and RAW video capture and editing).
• Fast Ashley’s Studios & Fast Locations (founded 2002) – 16,000 sq. ft of drive-in rental studios in Williamsburg Brooklyn and full location eq. rental.
• M Project Gallery (founded 2007) – To exhibit collaborative projects, such as the recent Jim Fiscus CGI graphic novel.

IC Motion was in the planning stages during 2008 and formally launched in March 2009.

When the RED camera was released, we saw an opportunity for photographers to embrace HD video in a special way. Because every frame is printable, photographers can think in motion and still at the same time. The creative possibilities are endless. The RAW digital video revolution is very similar to the digital still revolution when the first 16MP still camera backs came out in 2001. HD Video is very new to the photography industry. We felt that Industrial Color could bring significant value by providing full-service high-level support that makes booking, shooting, editing and distributing video easy for photographers and clients.

After much testing and development, we found the RED and P2 formats fit into our company infrastructure perfectly in terms of our tech capabilities, post production services, equipment resources, NY, LA and Miami locations, and other important resources. Our tech base of 20 full time digital techs are all battle tested and very experienced working on intense studio and location shoots and have photography and film backgrounds. We developed a digital video training program and certified our team during the past year. We then added a specialized editing team and built high-end editing suites to provide important post-production services that are a very big part of supporting digital video shoots and helping photographers deliver meaningful content to their clients.

Also, our software division Industrial Color Software, developed FileSociety, a web-based high-speed file sharing and distribution service designed to serve the digital video industry. We recognized that video shoots generate a massive amount of files and dailies. Video file sizes are large and need to be shared by creative talent and decision makers very quickly. FileSociety is up to 100 times faster than FTP, is secure and lets workgroups collaborate anywhere at very fast speed.

In addition, we are leveraging our tier 3 datacenter in which we have petabytes of LTO tape storage and approx 500 terabytes of live enterprise storage and a redundant gig internet link and an offsite DR facility.

After all the investment and R&D, we worked with top photographers to test many filming conditions and projects. By our launch date, we were in great shape cover our client’s needs throughout the video production pipeline from planning to shoot, edit and delivery. The response has been very strong. We are now concentrating on shoots and editing projects and educating clients on the potential, economics and best practices of adding video to photography shoots. For example we have seminar series on July 14 and 15 entitled, “Photography and the Video Revolution” that will show real world production process and output from RED and P2 Formats.

APE: It looks like the RED is an awesome camera for cinematographers and directors, which is great if you have those skills or the budget for that kind of thing but until I saw one of those “living” images for online use I’ve been kind of skeptical about the use of a camera like this for still photographers. Tell me how you see people using this camera?

Our clients are primarily photographers. They are using the RED in every way possible, including shooting commercials, web content, social media content, interviews, teasers, behind the scenes, b-roll, video fashion stories, in-store videos, outdoor video advertising, music videos, short films, etc. On the print side, they are using video capture in editorial and advertising campaigns.

However, a large part of the photo industry is still thinking in the past that still photography is the only medium worth pursuing. Everything is going video. Print and video are converging. Digital advertising is replacing traditional print so fast right now that entire industries are disappearing and new ones are taking over. Plus, with the RED (and only with the RED) clients can print every frame, so you can produce print work using the RED. What we are seeing now are photographers that have a natural affinity and passion for motion are adapting very quickly. This is very exciting for us, as we love to help photographers translate their visual style to video. Since RED is a RAW format, you can change color as much as you want without effecting the RAW file. The camera software also allows you to create looks and shoot in real-time using a look, just like with still capture software. Hardware and software manufacturers are doing a great job in anticipating how photographers work and are integrating photo style workflows into their products. I think that the film to digital still transformation in the early 2000’s taught everyone a lot of lessons and most people are prepared to embrace this new technology and medium. We see people very open and eager to learn about the equipment, workflow and possibilities with digital video.

