Cameras

The BBC has suspended its annual photography competition. The move follows a series of mistakes made in six BBC programs when staff faked phone-in contests. Most of the programs were charity fundraisers. When technical problems prevented callers from getting through, production staff posed as callers.

All competitions across the BBC have now been suspended.

The annual photography competition offered no prizes but generated plenty of interest from photographers around the world. The first round of the corporation?s Photographer of the Year 2007 contest, on the subject ?Blue,? attracted some 4,000 submissions from both professionals and amateurs. Total entries to last year?s competition numbered around 20,000. Unlike the phone-ins, winners of the online photography competitions were chosen by readers in a public vote.

The monthly photography contest has also been shelved.

The loss of such a prestigious competition is clearly a big blow for any photographers looking for an impressive line on their resume. Entry was free, open to anyone and with the public doing the judging, everyone could feel they were in with a chance of winning.

And it was very unlikely that staff at the BBC were faking it by sending in their own photos.

Digital cameras have introduced us to a world of possibilities that were previously not available with shooting film. The ability to instantly see what we’ve captured, and to edit, share and print the images has changed how we take pictures. It has also changed how many photographs we take, where they get stored and what we do with them. We were limited to 36 images per roll of film, now an average digital camera can store hundreds if not thousands of photographs on memory cards, encouraging (even taunting) us to shoot more.

Shooting more photos means capturing more memories, always a great thing. The downside is what to do with all of them, how to manage them, keep them backed up and share with friends and family. Utilizing local, network and online storage for backing up is a great, easy idea, and allows sharing the memories without the need or pain of attaching large files to email.

Local and Online Solution

This is an amazing solution in that you get the best of both worlds. Local storage, which is easily accessible, to an entire home or office, and online storage, accessible from any location with high-speed internet access. This solution is called a network attached storage (NAS) device, an example of which is the WD My Book World Edition. This device also takes the guesswork out of backup procedures with automatic and continuous backup software.

Utilizing the included MioNet software, you can also access your NAS from anywhere that has an Internet connection. This is a big advantage over external hard drives directly attached to your computer and the reason that we advocate using a NAS. As a photographer taking pictures anytime, anyplace, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to upload all the day’s shots to the NAS device in your home or office? You can rest assured all is safe, and if you have a staff, they can begin working with photos while you are on to the next shoot.

Being cross platform and supported by both Windows and Mac means you can painlessly share and access all the photos and data you have on your home network, or anywhere in the world.

Online Web Based Solutions

Ideally, utilizing both an online backup storage and sharing solution with a local NAS would give the best possible scenario for recovery of data should something happen to the local NAS.

Here’s a roundup of some of the top web sites that offer sharing for your photos. An important thing to note is that only one of these sites, Flickr, allows for unlimited photo storage. The other sites are mainly for sharing your photos and are not viable backup options.

Flickr has become somewhat of the standard for online web albums and sharing photos.  They’ve made it so easy a grandmother can upload photos, yet still utilize advanced features such as commenting and tagging, along with the ability to create custom photo streams to appeal to everyone. Groups created inside Flickr share photos, critiques and ideas and this is all offered free. A paid account with Flickr opens up the upload and storage limits to be unlimited and gives access to advanced statistics. There is no built in photo editor on Flickr, though.

MyPhotoAlbum has one of the most attractive web interfaces for sharing photos of the bunch. They offer 1,000’s of different templates and designs to create a very personalized, fun web album of images. They don’t limit the number of photos or albums you can host and offer privacy settings that enable you to control who can and can’t see your images. MyPhotoAlbum also stores the full, high-resolution images on their server with no editing needed. Another interesting feature they offer is a personalized domain, http://you.myphotoalbum.com, allowing you to create an easy-to-remember address to email your friends and family.

Pbase has been one of the largest photographer image sharing communities online for the last few years. With forums for chatting and albums galore, it’s become one of the premier places to show off your photography skills. Advanced amateurs and professionals alike use this service to showcase their best photos, learn from others and get inspired. Pbase is a paid service, unlike most of the others listed, but for that you are also getting advice from other photographers. It’s probably not a site you’d want to use to just upload photos from your last vacation to share with the parents.

