Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new recommendation to treat childhood obesity with statins -- the drugs used by millions of adults worldwide to reduce cholesterol. Irrespective of your feelings about whether this course of treatment is prudent or safe, the result has been a cascade of news articles with images of childhood obesity.

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.

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:

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.  

The 800 lbs gorilla, Getty Images, roars again.

Getty makes a very small fraction of photographers a lot of money. In fact, a handful (i.e. <10) even make over $500,000/year from stock image sales. They can do this because they consolidated collections and provided a one-stop shop to the image buyer. They took massive commissions, but also spent money on advertising the service, so now they can rightfully claim that they do more image sales business than their next two competitors combined (Corbis and Jupiter Images).

But times are tough, and the fact is that the three largest stock agencies represent less than 1% of professional photographers worldwide. The rise of sites like Alamy and iStockPhoto (owned by Getty) suggest that there is a larger market for images both on the supply and the demand side. In an effort to cash in on this, they have introduced Getty Open.

Of course "Getty Open" is a moniker akin to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea." Well friend, there ain't nothing democratic about North Korea, but a little marketing will hopefully go a long way.

Getty Open is an effort to allow anyone who wants to sell an image to do so. The catch is that you'll have to pay Getty $50 per image to submit, and then give up 70% of the sale with a two-year exclusive. Their value proposition is that if the image does sell, you'll make up that money. And of course, there is some psychology going on. If I have to pay to play, then I will self-select more critically. And for some people, spending money makes them feel like they are exerting control.

But think about this. If you're a good photographer, you don't have to pay to submit to Getty. They just take your images because they know it will sell. So Open is more about monetizing the fact that more people want to be "with Getty" than they really want. Sure, they will find a few diamonds in the rough, but for the most part, this gives them a revenue stream by preying on those who don't know better. This is like putting a non-refundable deposit to get on the waiting list for a hot new condo development, and not being able to put a deposit on any other property.

There is incredible upside for Getty without much risk. Piss off photographers, but who cares. As long as they can keep their image buyers happy, who cares about photographers? After all, whining photographers don't drive the business, revenue does.

Getty didn't get to be #1 by being stupid. I would even argue that they removed inefficiencies in the market that created a larger market for stock imagery.

But don't be seduced by this one. Close the door on Open.

Thomas E. Witte got a surprise lesson in preparedness when his cell phone started ringing much more than usual. He didn't know it, but one of his images was suddenly, without warning, in demand. It was the photographer's dream -- to shoot a picture that could be sold over and over again, maximizing profits and making him thankful that he kept his copyright.

But in the fast-moving world of publishing, you need to deliver the image quickly to get the sale, and although Witte was getting the calls, he was on the road, away from his desk and disconnected from his archive. He had no way to deliver the product.

After Witte's images of Danny Graves and his performance-enhancing contact lenses appeared in The Sporting News, numerous publications wanted to get their hands on his images. He was sitting on exclusive images, and he could demand a premium price.

"Twelve people called where I couldn't help them because I was nowhere near my computer," Witte said, "Five of them in one day."

Of those twelve, seven were on a tight deadline, and couldn't wait, so they ran the story without the photo. Two of them were able to hold the story until another publication date entirely, which resulted in Witte giving them a normal (non-premium) rate for their inconvenience. Three of them weren't facing such a tight deadline, and Witte was able to get back to his office in time to send the images.

"I figure I lost $2,256," Witte said, "Give or take $300." His losses would have paid for 100GB of storage on PhotoShelter for four years.

Today, Witte's images of Danny Graves and his contact lenses are available for licensing on PhotoShelter, here:

http://www.photoshelter.com/gallery-show?G_ID=G0000uzRAYFhX8Pw

He's ready for those calls now.