Take 1: I'll be honest. I'm not a video guy. I don't get it. I think that all the people that say that video will make still photography obsolete are smoking crack. But I have been intrigued by the Red camera since it's early introduction. And now that it's actually shipping and people have had time to mess around with it, I have to say that I'm pretty impressed that it's a digital camera. Jeez, I'm gonna need a stronger camera strap!

Take 2: I'll be honest. I'm not a skateboarding guy. I don't get it. All these guys flipping around on their boards outside our office day and night. But whenever I see a guy pull and ollie or a kick-flip, I think to myself, how the heck did they do that? And now with Tony Hawk pulling 900s, I have to say, I'm pretty impressed.

This skateboarding video is just beautiful.

Shoot! The Day is approaching, and we thought that we'd throw together a list of items that we find indispensable on shoots with the help from our good friends over at Adorama Camera.

Lowepro Street & Field Deluxe Padded Waistbelt
I like to use a good camera backpack when I'm traveling from place to place, but once I'm on location, there's nothing worse than fiddling into the camera bag, or leaving a lens lying around. So I dig a good belt system with some pouches. It's like Batman for photographers.

Make sure to get the right pouches for your gear.

Off-Camera Flash Cord
for Canon and for Nikon:

Step one in taking better pictures with your flash is taking the thing off your camera. By creating more directional lighting, you can control the way shadows fall in your photos and eliminate red-eye and that "deer in the headlights" look.

Permacell Gaffer's Tape
In Hollywood parlance, the gaffer is the head electrician who is responsible for wiring all the lighting gear. Mr. Gaffer didn't like Scotch or Duct, so he made his own tape. It's better, and it's built for the job. And remember how many times MacGyver saved the world with a little bit of tape...



Photek 12' Portable Background Stand
If you want to shoot people against seamless, you'll need a good stand system. And if your significant other doesn't like it when you leave the seamless up in the living room, then you'll probably need something portable. That's why I'm recommending this particular unit. I'm on my second set because I have a bad habit of tripping and tipping it over. Trust me, it's not prone to tipping, I'm just a klutz.

Pocket Wizard MultiMAX
If you're dealing with multiple strobes or are just fed up with wires, the Pocket Wizard is the de facto solution. I have three of these bad boys and they are beat to hell, but they keep on ticking, and have saved me hours of frustration running zip cord to power my strobes.



SanDisk 4GB Extreme IV Compact Flash Card
Echoing my sentiments from "10 Pieces of Photo Gear Under $50 You Should Own," I'm calling out this CF card again because you can never have too many. I hate it when I'm shooting RAW and I run out of cards, and begrudgingly have to switch to JPG...Don't forget, SanDisk has some great rebates right now, so stock up!

In case you missed it, we set up a community site for Shoot! The Day and decided to have a little pre-shoot day contest. So we asked a few of our cool friends (Nikon, Lowepro and Apple) to pony up a few prizes, and just like that, we had ourselves a contest.

But why make it so competitive? Why not have a little fun and make it creative? Avatars have become iconic (literally) of the hours we spend online, so we figured that "best avatar" was as good a competition as any.

The fun thing about having a totally silly contest is that you don't need strict rules and you don't need Price Waterhouse audting your selection. Instead it's just me with no pants on IMing a few other PhotoShelter peeps about what we like. But before we announce the winners, let's talk about some trends that we saw.

You holding a camera
I don't want to be a debbie downer, but in the annals of photography creativity, this particular trend ranks near the ground. And the ground is down low. Now, now. That doesn't mean the photos are bad, I'm just saying...sometimes you have to step it up a creative notch. Here's a little pupu platter.


Laura

I'm not quite sure what caught our eye with this photo. Before we even thought of Shoot! The Day as an event, we had been talking about this photo. It almost looks like the girl is walking on the moon or some other exotic locale. The silhouette of the camera, the strange bokeh, the hint of green tone in the dress....it all comes together fabulously.