The current RED sensor is 13MP (the same as a Canon 5D) so the file is quite respectable for print – as there are many advertising photographers that still shoot with the Canon 5D for campaigns to this day. But to be clear, we don’t recommend leaving your still camera at home. Many clients think that the Red completely replaces the need for still cameras. Today’s still camera backs are at the 22-65MP range and produce amazing still images. Plus still photography is about freedom of movement. So this needs to be taken into account when deciding what to shoot with. The RED is a Cine-style camera and is rather large and heavy especially when fully accessorized. Almost every one of our motion jobs includes both still and video gear on set. The huge savings and opportunity for clients come from being able to capture video content with only a slight incremental cost of hiring a RED video capture team. All the major sunk costs of producing the still shoot like hiring talent, locations, props, sets, styling, travel, lodging, etc. are leveraged by adding video on a still shoot. Financially it’s a no-brainer. For the photographer, video provides a new revenue opportunity. Right now, video is a win for everyone and content is in demand by marketers.

APE: How much expense does using a RedOne add to a shoot?

The day rate ranges from $3,000 to $5,000 for a complete system and tech support. Our full featured package called the “CinePak” includes a full Red system, specialized computer and video equipment, 2 techs, tape backup via our GLOBALvault storage service and a 30-day FileSociety account for high-speed file distribution. We also have high-end sound recording packages and our Panasonic P2 packages called the “VideoPak” as well as color grading and editing, format compression and authoring rates. We also offer discounted still/motion combo packages that reduce overall cost and reduce the number of crews while streamlining communication and deliverables. We can also supply lighting equipment via Fast Locations, our equipment rental company.

APE: What’s the editing process like dealing with all those Gigabytes?

On average there can be anywhere from 100GB to 500GB of RAW data per day, depending on how much you shoot. For sure that’s a lot of data and files to deal with, especially for multi-day shoots. But there are techniques for making it manageable. For pulling stills, our techs work with the AD’s and photographers on set to edit when possible, but usually we will process QuickTime dailies with clip names and time code and send them via FileSociety or on a drive to creative decision makers. Clients select a shot list from the time code, and then we deliver the related RAW files or processed tiffs.

For motion editing, we have full editing services and work with directly with clients starting with a clip list, then make rough cuts, do the color grading, sound, graphics and final edit, or we deliver a drive and the client manages editing separately. Color grading is one of the most exciting parts of the video editing process from a traditional photography point of view. Color grading in video is like image editing in Photoshop for still images. There are powerful tools that let photographers refine the look of video like they would with still images, including primary color, secondary color, color masking and adding realistic film grain effects and other filters. We can work with the photographer directly or photographers can work with the RAW files themselves using free editing software from RED.

APE: How do you store all that information and how do you deliver a final product to the client?

First thing to consider is the active storage on set during the shoot. We have about 16TB of very fast RAID storage built into our shooting systems for primary storage and backup, plus we also backup onto portable drives and usually deliver a terabyte drive to the client. In addition, we back everything up to onsite and offsite tape libraries that are stored in special fireproof safes. Data storage adds up fast, so it is an important consideration. Clients should decide what is worth keeping and storing.

APE: Tell me about a shoot you’ve been involved in recently with the RedOne and how it all went and how the client reacted to the final product?

One of our recent shoots was with fashion photography team of Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton. They wanted to use the RED camera to produce a short film and stills for fashion phenomenon, Tracy Feith. The risqué project was shot on a sunny day in the back streets of LA. The freestyle shoot worked well to enhance both the vulnerability and courage of the subject that reflected the Tracey Feith brand. The client was very happy with the results and produced a 7-minute final edit that is planned to run in stores in addition to print collateral pulled from the RED footage.

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I have been staring at hi-res scans of my 8×10 work on my Apple 30″ inch LCD display for a number of years now and wondering why the same displays have not yet been made to accommodate large display sizes. Thin museum quality LCDs, LEDs or better yet, OLED displays to display our work in larger sizes, 40 x50, 60×50 and bigger….

