Photography can be social. It can help us remember events in our life that we shared with others. But photography can also be informative, and in the case of photojournalism, often the goal is to be transformative -- i.e. to bring awareness to a social issue that might be flying under the radar.

Kosuke Okahara is a 2006 Eddie Adams Workshop alumnus based in Tokyo who recently covered the trend of "cutting" amongst teenage girls and young women in the society for Time magazine. Japan has a pretty spotty record dealing with their burgeoning social issues that is plaguing a hyper-polite, once dominant economic power that has floundered for many years. Okahara's work is eye-opening and distrubing, and points to the need for better social structures and mental health capabilities within society.

It feels really good to be back working full-time on the PhotoShelter Personal Archive again. It is, and always has been, our core product - it is healthy and strong and there's nothing else like it.

I am actually legitimately excited right now about all the upgrades we are about to inject into the Personal Archive. (That's right! Legitimately excited!) Our engineers are busy putting the finishing touches on things as I type this, and you'll get to see everything for yourself this month, in a few weeks, before the start of PhotoPlus Expo (which starts October 23 - we've got a large booth space -- #1808, so visit us.)

Here are my personal favorite updates:

1) Customization Templates. If you love the power of PhotoShelter's Seamless Customization system, but don't love all that HTML and CSS that comes with it, you're going to love what's coming. The process couldn't be easier and the templates, or "Themes", are nice and clean. The engineers showed it to me in action today, and I can't wait for us to roll this baby out for everyone.

2) Upgrades to the Virtual Agency feature. The Virtual Agency enables a series of independent photographers to "link" their archives together so that they can form a "virtual agency" of their own. The VA is getting an overhaul, will contain a host of new features, and one big huge surprise that I can't mention just yet -- but I am DYING to tell. (This is torture.) Let's just say that I expect people to really love the VA and there won't be any excuse not to use it. :)

3) New PhotoShelter Uploader. What's special about this version is that it allows threading. Translation: No more waiting for through that pesky "Processing Image..." period. Images will just immediately send one after the other without delay - which means even-faster uploads are coming. (Less time uploading means you'll have more time for beer.)

4) Member Forum. You'll finally be able to chat with other PhotoShelter Users right through the member forum. The forum will be broken down into a few different sections, and is similar to the message board we had within the PSC. If you're a fan of forums, but you've only got a free PhotoShelter account, you will be able to read the messages, but you won't be able to post. It will be a place for people to talk about all topics related to the business and art of professional photography.

5) Navigation Improvements. Getting around the site will be quicker, more intuitive, and very simple. Can I get a big "Yay!" for simplicity? Oh yeah.

6) PA Gallery Widget. We created a similar feature within the PSC, and it went over so well that we thought we should make the same thing possible within the PA. This will allow you to take a gallery of images, and create a widget that can be embedded in a website, blog, or even Facebook. You can go totally nuts and create one for every one of your public galleries if you want. Clicking on the widget will take you to the gallery itself within your PhotoShelter Archive. Super cool stuff alert!

We will be showing off these updates, and more, in our booth at PhotoPlus Expo, in New York City. If you do, I'll be happy to show you what I look like when I am "Legitimately Excited.

Have you ever attended a party where there are a handful of photographers mixed in with "normal" (as in non-photo) people, only to see the photographers group into a cluster, talking endlessly about topics only they could understand, and ignoring all the other non-photographers in the process? I see this a lot, and what's interesting to me is how they'll keep on chatting about the same things, over and over, until the beer runs out.

They're usually talking about "the business." Workflow, marketing, philosophy, the state of the industry - all popular topics. The problem with these meetings is that nobody ever writes all that good stuff down. (Which is probably a good thing. It would look weird.)

I thought I would poke my head into the PhotoShelter blog every once in a while, just to see if I could replicate that "party cluster," online and without the beer. This post is the first in a series of interviews and feature stories where I ask other photographers to talk about their workflow, sales and marketing strategies, philosophy and outlook about the industry, and what works and doesn't work from a business perspective.

Jason O. Watson is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based photographer who specializes in sports, action, assignment and travel photography.  His images have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, The Perth (Australia) Sunday Times, The (Portland) Oregonian, Boston Herald, Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Charlottesville Daily Progress, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jason is successful with his business, so I thought he might be willing to share some of his secrets with the rest of us.  Lucky for us, he did.

First, a disclosure. Bill lives next door to me, as he has for the past 6 years. We are both photographers (although one of us is more accomplished, and I'm not talking about me). We've borrowed equipment from one another before. And we both fulfilled our civic duty by serving on our condo board.

Ok, now the relevant stuff.

I suppose at some point, every photographer goes through a nude phase. Most of the time, the nudes look pretty average. You know, get the girl naked against a black background and some moody lighting and pretend you actually have a vision. But in the end, it's just another average nude photo that no one really wants to look at because it's neither provocative nor interesting.

