Depositphotos Raises Prices and Cuts Photographers Commissions

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In another step towards racing to the bottom, photographers will be paying the price for it and not consumers. In a saturated world where photos can already had for free, Depositphotos think that you deserve a rate cut. 

old royalties

read'em & weep new royalties

So where is the logic? Apparently Depositphotos has had enough of going through your photos and want to pay you what you deserve, according to the reasoning, it is to bring it more in line with market demands. This could mean that they are raising the rate as the demand has fallen off a cliff so they have to sell less but charge more, while at the same time trying to accommodate more and more photographers who wish to sell at their marketplace. 

This cannot be good news for the photographer. The 10 percent royalty cut may not prevent you from earning your beer money but it does towards drinking lesser pints. 

Why you should rethink your plans about Quitting your Day Job


Everyone at some stage of their miserable lives would want to embark on a life changing career and some may even want to dabble in photography. 

There is no sin in this but you need to understand that each step you take forward is like traversing a minefield. 

Having had the experience of working within a advertising agency, I know how they manage client expectations and this can be difficult. First, every dream the client has about an advert has to be skillfully rationalized in terms of budget. If a client refuses to opt for a staged photo shoot to meet the imaging expectations, then they resort to using royalty free photos. 

Royalty free photos can be purchase for either print or web campaigns, and this is where they start to fire up their photoshop skills to composite photos to create the illusion of an actual piece of canvas. This is a no brainer. 

Royalty free microstock photos pander to such needs and are ideal when very little is involved in terms of cost. Instead, the Advertising agency will then charge their Digital Imaging Enhancement fees on top of the purchase photos, making the bulk of the money in place of what they have purchased from you...the photographer. 

There is always some work to be done, for photographers to shoot for agencies, but the value proposition is always very poor. 

Special assignments do not come in a bear market but a bull market, where lots of special projects to shoot models and products can be had in a booming consumer market. 

The reverse is true when in a bear market where consumer sentiment is poor, budgets will have to be cut and this is where they turn to buying stock photos. 

Stock imaging works best in countries where a copyright is valued. This unfortunately does not happen in Asia or the USA, where countless large corporations have ripped photographers off. 

The last market for microstock lies in websites, but not personal blogs. Corporate or business websites have a need to fill those blank spaces in their content and this is where an image will come in handy. But look at the above rates for web use and you will know that you're not going to get rich from it anytime soon. An image that is between large and medium cost lower than 3 bucks. A buck might buy you a beer at some places while anything less than 3 might qualify you for a Starbucks latte in some parts of the world. 

In a day or week, you have to work out your expenses on how much you want to devote to this career and how much you can earn in the process. 

Lastly, demand for photos always come from developed countries as oppose to semi or least developed ones. This is due to copyright laws and of course demand for unique content as a corporate differentiator. 

In Malaysia, a third world country, several banks were caught off guard using the SAME stock image to run their ads. That's how poor budgets are and even the big guns don't bother licensing managed photos. 

So proceed with caution, don't raise your expectations that you will be a earning a decent income when shooting royalty free stock photos. If you have a comfy financial basket to rely on, and want to take up photography as a past time, then go ahead, live your dreams. However if you think it is going to pay for your overheads, expenses while affording a comfortable life, well you had it coming. 










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Shooting Panoramas, how Technology Democratised the Business

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During the dark age of film photography, getting a panoramic picture meant getting a dedicated camera that could pan the lens at a 180 degree angle or more. In the 90s, there was the Widelux which did this splendidly and after that, it was the Hasselblad Xpan which I grew to love but could never afford. These cameras would use two 35mm frames to capture a scene, allowing for a wide angle picture which was very rare to find. For one, there was no way you could hand hold this steady enough and you needed a tripod to help you do the job. Picking a scene and how you exposed it was a matter of science, as the aperture was normally fixed (except in the case of the Xpan). 



After that, I never bothered to look into this genre of photography ever again until the late 2000s when I was asked by Sony to manage a project where one of the photographers, Paul Daly, was a professional panoramic photographer. Nomadic planet were asked to produce a series of pictures for Sony Asia Pacific using Sony DSLRs. 

