Since my last post was all about stock I just had to tell you about this website: www.awkwardstockphotos.com the name says it all but really, some of these pictures, what were they thinking…

Photo by BlueLotus
Today’s post is all about stock. First off a disclaimer: I’m not an expert on stock by a long shot. My focus is on commissioned work and although I have a few images in stock I’m no expert. For a while I had a bunch of images with a really big company (whose name starts with “G” and ends in “etty”) and made a few good sales early on, however their umm business model changed and the value of sales plummeted. When I saw my share of a sale amounting to $6.30 (I kid you not) I pulled my images. Clearly I’m no stock photography success story but here’s a guy who is, my good buddy and talented photographer Stephen Kennedy. Stephen’s business is built on stock (although he does a bunch of commissioned work too) and what makes Stephen a bit different (and I don’t mean his sense of humour) is that he runs his own stock site. If you look down at the bottom of his site you’ll see “Powered by Photodeck” which brings me neatly to the subject of this post, which is how to sell stock yourself and why you should use Photodeck

Photodeck is the brainchild of photographer Jef Maion.

I got Jef to answer a few questions about Photodeck for us:

Jef, tell me a bit about your background:

I’ve been shooting landscape and travel stuff since I was 13, and have been selling stock through my own site. But my formal training and my career has been in the high-tech industry, in engineering and business development, mostly with a well-known international corporation.

So what is PhotoDeck exactly?

PhotoDeck is a service for photographers who want to have their own online archive and e-commerce on their website. A photographer gets his own website with all the features of a stock agency. The website can be integrated with an existing site, and there is plenty to customize: look&feel, branding, pricing, web address, even Search Engine Optimization has its own settings. A buyer can purchase a license for an image, pay for it, and download it without the photographer’s intervention.

Why did you decide to develop PhotoDeck?

A few years ago, I set up my own stock site as a side experiment (www.maion.com). It was a lot of work but I did well, and got requests from photographers asking how they could get a similar website. New technology has traditionally helped remove intermediaries – think e.g. publishing – and I believe we’re starting to see that in stock photography too.

Aren’t there other people in the market offering the same product?

There is a handful of similar offerings already, PhotoShelter being the best known, but there is room for improvement. The approach we have taken is to start from a blank page: we’ve been working with a network of photographers and we’ve focused on understanding their needs and getting feedback, also taking in the learnings from my own site, rather than looking at the competition. We got quite a few members telling us they found in PhotoDeck what alternatives could not offer. Naturally, I’m also sure that the established players offer things we don’t, at least yet. Ultimately, I believe this is more about growing a nascent market rather than fighting for an existing user base.

Strengths?

We’re very proud of our Style and Layout editor: photographers don’t need to stick with preset themes anymore, they can simply design their own in a few clicks – no coding experience required. It takes about 15 min for an experienced user to match closely the design of most websites.

The pricing module is quite powerful too: people have a great level of control over e.g. their Rights-Managed prices.

Weaknesses?

We’re still very young, so we’re missing a few features. For example, we don’t support prints sales just yet. Our roadmap for new features and improvement is based on members’ feedback (they can vote to help us prioritize), so we know exactly what is most important to them and focus on it first. (We’ll get initial print sales support during the summer.)

What does it take to build a successful stock site?

Putting images on a website and hoping for the best is likely not enough. You need good Search-Engine Optimization for people to find your images (PhotoDeck does the heavy lifting for you, but you still need to get as many links as possible pointing to your website). A great strategy is to develop relationships with buyers – it’s of course easier if you already shoot on assignment or if you grow a specialized archive. Relationships with clients bring repeat business, and that is something you can’t have when working through an agency. This is where stock and assignment businesses meet.
Building a personal online archive is certainly more work than uploading images to a stock agency, but the rewards are higher too.

What is your business model?

It’s very simple: we’ll charge a low monthly fee for the website ($9.99 or $24.99, depending on features and disk space), and that’s it. We don’t take any cut on sales that originate on a photographers’ website.

What’s next?

So far we have focused very much on stock photographers, but we also want to explore print sales, and we’ll make PhotoDeck also a great tool for photographers interacting with clients on commissioned shoots.

http://www.photodeck.com

This month we are going to hear from long time Hasselblad (and prior to that Imacon) shooter Monty Rakusen on his experiences with the H3D50 (Monty has since sent it off for upgrade to H4D50). The images dotted through this post are from a recent trip Monty made through Andalucia in Spain. Oh and I just know Monty’s going to hate the headline but I have a history of comedy headlines to maintain…

Read on to hear from Monty.

