Friday, November 26, 2010
Things I give thanks for
On this Thanksgiving, among the things I'm grateful for are Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party mad-hatters for injecting a little humour into turkey day. In their madrassa-like study courses and his broadcasts, they accuse the sainted Plymouth Rock Pilgrims of the crime of "socialism" or "collectivist communism" because the Massachusetts settlers pooled their scarce resources to survive that first starving winter in America. Aha!
Canberra on alert for Wikileaks
AUSTRALIAN officials are bracing for a massive leak of classified US State Department cables.These cables could include embarrassing disclosures about Canberra's secret diplomacy on controversial issues, such as the war in Iraq, The Australian reports.The Gillard government was one of several foreign governments put on notice about the leaks, expected to be released within days by whistleblower group WikiLeaks.So seriously is the issue being taken that several sources told The Australian it was raised during a phone call yesterday morning between Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss the crisis on the Korean peninsula
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Do you wanna buy this 1977 Peugeot 504? Pls, contact Ahmadinejad.
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to auction his 1977 Peugeot 504 for charity | Mail Online
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to auction his 1977 Peugeot 504 for charity
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to auction off his 1977 Peugeot 504, a key plank of his populist image, to raise money for charity, state television reported on Monday.
The money earned from the sale at the international auction will be given to the Mehr housing project, a network of cooperatives that provides affordable housing for low-income families, the television station's website said.
'In order to help the Mehr housing project, as an act of charity yesterday Mr Ahmadinejad put his car up for sale,' the website quoted Welfare and Social Security Minister Sadeq Mahsouli as saying.
Peugeot 504
Presidential motor: A Peugeot 504 similar to the one Ahmadinejad is auctioning for an Iranian housing charity
'This car is to be sold in an international auction,' the minister added.
Ahmadinejad has always cultivated an image as a 'people's president' and friend of the poor.
After his election to his first term as president in 2005, he was required by law to make an asset declaration and he listed a then 40-year-old 175-square-metre house in a lower-middle class part of east Tehran, the contents of two cheque accounts and the ageing white Peugeot.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
People's president: Ahmadinejad has always cultivated an image as a friend of the poor. He has promised to put 'housing, employment and economic reform' at the top of his agenda after house prices soared during his first term of office
Following his controversial re-election last year, he vowed to put 'housing, employment and economic reform' at the top of his agenda after house prices soared during his first term of office.
Under the Mehr project, housing cooperatives are given free state land and low-interest loans with which to build cheap residential units for first-time buyers.
In February, Housing Minister Ali Nikzad said that around one million Iranians were eligible for the project.
He said deals had been signed for 525,000 units with another 444,000 given a preliminary green light.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path
D. Sharon Pruitt, taking photos of her daughter Hayley, is one of a growing number of amateur photographers who earn small fees for their work.
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.
Nicole Fruge for The New York Times
Matt Eich, a freelance photojournalist, edits photos in his Norfolk, Virginia home-office.
D. Sharon Pruitt
"Adventures in Childhood" is under a royalty free license with Getty Images.
But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.
“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.
Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”
Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.
Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.
Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.
“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.
That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”
They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.
Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.
“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.
And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.
“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”
At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.
Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.
That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.
“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”
In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said.
That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.
With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.
There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.
Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”
But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.
“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is.”
“Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”
But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care.
“I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
