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So what is the big deal about photo metadata?
Recently I participated in three onsite seminars in Seattle, SF and LA as part of an SAA tour to educate photographers using a grant from the Library of Congress Digital Preservation project.
Simply put photo metadata is data about an image. Basic metadata tells who made it, what is the subject, when, where and how it was taken etc. etc.
None of this data is part of the visible image itself. It can only be stored hidden inside the image file. It has to be deliberately added; and it can easily be removed. Much of the SAA presentation covered the value for photographers and the various tools available. Details are being psoted to the Photometadata website
Since search engines are completely text-based, they can only recognize and find text strings. It can be very difficult to find specific images on the web or to find out more about a specific images. Metadata can help with search only if it is also on the page where the image is displayed.
In terms of identifying photos, the jpeg is not our friend. A viewer can find an image and have no idea where it came from. If they have dragged it to their desktop for future consideration then the task is even more difficult, unless the metadata was entered and is still there.
Here are two helpful tools to help with image identification.
1) Jeffrey Friedl’s EXIF viewer allows you to see inside any file, web or desktop, to see stored metadata, caption copyright date etc.
2) Tineye allows you to other occurences on the web of any image file, web or desktop, using visual recognition to match your images with those in its index.
An obvious question is why does Google (or Bing or Yahoo) not provide these services. None of these search engines look within an image file to read photo metadata. Certainly keywords and copyright info at a minimum would help with Image Search. And none of them can match candidate images using image recognition technology.
Sometimes we get where we are going in the most circuitous way.
Today I discovered a recording artist I had never heard of and a song I really enjoy, Carla Bruni – Le Plus Beau Du Quartier. What is fascinating to me is the roundabout and serendipitous wav I got there, and the interesting places I stopped along the way, and what I learned.
It started with following a link on Kevin Marks’ Friend Feed where he quoted Fred Wilson commenting on a post by Josh Koppelman about shrinking markets. Fred is a venture capitalist, and investor in Twitter, Tumblr and Disqus, and blogs at www.avc.com. There I found the video of a talk on Disruptive Economy at Google.
After the video I read several other posts including Is Momblogging The New Radio?
Which led me to Jennifer McKinney’s blog My Charming Kids
Where I found a link to Jennifer’s great childrens’ photography site www.jennifermckinneyphotography.com
Where she played several songs including
A long way round, but I’ll have more to say soon on disruptive economy, shrinking markets and how I think it applies to the future of stock photography and media. Meanwhile I am enjoying the music.
Recently I was a guest on a podcast on PhotoNetCast.com discussing stock photography licensing models with Rich Legg, a primary iStockPhoto contributor. The discussion was wide-ranging covering how to get into the business, how it is changing, expected revenue and returns and why certain buyers and photographers choose RM, RF or microstock for image licensing.
In the larger photographic world there is seldom conversation between “traditional” stock photographers and “microstock” shooters. It was refreshing to put all that aside and discuss the rapid changes that are taking place in the industry (and the economy). The two camps certainly seem to be moving towards each other with RM photographers seeing steep declines in average prices recently while iStockPhoto contributors are seeing steady increases in prices.
It was interesting to me that Rich was planning a shoot the next day with five models, and running the numbers to estimate ROI and RPI, while I was doing the same calculation for a recent shoot in Argentina. Hopefully we’ll revisit the conversation in a year and see how things have changed.
Thanks to Antonio Marques, Jim Goldstein and Martin Gommel for hosting the progam. Listeners can add comments or questions here or on their site.
Every photographer at some point in their career asks themselves “Why am I doing this?”. It is an excellent question and one which warrants careful thought. Everywhere we are surrounded by images – images on the packages of products we buy, in magazines we read, on billboards we drive by, on television and websites, on our living room walls and bedside dressers, in our wallets even on our clothing. As photographers, we produce all these images. Yet often the experience of the viewer is far removed our original perception of the subject. This leads in a roundabout way to the question I often ask on location as a travel photographer, “Why am I taking this picture?”
