My birthplace of Hawai'i is situated 5000 miles away from my current home in New York, so I don't get to go home very often. Two years ago, I traveled back to celebrate my Grandpa's 100th birthday. This time, it was a combo visit to see my parents' newly rebuilt home, celebrate mother's day, and celebrate my Grandma's 93rd birthday (they live long in Hawai'i).



The original house was built right after WWII, so it was in need of some repair after nearly 60 years. The new house maintains much of the same footprint, but the folks added a partial 2nd floor with a few more guest bedrooms. My grandma had been living alone since my grandpa passed away in December 2007, but she has now moved in with my folks.

Did you see our ad running in PDN?

I met Kristen Ashburn in 2002 when she guest lectured at a class I was taking at the International Center for Photography with Andre Lambertson. She had been self-financing trips to Africa to photograph the effects of poverty and HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe in black-and-white with her Rollei, and the images were stunning.


photo by Kristen Ashburn

Since that time, she went on to win the Canon Female Photojournalist of the Year (the year after Ami Vitale won), a Getty Foundation grant, PDN 30 under 30, and multiple NPPA and World Press prizes. She produced a traveling exhibit called Bloodlines which premiered at the prestigious 401 Projects gallery in Chelsea along with a beautiful multimedia piece.

But more importantly, she kept going back to Africa -- still self-financed -- to continue to photograph the on-going epidemic. Somewhere along the way, Madonna found Kristen's work, and pulled Kristen over to Malawi, and that work and her previous work are now feature prominently in Madonna's new documentary "I am Because We Are," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend.

Besides her humility, I've always found Kristen inspiring because all her long-term projects have been self-financed, and it seems like the assigned editorial work she takes for clients like Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Business Week are merely ways to finance the humanitarian photography that drives her. Many aspiring photojournalists that I've spoken to always wonder how they can get their start, and for Kristen, it was a stubborn perseverance to shoot what was important to her, irrespective of geography or political climate.


photo by Kristen Ashburn

After some gentle prodding (read: being annoying to her), Kristen has finally decided to offer some prints in a limited edition through her PhotoShelter Personal Archive account. I've got one sitting in my apartment and it's haunting and gorgeous. Definitely worth a look.

I don't know about those kids who have only recently entered a photo program (read: all digital), but if you've taken a photo class in the past 30 years, you've probably run into Henry Horenstein's bible of black and white photography.

Matthew Porter #PSC000762558


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those buzzwords flying around the Internet that describes a general approach towards increasing your visibility to search engines. The goal of SEO for a photographer is to come up on the first page of a search engine when a buyer performs a search. For example, if a buyer is searching for "Grand Canyon Stock Photos" and your page came up first, then the search engine acts as an effective marketing funnel for garnering new clients. And the more eyeballs that see your work, the higher likelihood that you will make a sale.

Although there are different techniques for improving SEO, the single most important factor (for most mainstream search engines) in determining a page's ranking is the number of in-bound links pointing to that page. For example, a lot of people have set up various pages that link to "photoshelter.com" therefore when a user searches for "photoshelter" in Google, our website comes up first. If GE had a product called "photoshelter" and more people linked to it, then their site would come up ahead of ours.

Although PhotoShelter employs a number of SEO techniques, the single most important factor in gaining visibility is the number of pages referencing given content. For this reason, relying on PhotoShelter alone to improve your search engine visibility is a poor strategy.

One very interesting way to increase your visibility is through the creation of a blog. Although we often think of blogs as destinations of readable content, many people use blogs to simply create pages to point to other content.

Jim Hunter created his blog in Feburary 2005 using Blogger to display his food images. He structures the entries in such a way that an image appears in close proximity to a description of the image, and each image has a link back to a page on PhotoShelter where it can be licensed.  He uses the same technique on his regular website.

No matter how far we move into the digital age, there's still nothing like having a nice print. You can stick it in your wallet or hang it on your wall, and it doesn't require a battery or a USB cable to view.

The PhotoShelter Personal Archive has the ability to sell prints and other products either through a completely automated fulfillment mechanism with our partner, EZPrints, or through self-fulfillment if you want to control everything from soup to nuts.

After you've uploaded images, you can create a pricing profile -- basically, a way to designate a price for each print size that you want to offer to your buying audience. EZPrints offers everything from wallet-sized prints all the way up to monster 30"x40" prints. In addition, they also offer products like keychains and mugs that you can imprint your photos onto.

Alternately, you can set up your own custom prints or products, and set shipping prices to them. Want to sell a custom 20x30 print on watercolor paper in a limited edition, signed by you? No problem. We have all types of photographers selling images from youth sports to high end art prints from people like Vincent Laforet.

One of the cool features we introduced recently was the ability to also allow the customer to optionally specify a crop. This is useful because a standard digital camera has a sensor with a height:width ratio of 4:3. But a 4x6 print has a ratio of 3:2, so inevitably, something has to get cut out. Before we released this feature, a buyer might order a picture of a football player with his outstretched arms, only to receive a print where the ball was cropped out of the image. That's no longer a problem.

When the buyer clicks the "Add to Cart" button, they will see the following:

We are fortunate to have a centrally located office in New York City, so we have a fairly steady influx of photographers that pop in to say hello, and we thought it would be cool start showing pictures of you!

Model releases aren't just for professional models! Any person appearing in your stock photos is considered a model, and to maximize the profit potential of an image, you should obtain a model release, which gives you consent to license the image for commercial purposes.



