People want beautiful things. The art is finding a way for them to pay
This Photograph Is Not Free
41–50 of 257 posts
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#42I enjoyed the article. It's a good reminder that the act of consuming creative work is far easier than its creation.
Too many people forget this and, IMHO, thereby fail to appreciate the creative work. Waxing poetic, but the view from the top of the mountain doesn't mean as near as much if you didn't climb up it.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could argue about the value and market price. In the same way that a liquid betting market, the price is a reasonable estimate for probability, in a any liquid market, the price is a reasonable estimate of value.
Define "liquid market".
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all photos of sunsets are equal, just as the huge number of portraits of women doesn't price the Mona Lisa out of the market. If people decide that this photo has a particular merit, then that is worth something. Of course, that's an entirely subjective issue and will vary from person to person.
Sure, but I was talking in the context of filler photos for magazines and such, where very low cost is usually important. If someone considers it a true œuvre d'art then the post is meaningless, because the available resolution isn't enough for a decent print at full page, and so nobody can "steal" it; they'll need to contact him regardless.
Great, then the magazines should use one of the 300,000, not his. His cost money to use, and that's the way it is.
Several of those 300k are mine, by the way, and they are indeed free to use, assuming I am credited as required by the license. Of course, there are countless stories of magazines ignoring even this very simple requirement.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could argue about the value and market price. In the same way that a liquid betting market, the price is a reasonable estimate for probability, in a any liquid market, the price is a reasonable estimate of value.
Define "liquid market".
For example, the market for apples (the fruit) is liquid, but the market for Van Gogh's paintings is not.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#46The replacement value is actually much more than that. You could take that same equipment and shoot your entire lifetime and never get a shot like that.
The internet is not about content. It's about distribution. It costs a LOT of money to use a human -- the artist -- to "distribute" that image from nature onto his digital camera. From there it costs zero to distribute it to the rest of the world.
The answer is to tie the initial "distribution" of the data with the end consumer. So share the small image for free with whomever wants to see it, then charge a small fortune for a steganographically watermarked 10MB one. If you "sign" your images with a tamper-proof record of whom the recipient is, who you are, and perhaps a personalized message, not only can you track the image, you increase its value for the buyer. It's a good thing for both patron and artist.
ADD: As a real-world example of how this works, take my funny picture collection. (http://caption-of-the-day.com) I have a hobby of collecting funny pictures. Finally decided to put them all on a blog.
Now many of these pictures are actually web comics, or demotivators, or whatever. I want to credit each artist, but I'm just some schmuck collecting funny pictures. I don't have time to research each and every one.
But with watermarking I don't have to. Most of the times whoever made the image also put a watermark on it pointing back to their website. So instead of "lifting" the pictures, I'm actually providing free advertising for the artist. Artists compete to have their work distributed for free. Consumers become big fans of certain brands and help the artists advertise. Think of how worse this system would be if the artists controlled everything. DRM is a menace. The business models might be different, but The technology community has solved the exact problem this photographer is concerned about.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#47A) Price comes first, not cost. In the real world clearing prices are justified based on how much the buyer is finally willing to pay for something, not how much it cost the seller to make it. If no one wants to buy a photograph for 6000$, then the market does not exist at that price. If the seller believes his cost is greater than the price quoted by his buyer, he should move to another more profitable business venture.
B) that said, digital technology has reduced the cost of entry and the cost of repeat production greatly, had ansel adams to take that very shot, the "replacement cost" of that photograph would have been much much higher. The cost of continuing to take photographs is also fairly minimal compared to earlier. The buyers price flexibility has not changed while your ability to produce at a lower cost has improved considerably.
C) You cannot equate yourself with a restaurant or a secretary or a writer in these companies, they unlike you are paid to continue working on a daily basis, whereas you're expecting to be paid for work that is already done. once. When you order your lunch today it costs the chef x $, order the same lunch tomorrow costs him another x $. But regardless of how many prints someone buys of your work, the cost to you does not increase. In other words, the legitimate product is not "one print", it is the whole set of prints that you expect it to sell over its lifetime. If you can guarantee that a print is exclusive, then you can legitimately expect the kind of amount conventional economic calculation leads you to value your photograph at ( im not talking about 6612$, thats insane )
D) The true comparison is to that of a restaurant that comes up for one day, makes an innovate dish, and then exits the business the next day and expects to be paid whenever someone else makes the dish elsewhere. No one does this because you can not run a profitable venture or even make up your costs based on this mindset - based on one sessions sales. And draconian IP laws aside, the only way to make a profit in that venture is to stay in business and keep at producing that dish over and over again, and more over, innovating with new standout dishes. And as a photographer you should learn to treat yourself, like the restaurant above, as a service industry, not just a product industry.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#48The machinery needed to produce a ballpoint pen costs the best part of $10m. A ballpoint pen costs 20 cents.
Cameras are expensive. Photographs are almost worthless. Supply utterly outstrips demand, especially for shots like landscapes that have great appeal for amateur photographers but little commercial utility.
Ten years ago, you could name every paparazzo working in London. They were a small circle of time-served photogs who knew everyone, and whom everyone knew. There was an infrastructure of couriers and darkrooms to get images from film to press in time. They spent years cultivating relationships with celebrities, doormen and nightclub owners. Today, there are countless PJ students and teenagers hurtling around Soho on scooters. With a cheap DSLR and a smartphone, an image can be on the front page of dailymail.com in 20 minutes.
The new breed see their work as a more exciting alternative to working weekends in a shop. Most of them are happy to get a quarter of what images used to sell for. They shoot using the modern equivalent of "f/8 and be there" and need practically no technical skill. Rather than cultivating relationships and building sources, many of them rely on Twitter. Unlike the previous generation, many of them are happy to tip each other off and share information. It's now scarcely possible to make a proper living and most of the old-timers are shooting commercial work or weddings.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#49The very existence of an intellectual property market is absurd. In my opinion, the scenarios in which person should expect to make a profit doing something creative are:
A. The person is hired to create something.
B. The person creates something that's not easy to copy.
If you were hired to design a set for a play, you would get paid for your work. If you created a physical three-dimensional sculpture, someone else could try to imitate it, but the imitation wouldn't be a perfect copy. That means your original sculpture would still have value and could be sold. On the other hand, if you, on your own time, created something that cost nothing to copy, such as--oh, I don't know--a picture of a sunset, you should not expect to profit from selling it. It wouldn't matter how much time/effort/money/energy you put into creating it.
So, what's going on with SOPA then? The government realized that they don't have the resources to police the Internet for copyright violations. Of course they don't. It's impossible. So now they're attempting to foist that impossible responsibility on website owners. I have no idea how the bill is worded, but I can't imagine a scenario where the wording could be "fixed" while keeping the intention. The intention is broken. Copyright law is broken.
Copyright should be non-exclusive. Anyone should be allowed to copy anything for free.
Re: This Photograph Is Not Free
#50What utter nonsense. > * As someone mentioned, THIS single photo didn’t cost me $6,612, but if you wanted to create it, from scratch, that is what is involved. So I consider it the replacement value if it’s stolen, or how much my lawyer will send you a bill for if it’s found being used without my permission.* I hope he's never pirated a film or he could owe the studio millions and millions of dollars. He should be ar…
I wonder why he doesn't add the cost of his car, in which he traveled to and from location, and the cost of building the road, and his home, and his entire life up to this point, and what it cost humanity to invent photography in the first place.
I get his point, of course, and (kind of) agree with him, but his argument is weak.