Anyone who has had the pleasure of watching a well mastered Blu-ray disc on a good quality 1080P HD screen will come off the experience a better man or woman and wonder why this technology is not being put to good use in the world of photography. I am convinced that there is a large market for high end electronic displays where photographers and other artists can show their work in a way that completely bypasses the “Print”. Personally, I have been very frustrated by the process, one fraught with difficulties, work flow hick ups, expense and many other such issues which crop up when faced with the task of producing large prints for gallery or museum display.

Often the end product is nice enough, or close enough to my creative intentions, but the greatest frustration is that the last step in the making of images is left to a printer (not to me), and to one who may or may not care about my real intentions. The limitations of their technology, skills, experience, and increasingly scarce geographical locations often prevent or limit my creative choices, not to mention the cost of a C-41 printer.

I work very hard to produce an image which pleases me, but I often find myself frustrated by that last step…a final step many photographers struggle with: The exact and brilliant reproduction and display of one’s work. Even-though, the print has served us well for well over a 150 years, I believe it is time to explore and demand that a niche market of high end large flat screen displays be developed for the photography market.

My original idea was to use 16:9 ration LCD TVs but the aspect ratio does not fit the average aspect ratio of many cameras(8×10, 4×5. 6×7 etc…). This led me to believe that there would be a market for high end LCD or OLED flat panel displays for fine art photographers, as well as other artists who might wish to display their work in a format other than regular TV panoramic formats. The ability to buy a high end barebones display, that is one without broadcast tuner or other electronic components needed to display moving images, would open a new medium for display and appreciation of photography as a whole.

Many photographers, unlike myself, did not grow up with film and digital cameras and have become very adept at manipulating and producing digital photographs and other works of art. These growing communities do not seek out the traditional print and to date, contents themselves to viewing their work on PC screens and on the internet. A new product catering to their needs, and to mine would be extremely successful and well received by a new, as well as older generation of photographers and visual artists.

The ability to frame this display with conventional frames, as well as sophisticated and functional color, contrast and multiple viewing interface (contrast, luminosity, back lighting, etc..) would render this product a versatile and more easily accepted new format. For example, the photographer might wish to approximate the look and feel of a C-print which could be achieved, as well as many other results.

A photoshop compatible display, one easily calibrated with common and sophisticated ICC profiles would go a long way to express the photographer’s vision, as well as provide him or her with a versatile, cheaper, more user friendly and better adapted product than the traditional C41 print. This display would be a sharper, more detailed version of their digital original.

I am convinced that this generation of photographers, as well as subsequent ones will demand a product better attuned to their digital abilities and aptitudes, not a product which is becoming increasingly scarce, expensive and monolithic. A product found only in major metropolitan areas, but who’s market share is shrinking and becoming more difficult to purchase and review. Most photographers who print for a gallery, home or institutional display do so long distance or through Fed-ex, a process which is rife with expensive reviews, slow and archaic.

There are many types of displays but personally I think the OLEDs are starting to look increasingly like the display to be. Their contrast aspect ratios are extraordinary, as well as their incredible thinness. Samsung’s latest 40″ OLED TV is an astounding piece of technology and produces a brilliantly sharp and amazingly detailed image, one much closer to what I am used to when I stare at my 8×10 commercial drum scans. Another interesting technology which to some degree is still in its infancy are E-readers(electronic paper). These albeit small displays have a very interesting way to mimic the book page and a visually tactile texture which I personally would like to see incorporated into larger color or black and white electronic display technology.

