Just Be.
On April 28th more than 100 photo professionals gathered in Seattle for ASPP’s 2nd Annual All-Day Workshop. The theme of the workshop was “Branding & Marketing That Works For Photographers and Creatives.” Among the many presentations delivered, Eric Baumgartner, Chief Creative Officer at Wunderman provided one of the days most succinct and memorable insights for photographers to consider before investing time and money in promoting their work to creatives:
Just Be: Inspiring. Astonishing. Beautiful. Hilarious.
Eric Baumgartner, Chief Creative Office, Wunderman presenting at ASPP Seattle Workshop, 4/28/2012 Photo Credit: © evolveimages.com
When I reflect upon the photographer’s and images that resonate with me long after the page turns, these attributes pretty much nail it for me. Show me beauty, humor, inspiration and innovation, I’m yours.
For more reflections and other highlights from this workshop, check out Bill Cramer’s post on The Wonderful Machine Cog.
Power of photography to move, stir, & generate BIG results
Invited by a friend to attend a fundraising luncheon for Wellspring Family Services, I was on my way to the event when I encountered a “child army” clutching sign boards on the sidewalk. In the mid-day sun, I had to do a double take. For a moment I thought these were real kids. The images were rendered perfectly to scale and beautifully reproduced.
Event signage on the streets of Seattle used to promote Wellspring Family Services “Powerful Change Luncheon”, May 10, 2012
More event signage appears on Seattle sidewalks promoting Wellspring Family Services, May 10, 2012
Originally created as a guerrilla marketing campaign, Wellspring partnered with Hydrogen Advertising in Seattle and Getty Images photographers provide assignment photography services pro bono. To protect the privacy of Wellspring clients, the talent used for the shoot were Wellspring staff, board members and friends.
Patricia Gray, Community Relations Manager shared the back story of the campaign: “When we first launched the “Don’t Just Look Away” campaign, we covered an 11 block radius in Seattle’s downtown core with 300 signs. Volunteers started at 7AM and posted the signs at heavily trafficked intersections to catch early morning commuters. After the initial event, we then scheduled impromptu ‘appearances’ of the kids in neighborhoods throughout Seattle which really helped extend awareness of our message throughout the community.”
And talk about results: The first campaign generated more than $450,000 in donations. And Hydrogen netted an ADDY Award for their terrific work. This year’s event netted another $473,000. But most importantly, during the last year, the financial support generated by the campaign helped provide housing and family services for more than 4200 Wellspring clients in King County.
Smart Campaign + Powerful images + Effective Execution = Big Results.
Thomas Brummett American Photography 28 Jury Selection
We loved this image when it first came across our desktop, but clearly we are not alone. American Photography 28 recognized Thomas Brummett as a jury selection award winner. We contacted Thomas and he shared this back story:
© Thomas Brummett/evolveimages.com
“This is my 4th award from American Photography Awards. I made this image on vacation. There was a big storm coming in and the waves were up so the surfers were all out. I love these days as the beaches are empty and only the hard core guys are in the water. I spent about 4 hours shooting the surfers with my old handmade Hasselblad 503cw and a digital back. The reason I still prefer the older cameras (without the internal menu configuration) is they are very, very fast to adjust f/ stop and shutter and give you a choice of film or digital on the fly. All my fine art work is still shot on black and white film with a Hasselblad and a very cool Zork lens configuration. For these images I make unique one of kind prints on old Agfa paper I have been hording.”
This image and more of Thomas’ work are available for purchase direct from the artist. Vist: http://www.gogglepix.com/Book and http://www.studio-4a.com/
On The Road to Marrakesh With Inti St. Clair
Having recently returned from an adventure in Marrakesh, Morocco, Inti St. Clair submitted to Evolve this set of provocative images that left our editors wanting to know more. We spoke with Inti and she shared these reflections about her time there and the inspiration behind this body of work:
Why Marrakesh? “I am an avid traveler and love new adventures. Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Europe to attend a friend’s wedding. Since I was already on the Continent, I thought it would be cool to extend the trip and travel to Morocco where I had never been. I especially wanted to visit the walled Old City of Marrakesh and experience first hand the mystique of this special place.”
Iconic Morocco: “These lanterns were just everywhere we turned. I fell in love with the multitude of designs, shapes and colors and would have loved to take some home. Alas, they were just too big to get into a suitcase. So the pictures will have to do.”
Metal Lanterns hang in front of metal framed window, Marrakesh.
© Inti St.Clair/evolveimages.com
Treasures in the Market: “One of the many charms of Marrakech is the open-air market divided into “souks” or sections each featuring a particular category of product for sale. Of course, I was drawn to the antiques section and came upon this incredible cache of cameras for sale. How could I resist?”