It is a humbling experience to stand before a subject, a person, building or landscape, in a foreign country, camera in hand, and propose to make an image. Thinking of the vast number of images already in circulation, the billion shots of the Eiffel Tower, the flowers and sunsets, happy children and earnest peasant farmers, it is easy to get jaded. “What can I say that is useful? What does this subject have to say? How do I see what is in front of me?”
Harvard economist Umair Haque calls for a new constructive capitalism to focus more on “create authentic, meaningful value”. For the photographer this means seeking to make images that mean something, images that make a contribution to the world, that illuminate in some way. For me as a travel photographer that means images that reflect and carry the values I see in travel – respect for other cultures, learning to be a guest, broadening one’s horizons, developing a capacity for wonder, seeing beyond oneself and learning from the Other.
So how do you make meaningful authentic photographs? The American photographer Minor White said “No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.” It might sound presumptuous, but it helps to cultivate a sense that there might be something else going on when one is is photographing, whether it is being aware of “the decisive moment”, or consciously emptying oneself, trying to stand aside and let the subject present itself in its own right.
For a photographer this practice can be part of a counteraction against the flood of images, the posed models and generic business handshakes that surround us. And it can be part of a transition beyond generic travel shots, the billion-and-first Eiffel tower shot etc., to an authenticity that is rare but life-enhancing. In this world of commodity images it is a goal worth striving for.
If you have experiences of the search for authenticity in your own photography, please add your comments below.
Note: You can see and extended video presentation by Umair Haque here. More on Minor White on Encarta and here
I am repeatedly amazed and the density and diversity of photographic subjects in Europe. In Flanders, the northern, Flemish-speaking, region of Belgium, for example, within a short range of only 100 kilometers, are four major destinations, the cities of Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels.
On a recent photo shoot in Flanders I was able to cover all four cities, traveling easily by train and taxi, with an initial connection by Eurostar form London. Bruges is the most touristy and the recent Oscar-winning film of the same name contnues to draw people fascinated by the cobbled-streets, canals, market square and old belfry. Ghent is much more a university town, home to the 15th century St. Bavo’s Cathedral, less crowded and with wider range of upscale restaurants and clubs. Antwerp is the commercial center of Flanders and hub for the diamond trade, bustling and business-like, with a broad shopping promenade and vast market square around the cathedral. Brussels, seat of the governments of both Belgium and the European Community, is by far the largest of the four, yet is surprisingly accessible on foot. Wandering in and out of the tiny streets of the historic city center, even amidst the tourist throng, I found an endless series of cafes and specialty shops, people, parks, museums and churches.
Flanders now has its own tourism representation in New York and an active website visitflanders.us. You can also follow events on their Twitter stream @visitflanders
A selection of my Belgium images are now up and available for licensing from Getty Images. Additional images are at www.davidsanger.com/stock/belgium
This oak tree image from Photographers Choice Getty Images collection was used in a creative composite image introducing in a story called Fertile Ground in Proto magazine from Massachusetts General Hospital. It is a fascinating stock sale for a landscape image in an unlikely setting – a medical journal reporting on new research on transplanting neurons and regrowing brain tissue – and shows that simply seen stock images like the solitary oak tree on a hill can be used by creative designers for all sorts of purposes far beyond of our original ideas as photographers. The other two images in the composite are ©Ralph Hutchings and © Leo Chapman.
LIFE magazine and Getty images have teamed up in a new website life.com to allow viewing and licensing of their collection of millions of images.
The release is controversial among photographers because the site allows the free use of embedded images on personal and non-commercial websites through the use of embedded javascript code. Daryl Lang of PDN concludes “Under the free sharing model advanced by LIFE.com, no one is going to pay to license photographs online.” Photographer Vince LaForet expresses concern about “setting a precedent that images shared via those avenues should not lead to any income for photographers or agencies”
I am not sure it is such a bad idea, however, for several reasons. First, whereas traditional licensing involves delivering an image (jpg or tiff) to a client for them to work on and incorporate into their publication, this offering by life.com only provides a small piece of javascript which the user embeds into their blog or website. Advantages are that the image is still maintained and served from the life.com site, they can tell what site it is being used on, what amount of traffic is generated, and most importantly they can stop serving the image or serving it onto certain websites at will. By some measure life.com is displaying the image inside the website of the users. By providing embed code they are creating an alternative for traditional infringers who otherwise would either hotlink or just take the jpeg. Also the embed image script contains a link back to the life.com site for a viewer to get a traditional license or get more information. This may indeed generate additional revenue for he photographer and the agency.
