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The Legal Aspects of Photographing Antiquity
Advance Notes: In a public place (whether admission is charged or not) it's possible to photograph freely. Only if the photographer is actually trespassing would there be problems with the law. However, in foreign countries, photographers and publishers may encounter restrictions regards photos in public places that are more rigorous than in the States.
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The necessity for a property or model release is dictated by a photo's eventual use. If photos are used for editorial purposes (not commercial use), model releases are not required.
ANTIQUITIES
In the case of the pyramids, the Siq, Jordan biblical sites, the Minoan palace at Knossos, Crete, the rock Tombs at Petra, and the like, whether the photos are of the inside or outside the site, no model or property release is required if the pictures are used to "inform and educate" (editorial use). Only when the picture is to be used for a commercial purpose would releases be needed. This would apply to pictures at archaeological digs, as well.
The confusion over whether a public object can be photographed and published, most usually comes from persons who arrive at the stock photography industry through the commercial door rather than through the editorial door. For example, photographers who have worked for a newspaper most of their career, know that model or property releases are not needed if the photo is to be used "to inform or to educate." Conversely, photographers who have worked in the commercial or advertising sector, e.g. corporate, advertising, and graphic art services, know that any photo used for endorsement or advertising purposes most always requires a model or property release.
Here at PhotoSource International, our emphasis is on editorial photography, and most of our markets, such as magazine and book publishers, maintain an editorial focus.
About $70,000 a day is spent on editorial photography in this country. That's about 1/5 of what is spent daily on commercial stock photography.
Although the monetary rewards in the editorial field are not as high up front as in the commercial field, other rewards abound.
One example: editorial stock photographers can afford to specialize in a field they enjoy working in. This allows them to build a deep selection of images in that specialization, making them a valuable resource to photo researchers and publishers in that field of interest. (Book and magazine publishers, of course, specialize, too.) Although the per picture fee is not as high as in commercial stock photography, many publishers buy in volume, which often makes up the difference over the long haul.
In many cases, however, researchers would do well to check if model or product releases are possibly available for the asking. This in the event the particular picture lends itself for commercial use, also.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA E-mail: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394
Web site: www.photosource.com
Welcome
to PhotoAim.com. Here's where you'll find information
about stock photography, editorial stock photography,
specialized photography, stock agencies, mini-stock
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Future Stock 2011
It is morning and as you finish your breakfast, in October of the year 2011, you click on your "daily revenue" feature on your keypad.
"My! That's a nice surprise," you exclaim. "But of course garden publishers are preparing for their year 2012 brochures, magazine articles, calendars and catalogs."
You are a gardening enthusiast and specialize in vegetables. Before you go off to your job as a biologist at a nearby college, you are examining your stock photo sales made last night while you were sleeping. Fourteen sales for a total of $307.16. That beats yesterday's sales of $215 for seven sales.
"I wonder if that company in Buenos Aires is still interested in the three dozen seedling shots I emailed them last week," you wonder to yourself just as the fax line rings. You watch as the machine curls out an order totaling $1,700 US. Not bad for 24 hours' "work."
You have been engaged in this kind of stock photo marketing for the past five years. You have developed a database of photos in an area (gardening) that you have special interest in and abundant knowledge about. You are not only a serious amateur gardener, but you also teach horticulture.
About five years ago, you began building a massive file, 10,000 photos now, capturing all aspects of vegetable gardening, from seed to mature plant. You researched the biological and common name of each plant you photographed. Because you live in the southwest desert area of the U.S., many of your images are unique to that part of the country. You have recorded the stages of various plants' growth, various insects that plague different plants, the resulting harm, and in some cases the effects of diseased plants on animals or people who eat them.