Vintage cameras in Marrakesh souk © Inti St. Clair/evolveimages.com
Motorized vehicles are prohibited in the old city. Motorbikes parked outside the city walls seemed to be stacked on top of each other. © Inti St. Clair/evolveimages.com
Hot air: “After arriving in Morocco, we planned to visit several adjacent towns and cities. However, we came to realize that the distances between many of the places we hoped to visit were in fact many miles apart and would require hours stuck in transit to get to each one. As an alternative to arduous road travel, one morning we woke at 3AM and hopped a sunrise ride on a hot air balloon. Not only was the balloon a picturesque alternative, it also provided an efficient way to experience a variety of terrain and topography. We took off pre-dawn and, once air born, realized we were hovering over what seemed like an endless desert landscape.”
Hot air balloon at dawn over Marrakesh, Morocco © Inti St. Clair/evolveimages.com
Why iPhone: “Of course I travel with a DSLR. But the spontaneity of the iPhone is really ideal. Manipulating the images with the apps also brings me back to my days of processing film. The instant gratification, creativity and doing-it-in-the-moment- wherever-I-am, are very freeing and fun. It’s quintessential play time for me— I just love it!”
Thanks Inti. So do we.
See more of Inti’s other iPhone images.
Announcing EvoRights Partner Program: Charter Partner In Transit Images
Today Evolve Images is excited to announce our partner program for EvoRights. We are especially thrilled to have In Transit Images as our charter partner in the program. Sincere congratulations to our friends Bob Hendriks, Alex Duchene-Zimmerman and the entire team at In Transit for the terrific work they’ve done in launching their website and being the first partner to integrate the EvoRights licensing model.
In Transit Images powered by EvoRights Simplified Licensing. Photo © Christian Tylko
Why EvoRights: When we started Evolve we believed in the premise that once a creative finds a great image it should be easy to license. “Easy” means fast, simple and fair. Traditional royalty free licenses meet the criteria for “fast” and “simple”, but we believe don’t return enough value to photographers. Traditional rights managed licenses may be “fair” to copyright holders, but are overly complex to execute and manage and imply a level of protection to the photo buyer that is vague at best and misleading at worst.
Therefore, we set out to develop a simple way for creatives to license images while still preserving value and compensating photographer’s fairly for their work. We developed EvoRights as a simplified rights licensing model that focuses on four primary attributes of an image license that are value drivers for both buyer and photographer: The market classification (commercial or editorial), the intended media (print, digital or both), duration and geographic distribution.
By isolating these core variables, we believe we capture the critical value drivers of an image license. Moreover, traditional rights managed images do not account for the intrinsic value of an image– especially as related to production value, uniqueness and overall difficulty– or simplicity– to produce. The EvoRights model allows us to reflect the intrinsic value of images in our pricing without bogging down the licensing process. Read our previous post “All Images Are Not Created Equal” for more insight on our approach to align value with price.
We’re on a Mission: In addition to our drive toward simplicity, we believe removing complexity will make licensing of rights managed images more accessible to more buyers — especially those who have been acclimated to licensing only royalty free and/or microstock content. And that feeds our broader mission to create a sustainable creative economy: where artists are compensated fairly for their work ensuring a supply of professional quality images for creatives to choose from for years to come.
But we can’t do it a lone: In creating this new model for licensing images, we understood that our humble little agency would be the only one on the planet taking this novel approach to licensing images. And, with hundreds of thousands of active image buyers in the market we also recognize we face a critical hurdle in adoption. So, rather than keep this cool piece of intellectual property all to ourselves, we decided to make it available– at no charge– that’s right, FREE – for any agency or photographer who shares our goal to simplify image licensing.
Join Us: Rights. Simple. To learn more about EvoRights Partner Program, read today’s press release and check out the information we’ve posted on our website. Questions? Please email us or, even better, post your comments below so other potential partners can benefit from the dialogue as well.
Françoise Gervais: Real Cow, Beautifully Restored
During the month of April we’ve been featuring this wonderful image from photographer Françoise Gervais in our “What’s New” email campaign. When our editors selected the image for the campaign, I too was immediately taken with not only the beautiful lighting and rich tonality, but also the bovine’s evocative expression that seemed to beg for a headline or caption. Françoise shares how she turns the simple into the sublime:
© Françoise Gervais/evolveimages.com
“I came about to create this image as part of an editorial assignment on diet and nutrition for Men’s Fitness Magazine. Living in and working from a downtown LA studio at that time gave me few options to come up with a real cow for the shoot. So we did the next best thing: headed straight for the prop houses! I can’t recall at this point if we ended up with a once real cow “beautifully restored” or one made from scratch. She did the trick for my assignment, however, and the shot later won an honorable mention in the APA/LA Awards.”
Moo.