Life with the 50

I am a Corporate Photographer shooting unusual work within Industry. I work for major International clients and I shoot library imagery which is syndicated through Cultura to over 80 LIbraries Worldwide. Originally i was using a flextight scanner and then Imacon backs, I have been shooting with the H3D 39 for three years and recently traded up to the H3D 50. You can see my most recent work here: http://www.rakusen.co.uk/new-photography-gallery/

Earlier this year, I was at a large meeting of photographers who work for Cultura and we were discussing final library file sizes. At the time they were 52mb. I suggested we should be allowed to supply higher sizes and someone jokingly piped up that as I had a Hasselblad 50 mega pixel, maybe 143mb! We settled on 65mb!

Someone in a very friendly way said that only I , in the middle of the worst recession in living history, would buy a Hasselblad H3D50!

I have to admit that some small worries crept into my mind! What am I doing? Many of these guys shoot much smaller formats with cheaper kit, some of them are much more successful than I! And it’s not like we’ve not been affected by the recession either, our commission sales have dropped and there simply isn’t as much of my type of work out there at the moment at a decent rate. Nevertheless, we still make a good living and with the kind of work I am doing, I’m enjoying it more and more.

So, was trading up to the 50 Hasselblad camera a good investment?

There is absolutely no doubt that it was.

Could I have continued with the 39 mk1?

Yes probably, but it was quite worn out, having shot over 100,000 frames and now I have a spare camera.

Is the 50 better than the 39?

Yes it is, but it is subtle and clients do notice. I’m not sure what they notice, but they love the quality. For me that’s what it is about, quality. There is no doubt that the Hasselblad 50 is the ultimate in quality!
The chip is different. You don’t get red in the mid-tones. The tonal range is better and smother, much more like seeing. You do still get moire, but Phocus is quite good at dealing with that. It seems to shoot a more ‘complete’ picture, in terms of over exposure and you can successfully recover much more over-exposure, should it be necessary. I’m quite happy at 200 asa and sometimes I’ll work at 400 asa. There is a tremendous amount more you can do to the picture later without causing any damage. It may seem insignificant, but the seals on the back of the camera are much better and nowadays I will regularly go through a shoot with no dust at all.

Is the 50 any easier to use?

No it is not.

Recently a very well respected photographer was being kindly complimentary about my work.

” Oh I just love the gentle colours and tones and the softness is amazing, how did you get that?”.
“Well I think it must be the camera, the Hasselblad H3D, and the profile I use”.
“Ahh yes we have one of those but its just too difficult to use, we find the focus very hard to get right”.
There is no doubt, you do have to work at the focus, but that’s what makes the pictures good!

As I write it is being converted to the H4D so I’m looking forward to the new [true] focus.

What has it done for my work?

I shoot more into the card but still 90% tethered. I shoot more hand held and freer and still the focus is quite successful. I’m sure 35mm is just the same, I don’t know, but as most people shoot on 35mm at f8 and I shoot everything on my Hasselblad Medium Format at f4 or f2.8, it is not surprising that some things are out of focus! The visual appeal of medium format is in my opinion much nicer than 35mm format. The work looks better, and clients notice. It also gives me more confidence and I’m able to maintain my style and improve my work on what has become a very stable platform.

Is the huge file size a problem?

Yes and no.
Firstly, I was concerned, why was I using a 50mp camera, shooting 286.9mb 16 bit files? Then I was post producing these and bringing them down to 143mb 8bit, then resizing them down again to 60mb AND then saving them out as 11 quality 300dpi jpgs which were only about 7mb for upload to the library!
This seemed absolutely bonkers, until I was stuck in the volcanic ash cloud on a shoot in Spain. Because I was away from my office and had deadlines, I tried to post produce some of my work on my 3 year old Mac Book Pro. It was a nasty experience, so I processed out my files at approximately 120mb in 16bit so they went down to 60mb in 8 bit. That worked fine until I had the retouching to do. When you retouch on a massive sized image and you shrink it down to less than half its size, your retouching looks great because it was originally done at a larger scale! When you do it one to one… it is not so good. What a revelation…bigger files make better post-production! I see this as a tremendous advantage.

Secondly, I have had to buy a new MacBook Pro i7….well it was due, the old one was over 3 years old and was literally creaking! Phocus flies so fast on this machine, and is a joy to use. One worrying fact, is that the MBP has only got an 800FW port. I’ve been through that on my old machine. 800 is not really designed for the kind of work I do. All that plugging and unplugging jolting and moving is a recipe for disaster. There’s no alternative incase the port goes down. I’ve made a plastic clip to hold the plug into the socket nice and straight, and this seems to work well. I’ve bought an 800 Right angle to 800 female socket, I’ve not used it yet but it shows promise http://www.usbfirewire.com/firewire8001394b.html . There is a way.