There are three elements I would change though. First is registration. It is extremely easy to set up website registration (via email confirmation). If life.com were to only make embed scripts available to registered members then there would be an additional level of monitoring and a way to link embed usage to actual users. A similar service has already been rolled out by Picapp offering embeds of images from Corbis and Getty Editorial.
Secondly, the issue of financial return to the photographer could be ameliorated if there were a feasible micropayment system in widespread use. Google manages what are in effect micropayments on a per-click or per-page-view level with AdSense and Adwords, with iTunes we have the 99¢ song. One of the reasons blog usage has either been free, unauthorized or now script-based is that there’s isn’t in place a viable means to gather microrevenue. The third change I’d like to see is the incorporation of caption and credit info into the embed. The above well-known image by Dorothea Lange of a Migrant Mother in Nipomo California should always have her name and credit prominently displayed alongside, ye the embed code does not provide that.
There is one last issue that warrants serious review, though, and that is how this program fits with the original contracts and licensing agreements photographers signed with Time/LIFE.
For this assignment for Rensselaer School of Engineering magazine, the challenge was to show Rich Heley, chief engineer of Apple’s iPhone manufacturing project, in a way that emphasized the intricate precision of the development process, and his own personal attention to detail. We didn’t have access to the research labs (Apple is very very secretive about that!), but we did have a conference room, boxes and boxes of iPhones cases, a large table, lights and time. After exploring several setups, including RIch lying on his back in a sea of phones, we settled on this direct upward-looking serious yet cheerful gaze, which the Art Director chose for the spread. You can read more about RIch and Apple and download the story No Tolerance for Error(pdf) from the RPI website.
Years ago, in a different life, I worked on a systems project using the Smalltalk language. Most of the development projects of that era were enormous exercises, carefully planned, projected, reviewed and re-reviewed before the first lines of code were written. The requirements stage, figuring out what was wanted, took forever, back and forth among designers and users. Smalltalk projects were different. Rather than think every detail out before hand, analysts would get a general idea of the goal of the project, and then build a small part of the system right away. It would be a working prototype, a foundation, not just a cardboard mockup. The idea was that by seeing something quickly, being able to touch it and use it, see how it worked (or didn’t work), users could give feedback early. Over multiple iterations back and forth the system would grow and change to meet the need.
Photography in the field can be approached in a similar manner. Some photographers and art directors prefer to plan everything beforehand and then, committed, shoot the scene. Another way, more nerve-wracking perhaps, and less structured, is to begin shooting early and see where it leads you. Working with a photographic subject, whether models, still life, a city scene or a landscape, is an iterative project. You can never really know where it will lead. The process of engaging with the subject, involves working the scene, looking, watching, shooting, responding, seeing, reframing. The early images are prototypes, rough sketches, perhaps. And in the iterations, the back and forth, a vision emerges, something not seen at first, unplanned.
So too with websites, at this moment. A rush of restructuring, migration, cutting and fitting, and this is the working prototype. Not an end but a beginning. It’s a bit rough around the edges, things don’t line up right and some links are likely broken. Over the next few months I expect it will all change significantly and I have idea where it will lead. Your comments, of course, are welcome.
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Recent Posts
- Hands
- Photo Metadata
- Finding Music
- Stock Photography Licensing Models Podcast
- Authenticity
- Four Cities of Flanders
- Fertile Ground
- Life.com collection photo usage
- iPhones and iPhones
- Prototyping
- Stock Photo Search
- Wordpress and reworking the website
- Time to Start Blogging Again
- Buenos Aires Tango shoot
- What is So Special About This Place
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