Disclaimer:This photo in no way represent Coldplay management, but it could be close.

First there is the three song limit with crappy lighting until the photographers are out of the pit, now bands and their management are getting more aggressive on demanding all rights from photographers.

“Coldplay has been accused of grabbing the rights to photographs taken during its concerts.

The chart-topping rock band has introduced a new contract for professional photographers that gives ownership of all the images to Coldplay’s management. Photographers who refuse to sign the contract will be denied access to the band and its gigs.”

So the question begs, why would a photographer sign a contract like this? Why not bring a 12 mega pixel point and shoot, pay for a ticket and get your own images without a contract? I understand the idea of having the photographer sign the contract and say its only for editorial use. I signed these type of contracts when I shot the Molson Indy Racing series. But no one ever said they owned my work.

If you work for a newspaper or magazine, chances are you won’t own the images anyway. Does a photographer have the rights to give away the rights of the newspaper when he shows up at the venue and the contract is thrust into his face?

This thread has an interesting comment about how this contract can negatively impact the fans and publications.

“I ran into a version of this contract with Coldplay in November of 2008. My paper had planned to give the show a big ride in both print and online.

We have to deal with contracts all the time, but this one was so tight and demanding it was horrifying.We attempted an amendment to the contract but it was rejected by Coldplay’s tour manager … so there went the planned photo gallery linked with the story.

After some discussions with my director of photography we opted for me to sign the contract and just get one photo we could use as a cut-out tease refer on the front of our local section.
However, because of the contract, there would be no photos online, including a gallery and we didn’t run any photos with the story in print outside of the teaser cut-out referring readers the the story.

I got some good photos that their fans here will never see because of this contract.

Also, we were allowed to shoot songs 2,3, and four, which is about standard. However, the position that was given to all of us covering this event was so far and off to one side of the action it was almost impossible to get a nice clean shot of the performance taking place. And, songs 2 and 3 were under such a dim red light I was actually trying to shoot a 300mm 2.8 hand held at 1/10 of second and they were still super under exposed( and not sharp) under a red light that would never reproduce on a cmyk press. All of my photos that we considered from this event came from the last 20 to 30 seconds of the last song we were allowed to shoot when the performers came anywhere near where we were told to stay.

Just my two cents.”

Gone are the days when you could get some real shots of real performances, not the pre proceesed “Cheese Whiz” type of stale images. 

Read more on BJP-Online.com

 

Underneath a star by Jaewalk licensed under CC

Getty Images and Flickr launch first-of-its-kind creative imagery collection

SEATTLE and SAN FRANCISCO, March 11, 2009 – Getty Images, the world’s leading creator and distributor of visual content and other digital media, and Flickr®, a Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) service and one of the world’s largest photo sharing communities, today announced the launch of the Flickr Collection, a creative imagery collection now available exclusively on gettyimages.com for commercial licensing. With the debut of this first-of-its-kind collection, customers can easily access and license the inspirational and unexpected photographs for which the Flickr community is known.

“We are thrilled to provide our customers with this ground-breaking collection,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive officer of Getty Images. “We are impressed with the talent from the Flickr community, and are proud to once again lead our industry in this exciting new direction. We are eager to hear what our customers think, and look forward to their input in shaping this ever-expanding collection.”

“This collection reflects the unique perspective Flickr offers as the ‘eyes of the world’ and is testament to our community of photographers, who have shared their authentic visions with the world through Flickr,” said Kakul Srivastava, general manager, Flickr. “Providing our members with a way to bring their imagery to Getty Images’ worldwide customer base through this partnership has been an important step for us and we look forward to seeing the collection evolve over time, just as Flickr itself continues to do.”

Photographs for the Flickr Collection were selected by Getty Images’ editors based on their expertise in licensing digital content and insights into customers’ needs. The collection features a variety of conceptual imagery, such as everyday scenes and believable subjects, and original and regionally relevant content. It is a living collection, with thousands of new images added each month to meet the evolving needs of Getty Images’ customers. Images from the Flickr Collection are available in both royalty-free and rights-managed licensing models.

“The Flickr Collection is determined by the lives of those who contribute to it,” said Andy Saunders, vice president of creative imagery at Getty Images. “The collection changes the definition of ’stock’ photography by making it even easier for our customers to find and license imagery that is unexpected, genuinely original, and created by an untapped imagery resource – people everywhere.”

Getty Images will continue to build this collection over time by inviting select Flickr members to participate. Members who choose to participate will benefit from the global reach and distribution power of Getty Images to help market their images, as well as its unmatched expertise and experience in rights and clearances of digital media. Please visit the collection at www.gettyimages.com/flickr.