It works, Phocus that is, on my big Mac Pro in my digital darkroom, with very few but occasional problems. Photoshop CS3 (not upgraded yet) works fine with the big files, if not a little slow opening them up, and occasionally complex history brushes take a little while to catch up. I only work on one file at a time in 16bit. It is bearable and I will be changing machine in the future.

Is the camera stable?

I did have problems at first, but these are all sorted out and it is very unusual to have any sort of crash, especially with the new Mac. Shooting as I do, you could expect to have one event every day (which is resolved by removing the battery/shutting down) but it’s less than that now.

What about ‘old standard’ profile?

For those that do not know, this was a shooting profile that you could apply way back in the days of Imacon Digital Backs and Flexcolour. I have used it as preference because of its delicate tonal range and slightly subdued colour, however, it would seem now that it is incompatible with Phocus 2.5. It was causing lots of problems. Consequently I have built my own version which looks and works much better. The 50mp files are absolutely bomb-proof, fabulous dynamic range, so my version of ‘Old Standard’, lifts the images just over half a stop and so far this hasn’t caused any problems. I much prefer my custom-made profile. It is a great facility to have, a bit like choosing your own film type. However, the Standard setting is fine in the studio and of course its a good base point to work from.

Would I have been better off with the 40?

Perhaps, its a very nice camera with a slightly problematically smaller chip and better high asa. Perhaps, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.

What have I been doing with the 50?

Recently I have been shooting in Andalucia about farming, solar power and some Hispanic lifestyle and some of those images are featured in this blog. I’ve also been working on a diverse range of projects such as Ship Building in Korea Steel Works, Nuclear Power Stations, Container ship’s engine rooms, Dunlop Aircraft Tyres, people’s desks and beekeeping! We have lots more coming up.

So am I happy with life with the 50?

Oh yes very much! The ‘feel’ of the images is so special and the camera is reliably a joy to use!

Thanks for reading and happy shooting!

In the true tradition of blogging I’m going to err borrow a post from Hot Wire Digital, (hi John!).

First off a quick plug for Hot Wire and specially John Williams who I had the pleasure of meeting in Orlando last year. John runs a top notch Hasselblad dealer near Atlanta/Georgia but I hear he travels around a bit too, highly recommended. The following is a story on a bit of the niche area of photography that is multi-shot. I’ve been using multi-shot backs for 10 years now and am a huge fan, if you’d like to know more about the technology or practical use of it feel free to leave a comment below or indeed get in touch with John at Hotwire.

Hasselblad H3DII-50  Multi-shot

Terry Townsend is a southeast-Florida commercial photographer with a professional career spanning three decades for numerous accounts in Miami such as Burger King, TD Bank, Pfizer, Seminole Hard-Rock Hotel and Casino as well as others. As a member of ASMP (American Society of  Media Photographers) he is active in the photographic community and bought his first Hasselblad when he was 16.

Terry attended a Boca Raton  workshop provided by Hotwire-Digital in the spring of 2010 and learned about the multi-shot technology used in the Hasselblad digital backs and integrated DSLR camera systems.

This proved to be ideal for an upcoming job with a  global brand in the transportation industry for their fleet of commercial  trucks. Sales and marketing of this Fortune 500 company needed images that  could meet a variety of uses from web to PDF to point-of-purchase. The most important aspect was maximum detail for flexible use over the next 5-7 years.

“Initially, I considered the highest resolution digital back, figuring the 60 mega-pixels would certainly meet the need for detail and resolution,” Terry explained, “and I knew we needed to have the dynamic range from the bright white on the side of the vehicle to the dark equipment on lift gates and wheels without noise in the shadows.” Terry’s research revealed a troubling concern; “…current issues regarding image clarity and detail in dark areas were unacceptable to the client if we went this route [with a competitive 60MP product.]”

After discussing the technology behind multi-shot with John Williams of Hotwire-Digital, Terry said, “we decided to use the H3DII-50 MS (50 mega-pixel) multi-shot camera system for this shoot for the low noise and high-detail.”

Multi-shot technology takes four successive photographs, moving the sensor in 1-pixel increments in a square formation, then joins the four images into a single shot. The advantage of multi-shot versus traditional single-shot is greater detail through increased contrast and avoiding color interpolation required by single shot captures to render the actual colors in the scene. [More multishot from Victor Magazine article]

“I have shot with Hasselblad throughout my career and I was concerned about the Fuji glass compared to my Carl Zeiss lenses,” Terry stated, “and, a local source cautioned me against using the Hasselblad DSLR and Phocus software for reliability.”

