Slashdot Mirror
Getty's Flickr Sales, Money Spinner Or Ripoff?
Barence writes "Photo-sharing site Flickr is offering photographers a new way to cash in on their work. The 'Request to License' scheme allows renowned photo agency Getty to sell photos on behalf of Flickr members. Once part of the scheme, all of the user's photos will carry a Request to License link (users can't select certain photos to license in this way). People wishing to buy the photos are directed to Getty's staff, who 'will help handle details like permissions, releases, and pricing,' according to Flickr. However, the last time Getty sold images on behalf of Flickr members, it led to complaints that photographers were being exploited, with commission on photos as low as $1. So who's doing best out of the deal, photographers or Getty?"
It's like Lenin says: you look for the person who will benefit and, uhh.... I'd like to think that those photographers who don't have any representation at the moment and have HIGH QUALITY work to offer will benefit, those with medium and low quality work will suffer. The problem is that those with high quality work would be more likely to have representation outside of the internet, thus leaving the majority of people left to fend for themselves on flickr getting the short end of the stick from Getty. You can't pay them more just because they have low quality work and there are more of them, this is not social welfare. Those that opt in need to understand that there are better ways at getting financial representation for their work. But for those that need a little bit of cash from works they aren't making any cash from, this works fairly well.
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However, that's the price for the ease of use. Basically if you want to sell your photos, nobody is stopping you. You can have your own site, where you sell prints for whatever price yo like, under the terms you like. This lets you do more or less "One click sales." That's a nice feature, but it means you are at the mercy of the person who sets the terms. You have do decide if it's worth it to you.
Professional photography -- particularly, photojournalism -- is a dying art. Yes, there are a few people taking some really good photos, ones that tell stories, represent facts, or are just nice to look at, but is also a tidal wave of "high quality" images that are nothing but amateur snapshots taken with high-end equipment. A few bucks flowing through Getty will make these people feel like they have a chance at the big time...and probably cause even more of them to set up websites promoting their wares, but the "art" aspect of photography doesn't come with a $3,000 camera and a little bokeh. It just moves the $5 stock photo market from the trained professionals to the part-timers and makes it all the more difficult to scratch out a living without shooting weddings.
I agree with your post but as an old school photographer I'm no longer sure what staying relevant entails. I came to define photography as the interplay of light and form, but when colour and content are factored in, composition gets overlayed with endless details and syntax. When I shot wildlife and wilderness scenery with a Pentax MX I used a landscape viewfinder and imagined crossed diagonals as a way to frame and compose shots, but when shooting wildlife using a 300 mm manual lens and pulling focus on an animal's eye to eyeball depth of field composition pretty much goes out the window. Now the classical ideas of composition probably aren't studied and the approach is basically a Rambo automatic fire mode which means many neophytes are likely to capture good shots that can be touched up by software. Good on them and I'm glad they have a means to pick up some pocket change in addition to having had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time.
I think pros still have to learn the basics and even go back to the ideas that came out of the Paris exposition that introduced Japanese ideas contained in the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige to artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh and can be seen in works like the Samurai Trilogy and Lady Snowblood. But like I pointed out above, I'm not sure how those classical ideas and works can be integrated with the DSLs and software available today. I'm glad to have started out with a K1000 shooting black and white asa 100 and having to learn the hard way.
just my loose change
ideopath @ play
I think the main problem is that the market for truly artisan-quality, top-end photography has never really been that large: much smaller than the number of professional photographers. They've been able to make up the gap until now, because they also owned the market for more run-of-the-mill photography, which did not really need top-end photography, but did need something better than low-quality 35mm point-and-shoots. Now that amateurs can do that medium-quality work, the people selling themselves as professionals really only have the top-end professional market left, which isn't big enough (i.e. there are too many professional photographers).
Actual recent example: someone's writing an academic book and needs a bunch of 2-by-2-inch stock photos, of things like Parthenon, or an Atari, or clouds. They used to have to license these from a professional photographer, even though the quality they need is not really particularly high. Now they get it free from Wikipedia, or a few bucks from some amateur. Is there any real reason they need a highly paid professional to take these small stock photos? If the photos were the point of the book, say a coffee-table book about architecture, sure. But that's often not the case.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I suspect that the "specifiers" idea, unless restricted to a pre-canned list of them, with meanings spelled out somewhere, would be cumbersome; but the foolicence:$cost idea is eminently sensible, and quite arguably better than what they have in fact done.
This raises to possibilities, neither entirely encouraging:
1. They are stupid: During the course of what must have been at least several weeks, if not substantially longer, of hammering out the deal, flickr failed to come up with something that a slashdotter came up with within less than an hour of the article about it being up. That would be unimpressive.
2. They are evil: Someone involved in the flickr/Getty transaction wants it to be all-or-nothing, and it was set up to be so. I can only imagine that letting individuals do their own pricing would detract from Getty's role in doing that, and that it is better for them if the user, and their entire image collection, is kept as homogeneous fodder.
Flickr never cared about professional photographers. It's possibly the worst imaginable interface for viewing photos, debasing just about everything that makes photography interesting and engaging.
Contrast this with an interface like that offered by 500px.com. This site was also founded in Torionto by a few guys who are genuinely passionate about photography. While it consciously apes Flickr in some respects, just about every design and editorial decision is made to enhance our appreciation of photography as art and craft.
Flickr drives virtually no traffic to my websites, in spite of my having some interesting and unique photos (I live in a part of the world few have visited). Since I moved to 500px, I haven't even thought about it. Oh it's perfectly fine for sharing snapshots, but any professional, talented photographer who think Flickr is going to help their career is labouring under a delusion.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Well indeed, the latter part of the tag would have to be kept to a pre-canned list with carefully explained meanings, or you'd effectively be promoting contract disputes.
I suggested the noads one because I can see people not wanting their likeness abused for whatever type of product advertisement they find to be most annoying.
Why it was implemented as all-or-nothing, I'm inclined to go with your second suggestion. This idea I outlined wasn't particularly hard to arrive at.
If what they effectively want to say to downstream clients who would buy a license via Getty is, 'You only have to deal with one party: us', that still doesn't explain why they're not allowing an artist to specify a minimum fee, or indeed what images are released this way.
Technology wise it's hardly that much more work to adding just images with a certain tag to Getty's pool vs. adding a user's entire cache of images. One would imagine this to be trivial, in fact.
Indeed!
Digital cameras aren't the first time something once available to professional photographers became available to everyone.
A century ago, the Brownie camera brought photography to the masses. The coming decades would see at-home developing and printing systems and by the mid-century instant film cameras were becoming available to the masses.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The ideas you speak of - good composition, good artistic sense, and the like - are in the mind of the photographer not the tools he holds in his hands.
At least, they are until we get a good AI inside camera. Then watch out.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actual recent example: someone's writing an academic book and needs a bunch of 2-by-2-inch stock photos
Taking photographs for my upcoming book so I don't have to pay a stock agency ... I thought that's what underpaid grad students were for. *cue rimshot*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.