Despite a temperature of around 7C and a sharp breeze the cyclists were out and touring the slipways in Titanic Quarter.
Cycling on the Slipway
Category: General
Contracts and Commissions
Sales on Alamy have nearly zeroed for me recently, although some others seem to be doing fairly well. I can’t be sure if it’s just normal ebb and flow or something I’m doing, or more probably something I’m not doing.
I haven’t submitted any images this year and a quick read at the Alamy forum reveals some people say you need to keep up a constant flow of photographs while others say it makes little difference. No wiser then. The problem with the Alamy forum is that the people there make up a very small percentage of contributors to the platform and their experiences may well bear little relevance to the overall situation. My image views are about normal so I decided to wait and see what happens.
While I was waiting Alamy had another contract review. They’ve increased their commission to 60% from 50% for images exclusively licenced through them. Strangely that’s the same rate as they take for non exclusive images so it may point to further commission increases in the future. They’ve also created commission tiers starting at a cool 80% to them when they licence your photographs although if you manage to licence $25000 they will take only 50% commission.
I’m in the fortunate position of not having to care. In the past I’ve made enough sales to keep me above having to pay them 80% and I’m so badly organised I couldn’t say positively whether many of the images I have on Alamy were not also licensed elsewhere so I kept them all marked as non exclusive. Commission rates will stay the same for me – for now anyway.
What does concern me however is the appearance that the new contract moves much of the liability for problems with licencing and the use of images by Alamy and their clients very much towards the contributor and away from them, although they get more money from licencing an image than the photographer who created it does.
Predictably the Alamy forum erupted in alarm and indignation. At time of writing it consisted of 60 pages. If you have a spare day or two, have a read.
My last three sales with Alamy have been for $3.75, $13.41 and $31.54. From these princely sums Alamy deducted their 60% commission. You can see that I’m unlikely to reach the $25000 threshold.
In between these sales was another for ‘Personal use’ at $13.02 but it was refunded. This ‘Personal Use’ which usually means someone buying the file to have it printed to hang on their wall, was a photograph of a box of 28 Aspirin tablets. These ‘personal use sales are an ongoing problem but that’s for another day.
The future of stock photography is looking bleak, for photographers anyway.
In case you’re wondering – the photographs are not connected with the contents of this post. They’re just of activities that grabbed my attention at Ballyholme today.
Castle Espie Wide Angle
I’ve written about Castle Espie before. It is a Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Centre on the shores of Strangford Lough about 10 miles from my home. I try to visit a couple of times a month and while I go mainly to take photographs as do many others, a lot of people come to simply walk in the grounds and see the wildfowl and the views over the lough.
It’s a popular place to see the Brent Geese as thousands of them winter on the lough and the Trust has The Brent Discovery Hide right on the shore where you can watch them in reasonable comfort.
The Centre is good for photography. When you enter there are large ponds where you can feed the ducks and geese. This area is separated from the main reserve and the birds are used to being fed so you can get fairly close.
I’ve tried before to photograph the ducks and geese using a wide angle lens and it didn’t work out well for me. The birds had been fed and my attempts to coax them to come close with grain I had bought didn’t work.
This was my second attempt. These photographs were taken using a Canon 17-40 lens at the short end. Since I took these images I’ve thought of a few ways to make improvements. I need to get the camera lower and closer for a start and I need more birds in the frame. I know I could clone some of the birds from elsewhere in the photograph but I’d prefer to get it right in camera if possible.
I’ll try again and call this work in progress
Surf’s up
A couple of years ago I saw kite surfers off Ballyholme Beach and anytime I was near I would drive by in the hope of seeing them again, especially on good windy days.
I had expected to see them over the summer months but never did and I’d given up, thinking it was now too cold. Then a few days ago, although the temperature had dropped to around 7°c, one appeared.
I had always thought kite surfing was a summer pursuit.
Bank of the Four Johns
The Bank Buildings, Castle Street, Belfast was built in 1785 and was originally known as the Bank of the Four Johns because the four founders shared that Christian name. The bank collapsed around the early 1800’s and became the residence of the Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Connor.
Interestingly or gruesomely, depending on your outlook, the area directly in front of the building was used for public executions until 1816.
In 1853 the building was taken on by a wholesale drapery company and later became a retail department store with the upper floors being used as wholesale and warehouse area.
It was bought by House of Frazer in 1969 and later Boots the chemist. Boots moved out in 1975 when the building was badly damaged by fire after an IRA bomb and the present owners, Primark took possession in 1979.
On 28 August this year fire broke out on the fifth floor.
I photographed what was left the next day and it was only today while tidying up some of my photographs I came across this photograph that I had taken on the run up to Christmas 2016. The after the fire photograph is at the bottom.
Thankfully there were no injuries but the staff at both Primark and neighbouring businesses are now faced with an uncertain future. The surrounding area has been cordoned off, as the building is unsafe, with premises inside the cordon having to close. Pedestrians and traffic have been diverted, further reducing footfall to the nearby shops that have been able to continue trading.