To conclude, here are other potential uses for Electronic Fine Art Display (EFADs, just made that up):

1-Ability to wirelessly control the content of the display. For, an artist or photographer might upload and change a show over a period of time by adding or removing work over a network.
2-The same principle could apply to a collector who might wish to “subscribe” to an artist’s work and receive a photography subscription. New images would be uploaded based on a specific delivery contract with galleries, musems and collectors.
3-Work would be sold and downloaded in any number of electronic formats and uploaded into the display. Some high end TVs allow the user to transfer their family photos to their screen for viewing but a more high end and flexible system would be easily devised to allow the artist or photographer to fine tune the image on a screen or allow for laptop and PC connectivity.
4-Imagine a show of 40×50s or 50×60s and larger EFADs in a darkened room, gallery or museum setting. Personally I cannot imagine a more impactful way to display my personal work.
5-Re-usable. Price wise these displays might cost more up front than a typical print but large, archival quality frames are extremely costly; making a EFAD competitive and attractive.
6-Matt and glossy screens…and even touch screen technology.
7-…..I am purposely leaving this list short and open sourced as I think it would be best if my fellow photographers and artists could add their own ideas and suggestions. An open source submission will make for far more ideas and suggestions, as well as other concepts than I could possibly come up with. Some of you might well be far more technologically inclined than I am and that knowledge might lead this idea to further developments, as well as serve as a way to push this concept on manufacturers and make this dream a possibility somewhere down the line. Have at it…the discourse will create its own weather and further refine this burgeoning concept.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_display_technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_light-emitting_diode
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/blackandwhite_ebooks/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_ratio

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I really think this will do well for them and in general repackaging the content that already exists into easy to use, easy to carry with you applications will work well for all magazines. There is so much great service content that is printed once and then heads for the recycling heap, but if it can be packaged together and purchased when you suddenly need some reliable information from a trusted brand I think most people would pay 99 cents or 2 dollars instead of spending 45 minutes googling for results.

I can already hear editors calling meetings, “we need an iphone app show up with your 5 best ideas.”

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by Jerry Leichter
Anyone who sells his work – as an artist, writer, consultant – has to face the tradeoff between getting paid what the market will bear, and accepting little or no monetary compensation in trade for visibility. This isn’t new to the Internet era. People starting out in any such business rarely have a good feel for what their own effort is worth. A few think too much of themselves; most undervalue themselves and will all too readily buy into this kind of deal.

The tradeoff is complicated. For one thing, like many tradeoffs in business, it’s about current versus future expense or income. These are always hard, because future expenses/incomes are inherently uncertain, while current expenses/income are certain – and sometimes you just have to pay the rent.

If you look at the actual Times article, the clear impression is that all the artists approached have a significant audience and business already, and certainly the ones who are refusing to let their work be used for free appear to be doing quite well. To stand on the outside and tell them how they should run their businesses – with no knowledge of where they actually stand – is incredibly presumptuous. Some of the artists who are refusing to participate are likely making a mistake. Others who are *agreeing* to participate may well be making a mistake, if the publicity they get ends up garnering only requests for more free work, rather than paying contracts.

Frankly, it seems to me that the biggest mistake here was Google’s. I’m reading between the lines here – I don’t know what Google actually said – but they appear to have been insensitive to how these artists see their businesses. It was only after the fact that they appear to have made it clear that they would be happy with existing work – most artists at the level they were approaching probably assumed they, like most customers, wanted something unique done just for them. Rather than casting this as an honor – a kind of on-the-web art show – they let it look like commerce. Well, if it’s commerce – why shouldn’t the artists expect payment? Perception and setting are essential in determining how people view a request.

More (here).

The bottom line is this, you can’t estimate the value of exposure, especially for things that haven’t been tried before. We all do stuff for free in hopes of generating future income but when a billionaire comes knocking sometimes it feels good to tell them to take a hike. I would argue that for your everyday consumer most browsers work just fine and choosing one comes down to, if it was bundled with the computer you bought and possibly how it looks. Covering a browser with artwork probably adds more value than people think.

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I think this is such a great way to treat photography online where the shoot is still essentially a stills shoot the the results are not a video that suddenly needs a plot, sound, editing, graphics and on and on.

Visit his blog to see the web page with the final result (here).

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“We had a few key goals with this CBSNews.com redesign — make the site easier to navigate, more visual, faster and highlight our unique content.”

