The Obsidian Stock Blog

So you have a little portfolio of your images on Flickr. Whether or not you are a professional photographer, this latest blip below should make you think twice about displaying any of your images on the Net without a watermark - and working with a stock agency like iStockphoto whose anonymous mass of contributors can turn out to be image thieves …

“According to a news report on Webware.com (a CNET web-site,) Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, a professional photographer from Iceland and a user of the Flickr photo-sharing site, has discovered several of her images were posted on iStockphoto by a third party using the screen name “vulcanacar.” iStock has shut down vulcanacar’s portfolio and removed his or her account from the site.

As a warning to other users about the risk of posting images on Flickr, Ms. Guðleifsdóttir posted on the Flickr blog a screen shot of one of her images as it appeared on iStock under the imposter’s name.

She points out that of the thirty-one images in vulcanacar’s portfolio on iStock, twenty-five were hers. iStock EVP Kelly Thompson says it will be difficult to pursue damages from the user in question because he’s in a country where it would be very difficult to do too much to him.

Obsidian Stock prides itself in knowing each and every single photographer in its portfolio, having met most of them face-to-face, and paying extreme attention to usage and copyright issues.

Coming up tomorrow - How To Watermark Your Images for Flickr and the Web.

Kudos to the New York Times for writing an most excellent article on the importance of hiring a professional photographer to take pictures when trying to sell a high-end property or residence.

In real estate, a picture can be worth more than a thousand words. Much, much more. When selling properties online, agents and Web designers say that the pictures buyers see of houses and apartments for sale are often the first - and sometimes the only - chance for a seller to make a good impression. Less-than-flattering pictures can turn buyers off and lead to lonely open houses.

“Good photos will grab people’s attention and help you sell a home,” said Jacky Teplitzky, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate in New York. “Bad pictures will absolutely give you trouble, because you won’t have any calls on it, and nobody will come to see it.”

Eighty percent of people across the country who bought a new home last year used the Internet while house hunting, and they rated photographs as the most useful tool in their search, according to a survey of buyers and sellers by the National Association of Realtors.

Microsoft has been busy in the realm of photography recently.

Not only have they been actively promoting the scRGB color space and introducing a new photo file format, the software giant’s engineers have just unveiled something called Photosynth to the world.

Still at the “technology preview” stage (which means that you can’t download/buy it yet), Microsoft Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Go watch the slick promo video to get a better idea of what Photosynth actually does.

Here’s a little pick-me-up for every photographer out there:

“Looking through photo albums makes you happier than chocolate, music, TV or even your favorite drink, according to research revealed today by Orange. The results show that the mood of those viewing photographs was consistently lifted by 11% during mood measuring tests whilst the groups who tried to eat, listen, watch, or drink their way to happiness registered a mere 1% increase.

The tests demonstrate that looking through personal photo albums produces an improvement across all measurements including a person’s sense of relaxation, brightness, calmness and alertness and even their sense of being valued and popular - resulting in a higher happiness score overall.

In contrast, the pick-me-ups people commonly rely on were only successful in helping them relax: Wine by 14%, chocolate by 8%. Photo albums were proven to be a far more effective way of unwinding, with subjects recording an average relaxation score of 22%.”

Full Story here.

Photographers who register their work with the U.S. Copyright Office should prepare to fork over a few extra bucks beginning July 1.

The copyright office is raising the fees for registering single works and groups of photographs from $30 to $45. The cost of basic registration last went up in 1999.

The copyright office initially proposed raising the fee for groups of photos to $75, saying it costs more to process groups of photographs than other works. But after photographers protested, the office decided to keep the fee at the same price as the basic copyright registration fee.

The fee for having the copyright office staff conduct a records search is also going up - doubling from $75 to $150 per hour. And the office will begin charging $100 to provide an estimated search fee.

The fee for preregistration – a new type of registration that protects a creative work before it is completed – remains $100.

Creative works are automatically protected by copyright, but registering with the copyright office provides greater assurance of legal protection in case of infringement. Photo associations recommend that photographers register their most recent work with the copyright office on a regular basis.

The copyright office says it needs to raise fees to keep up with rising costs. More fee changes are expected next year when the copyright office makes it possible to register works online.