Your photobuyers, a select group of 42 photobuyers and researchers on your master list, call you by first name and you call them collect whenever you wish. You have become an important resource to them. You also deal with outside buyers. Every now and then you get an occasional one-time sale from a buyer who has used the Internet to locate you and your email address. A children's book publisher bought one of your beanstalk images, an advertising agency bought a tomato plant growth sequence for a pharmaceutical ad, and a close-up of a ladybug was used on a drug company's advertisement for a salve for freckles. But for the most part, your checks come from within your 42 mainstays who are prompt with their photo requests, and who know you do good work and provide accurate captioning.
WHEN IT ALL STARTED
And how did this system of acquiring that "just right" photo at an inexpensive fee all start? It was born of the revolution in e-commerce marketing at the turn of the century; inspired by the Napster music outburst back in 2001. Internet entrepreneurs realized that if you injected some democracy into music buying, more people could enjoy music at a lower cost to the consumer. And if you applied evolving Internet search methods, photo researchers and photobuyers, using the same basic technology, could use more illustrations because they were easier to find. A final advantage was micro-payments, a system of tracking multiple volume sales and controlling the bookkeeping through subscription services that provide royalty tracking and payments schemes, ensuring that the photos purchased didn't leak out onto the wider Web landscape.
In the first decade of the 2000's, the world of stock photography distribution changed. No longer did massive stock agencies, based on previous century technology, control the commerce. Photobuyers armed with Web search know-how, aimed their high-speed computers and bandwidth directly at individual photographers who were able to supply the highly specific images they were looking for. Everyone from school children to major book publishers, from TV documentary production companies to major advertising agencies, were customers.
What made the difference? There were several factors. Digital cameras that could produce high-resolution images became affordable. Speedy phone lines could transmit images for preview with immediacy. Web search engines became more sophisticated. Photographers began building deep selections of specific subject matter that they were expert in and enjoyed photographing. Business software for stock photographers emerged that made bookkeeping and accounting chores more bearable. Disk storage became cheap and dependable. Digital-only printing plants became the norm rather than the exception. Picture security systems became useable. Copyright protection laws were revised and brought into the new millennium. Magazines and book publishers focussed more on theme publishing, rather than producing "across the board" subject material. Photobuyers and researchers became more versatile in Web technology and more expert in the select special interest area of their readers.
BLOWING IN THE WIND
What caused the demise of the large stock photo agency as we know it today? All of the above, of course, but the main factor was that, being a centralized organization, the massive stock agency was too monolithic to be able to act swiftly when a buyer needed a picture. In the past, the massive stock agency was convenient because all the images were housed in a central supermarket-style location. But the emergence of the Web destroyed this advantage. Photobuyers could now go directly to the supplier-the photographer - rather than through a bureaucratic middleman system.
In addition, if the buyer needed a recent photo of school children in France, or a skyline of a particular city in California, the image from the stock agency might be 4 to 5 years old. A query to a California photographer living in the exact city or to a Parisian schoolteacher-amateur photographer, could produce current results in less than 24-hours.
We emerged into an era where film-produced images became artifacts and were seen in 'antique' exhibits, and film photographers came to be revered as artists who mastered archaic darkroom techniques to provide museum-quality prints. Digital photography became the norm. Not only did the automatic controls on digital cameras allow persons with a sensitive eye for imagery to produce fine quality images, but photo editing software allowed them to enhance the pictures for additional creative treatment.
When we look back on the turn of the century, our grandchildren will admire those early photographers who spent lonely hours in darkness to produce memorable film images of the world around us. The turn of the century will also be known in photography circles as the era when photography lost the shackles of cumbersome roll film and odorous darkroom chemicals. It will be known as the revolution that gave pictures back to the people and eliminated greedy photo pricing and limited distribution of those images.
Thanks to the photography of yesteryear, we were able to perceive a limited view of our planet. The new era of photography will be boundless in its energy to provide us with a more comprehensive knowledge of our world.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, Osceola, WI 54020 USA Email: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394
Web site: www.photosource.com
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When in Rome. . .
