PhotoShelter Shutdown: Tangential Interest

I stumbled across this link in one of the fora I regularly visit. Images of the WTC Disaster 9/11 taken on that day by Allen Murabayashi (erstwhile leader of the PhotoShelter Collection). The one I have linked to here is one of the finest images I've seen, except that it's not straight vertically. Something which can obviously be forgiven in such unprecedented conditions. It is the entrance to a slide show of more images taken on that day.

There are no comments or captions, which is appropriate here. For this immediately recognizable iconic disaster, none are needed.

I also found it interesting that there is no metadata in this image: something I find curious from a major player in the stock photography business. Needless to say, I added the basic stuff in the copy I made.

PSC Shutting Down - Archive Regaining Focus

It's the end of a very short era in the stock photography annals.

The PhotoShelter Collection announced yesterday, that the doors are closing. It was an effort that failed. But, at least they tried. I, along with many others, think perhaps a year was just too short a time, and perhaps the plan should have had at least a 2-year window. These are tough times, and so everything takes longer.


BUT, they are saying that they will go back to their roots, which is the PhotoShelter Archive. I applaud this. I've been a paying member of the Archive since January or February and find it valuable and slick. I'll like it even better when they improve the stats and search engine. My photography website links to my Archive galleries.

Here's their comment on the Archive in their Collection closing announcement:

As an ongoing indication of our commitment to you and the Personal Archive, we are currently developing a new feature release to address some of your most frequently requested items. We'll also be hard at work developing new innovations to help advance both the art and business of photography. We will be in touch soon regarding these exciting announcements.

And here's the link to the main Archive page.

Small Announcement

Since this blog may loosely be construed as a chronicle of my progress in the digital visual world, I probably should announce that I've sold my first stock image. Any stock togs reading this will already know that it takes a lot of work to even get to this point, never mind progressing to where your income from stock is significant.

And it has taken much work, much study, much shooting, much thinking.

The sale occurred on the 4th of September and was an Alamy sale for a book, full page, print run of 25K, educational use. So, I'm not suddenly rich: image sold for $205. My take is $133 and some change. At the time of the sale, my portfolio on Alamy only consisted of about 106 images. Very, very small.

I only do Rights Managed (RM). And IMHO if you are starting out in the stock business you should aim to have a large portion of your portfolio RM as well. A good article to start with on this exceedingly important issue is from the ASMP Library Rights Managed Stock vs Royalty Free Stock.

Wild Image Search and Hurricane Gustav

It's 5 a.m. in New Orleans now and my server, where this blog is located, is in Metairie, LA. So, don't be surprised if you weren't able to get here in the first two days of September! (Actually I just ran in here to post this after listening to CNN's Sanjay Gupta report live from Metairie.)

Bob Croxford in the PhotoShelter forum posted this link a couple of days ago and I must have wasted and hour and half with it. So, of course, I want all other togs to do the same!

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour/

It's a wonderful piece of efficient coding--something not widely seen now in these days of cheap memory. It does color searches on images. I have a question though about the image pool they are using (It's from Alamy.). I wonder how they selected their 3 mil of images from the over 10 mil on Alamy. I wonder too, do they ever refresh it?

Anyway, if you are an Alamy contributor it's worth a look, and if you are an AD or graphic designer, you might find it quite helpful in some circumstances. And, for fun, trying selecting MORE than 10 colors.