What is the point of a model release?
Model releases are required primarily to protect two of the subject's rights: the right to publicity and the right to privacy. The right to publicity ensures that everyone has the right to control how and when their likeness is used. When a model signs a release they are allowing the photographer to profit from the sale of their likeness.

The right to privacy gives everyone the right to live a private life. Although a person in a public venue is fair game to photograph, people can reasonably expect not to be photographed in private areas against their will. Similarly, a model release therefore asserts that the photographer had permission to take a particular picture, and that the subject has consented to their likeness being sold as stock. In addition, models can request that the picture not be used in certain contexts (such as to promote cigarettes or prescription drugs) through the model release.

Model releases can make or break a sale
There have been a number of legal cases where models have successfully sued buyers and photographers over images taken or sold without their permission.
 
One such case is the story of the Simon family. A posed portrait of the family intended only as a private keepsake ended up on a Royalty Free stock photography CD-Rom published by PhotoDisc, Inc. It was then purchased an unknown number of times, and used in widespread ad campaigns by companies and organizations such as Rogaine, Macy's, and the Christian Coalition.
 
The Simons sued in part because they had not consented to the sale of their likenesses as stock, and were personally offended by some of the causes the portrait had been used to support. More than a dozen buyers of the image were named in the lawsuit. In November 1998, PhotoDisc awarded the Simon family a $1.5 million settlement.  

Buyers naturally don't want to open themselves up to this risk, and most are very careful to use only model-released images for advertising or other commercial usages.    

I asked Bethany Rouslin, a senior photo editor at Time Inc. Content Solutions, if she searches specifically for photos that have a model release. "Always," she said. "Here at Time Inc. Content Solutions, we produce promotional collateral including magazines, magalogs and websites for single clients. Due to the advertorial nature of most of our publications, we only look for model and property released images with very few exceptions." 

Although great images can often stand on their own, a caption can provide context and background information that greatly enhances a picture. In the realm of stock photography, a caption can often make the difference between selecting a photo or not because publishers often rely on the written word as a way to verify what is depicted in the image.

Travel imagery is a popular content submission area for PhotoShelter, and is also an area where the strength of a caption can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. Here's some guidance.

Captioning Style
Captions are required for all News+ images, and are very important for travel imagery.  Although captions help our photo editors identify the subject of photos, their intended audience is the photo buyer. As such, it's important to maintain uniformity and professionalism in the creation of the caption.

Captions (AP Style preferred) should answer the who, what, when, where and why of the subject depicted in the photograph. Captions should be written in English in the present tense and include a date.

Typically, captions are written in two parts. The first sentence describes the subject/action depicted in the image, while the subsequent sentences give context to the image.

First Sentence:
Los Angeles, CA, Jun XX, 2006- Virginia Nguyen is crowned Miss Vietnam USA 2006.

This first sentence effectively conveys who is depicted, but a picture of a girl in a gown and crown doesn't provide the viewer with much context. Is this a small event? A world-renown event? Is it historically significant?

Two Sentences:
Los Angeles, CA, Jun XX, 2006-Virginia Nguyen is crowned Miss Vietnam USA 2006. The pageant is in its fifth year and celebrates the accomplishments of Vietnamese-Americans.

Sentence or Phrase?
Travel captions don't necessarily have to be a full sentence, but it should at the very least be a descriptive phrase.

Bad (soft reject):
Cave in Petra

Better:
Cave entrance near the Siq in Petra, Jordan

Verb Tense
Captions should be written in the simple present active form.



Best:
Paul Haas conducts the SymphoNYC orchestra at the premier of "Traces" in New York, NY.

Avoid the present progressive (gerund)
Bad:
Paul Haas is conducting the SymphoNYC orchestra at the premier of "Traces" in New York, NY.

Avoid past tense construction (particularly in the first sentence)
Bad:
Paul Haas conducted the SymphoNYC orchestra at the premier of "Traces" in New York, NY.

The second or subsequent sentences can contain past tenses.
Paul Haas conducts the SymphoNYC orchestra at the premier of "Traces" in New York, NY. Haas founded SymphoNYC as a new way to present classical music in the 21st century.

One of the cool features we released a few weeks ago with the Personal Archive is the ability to sell an image as an electronic personal use license via digital download. Why is this so cool?

From a technical standpoint it's not. The mechanism allows you to sell (i.e. license) a digital download of an image whereby the pricing is based on the size of the download. Sounds a bit like Royalty-Free right?

That's where the similarity ends.

Royalty-Free is designed as a commercial license, so the buyer can basically do whatever they want with the image. Clearly, most of us don't want that happening.  If you shoot a wedding, and then offer the image under a royalty-free license, an unscrupulous buyer could appropriate the image for commercial purposes. Imagine the bride on a subway sign for a divorce lawyer. That wouldn't do wonders for your wedding business.

On the other hand, if you're only offering it up for personal use, the image is protected by the legal license that you offer to the buyer. And if an infringement occurs, you have a basis for suing. It also means you have a way to sell downloads at a different price point than the typical royalty-free image.

Here's an example of the purchasing screen from Jason Kindig's PA homepage.



Everyone talks about the death of print, and while we're not about to concede that prints are dead, we definitely see an uptick in the use of digital imagery for personal purposes like on Facebook, desktop wallpapers, etc. The Electronic Personal Use license is a perfect way to offer a downloadable file to your clients through our simple-to-use cart interface.

So whether you shoot weddings, headshots, sports, etc, there's probably a good reason to consider adding the personal use license to your arsenal of products.