About Getty Images
Getty Images is the world’s leading creator and distributor of still imagery, footage and multimedia products, as well as a recognized provider of other forms of premium digital content, including music. Getty Images serves business customers in more than 100 countries and is the first place creative and media professionals turn to discover purchase and manage images and other digital content. Its award-winning photographers and imagery help customers produce inspiring work which appears every day in the world’s most influential newspapers, magazines, advertising campaigns, films, television programs, books and Web sites. Visit Getty Images at www.gettyimages.com to learn more about how the company is advancing the unique role of digital media in communications and business, and enabling creative ideas to come to life.

About Flickr
Flickr is one of the world’s leading online photo and video sharing communities where people explore, find and manage pictures and video clips of life’s daily moments with friends, family and the world. With 73 million worldwide visitors each month and more than three billion photos stored by 35 million members, Flickr serves as the ‘eyes of the world’ and has revolutionized the sharing and discovery of what people see and experience through digital imagery. Flickr was developed by Ludicorp in February 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005. To share and explore the world’s photos and videos, visit www.flickr.com.

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For more information, please contact: 
Bridget Russel, Getty Images, 206-925-6405, bridget.russel@gettyimages.com 
Alison Crombie, Getty Images, +44 (0) 207 424 8081, Alison.crombie@gettyimages.com 
Meaghan Smith, Edelman for Getty Images, 212-704-8196, meaghan.smith@edelman.com 
Kryssa Guntrum, Yahoo!/Flickr, 408-349-3351, kryssa@yahoo-inc.com

We are all looking for the holy grail to help our work get noticed, so I thought I’d put together a list of ideas that might help you  bring your company to the next level. You may not be the next Chris Buck or Terry Richardson, but you’ll being doing what 95% of the other people are not doing. 

First, you need to sharpen your game. There is no better advertising than that of having stunning work that rocks the socks off of a potential client. When learning to photograph, we all go through a growth period to define who we are as a photographer. After shooting tens of thousands of photos, you’ll soon find out what works for you and what doesn’t. This is the early stages of developing a style that will start to define you as a photographer. The photos that you get excited about, will probably be the ones that start to define the little niche you are trying to build. So this is probably the first and most important thing you need to do decide, who you are and what you will shoot?

Develop a Web Presence

You have to have a website or images hosted somewhere that people can find them. Even if you use Flickr.com or some other free site, you need to get your work out there to prove your abilities.

If you are going to build a site on your own, there are a number of great options, probably the best being Wordpress with tons of plugins and both free and premium themes available. Wordpress is easy to optimize for Search Engine Optimization with plugins like the All in One SEO pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Of course you’ll need hosting for your site. Do not use a free hosting service, they are terrible and loaded with ads that just detract from a professional image. Also be wary of using shared hosting that may have thousands of other sites clogging up the datapath to your site. At one point Pixebian was on a shared hosting site with over 4,500 other websites sharing the same IP address . Look at this chart below from our crawl stats for the site, before we moved to Westhost.com. This is the time in milliseconds that it took for Google to crawl Pixebian.com. Now you know why we went to a reliable hosting company. As of this writing, we have not been crawled since we changed hosting, so I hope the slow speeds did not impact our SEO effort. 

Once you have your hosting service, then you need to decide on design options. From my personal experience, forget the fancy flash intros and music. You can still use flash as I do on TerryDivyak.com, but keep it to a minimum. Editors and clients only have so much time to browse your site and if it’s slow or kludgy, then they move onto the next photographer. A well designed, easily navigable website with a short easy to remember domain name will keep viewers  focused.

Continue Reading

This is a must read for all freelancers and pro’s alike. Tony Luna has put together a four part series titled “Lifecycle of a Freelance Photography Job“. Hey lays everything out from marketing, to working with clients to billing.  A couple of the key points: “Your portfolio must be more than a box filled with pretty pictures. It must convey how you uniquely see the world and what you have chosen—out of a universe of options—to affix the rectangle of your viewfinder to and catch a moment in time.” “Most people want to be everything to everybody but you stand a greater chance of being noticed if you sell your services to a segment that needs what you love to shoot” “Very importantly, you will have to commit to creating marketing campaigns that will reinforce your unique viewpoint and your development as an artist.”

JPG Magazine announced they will no longer be producing their product due to lack of funding. I guess their business model of having customers choose photos, to be included in a magazine, was not a viable option.

Somehow the idea of sharing photos, before you published them, doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s like showing people a movie and then asking them to buy it after they have seen it.

For the time being, their website is up and .PDF files of all their back issues are available for download.  Download them here.