The complete list of fee changes is available at www.copyright.gov/reports/fees2006.html.

Ladies and Gentlemen - the future has arrived:

DALSA develops 100+ megapixel CCD.

DALSA Semiconductor has today announced that it has developed the worlds first sensor with a total resolution of over 100 million pixels. To be more specific this single sensor, developed for astronomy, has 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, 111 million in total. The active area of the sensor measures approximately four by four inches and has a 9 µm pixel pitch. This sensor has been developed in conjunction with Semiconductor Technology Associates for the US Naval Observatory.

It’s going to be truly interesting to see just long it’s going to take for a sensor of this caliber to hit the pro photography market…

OpenRaw.org, an organization dedicated to pushing camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats, has released its 2006 survey of photographers and imaging professionals.

Albeit long, it’s an interesting document that showcases the concerns of people in the industry about ever-changing, manufacturer-proprietary RAW formats and its potential pitfalls.

More than two-thirds of the 19,207 participants expressed concern that they won’t be able to open or edit raw files created by older digital cameras. The most telling statistic is the 90% of respondents who agreed: ‘Once a digital image is written to a file by a camera, data in all parts of the image file should belong to the photographer who captured the image. Camera makers should publish full and open descriptions of all parts of the raw image files their camera produce.’

What *is* the RAW problem, exactly?

From OpenRAW.org: In the short history of digital photography, manufacturers have released numerous cameras with constantly evolving RAW formats. This has lead to the existence of a vast number of RAW “dialects,” even within each major brand, that store image and camera setting data in a different manner.

In some cases, manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not, this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.

To date, this vast number of RAW formats has been hidden by the transparent support offered in RAW converter software, provided by both the camera manufacturer and various third parties. At the time of writing, the open source dcraw converter currently supports more than 200 formats. However, as manufacturers lose interest in their discontinued products and drop support for them, the true impact of all of these “dialects” will be felt.

Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.

The OpenRAW Solution: The goal of OpenRAW is to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images. To this end, we advocate open documentation of information about the how the raw data is stored and the camera settings selected by the photographer.

More info is here.

Microsoft has announced a new image format called Windows Media Photo (with a WDP file extension). According to their white paper, this new format offers compression ratios close to JPEG-2000 but with the computational requirements of JPEG (smaller files with the same image quality). The use of new algorithms are also claimed to reduce the visibility of ‘objectionable spatial artifacts’ (those mosquito JPEG artifacts). Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of image formats including both fixed and floating point numerical representations (think wide dynamic range), various color spaces, metadata (including EXIF) and even transparency. This new format will be supported in Windows Vista when it arrives and will be made available for Windows XP. There has been no word yet of support for the format in any hardware devices.

More info is here.

Specs are here.

Via Reuters:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Canon Inc. said on Thursday that it would consider halting development of new film cameras as it focuses resources on digital models, the latest sign of the rapidly fading role of film in photography.

A spokesman at Canon, the world’s largest digital camera maker, said it would consider whether it needs to continue developing both compact and single lens reflex (SLR) film models because the markets for both are shrinking.

Canon said it would continue to produce and sell existing models and make a final judgment on the business in the future while monitoring market demand.

Canon’s statement follows an announcement earlier this year by rival Nikon Corp. that it would stop producing most of its film cameras, expect for a few professional products.

Konica Minolta Holdings Inc., meanwhile, has said it would exit the camera and photo film markets, where it has been losing money amid stiff competition and weak demand.

The photographic film and film camera markets have been shrinking rapidly in the past few years due to the rising popularity of digital cameras, which can take and store photos without the need for film.

The Copyright Office has suggested legislation that, in its current form, could have a devastating impact on professional photographers.

The proposal would limit, or in some cases eliminate, the damages available against an infringer of an orphan work.

What is an orphan work? It is a work or image, presumed to have copyright protection, but whose owner cannot be located even after a reasonably diligent search conducted in good faith.

Full Story.

At the same time, the American Society of Media Photographers has met with representatives of the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress and with industry partners to discuss the online registration of photographs from within existing and future digital asset management programs.

“With on-line registration on the near horizon, this feature will make it much easier to actually register your copyright and more fully protect your images,” says Richard Anderson, chair of ASMP’s Digital Standards Committee.

Full Story.