Photo by Sean Marc Lee / #PSC000118425

I decided to ask the photographer, Sean Marc Lee, out in Los Angeles about the photo (Can't let Rachel "The Glove" Hulin have all the fun in her blog).

Where did you take it?
This was taken in Malibu right off the Pacific Coast Highway at one of the really small coastal reserve beaches (can't remember the name). I believe it was during golden hour a little before sunset. January sunsets tend not to be so warm in tone. I remember that day because it's the exact day the Malibu fires started and I managed to take a picture of the smoke from a distance and had submitted to CNN as a reader submitted "breaking news" picture.

[ed note: ooh! The old CNN rights grab! They got lucky this time!]

Who is the subject? 
The subject is my girlfriend Yumi, who seems to appear a lot in my photos for some reason...  :) 

What were the circumstances for the photo?
We like to do a lot of exploration and try to find interesting places you wouldn't expect to find in Los Angeles. She recently received a Nikon D70 at the time and wanted to try it out. She's very curious by nature so we kind of just wander around places on our own but together. I believe it was low tide at the time, so we walked out where that pool of water is. As she was
walking out I just liked the way she was carrying her camera and by instinct crouched down and took the picture.

Oh, and if I know we're going out to explore or something where potential photos can happen, we go through her wardrobe to find something photogenic.

There's a weird bokeh, were you using a doubler? Or is something else
causing that effect?
I like using really shallow depths of field. On the 5D, I usually kept it wide open at f1.4 at all times with the center focus point selected. It's similar to using old cameras, focus in the middle and reframe instead of letting the camera decide what point to focus on. As far as technical specs, it was shot at f1.4, 1/1000 at ISO 100 with exposure compensation set to -2/3 on Aperture Priority. As the subject is backlit, I believe it's causing some weird effect with where the light is meeting the horizon!

And are some other photos from the day...


Photo by Sean Lee


Photo by Sean Lee

Totally awesome. Sean Shoots! The Day every day.

Everyone loves acronyms
Acronyms sure are handy.

PSC = The PhotoShelter Collection
PA = Personal Archive
RRS = Research Request System

When we started planning our newest announcements, a few more acronyms were born:

SOS = School of Stock -- our cool new resource on stock photography from the mouth's of buyers

However, "Shoot! The Day" provided some challenges for obvious reasons. Had we planned the event 30 years ago, it wouldn't be a problem because back then STD didn't have any strange connotations that I'm aware of (we called them VDs back in the day), ah, but here we are in the 21st century.

I was pleased to find that the Strobist solved the problem for us by referring to the event as S!TD. Now, that's a creative solution. When I saw his post this morning, i shouted, "SEXUALLY, transmitted disease" and heard a few tentative giggles around me. But in fact, it stands for "SHOOT! The Day."

Ok, go take some pictures.

There is a pretty simple formula for selling anything: Give the buyers what they want.

It seems pretty obvious, but knowing what buyers want requires actually talking to buyers. Knowing isn't built on assumption or anecdote.

Selling stock imagery is no different, and it should come as no surprise that most stock sales are lost because the buyer simply can't find the image they are looking for. Selling stock photography is speculative in nature, yet seasoned stock shooters approach the market with certain trends and topics in mind to optimize their chance of success.

We've had the privilege of speaking with thousands of photographers and buyers to learn what's on their mind. We think there's a major disconnect between these groups, and we're resolved to close this loop so that photographers make more sales and buyers get what they want.

A few weeks ago, we launched the first phase of our efforts by creating our Research Request System (RRS). Our photo research team received several hundred research requests per month from top advertising agencies, publications and graphic design firms, and we publish them to you. We figured that photographers have a lot more images in their archive, which they might not have considered as stock. The RRS allows photographers to use the Personal Archive to submit images into the PhotoShelter Collection, and the best part is that it's all free.