There has been a campaign involving some local celebrities to promote the city and the council has committed funds to ease things but its a situation that is going to affect the livelihoods of many people in these already uncertain times with Brexit on the horizon.
Mobile Workflow
A couple of posts back I wrote about my attempt to get news away quicker than I had been doing and my failed attempt using Press IPTC for Android. I spent considerable time on that App but couldn’t get it to work – I still haven’t. I looked at Shuttersnitch but was reluctant to go there as it seemed similar to Press IPTC albeit on iOS. Another App called Filterstorm looked interesting but it hadn’t been updated for a couple of years. It’s also in the back of my mind and its probably just me, but I’ve found that often some of these apps take me more time to set up and master than I’m going to save using them and I don’t submit to Alamy News all that often.
Anyway Google was my friend and after a lot of reading on the App store I’ve found two relatively simple apps that seem to be more or less what I want – MetaGear and Easy FTP. Metagear allows batch edit of IPTC and Easy FTP to send the pics off. There are many FTP Apps available but not all seemed as intuitive to use as Easy FTP. Again probably me rather than the Apps.
I tried my new workflow out the day after a fire at the Primark Store in Belfast. The building had very badly damaged and the Fire Brigade were still there the next day. I photographed the damaged building and went off in the direction of Starbucks to work on making a selection and sending them off. This presented a problem, not with the workflow as such but getting somewhere to sit to put the workflow into operation. Starbucks at lunch time is a very busy place with a queue and few seats. Indeed it was like that in all the coffee shops I tried. Back to the car again – where it all went reasonably smoothly and I managed to send four images to Alamy Live News.
Although I’m happy now that I can use the iPad to send off images quickly it is far from ideal. A brief outline of my workflow follows.
I selected photographs on the camera screen and transferred them to the iPad one by one using the Panasonic App. Images imported into the iPad go into the Camera Roll rather than where you would like them to go and for some reason they are renamed on import. This means when the images are imported into Lightroom Classic on my computer later it can be difficult to identify the specific images sent off from the iPad. After import to the iPad I have another quick look and import the keepers into Lightroom mobile. At this stage I delete the images from the Camera Roll. I straighten the photographs and possibly adjust the curves in Lightroom (I’m working with jpegs so they need little adjustment) and then export them back to the Camera Roll. This is why I deleted them earlier. Lightroom allows you to export images to Files on the iPad but as far as I can find Metagear will only work on images in the Camera Roll. I title, caption and keyword the photographs in Metagear and then send them off using Easy FTP with my iPad tethered to my phone.
Surprisingly you don’t seem to be able to batch caption and keyword images in Lightroom Mobile and on export the keywords are removed anyway. Why you would want to keyword images and then export them without the keywords I can’t explain but the software seems designed that way.
I’ve just read over the procedure above and there must be an easier way. The wish that you could use Photo Mechanic on an iPad was a sentiment I read often while researching this workflow but t I gather Camera Bits have no plans to go there.
The iPad is a great piece of kit but for this its a grind. It may be I’m asking too much from it. The Apps don’t work well together and iOS doesn’t help. I’ve read that Lightroom will export fifteen images only at a time and others have experienced difficulty importing images with the Apple card reader. It feels that everything you want to do presents yet another problem that requires a workaround first.
I have an iPad already so I’ll work with it. I may have another look at Shuttersnitch and Filterstorm depending on how often I use my iPad for processing photographs. From what I’ve read I believe that it may be possible with these apps to import photographs directly into Files on the iPad meaning, if I understand correctly, they wouldn’t get renamed. Both Apps may also be able to connect directly to my camera, Filterstorm has some editing capabilities and both have built in FTP thereby reducing the number of Apps I need to use. Whether these points are enough to overcome the sentiments I have outlined in the first paragraph remains to be seen.
If I was starting from scratch however I’d be looking at a Surface Pro or a MacBook Air with Photo Mechanic.
If anyone has any observations or views I’d be very grateful to read them.
The Big Wheel
Bangor, for the next few weeks anyway, has its very own Big Wheel. The wheel has been placed adjacent to the marina and gives a great view over the moored boats and the town itself. Its arrival has coincided with the best weather of the year to date with unbroken blue skies and temperatures approaching 30C. This is just about as good as it gets in Ireland and such weather coinciding with the schools breaking for summer is a rare occurrence indeed.
I haven’t been up in the wheel as yet but watch this space.
Forgotten images
As I mentioned before I’m using the winter weather as an opportunity to clean up my Lightroom catalogue.
Working through images from previous years is a walk down memory lane and while doing it I’ve found photographs that should’ve been sent for stock but were missed at the time.
There are also many personal images that I meant to get printed and never got round to it.
These photographs are a find from the personal folder. I took them at a wedding reception on a little Sony RX100 that I no longer have. From memory I think it had a setting for fireworks that has worked pretty well.