If you are attempting to sell your stock photography abroad, be prepared to do some haggling. It won't be the same experience as at a fish market in Marseilles, but it'll be pretty close. Europeans don't' go by "standard" prices, and photobuyers expect to negotiate. A new book, "Stock Photo Fees and Terms of Business in Europe, " lays out the details of rates generally paid from one country to another. These can be used as the basis for negotiations.
The biggest hurdle is the economy. According to the book's authors, European stock photo prices have declined in the last couple of years, despite increased usage of photos on the continent.
One positive factor: The Euro is now the official currency of most European countries, making it easier to get a grasp of the fee differences from place to place.
You can get a good picture of stock photography rates and terms of business in the major European countries in this latest book, which is available in German and English. (Available from: PIAG, Tel. +49 7221 301 7560, Fax: 301 7570, e-mail: office@piag.de ; 240 pages, price Euro 28,- in Europe postage paid.) -RE
by David Arnold & Gail Rutman
Does your DSLR produce adequate-sized images for your photobuyers? If you’re selling stock only direct to photobuyers (via PhotoSource International’s PhotoDaily or PhotoLetter market letters, through some other market list, or through your own efforts), the answer is probably yes. But deal with a stock agency or online portal and you may come up short.
Most stock agencies and libraries require at least a 48 megabyte file (although some accept 24MB for certain editorial subjects). You could make the 24 mark with an 8 megapixel camera (since it takes three bytes to make up one RGB pixel), but the only DSLR that will give you a 48 MB file is the $8,000, 16.7 megapixel, Canon 1Ds Mk II.
UPSIZING
Can’t swing $8,000? There’s an alternative: generate new pixels from the existing ones. This is commonly called “uprezing” (since it increases the resolution), interpolation (since it involves inserting new pixel values between the existing ones), or simply upsizing. There are a number of products you can use for this. We tested five of them: Photoshop CS2, Adobe Camera Raw (built into Photoshop), Genuine Fractals (www.ononesoftware.com, $159.95), Resize Pro (www.fredmiranda.com/software, $29.90), and the interpolateTHIS.com action (www.interpolatethis.com /actions.html, free).
We took an 18MB TIFF file from a Canon 10D (6.3 megapixels) and uprezed it four times with each of the five products. First we enlarged it to 165% of its original size to meet the 48MB requirement. Then, going back to the original, we uprezed it 200%, doubling the original width and height and quadrupling the file size to 72 MB. Then, again starting with the original file, we uprezed it 400 percent, creating a 288MB file (enough for a 27 x 41 inch print). That’s certainly enough, isn’t it? Not necessarily. What if you want to crop the original image, using only, say, one-quarter of it (4.5MB or 1.5 megapixels), and then enlarge it to that same 27 x 41 inch/288 MB size—an 800 percent enlargement? We gave it a try. The result was softer than the other files, but for many buyers it would still be acceptable.
AND THE WINNER IS…
In evaluating the results we looked primarily at sharpness, but also at color rendition, degree of noise and other artifacts, and other quality considerations that could influence a photobuyer’s decision. Miranda’s ResizePro stood out as yielding the sharpest, cleanest image. The remaining four were tightly grouped behind ResizePro, with their relative ranking varying from test to test. Keep in mind, however, that the brand and model of the camera you’re using could influence your results.
In addition to image quality, we considered each program’s ease of use and flexibility. Adobe Camera Raw only lets you uprez to three preset sizes, making it the least flexible. Easiest to use are Photoshop CS2 and Miranda’s Resize Pro, closely followed by Genuine Fractals.
Our recommendations: ResizePro consistently turned in the best results for us. But if you want to see which one best suits your style and equipment, download the free 30-day trial versions available for all but Resize Pro, and perform your own tests. You might want to skip the free one, however: it ranked near or at the bottom in all our tests, and was clumsy to use.
David Arnold and Gail Rutman are Oregon-based stock photographers and photojournalists who have been writing about photography and computers since 1980. You can contact them at www.arnoldrutman.com.
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