To gain more intelligence, we conducted a survey amongst photo buyers of all different types about a month ago. We asked them a slew of questions, and tabulated the data for you. The good news is there is a huge opportunity to create a whole new generation of stock photos. Here's an exerpt:

"We asked our buyers how they felt about the following statement: "When it comes to the images I search for most often, I think I've seen all of the content available within the major stock houses."

Three-quarters of the buying population (399 of 536 people) agreed with this statement."

Armed with all of this information, we decided that we were going to push education even harder than we have in the past. But rather than try to teach people about photography in general, we thought we focus specifically on stock photography. And rather than compile information about how a few photographers shoot stock, we decided to talk to the people that do the buying to understand where the opportunities lie. The result, our newly launched School of Stock.



The School of Stock is an ever-growing repository of information, quotes, tear sheets, and visual examples designed to help photographers create better stock and increase their sales. We threw together a pretty kick-ass group of experts, and we're really excited to see how it will grow.

But the Research Request System and the School of Stock weren't enough. Reading stuff on a web page is cool and all, but photography happens offline. And for pros and amateurs alike, photography can be an intensely social endeavor. We all seek to get feedback from others about our photography. We enjoy the camraderie of like-minded artists. So we made a few phone calls some friends like Nikon, Adorama, Shoot Digital Studios, and this cool computer company whose name is a fruit, and they all got really excited.

The result? On July 20th, thousands of photographers around the world are going to change the stock photo industry for good. And not only can you create imagery that could sell, but you could also win a cool prize for doing so. We're calling it "Shoot! The Day"

In the next few weeks, we're going to be posting a lot more information on this very cool event. A bunch of really awesome photographers, like David Hobby from Strobist, have consented to lead groups on that day. Get the word out, but more importantly, sign up and take some great photos.

Photo by Stefan Postles

Rachel "The Glove" Hulin posted about the photo fracas at Union Station, so I figured we could coordinate our outfits today.

So here's a post from The Guardian that Jim Colburn posted on Sportsshooter entitled "Are Photographers Really a Threat?"

"Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

"Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography."

The NBA's wildly popular "There Can Be Only One" campaign has entered a new phase by encouraging fans to pair up their own faces with those of the NBA superstars. You can actually download split images from the NBA site, composite your own photo, and upload the images for other fans to see. There's no prize for doing so, just the glory in being humiliated online for having the gall to compare yourself to a highly trained, professional athlete. (But really, I think it's all in good fun as that's the point of being a fanatic).

Of course, like most sites that allow photos to be uploaded (e.g. Facebook), you essentially grant a huge swath of rights to the NBA to use in perpetutity. So we won't be doing that today. Instead, you can enjoy Grover in all his glory because there can be only one.

We have recently announced a policy change that disallows our photographer contributors from cross listing an image on PhotoShelter and another site where the retail price of the image is less than $50 (which translates to microstock sites). As expected, reaction to the decision was varied and vocal.

But rather than get into the emotional responses, let's talk about the observations that led to our decision.

First, we are not in denial about microstock. Microstock is here to stay just like royalty-free licensing. We think that microstock fulfills a niche for people that 1) want low cost licensing, and 2) do not care about exclusivity. iStockPhoto's projected revenues for 2008 make it clear that microstock is one of the few growing areas of image licensing, irrespective of our opinions of how it is affecting the industry.

When we started PhotoShelter, our goal was to create a product that enabled and empowered the individual photographer. The creation of the PhotoShelter Collection last fall was no different. We wanted to give photographers a better deal, and allow virtually anyone to participate. But helping photographers wasn't the key business driver. Rather, it was to address the buyer sentiment that there isn't enough diversity in the marketplace, and that the stock photo collections had stagnated.

We want to give photographers the control to pick and choose their outlets, but not so surprisingly, we began to see situations where an image was about to be sold for several hundred dollars through the PhotoShelter Collection, and then the deal was scuttled because the client found the same image on a microstock site for $1.