On Sun, August 17, 2008 20:45, Tim Mulholland wrote: > A few weeks ago, a very successful graphic designer friend recommended > to me a book by Chris Anderson - "The Long Tail" It's a pretty easy > read, and I found it to be an enlightening and pleasant book. So, > here's my brief book report. Interesting to apply this idea in detail to photography; thanks for bringing it up. It clearly *does* apply! > Mr. Anderson is an editor for Wired magazine, and he has thoroughly > researched his book. His basic premise is that with our technological > changes (computers, digital cameras [in our cases], the internet, > etc.), the world has significantly changed from the economics of > scarcity to the economics of abundance. (And, don't take this too > far, as we all know that there's not an abundance of oil!) There's an > abundance of computers, web sites, digital cameras, users of digital > cameras, digital photos, consumers of digital photos; you also may > have noticed that the consumer has a changed mindset from "please help > me find this" to "I'll help myself to find it." I wish more people *had* changed to "I'll help myself find it"; or at least not so many of them were still asking me. > As I read this book, I was constantly asking myself, "so, how is > photography affected?" Photography is hardly mentioned, explicitly, > but it seems that it's following the same principles. First, there > are more producers of photographs than ever before. This is due to > the increase in the number of digital cameras and the ease of > distributing/sharing images on the internet. Second, there are more > "aggregators" of photography out there, on the 'net, than there were > in the pre-internet days. In the "old" days, just ten or fifteen > years ago, the aggregators were galleries or stock agencies. Now, > most all of us have our own galleries on the 'net and have images > posted in a number of other places. "My own" gallery is not an aggregator, though. People would only go there if they were looking specifically for *my* photos (or found one in an image search; Google is an aggregator). The other thing we need and don't have yet is aggregators with standards. Possibly multiple standards that I can select between, rather than having to go to a different aggregator. Maybe using collaborative filtering of some form rather than professional editorial judgement. But standards. Looking at the total Flickr stream, or searching by tag, is not a useful way to find good photos (never mind most of them aren't for sale, that not being what Flickr is there for). (There are heaps and loads of good photos on Flickr; mixed in with many perfectly ordinary photos.) As an analogy, we can replace a bookstore online (Amazon does a good job), but we can't yet replace a publisher, and the difference is that I *want* the publisher to reject the unpublishable dreck, whereas I *don't* want a bookstore limiting my choices, I go there looking for specific things and I want to find them. (I've got lots of friends who write professionally and a number who work in publishing, and I've *seen* the things the come in "over the transom" and end up in the slushpile. Now and then there's a gem, or at least something publishable, which is why SF/fantasy publishers still accept unagented manuscripts, but *man* the low end of what comes in is low!) > Here are a couple of examples that came to my mind while reading the > book regarding how the long tail has changed and is changing > photography. In terms of wedding photography, I run into possible > clients who tell me that my price is too high, that they'll have their > cousin shoot their wedding for them (more producers, more production > tools). And, couples want to have their digital images on a CD/DVD > now, rather than receive just a proof album from which they can choose > and order images (control). I'm not their cousin, but I've shot a number of weddings for friends as the main photographer, and a very few for strangers. And, for the amusement of the professionals out there, had my own wedding bungled by friends (I really thought three people would get me the pictures I wanted, mostly candids, but one had to cancel at the last minute and two fscked up nearly totally; I'm still friends with them). Then again a lot of this was in the film era, not a result of digital. The most recent three, now some years ago, were mixed-media (film plus digital), and I'm looking towards my first fully-digital wedding next summer. Partly we've got a learning curve; the market needs to get more sophisticated about photography to choose well in the new conditions (I'm taking for granted that the reliability and the quality of shots the *good* photographers get are actually worth the money to many of the buyers; that may not be exactly true, though). Also, wedding and event photographers really need to start advertising their reliability more. "Does Cousin Ralph have a backup camera?" That, and keeping a selection of complete wedding albums on the shelf to show people (everybody expects your two or three spectacular shots in the window to be spectacular, but look through the complete albums and see how many of the photos are better than Cousin Penny's). Hmmm; come to think of it, people may not have seen Cousin John's photos blown up to 20x30 and not realize how they'd look if they had been, either. It does seem to have become standard at weddings to get all your friends to give you a disk of their photos, and I think that's a really good custom. > Shifting the subject to stock > photography, we've all seen the advent of the microstock sites and how > anyone with a digital camera can submit an image and maybe make a buck > or two; there are frequent hues and cries about how these microstock > photographers are undermining the rest of the stock photography market. One of the big differences is model releases :-). That alone should protect people making a serious effort from those just playing around, in shots involving people. But I strongly suspect that the market for high-price landscape imagery is gone for good. Same for abstracts and everyday objects. > But, in all of the discussions in the book and that I've read on this > and other forums, what the professional photographer still offers is > quality, along with quantity. Yes, my cousin can photograph your > wedding just as well as your cousin - but they can't hold a candle to > me (at least, that's what I'd like to think). And, yes, my cousin can > submit a photo to a microstock site and maybe make a buck or two; but, > does my cousin have 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 images available on a > website or with a more well-known stock agency? Yes, while there are > microstock sites out there, there also are up-and-coming stock > photography sites, like Digital Railroad and Photoshelter, who are > trying to be helpful aggregators for photographers, not drive down the > price, and keep quality high. The point of aggregators is to collect the few hundred possible stock photos I have and present them along with a few hundred more from each of many thousands of photographers -- the need for 10,000 images *from one photographer* is just not there. Some photographers tried to be their own stock agencies, and needed that many. The business of manually integrating a collection of slides was messy enough that physical agencies didn't want to deal with you unless you had a lot of photos. But these days those barriers don't exist, and you can buy Uncle Fred's three good photos, and his 10,000 mediocre ones if you want, from Shutterstock. (I've got photos in Photoshelter's stock area, and really should send them some more.) It's fascinating watching the business evolve. But it's probably a good thing I didn't decide to make my living in it; it'd be exciting times, and I think I might have been one of the casualties. As I hobbyist, I'm immune, and in fact my friends don't seem to value my photos any less than they used to. But I notice that there are now four other people in my local social group doing photography that I think of as "serious", whereas it was never more than one or two back in the film era (and the group has if anything gotten a bit smaller). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