This project required lots of planning; a month of preparation and due to the size of the vehicles, locating and shooting in a studio with 18-foot doors (at Riverwood Studios, about 45 minutes southwest of Atlanta.) The last thing we needed was another challenge from equipment or software.

The digital tech hired for the shoot was familiar with CaptureOne PRO, but after a quick overview of the Phocus interface, felt comfortable using the software. Remote focus of the lens while in live video mode allowed for fast, precise focus and composition and dual monitor support allowed for large, 100% views of the images.

“Lighting the highly-reflective vehicles was a tough challenge, and [the digital tech] used multiple RGB anchor points on the image to help guide the lighting crew in positioning lights and flags for proper exposure across the entire scene.  Our schedule was tight and the crew needed to move quickly.”

“In the  first day of the shoot we were seeing things I haven’t seen in digital before; gradations in specular highlights, detail in the highlights and shadows, midtones – it was blowing my mind.” Terry noted, “The client was impressed and we knew we made the right decision.”

“In the weeks after the shoot, my retoucher continually commented on the quality of the files and the ease of  making adjustments to the 16-bit TIFF file without negatively affecting the image. The HC lenses were tack-sharp and the multi-shot files were incredible; the detail was extraordinary,” Terry continues, “we were tracing white antennas from the blown-out white background and the relief from each tire.”

The H3DII-50 MS can shoot in either single shot or multi-shot mode; “We used the camera inside the cab for hand-held interior shots with the 28mm wide-angle lens; it was gorgeous…when the client sees that you are  shooting with a Hasselblad – they know that brand – it elevates their perception of you as the photographer. In their mind, they are thinking ‘he is using the best.’”

Terry concluded, “Our client was more than impressed with the files and I would choose and recommend multi-shot over any single capture for my future product photography.”

Editors note:  Hotwire-Digital specializes in Hasselblad imaging solutions, workflow training, and is the premier Hasselblad partner in the southeast with operations in Atlanta and Boca Raton.

Townsend Photographics, Inc.

terry@townsendphotographics.com

(954) 491-8555

Hotwire-Digital

jwilliams@hotwire-digital.com

(678)  365-0435

http://www.hotwire-digital.com

American  Society of Media Photographers

http://www.asmp.org

via Hasselblad Multishot User Story.

Ya know if you are going to Photoshop images do it well, do it so that people can’t tell it’s been photoshopped, clean up a little wrinkle here, a blemish there… If you are a multi-national oil company that is spewing millions of barrels of oil into the sea please make sure you are really reallygood at photoshop.. Take this picture:

First glance looks pretty good right? Goose and um Maverick are going to zoom in there and mop up, uh stuff and like, save the planet. Problem is someone got in there with the clone tool and i have a suspicion that this helicopter isn’t actually airborne… Oh dear oh dear…

Read the full story over at Gizmodo.

I’m trying to turn this blog (I think), into a bit of a resource for H4D40 information. I’m keeping an eye on Google and each time I find and interesting H4D40 review I’ll post it here. All my posts should be tagged and if you look at left you’ll see the “tag cloud” (I think that’s what it’s called), click on “H4D40″ to get to all the H4D40 posts (it links to http://www.nick-t.com/blog/tag/h4d40/) If you come across any good h4D40 links please let me know and I’ll post them here. This one is a quick test by a Singapore based wedding photographer:

I’ve posted to his blog about the battery life issue but otherwise he seems pretty impressed:

Our latest tool – Hasselblad H4D-40 digital medium format | Lyrical Moments | Singapore Wedding Photography.

Another comedy headline, sorry about that. If you’ve read previous posts you’ll see how impressed I’ve been with the H4D40 especially with it’s high ISO performance, traditionally an area where the Nikons and have Canons ruled. Well the guys at Sunshine in South Africa have posted a comparison on their blog and the results are impressive, check it out:

http://www.sunshinecompany.co.za/index.php/blog/comments/high-iso-comparison-mf-vs-35mm/

Wide angle lenses are tough to design; they are expensive and it’s very hard to get good performance out of them. I’ve always been pretty disappointed with wide-angle performance on “35mm” DSLRs to the point where I just won’t use them. Enter the Hasselblad 28mm. I am a huge fan of the HCD 28mm lens. There I said it. If you haven’t used this lens you really should try it combined with the very very good automated corrections offered by Phocus. I asked the ever-so-talented photographer Keith Laban to write me an article on this lens as I know it’s a favourite, and here’s what he came up with:

The Hasselblad HCD 28mm lens…or the solution to a misspent life in narrow alleyways.