All of these sites offer basically one thing: online storage of your images. The advantages to this are plenty:

• Easily share with friends and family by simply emailing a link. No need to attach files to emails one at a time.
• Commenting and tagging in albums allows you to quickly and easily identify and find photos.
• Some offer automatic backup solutions, great in the case of a hard drive failure, corrupt operating system or home invasion / flood / fire.

Backing up online should be done in addition to localized storage, not instead of, just to have a fail-safe.

Got any backup, management or sharing tips of your own? Leave a comment below…

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Digital imaging changed everything. The darkroom turned into a Mac, rolls of film capable of holding no more than 36 pictures became plastic rectangles capable of holding  hundreds of shots, image selection began to take place immediately after the shoot, photographs could be delivered to clients at the click of a button, and deadlines became tighter than ever.

And of course, new sales channels opened up, allowing anyone with a camera and talent to put their work in front of buyers, revolutionizing the world of commercial photography.

So what happens now?

It would be nice to believe that after the upheavals of recent years, we can all take a breather, get used to the new ways of working and spend our time figuring out how to make the most of them. But life doesn?t work that way. The photography world is still changing. Smaller microstock sites like DigitalRailroad and LuckyOliver have found that selling images at a buck a piece isn?t as easy as it looks. Larger firms like PhotoShelter have discovered that buyers don?t always know what they want ? or don?t buy what they say they like. And there?s still plenty of room for improvement in image searching, display and purchasing.

Consolidating Three Million Images

One new trend then might be seen in BrightQube. Launched in 2007 and headed by Lee Corkran, a former professional photographer who has also worked for Digital Railroad, the service has few images of its own. Instead, it consolidates more than three million stock photos from more than 40 different companies, including Corbis, Jupiter Image?s Comstock and Getty?s Stockbyte as well as many independent niched firms such as GoGo Images and Photo India.

For buyers who don?t want to flip from site to site while looking for images, that already makes BrightQube a useful portal. But the service also stands out in the way that it displays search results. Instead of offering page after page of images, ordered usually according to a secret recipe of keyword relevance, views and downloads, BrightQube presents what it calls a ?Dynamic Mosaic? interface ? a giant, automatic-loading, animated wall of thumbnails which buyers can navigate with their arrow keys or a navigational grid, zooming in on the images that look the most promising. According to Lee, the system, which looks like a two-dimensional version of PicLens, allows customers to search ?hundreds of times faster than on other sites.?

Images are initially ordered by keywords, with the most relevant photographs placed in the middle of the mosaic, but buyers can then choose to order the images by price or size.

[P]hotographers working with collections large and small can be assured their images will appear on a single, equitable page of search results, in front of buyers? eyes, giving every picture a fighting chance to be found, seen and sold,? Lee told us.

But first, photographers have to get their images onto the wall, and that?s where things can get a little tricky. In a May interview with SocalTech, Lee indicated that the company was experimenting with adding user-generated content and that a private beta would be available in early fall. When we asked him in mid-November whether independent photographers could submit their images to the site though, Lee merely said:

?Not at the moment, but we are looking into this feature in the future.?

The Back Door to the Mosaic Wall

In the  meantime, photographers will have to use some indirect routes. While some of the companies from which BrightQube sources its images have the kind of acceptance standards that could block non-professionals, BrightQube does divide its inventory into two collections. ?Everyday? images are microstock photos sourced from Dreamstime; ?professional? images come from everyone else. The lack of exclusivity in microstock means that the service offers photos from just one low-cost royalty-free site: buyers looking for ?everyday? photos would likely end up looking at a wall made up of identical photos.

The easiest way for a photographer to get their photos onto BrightQube?s wall then will be to submit them to Dreamstime, giving the company an important advantage if the service takes off. It would also help to make sure that the photos show the right subjects. According to Lee, the  most popular keywords currently being sought by buyers are ?woman,? ?couple,? ?young,? ?business? and ?wildlife? ? broad enough categories to suit most photographers.

The remaining question then is whether the service will take off. One of the reasons put forward by Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, to explain the collapse of his company?s stock division was the subscription model that locked buyers into companies that they?ve used in the past; changing sources in the middle of a month risked a financial penalty. That?s still a challenge that BrightQube will have to overcome. At the moment, they?re not sharing their sales figures though so it?s impossible to gauge how well they?re doing that.

Even if BrightQube itself doesn?t turn out to be the future of stock photography though, it?s likely that future will include faster searching, a neater display? and the consolidation of stock libraries.