To Curate: Dial Down The Noise
© Skip Nall/evolveimages.com
Curation is not a word (so I’ve been told by my grammarian spouse), but you wouldn’t know it by its prevalent use in the media world. Powerful concepts won’t wait for cataloging by reference librarians, and curation is no exception. It seems a logical extension: curators curate, therefore the process is curation (right?). And why is curation critical for successful business models in media? There are three primary drivers, all of them long established trends:
- Ubiquity – the persistent growth in the volume of content online
- Promiscuity – the availability of content across multiple platforms
- Time – the increased speed/limited duration in which to locate content
As concepts, these drivers – when lodged far to one scale or the other – result in direct challenges for consumers:
- Inability to locate content
- Difficulty in accessing content
- Increase in time spent acquiring content
These trends simply amplify noise, but a dangerous byproduct is also in play as a result of heightened noise for the consumer: loss of market education. For consumers media licensing, the ability to navigate an evolving content landscape with efficacy, accuracy and confidence demands that the consumer has a firm grasp on issues such as copyright, licensing terms and usage. They must understand the risks in non-vetted sources, and are more reliant upon crowd or peer vetted sources than ever before.
As the landscape extends and territory morphs, consumers become more reliant upon those who have domain expertise – those who curate and can identify with accuracy – the desired content. Curation can effectively dial down the noise related to the effects of ubiquity, promiscuity and (save) time, but also can provide additional lasting value in training the marketplace.
- Posted by Robert Henson, COO, Evolve Images
Conversations with Creatives: Christine Saunders, Art Buyer
Kicking off our series of interviews with image buyers and image makers, we present an informal discussion with Christine Saunders, Senior Art Buyer. Christine, along with Janet Saville, is co-founder of SQUINT Showcase, a curated exhibition gallery for creative talent wanting access to leading UK and US advertising agencies. With over 25 years of award-winning experience at top London agencies, including JWT, Saatchi & Saatchi, FCB, CDP, and DDB, Christine is now career coaching with creatives and visual researching for agencies world over from her base in Seattle.
In this discussion Christine addresses the challenges of “too much choice”, the value of curation and wisdom gleaned from mentors who guided her career. Christine also discusses the importance of the collaborative process that takes place between creatives and photographers. Working with DDB creative directors Grant Parker and Mark Ready and illustrator David Bray and photographer Tim Bret-Day, Christine produced award-winning work for Harvey Nichols.
Best advice for photographers when presenting work to creatives: “Be bold: don’t second guess your work or worry what others might think. Just show it.”
New Talent Inspires
Seeing great, fresh work never fails to inspire. It’s especially gratifying when that inspiration gets delivered from young artists and emerging talent. Benaroya Hall provided the perfect setting for Art Institute of Seattle to host their quarterly portfolio show where this semester’s crop of graduates got to showcase their work to the general public hoping to connect with future employers, agents and producers. I was deeply impressed with the high caliber of work that is consistently being produced by all the artists.
Some standout talent that I will certainly keep my eye on and recommend you should too:
© Carlton Canary
© Carlton Canary
© Alex Lincon
3D Photography © Doug Betzold
© Simon Bogdanov
All Images Are Not Created Equal
Nothing revolutionary here, right? But when you look at pricing policies of almost every stock photo library on the planet, you would think that in fact all images are created equal. Bring up a search result for a still life of a coffee cup shot against a white background and then an image of a young couple (model released) in a cafe (property released) drinking coffee and the price is identical. Identical. Yep.
Beyond the subjective, often arbitrary and elusive valuations that often get attached to commercial art of all kinds there are some basic truths about the disparity in value of these images as it relates to price: the cost to produce these two images. Models, props, wardrobe location fees, not to mention pre-production costs to arrange for a shoot with all of these components are far greater for one than the other.
Two (2) very different images with identical prices from the gettyimages.com “Creative Collection.” Prices listed were current as of 3/15/2012. Photo Credit both images: © gettyimages.com/ImageSource
How did this happen? Well it started almost 20 years ago when royalty free images entered the market and pictures started being sold by the pound. Rather than evaluate how an image was used and pricing it according to the intended license (aka Rights Managed Licensing), agents and photographers flattened the prices for image licensing and established fees based on the file size – not the cost to produce the image OR the relative value of the image to the project.
Now, we’re not suggesting the entire industry go backward and return to the days of complicated pricing formulas where specific fees are calculated based on the plethora of possible licensing / producer / production value combinations. But we do think a more evolved strategy for pricing images of un-equal value can help both Creatives or Photographers get what they want: great images at realistic and fair prices.
One approach is to classify images based on production value and assign a premium– or discount– as appropriate. Compare the pricing calculation for these two images:
This image by Patrik Giardino features 17 models and comes with both model and property releases giving the image added value for commercial projects where model releases are a requirement. The fee, calculated in three clicks, for one year commercial use in both digital and print calculates to one time licensing fee of $1858 USD:
© Patrik Giardino/evolveimages.com
© Roberto Westbrook/evolveimages.com
© Franco Vogt/evolveimages.com