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Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review delivers a brilliant manifesto with a plan to save media (here).

“For many decades, publications were overdistributed to readers who didn’t really want them, because publishers were former ad salesmen who hoped to profit by charging advertisers the highest possible rates.”

[...]“Editors can charge readers for content that is uniquely intelligent; that relies on proprietary data, investigation, or analysis; that helps readers with their jobs, investments, or personal consumption; or that is very expensively designed. Everything else should be available free…”

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired has been working on a book about free that’s set to launch this summer (here), but I suspect he’s going to take a real thrashing on this one since it seems the tide has turned on free. All anyone is talking about these days is subscriptions, premium upgrades and advertising. All have free components to them it’s just not a big deal anymore. We know that if someone charges money for a product and you offer that same product for free you will attract more people. If you don’t have a way to make it profitable it’s called a trust fund not a business.

Here’s what the red hot Economist has to say on the matter:

“Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.” More (here).

And finally if you want read a fantastic analysis on the situation facing three largest business magazines all founded at the beginning of the modern era of magazines read 24/7 Wall Street’s: The Sun Sets On BusinessWeek, Forbes, And Fortune.

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The subscription model for Newspapers and Magazines that I’d like to see would allow me access to all the headlines and blurbs for each story but limit the number of full stories I can see/read each month/week depending on how much I’ve paid.

The cost for these subscription models is critical. I would read 1 story a month from 10 or 20 magazines and several stories a day from a couple different newspapers but not if it costs hundreds of dollars (based on current subscription prices). I think there could easily be ways to lower the subscription cost if I agree to watch and interact with special advertising or allow cookies to be set on my browser so the advertisers can follow me around and gather data. I can also envision a 2 year multiple magazine/newspaper subscription model where just like cell phone companies the media reader is free or significantly discounted.

One concept that publishers will struggle with is how efficient blogs and social networking are at distributing stories and bringing in new readers, because once you put a pay wall up that will end. The key to this is realizing that hits are worthless and loyal readers are valuable. I think there’s a way to allow your paid subscribers the ability to distribute full stories to their friends/audience along with embedded advertising and a pitch to subscribe. This kind of sideways distribution is critical for niche publications and they will need to find the balance point between content that is freely distributable and content you have to pay to see.

Of course none of this addresses the the most critical issue Magazines and Newspapers are facing right now. Most of the content is not worth paying for. Fixing that will require either a heavy investment from publishers or a changing of the guard.

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A: If you’ve got ink on your hands, which means that you’re a print person, you’re finished. These news-gathering organizations depended upon being the only place in town. And everybody has advertising now. So, it’s a very tough transition.

You’re going to pay for information that you want. And you’re going to pay directly, which means there’s going to be either micropayments or subscriptions. Advertising in the new world order can’t support much of anything. Therefore, you’re going to have hybrid business models that are going to have subscription revenues and other types of revenues.

We’re going to have professional news-gathering operations. I do not think we’re going to be a world where we’re going to have citizen reporters doing all of the work. I think that it’s going to be a really tough period, it will get worse, and then I think it will come out the other end by being supported by other revenue streams.

via CEO Forum: Media mogul Diller – USATODAY.com.

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“It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.”

Danny Lyon – NYTimes.com.

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I’ve long thought that some of the business photographers do now producing editorial photography for magazines will become producing editorial images for clients who then distribute the images to magazines and other online sources (advertorial in a sense). I’ve seen this for a long time with products. The products that come with great photography always get more coverage. Not only does a well done picture convince the editor that the product is great it makes it easy to drop into the magazine. Online, it’s obvious that shiny product photography can get you plenty of coverage (some of it just about how shiny the product is). Most savvy product manufacturers produce editorial friendly pictures to go along with press and product releases.

The problem with this of course is that the client has control over “editorial images,” but if you’ve ever worked at a magazine it’s very clear that product manufacturers have been exerting control over their coverage for quite some time. The only reason to leave an advertiser out of a product review is if their product sucked and even then you risk losing the advertising.