It’s afternoon on a remote blob of rock in the middle of the Aegean Sea. Most inhabitants of this Greek Island town left decades ago to start a new life in the Americas or Antipodes. It’s 100°F in the shade, the insects are biting anything that moves and the only things moving amongst these dusty narrow alleyways are mad dogs and an Englishman with a camera, here to capture the magnificent decaying vernacular architecture before it falls down or is raped by builders.

I’ve been here in the past, many times and on many islands, my V series Hasselblads going with me everywhere. I was in my element, and yet there were always so many disappointments. The alleyways in these towns were narrow by design, spanned and braced by arched buttresses to protect against earthquake damage. Time and again I’d discover stunning features in beautiful decay but without a hope in hell of being able to capture them. Time and again I’d find myself with my back against a wall and still the V series wide angle lenses and cameras just weren’t anything like wide enough for the job.

I considered using and experimented with technical cameras, but quickly realised that they weren’t for me. They got in my way, distracted me from creating images. The mere thought of constantly having to swap capture backs and viewfinders in these conditions filled me with horror. Sliding adapters were bulky and stitching simply wasn’t on my agenda. I considered using the small format DSLRs, but every time I picked one up the only thing I wanted to do was to put it down, the viewfinders, my window to the world, were inadequate by comparison. The small format 3:2 proportion has never been to my liking, particularly in portrait orientation and I’ve never been keen on shooting one format and cropping to another.

There was a time that I – and my colleagues and friends – thought I’d be buried with my V series cameras, but time moves on, even for this dinosaur. There were so many considerations, so many reasons why I eventually decided to move to the Hasselblad H series, far too many to go into here, but not least of them was the fact that in my opinion this was simply the best and most complete medium format digital capture platform and system that was available. And then along came the incredible Hasselblad HCD 4/28 lens.

Now when faced with these wonderful facades and features in confined spaces I can capture them in their entirety. Having been used to the V series it‘s mind-blowing to see just how wide this lens actually is. The horizontal angle of view (vertical when turned) is 83° compared to 67° for the 40mm V series lens and 72° for the SWC cameras. Perhaps even more remarkable is the image quality of this ultra-wide lens, the definition virtually on a par with my standard Hasselblad HC 2.8/80 lens, achieving all of this in a comparatively compact and lightweight form. Yes, as one would expect from such a wide lens, there is inevitably some distortion, but the Hasselblad DAC (Digital Auto Corrections) do a remarkable job in correcting for this and for other lenses in the series.

So, here I am again, in my favourite place, down a narrow alleyway with my back up against a wall, in my element, my options, productivity and creativity expanded, and now my only disappointment is that I didn’t have the combination of the H series and the HCD 4/28mm lens sooner.

Keith Laban is a painter, illustrator and photographer. See more of his work at www.keithlaban.co.uk

Photograph © Keith Laban

I have to thank my sister Jody for sending me this one, she’s a writer not a photographer but she totally gets it. This is a very gentle poke at the way homeware catalogues are styled, I love it.

All the comforts of home…

We’re so happy you could visit!  The room’s all made up for you, and I ripped out some pages of my favorite book and taped them to your wall in case you’re like me and enjoy reading before bed.

via Catalog Living.

I came across this fascinating article on the history of food photography:

For as long as there has been art, there have been still lifes. And for as long as there have been still lifes, there have been portraits of food. Last week I spoke on the phone with Larry Nighswander, photography director at Saveur, to learn more about the history of food photography, and he put it plainly: “Food seems to be a central part of family life and social events. … And I think it’s only natural that photographers gravitated to documenting that activity.”

Credit: Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Trust

Nowadays it seems like everyone is a food photographer. Or maybe it has always been a popular pastime, and now there are just more people armed with cameras. “Tasteful Pictures,” an exhibition currently at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, provides a historical look at food in photography.

The photos are drawn from the Getty’s permanent collection, and represent an all-star cast of photographers: Edward Weston, Man Ray, Weegee, William Eggleston and more. It may be a bit of a stretch to say that there's great significance in Edward Quigley's peas or Eggleston's freezer. For the most part, they were experimenting — and photographing pretty much everything.

But the collection of photos is still a nice celebration of food and, if anything, shows how far we digital-camera-yielding, blog-posting photographers have come.

via Tasteful Pictures: The Art Of Food Photography : NPR.