LScottPht@aol.com writes: > Here is an interesting statement from the editor at Getty Images ... > "While I agree that there is a serious problem with work for > photojournalists, I disagree that Getty Images is behind the decline > in work for freelancers. <snip> I'm probably the last person to start defending Gates or any of his ilk, but I do think there's a cause/effect confusion in the original claim (that Getty &c are *causing* low rates for photographers). Simple example: 1953: clients in Green Bay, Wisconsin and Edinburgh, Scotland need stock photos of a yacht with a white sail. Two strategies: (a) Two photographers do the separate jobs. Cost $100 and 40 pounds. (b) One photographer does the job (cost $100), plus the research and communications required for the two clients to discover that each other exists, etc etc. ($10,000, even not reliably) Not hard to see whether (a) or (b) gets selected. 2003: Same situation (only the sail is coloured stripes, not white). But the cost of finding out that someone somewhere else has already taken the photo has effectively fallen from infinity to zero. So obviously there's only a job for one person. So there's a fundamental change in the way the world is, and fighting it is not going to work. At the same time a whole new range of possibilities opens up - for example, it's perfectly feasible for someone in Green Bay to sell a print to an individual in Edinburgh, with no intermediaries, and negligible marketing costs; in 1953 this would have been completely infeasible. Brian Chandler ---------------- geo://Sano.Japan.Planet_3 Jigsaw puzzles from Japan at: http://imaginatorium.org/shop/
