livebooks blog

• Since the Iranian government banned foreign journalists from covering the rallies in Tehran on Tuesday, people are using social media to spread the latest news on the protests. Whether or not there is a “Twitter revolution” going on in Iran, people are definitely using Twitter to distribute unsanctioned news and images of the protests. One of the most visited TwitPic pages for Iranian protests photos has received over 126,000 page views since Monday.

• Hearing about the unrest in Iran, we immediate thought of Newsha Tavakolian, a talented Iranian photojournalist based in Tehran, a liveBooks client, and a friend. Check out her pictures of the rallies and her interview on the New York Times Lens blog, plus an interview about covering Hajj on RESOLVE.

• Joerg Colberg at Conscientious pointed us to a new online resource for photo lovers: The entire permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography is now available on the museum’s website. Not only can you search and browse through the collection, you can also save your favorites to view later or share with friends.

• MediaStorm is holding a new Methodology Workshop in the last week of July. The 5-day workshop is a hands-on overview of how to produce successful multimedia projects with a focus on the methodology behind creating and implementing such work. More details on their website.

Northern Gannet male bringing nesting material to mate. ©Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

In his  RESOLVE video, Art Wolfe mentioned that the percentage of his income derived from the big stock agencies is a fraction of what  it was a few years ago. Before 9/11, BIRDS AS ART w as making  about 50% of our annual income from leasing the rights to photographs  for publication; that now  generates less than 10%. Lot s of people complain, “I don’t get assignments anymore; no one wants to buy our pictures; there’s a million hobbyists selling their pictures for next-to-nothing; how can we compete?”  Realizing that things had changed, we looked elsewhere and came up with several new ways to generate income.

Two burrowing owls. ©Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

The first was the sale of educational material, usually in digital form.  That  has  been tremendously lucrative for us and very helpful for the people who are just starting in bird photography. In 1985 when I bought my first lens, the first and only class that I ever took ran two hours for each of eight Tuesday nights. I remember begging the  instructor to explain exposure to me. He was a studio photographer and he knew how to get the right exposure but he could not explain what it was or how he did it. He was and is a great instructor and became a long time friend, but boy, was I confused back then. One big thing that has helped us contribute to the wealth of information that now exists about all kinds of photography was to get away from traditional publishing. We now self-publishing, often selling stuff online as PDFs or formally manufactured CDs. Doing so has swung the profit margin from the publisher to us.

Another important piece of our income pie is selling equipment and accessories online. George Lepp’s son Tory was marketing a flash projector for telephoto lenses years ago and Walt Anderson, who is from Chicago, came up with something much more compact that was easy to travel with, folded flat, fit in your pocket, and gave you the same three-stop gain in flash output. We sent a sample to a guy in the industry named Brian  Geyer.  He said, “Hell,  that ain’t no Flash X-tender, it’s a  Better  Beamer.” And thus the Better Beamer became the  very first BIRDS AS ART mail-order item. Now 15 years later, we’re doing five-to-six hundred thousand dollars annually with our mail-order business. The secret to our success there has been answering thousands of equipment and accessory questions each year via e-mail and phone, providing honest and accurate answers, and actually teaching folks how to use the stuff that we offer.

Atlantic Puffin in flowers. ©Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

Aside from the sale of products, I’ve made a tremendous amount of money teaching others to photograph nature, especially birds. My formula is a simple one: Pick a place where the weather is going to be good most of the time and the birds are going to be  both numerous and relatively tame. When I started as a birder and I went out every morning for seven years before school. I changed my prep period to coincide with my lunch so I could go watch birds  in Forest Park. Being a birder for seven years and being a good teacher was a great combination. I’ve often said, “If I can teach 4th graders who can’t read how to do long division, teaching  photography to adult is is child’s play.”  I’ve put a lot of energy into helping other photographers and sometimes it’s a little draining, but the rewards are great.

Then, more than a year ago, a couple friends asked me to get involved with a new educational site, BirdPhotographers.net. There are a bunch of different sites where you post images for folks to comment on —  and pretty much it’s all  “great shot,” and pats on the back. So I said, I’ll get involved with BirdPhotographers.net on one condition: that everybody agrees to do honest critiques, gently. We’ve got to stay away from “great shot” and really teach these people. It’s been a tremendous success and now gets about five million page views per month.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, it was great to hear and see so many young photographers at LOOK3 who are taking ownership over the incredible change happening in the industry today. But, in the end, we were all there to scope out some great photography. Here are 10 awesome things from LOOK3 that I might otherwise have missed (they’re in no particular order, so I’m not even numbering them).

