June 07 British Journal of Photography
Picture of Health
Title: Picture of health
Feature: Picture library
Date: 6 June 2007
It’s been an interesting year for the picture libraries but, finds Diane Smyth, digitisation and redefinition in the market spell more opportunities for canny photographers
BAPLA - the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies - boasts an impressive membership including very nearly all of the picture libraries and agencies in this country. Its annual picture fair last month offered a barometer on conditions in the industry and proved how much it has moved on in the last year, with digitisation now central to most agencies, big or small, and big players such as Getty soaking up many of the small outfits.
But although it’s been through a transition, the picture industry has emerged stronger than ever. Big players are leading the way with new technology but the smaller operators are also getting up to speed and building global niches online. And all of them are hungry for new images - good news for photographers.
Animal Photography
Animal Photography has been running for 50 years, and was originally based on photographer Sally Anne Thompson’s archive. However it was recently acquired by a design company and, as MD Stephen Taylor explains, it is keen to expand.
‘The majority of our collection is made up of images by Sally Anne Thompson, who specialised in photographing animals. We have over 20,000 images in our archive - it was her life’s work. Sally had very good knowledge of animals and was able to capture their essence and she also revolutionised the way that animals were photographed, by moving away from stiff, formal portraits designed to show off the animals pedigree to more natural shots. People still come to us for those images, and I really want to build on the collection with new images.
Because our images are just of animals, without people, they don’t really date. We can sell images shot in the 1960s. For example, we’ve launched a canvas prints service and have used images dating back nearly 50 years. We had one of those prints at the BAPLA show and it generated a lot of interest.
Thompson shot on medium format but we are digitising the collection. I’m a designer by trade so I have first hand experience of picture buying. It’s a big advantage. Keywording is key. You need to think of good conceptual angles, not just label the image. We take on board the photographers’ suggestions re keywords, but we’ll also look at them ourselves. It doesn’t matter how good a picture is, if the keywords aren’t good then it won’t be used.’
Corbis
Corbis is one of the biggest picture libraries in the world and was set up specifically to supply digital images. But although its online capability is impressive, its success is built on image quality rather than cheap online stock, says Ivan Purdie senior vice president for global sales and services.
‘Corbis evolved to be the first online digital archive back in the late 1980s and was at the forefront of digital imaging via CDRoms and so on. Now we work in an industry that has an entirely digital workflow, from the photographer’s image capture to the design stage, and we ask photographers to submit images of about 50MB, so that we can then supply digital files without interpolation.
Where we have acquired analogue collections, such as Sygma, we have invested in digitising the best images for the commercial user and spent millions putting the rest in storage.
Wherever images are used, Corbis images crop up. They are used in major advertising campaigns but what we are very much noticing is that images for ads are no longer just used for print campaigns. They’ll be used online, on YouTube, in 96-sheet bill board posters, and so on. We are also seeing a convergence with moving images, and some of our photographers now shoot high definition video and pull off stills if required.
Stylistically, there is a trend towards conceptual images. So if a bank, say, is advertising, instead of showing piles of coins or something very literal like that it will show people doing things, having experiences, and get across the idea that if you plan for your environment, you can have nice experiences.
The idea of group experiences is also very important. There’s the notion of the 24/7, wired network and beehives. As traditional family groupings break down, people are surrounding themselves with extended groups of friends, be that online or real life. We also encourage photographers to take photographs of believable people. The days of models with big cheesy smiles are a thing of the past.
One of the fastest growing areas is in rights clearance. A major part of this work is clearing the rights to use images of celebrities’ images, such as Einstein or Steve McQueen. There is an insatiable demand for images of celebrities and we represent some of the twentieth century’s greatest icons. They have such weight today and brands want to be associated with that.’
PYMCA
PYMCA is a small, independent picture library based in London. It specialises in images of youth culture, which means that its collection has to be constantly refreshed, as library manager James Lange explains.
‘Our ethos is real people in real situations. It’s not contrived, as a lot of stock is, and the people who shoot it are often part of the scene. That’s why it lends itself to editorial uses. Our market is very much newspapers and magazines, and sometimes our images will be used on album covers.
That governs the way we sell our images. You can order online but we ask people to come to us to discuss pricing, and we’re not looking at changing that. We feel that rights-managed is better for the type of imagery that we have.
We do get the odd advertising job, and we’re just working on a new collection that will run alongside the PYMCA collection, at www.modelrelease.co.uk. The images will be similar to those at PYMCA but they will be more commercial and aimed at ads targeting the youth market. Model releases are becoming an issue with advertisers, so this is something to help. The images will be shot with models, but they will have an edge.