But when I received a postcard from Bill about his show, Figurations, I thought, "Boy, these are both provocative and interesting."

You know how sometimes you'll shoot a portrait and the person's arm will be hidden behind their back, and someone says, "It looks like they only have one arm!" And you think, "Geez, I'm an idiot. I'm not paying attention and this stuff just happens unintentionally."

Bill does it intentionally.


Photo by Bill Durgin

Photojournalist-extraordinaire, James Nachtwey, was awarded the TED prize last year, and has been working on a project ever since in secret.




""I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about.
I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof
of the power of news photography in the digital age."

All shall be revealed on 10/3....but what could it be?

Guesses:

• The plight of they professional photography industry
• The Nikon D3x
• Sarah Palin's IQ is actually 180

I kid. I'm a kidder. But really, what is it?

Over on the EditorialPhoto forums, there is a huge discussion about the Jill Greenberg controversy that everyone is talking about.

Jono Rotman's image of a black female smoking a crack pipe was referenced, so I dug in a little deeper, and found an interesting interview on Hasselblad's Victor magazine. Jono explains:

"ROTMAN: I use cliches an a recognizably seductive imagistic language to render divergent forms within the body of my work. In certain instances, I seek to reflect a trviality deeply ingrained in the culture I find myself housed within, but in raising that mirror I don't seek to further trivialize issues.

VICTOR: Do we need to be provoked into awareness?

ROTMAN: I think so, but it's not as particularly true of the current period as we may think. It's an ongoing dialectic equation - at this point perhaps we need more balance than provocation..."

In playing up certain stereotypes through photography, are we illuminating relevant issues? Should Jill Greenberg be commended or skewered? Maybe I should just have a beer since it's Friday.

We have typically used the blog to inspire and congratulate. Today is atypical.

When we started to envision The PhotoShelter Collection in early 2007, we went out and conducted research to understand the needs of photo buyers. We consistently heard from a myriad of sources that they were disappointed with stock photography because it lacked diversity and realness. We talked to a number of photographers that wanted to get into the stock photography game, but didn't know where to start. They were good photographers, but not full-time stock photographers, and therefore they were largely ineligible to play with the traditional agencies.

We believed that we could create a more democratic system - a marketplace for stock photography where virtually any one could participate. And a few months later, The PhotoShelter Collection was born. Upload your images, keyword & price, attach the appropriate releases, and voila! You were now a stock photographer.

Despite the naysayers, the photography was actually quite good. A number of stock executives and consultants corroborated this fact, and we felt good about being able to provide imagery that had largely been unseen and unlicensed before. The pricing was fair, and photographers received the majority of the sale.

We knew that sales would be challenging, but we honestly underestimated the complexity of sales. Licensing photography isn't like selling a widget on eBay. It's intellectual property fraught with clearance issues. Here are a few key learnings:

1.    Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player
There was a single moment for a company to capitalize in stock photography, and Getty took it. The use of stock imagery isn't growing fast enough to create a displacement opportunity, and Getty is far too aggressive (and smart) to allow secondary players to displace them in any fashion.

2.    Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion
We believed that using the crowd to fulfill research requests would give us an enormous advantage over the competition, but the nature of the industry is such that many research requests are due within a day, making it nearly impossible for non-fulltime stock photographers to react. Research requests are therefore relegated to what they've always been - namely the locating of existing images within an extant library that are ready for immediate licensing.

3.    Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire
The largest consumers of stock photography are often locked into subscription deals, which makes it very difficult for them to consider alternate sources. Subscription deals are very bad for photographers, but great for business.

4.    A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work
Licensing a photo is not a simple proposition. It is not like selling a widget. There are huge intellectual property issues, technical issues, and meta data issues that are difficult for even full-time pros to grasp. Companies that represent collections of stock photography have to build entire divisions of staff to deal with rights clearances and lawsuit that arise from improper clearance.

Despite these odds, we did make incredible in-roads to agencies and publications alike. But when we viewed our growth over the past few months, we became all too aware that our trajectory wasn't putting us on the right path. And despite repeated attempts to alter our trajectory, we were unable to substantially change it. Even though we are in the midst of our best month ever of sales, we believe that the growth trend isn't step enough to sustain the stock photography business in the long term.

So we are exiting the stock photography marketplace, and getting back to our roots with the Personal Archive, which still gives individual photographers the tools to market and license their images themselves. That business is doing quite nicely, and we look forward to continuing to support photographers and photography.

The pundits will surely say "I told you so." And maybe we will end up being just a tiny footnote in the history of photography, but on the other hand, we were also the largest aggregation of photographers participating in stock photography ever (And no, I do not count those places where a photo sell for $1. I remain defiantly stubborn on the microstock front as ever). We never assumed that this would be easy. Quite to the contrary. And yet, it was a goal worth fighting for. Tonight, I'm going to bed knowing that we tried something that had never been tried - a way to provide photographers with something they hadn't had in a long time: a fair deal and respect.