• Shaw Rocco’s Cellular Obscura, a series of images taken with this generation’s Kodak Brownie i.e. a cell phone. Don’t miss the end of the slideshow – it’s very worth it. Also, bonus points for a great version of one of my favorite songs.

• Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, the result of more than 10 years (and several prestigious grants) documenting post-Soviet Russia. Several people mentioned this to me as the standout of all the festival slideshows.

• Carl Bower’s Chica Barbie about the beauty pageants of Colombia. I feel incredibly ambivalent about these images, which in my mind is a marker of great art. This was one of several great projections brought in by Slideluck Potshow…a natural addition to a festival that started as a projection in Nick Nichols’ backyard.

• Martin Parr’s Playas book. Watch the preview on Magnum in Motion, but keep in mind that the book is so much trashier (in the best way) in person. Parr found the worst designer, cheapest paper, and least-talented printer possible to produce this little conversation piece…which claims “$7.99!” on the cover but really sells for $40.

• Kelly Shimoda’s I Guess You Don’t Want to Talk to Me Anymore. Ok so I technically knew about his one before, and in fact I think my cell phone is probably in this project somewhere, which comprises photos of cell phones displaying text messages. But until I saw this at Slideluck, I didn’t realize how many images were available on Kelly’s blog and website.

• Michael Wolf’s Transparent City. Considering that the Museum of Contemporary Photography has already picked up on these, I’m probably behind the times. The best part about seeing these as a slideshow was the mix between the distance and detail shots of people photographed in the windows of huge office buildings.

• Blood Trail, a documentary following conflict photographer Robert King through 15 years in the field. Sadly, I didn’t make it to this film, but I heard so many great things about it that I am making it a point to hunt down a copy asap.

• Jessica Dimmock’s Papparazzi! Jessica made a name early for herself with her Ninth Floor work about a community of addicts living in a posh New York apartment building. Of course I was intrigued to learn she had moved on to photograph the least respected and possibly best paid editorial photographers in the business.

• Tim Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers, which most people saw at the New York Photo Festival, where it was praised as the highlight of the program. I’d watched the video online, but it’s always better live on a huge screen.

• Yolanda Cuomo and Kristi Norgaard, who designed all the visuals for the festival, explaining the fascinating process they go through to design photo books for legends including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Sylvia Plachy.

It’s not very often that I return from a photo festival with a cohesive message or even a consistent idea. But I spent a lot of time at LOOK3: Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville last week talking with the up-and-coming young photographers who are being given the chance to shape the photo industry in a tangible way. Starting out as a photographer today, especially as a photojournalist, means nothing is certain. So it’s reassuring to hear that young photographers understand that this time of uncertainty is also an opportunity for evolution.

One way photographers are facing many challenges is by banding together into artist collectives, such as Luceo Images, MJR, Aevum, EVE, and Oeil Public. In the video below, Matt Eich (Luceo), Tim Hussin, Mustafah Abdulaziz (MJR), and Matt Craig (MJR) explain what they’re excited about in photography now. I also had conversations along these lines with Matt Slaby (Luceo), Kevin German (Luceo), Danny Ghitis, and Michael Christopher Brown. Although rubbing elbows with legends is always fun, these young shooters are most excited about their contemporaries and the camaraderie between them.

Michael Shaw, creator of the BAGnewsNotes blog and a RESOLVE contributor, is also excited about these young photographers and the collectives they’ve started, because they treat blogging as a vital, necessary part of their careers and distribution plans. Sometimes they strive to be featured on blogzines like Verve Photo, DVAFoto, and Flak Photo, which highlight great work by (mostly) emerging photographers. There are also blogs like That’s a Negative and We Can Shoot Too, that focus on work by photographers in specific places (Portland, OR, and Los Angeles, in this case). Other times they use the blog format to promote the achievements of their own members, as with the Luceo and MJR blogs.

Despite Michael’s quip about “older photographers,” I do have to mention that Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey, one of the dons of photojournalism, is also on the front lines with his online magazine, burn, which is working toward assigning original photography to emerging and established photographers — something Michael has been doing for years at BAGnewsNotes. David presented a very fun, sexy video promo for burn at the festival that includes an annual Blurb book and lots of other intriguing possibilities for new distribution models.