We have developed our site but we don’t feel under pressure to do make it ecommerce enabled. We are still a relatively small library so we don’t really need it. About 12,000 of our images are digitised, but we have about 60,000 images in our archive. At the moment we’re doing an edit of the archive, which we will digitise. We don’t intend to digitise the entire archive.
We have syndication deals with other companies, including Alamy and Jupiter, but we are an independent library and intend to stay independent.
What people want has changed. We don’t get so many requests for club pictures any more, though old archival images continue to sell well. We have 180 photographers who submit images but we’re always seeking work out. Youth culture is permanently changing and you have to try to keep up.’
Millennium Images
Millennium Images provides high quality photography to predominantly editorial clients, particularly book publishers who want to use the artwork on their front covers, but digitisation has also made it possible to become an increasingly global operation, explains MD Jason Shenai.
‘It’s been a good year for Millennium - we’ve expanded the number of staff here, so now we have five people here all the time, taking into account various people who work part time. We’ve also put in place a standard of only taking images at 60MB and are on target to get everything online by the end of the year.
Our archived images we save at 150MB, because we just don’t know what they’re going to be used for. It’s been a huge task but it’s obviously essential. It enables us to distribute images more easily. We also have eight or so international agencies that are distributing our images, and 50% of our sales are now abroad.
We’ve also just started a new collection called Wild Card Images, which collects together images from outside the UK. We’ve been very selective about what we’re representing, and its doing well, although it’s still early days.
There are distinct tastes from country to country but they’re difficult to analyse and our success has come from trying to keep our identity as much as possible. The same is true of photographers too. To be successful, photographers need to produce images that are technically of a high quality, but which are personally interesting to them.’
Wellcome Images
The Wellcome Trust is the second biggest charity in the world and its picture library, Wellcome Images (formerly the Wellcome Trust Medical Photo Library) is the world’s leading source of images on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science and clinical medicine. But the library also provides images of a more journalistic nature, explains the head, Catherine Draycott.
‘We need clinical images, taken by trained medical photographers, but we also need more general interest pictures, such as photographs of good photographs of the elderly and so on. Our images are mostly used in editorial, including in medical textbooks, but we’re also used in the mainstream media and sometimes even in adverts. I think just by watching television for an evening it’s easy to see that health and health issues have become very popular.
We have our own photographers but we do have nearly 600 contributors too. We also commission photographers, because it can be difficult for them to get access to medical environments. Those images also need to be updated because hospital environments change over time, and anything involving peoples’ clothes dates quickly
Something we often need is examples of cases that aren’t severe, and which aren’t yet considered medical. An image of someone with mild measles, for example, may be more useful than an image of a severe case, for example. We also like to have pictures of ‘normals’, of healthy eyes and so on, because they can be useful comparisons.
We avoid showing faces, even if we have permission and we have to be careful with permissions - photographers have to have model releases for their images. We also ensure we know how images are being used, and we won’t allow them to be used inappropriately.
With clinical images the most important thing is clarity, so the lighting and focus need to be spot on and lots of depth of field. We’re looking for information not aesthetics.’
Alamy
Alamy claims to have the world’s largest online collection of stock photography, with nearly nine million images available. With so much photography, new forms of distribution have become key, explains Alexandra Bortkiewicz, director of photography.
‘Photographers are currently submitting high quality jpegs to Alamy in preparation for the release of AlamyUpload, which will allow contributors to submit directly via the internet and eliminate the need to submit images on CD, DVD and other media. This is still in final test phase but it will be eventually rolled out incrementally to all our contributors.
We released our new search system, AlamySearch, in October 2006. It works on the premise of capturing the popularity factor of images, as indicated by our most active key customers. It’s a move away from the traditional way of providing search results, in which the agency’s editors dictated what images the customer saw. Our new system relies exclusively on client activity to objectively place the most popular image suppliers higher up the sort order.
We’re developing this approach to provide contributors with the tools and data to analyse how well their work is performing in the market place and see customer’s responses to it. By answering questions about why a particular collection is not performing so well, it will perhaps allow them to see where to focus their efforts.
Another area we’re working on as part of this is the Annotation project, which will give contributors a more effective way of classifying and describing their images more effectively.
We’re trying to empower and enable photographers to shape how they perform on Alamy and, in a way, control their destiny within it. And likewise we’re trying to give image buyers, the other important part of equation, with relevant and stimulating searches.’
Online
www.animal-photography.co.uk
www.corbis.com
www.pymca.com
http://images.wellcome.ac.uk
www.milim.com
www.alamy.com
Source:
© Incisive Media Investments Ltd 2007