What's happening now?

Post no. 14

Article 1: The British Journal of Photography, "Startups battle for rights to smartphone images"

This article finally gives me a more appropriate label for Instagrammers/Facebookers and such. They call them Social Photographers. Does this make them a whole new profession? To call it a profession though, should one earn a certain amount of income from that profession to call it an official profession?

So what this article basically argues on was about how Instagram/Facebook/Flikr (insert social media website here) provides millions of royalty free images online. This reduces sales on sites like iStockphoto and such as free quality images are available by just Googling them.

Although famous in use for news coverage, smartphones' images are occasionally doubted on the authenticity of those images; according to that article I've linked in the title.

It's quite a massive effect on how buyers of images would buy licenses for the images at 5$ rather than the original price of 20$ just after 48 hours the content is posted. It's really based on what's happening in real-time. If you were too late, you're old news as the demand just isn't there anymore.

What the publishers are trying to do to fix this is that they have 'authenticity ratings' to ensure quality and speed for those images. They introduced an app called 'FOAP' which allows any smartphone users to sell their images with the app. Now could this be a profession?



Article 2: The British Journal of Photography, "BEYOND INSTAGRAM: Should photographers accept the risks inherent in social networks?"

A photographer by the name Van Houtryve mentions that he uses his smartphone to experiment ideas by capturing it via mobile device before actually doing so with a professional DSLR. The article also mentions on how photographers lose ownership of those images based on the Terms of Agreement conditions set by Instagram. The effect of this agreement change resulted in many Celebrities closing down their Insta accounts.

Ben Khelifa argues, "..We might be the authors of our work, but without an audience, we're nothing."