Now I’m seeing several instances where photographers are teeming up with celebrities and publicists and cutting magazines out of the equation. Art + Commerce is now “producing our own celebrity shoots independent of commissioning magazines and covering all production costs” (from an email they sent around to publicists after the jump). I have no idea if they’re getting any traction with this (they didn’t respond to an email I sent them) but their roster is impressive and I can’t imagine that publicists aren’t paying attention. One agent I spoke with felt like it would remove all the mid level photographers from the equation because “newer photographers rely on the magazines to put them in the mix for assignments to elevate their career and get them seen.” I also spoke with an Art Director who works on celebrity shoots quite a bit and really thought that taking the voice of the magazine out of the equation would result in some mediocre shoots. I’m not so sure. Certainly magazines that want to remain relevant will need to commission original shoots but there is so much middle ground to cover where the publications don’t care but the opportunity still exists to elevate the coverage with great photography.

I also noticed that photographer Kurt Iswarienko is repped by the mega talent agency ICM (here) and while I didn’t call him to see I’m assuming this gives ICM the opportunity to pair their photographer with their talent.

And, finally we have Madonna one of the most image conscious celebrities in the world releasing sepia toned handout pictures of herself with the child she hopes to adopt in Malawi (here). In the Guardian story Martin Parr says, “Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It’s sort of a soft version of propaganda. Remember when the colour supplements used to run black-and-white pictures of famine and hardship? Some still do”

In the end I think these are all positive developments for photographers looking to replace lost editorial magazine shoots. Who knows if it will be good for media.

Sent: Fri Apr 03 2009
Subject: Art + Commerce Celebrity Shoots

Hey!  Shay here.  I wanted to fill you in with what I am doing at Art + Commerce, I think we could collaborate on this with some of your clients. ….see below.

We are now producing our own celebrity shoots independent of commissioning magazines and covering all production costs.

Art + Commerce represents photographers including Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Annie Leibovitz, Carter Smith and Hedi Slimane and syndicate their celebrity images to high-end magazines, always upon publicist approval.  We are bringing our photographers together with talent and their publicists to create iconic photographs and would love to speak with you about some of your clients who would be appropriate for this.

These images would be immediately available and would like to collaborate with you to secure US & international magazine placements, helping to promote your client for their upcoming projects.   We have wonderful relationships with publications worldwide and are looking forward to offering them a wider variety of high profile images within our archives.

This is a venture that A + C offers to a limited amount of talent & publicists and would love to work with you on this.

Below is a link to a small collection of our artist’s work.
<redacted>
Hope all is well with you!

Shay Nielsen
ART + COMMERCE

WWW.ARTANDCOMMERCE.COM

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via MediaWorks.

It’s important to realize that media is booming right now. What’s broken is the system where crusty old men take the piles of cash they already had and make more piles from printing and distributing media. Of course part of the fallout here is that most of the media that’s being made right now doesn’t make any money. That will change. Nobody said reinventing the wheel would be easy.

Aric Mayer has a good recap of the publishing crisis (here) where you can clearly see how the decision publishers made to put all their eggs in the advertising basket is now going to cost them dearly. After all those years of watering down their product to attract a more general audience, lowering the subscription rate to boost numbers and producing pathetic advertiser friendly content it seems that most magazines not only no longer have loyal readers but now the advertisers are gone too.

If that’s not enough, in what amounts to a perfect storm for publishing all these laid off editors, writers and photographers will be creating original content with their free time:
Web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists– Media Shift

The tide will be turning quickly for small, independent, efficient content producers. The first bit of good news comes from Advertising Age (here):

“In the past several months, there has been increasing evidence that the most easily measured metric on the web, the click, is not the right metric to use for many advertisers. And that’s good news for publishers struggling to monetize their content with online ads.”

With the news that San Francisco will soon be without a major daily newspaper (here) some see a smoldering crater, I see thousands of tiny saplings starting to take root.

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