To begin with, shooting a pano might seem easy but he had to do a lot of work to do with those DSLRs. First you needed a tripod, and because it was in portrait orientation you had to make several overlapping shots to ensure the computer program you used to stitch the picture was done correctly, and yes, you actually had to buy panoramic stitching software in order for this to work. 




Next was the lens, a 50mm for full frame would be just nice but Paul said he preferred 70mm or more depending on the subject he shot. Paul took beautiful panos, and each would take up to 20 mins to set up and shoot. That is how much work that went into the pano during the early days of the DSLR. 

I remember during my days with Sony Asia Pacific, they asked my opinion what would be the next big feature. I told them it would things like Panoramic photography as well as HDR. They shrugged, and I never brought it up again. This was in 2008/2009. Deep down inside I knew the technology would be able to make the whole process so much easier and it was in 2010 that everything became a reality. 

Pano Photography as an afterthought

In the days before this pano feature was introduced in DSLRs, panoramic photographers were professionals with a skill that only connoisseurs appreciated. Today, no one would give two hoots about them. If you wanted to try your hand at it using a film camera, you can't go wrong with a Horizon. 




Technology has made them redundant, and the business has been democratised. Anyone with a smartphone today has the ability to shoot a pano image without dropping any sweat. All it takes is a steady pose, holding your smartphone the right way and deciding on how the subject should flow in your picture. How technology had changed the landscape was exciting, and demeaning to professionals who had spent a good part of their life developing a skill for it. You can virtually capture a pano in less than 1 min...using a compact camera or your iPhone. If you compared that with the Panos of old, where you had to literally spin a DSLR on a specially built tripod, well, that's 23 minutes shorter and probably saved you a whole lot of time on a PC trying to stitch them together too. 

And if you had a business card that says you're a panoramic photographer, all you will earn is a shrug from the very people you wish to impress. 

Composing the Pano is not Rocket Science

One of the challenges of shooting panos the old way was to get the Horizon on a level. If you were shooting from a hill or a slope, you had to make sure you had a spirit level on your tripod to find out if you are on level ground. So if you are not, you had to make the collapse the tripod legs to have the correct fit. 

This was made redundant with the 3 axis camera stabilisation, which detected minute movements and adjusted it during capture. 


Rule of Thirds, redux. The Entrance occupies two thirds of the frame while the hotel building takes a third of the frame

So these days, the camera detects your panning movement as long as you hold it still, you can capture a panoramic image without the use off a tripod. All you have to do is hold your Android or iPhone steady, pointed at the direction you want it to flow and move along the horizon line. That's it!

And as long as you have compose the image using the rule of thirds, then you're ok. The rule of thirds here means composing your subjects using a grid of thirds, and it is not the conventional rule of thirds where the subject in focus should be within the middle four points.

Dividing your picture by thirds and then putting your main and secondary subjects within these one third frames helps to give it breath and space. If not, it would be a mess. 

How Technology is making even Easier

I remember shooting my first mobile panoramic picture using an iPhone 3GS. The quality of the image wasn't great but it got the job done. Today, with the higher spec iPhones and Android devices, where the whole processing and stitching of the image is done within the device, there is no longer a need to shoot with a DSLR. 

Even DSLR's these days support a panoramic panning function that you can opt to use without a tripod. That said, no idiot who knows how to use a camera could ever get this wrong. 





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Lomo's 20mm New Russar+ Lens to Launch in August

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Full frame wide angle 20mm is probably one of the great lenses one can get their hands on but they will never be cheap...even though they come from Lomo. It cost US$650 a pop and it only fits the Leica mounts and the L39 screw mounts.

You can of course use this fully manual lens on digital cameras with the option of a a lens adaptor but APS C or M43 type sensors will have to take into account the crop factors of a full frame lens and hopefully realize that they are not buying into a wide angle.

For smaller sensors, you are probably getting between 35mm and 40mm in focal length, which isn't a bad thing considering the vignetting you see on full frame results.


The smaller crop factor reduces the frame and the less than desirable vignettes will be gone...so you have been warned.


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