Stock photography has officially achieved critical mass in the absurdity department. I grant you, stock photographers are as much instruments of the marketplace as any other professional service provider and are therefore subject to the whims of the focus groups, the advertising big wigs, the ebb and flow of the dollars that keep them knee-deep in lenses and strobes. But when was the last time you saw a product advertised by a stock photograph and thought to yourself, That could totally be me in that picture?

There you are, holding a slice of kiwi in front of each eye, like any normal Tuesday, right? You look so happy about this kiwi you could make a coke addict jealous. The look on your face is one of such unbridled joy, such boundless euphoria, it would be hard for any bystander not to want your life at that moment.

Dear stock photographers… Quit it!

I’m not going to try to say that pictures of women ecstatically eating salad, men jumping up in the air in business suits, or families in pastel clothing not looking at each other are unnecessary or devoid of value. Quite to the contrary, if the market demands photos of people just about to take a bite of something delicious with a look of drug-induced bliss on their perfectly lit faces, that is what the market shall receive.

No, I’m only saying, really, seriously, don’t we have enough of these yet? Where’s the originality, where’s the inspiration? Where’s the creativity, people?!

The ad agencies are just as much to blame for this, flipping through their iStockPhoto dot coms and their Getty libraries and always choosing the group of conveniently diverse people huddled around a clipboard with blank paper on it instead of something, oh I don’t know, realistic.

Cracked does a phenomenal job of pointing out just how ridiculous and profuse some of these archetypical images have become, in the article linked below. Just a word of warning: there is some coarse language, which is uncommon for my blog, and is the only reason I mention it.

• The 12 Most Baffling Genres of Stock Photo, Explained, via Cracked.com

Have you run across some ridiculous stock photography lately? Do you make ridiculous stock photography? Leave a comment and tell us all about it.

It is easy to say that we are “standing at the crossroads.” Occasionally it’s even true, but the expression sounds so important, it evokes such responsibility, that it’s hard for scientists, technologists, journalists, historians, economists, and futurists to hold back the urge, even if the decision to be made is minor, the outcome arbitrary.

So recognize that it is with a full understanding that I say to you, right now, we stand at the crossroads of creativity. We’ve stood here before, we will stand here again, but I can say categorically that we stand here now and it is an important and exciting time to be a photographer.

To our left lies the path toward a technological utopia, a world where anything can be achieved in post-processing, where your creative vision can be phoned in from the desktop. On October 19th, Lytro announced the release of the Lytro “light field” camera. A digital camera smaller than a TV remote that allows you to take a picture and choose a focal point later.

The Lytro camera adds “focal point” to the list of characteristics that can be changed through software long after the photo has been taken. Among those are now white balance, tone curve, color balance, overexposure (to a degree), lens distortion, and likely more that I’m having trouble coming up with right now.

To our right lies the path toward a simpler time, toward the nexus of art and craft where technology assists in some small fashion the mind and hands of the artist, whose vision is crisp and whose execution is informed by experience. In September of last year, Leica released their second digital camera, the M9, a camera with so few features it seems, at first glance, a cataclysmic engineering gaffe.

The M9 is an 18 megapixel digital camera with no auto-focus, no single-lens reflex or through-the-lens view, and a metering system that barely qualifies as a “system” at all. It essentially puts a NASA-quality full-frame 35mm sensor behind a camera from the 1950s.

Though these two events do not precisely coincide on the calendar, they are so perfectly juxtaposed as to appear planned. The Lytro asks a photographer to think less—about focus, at least—and provides the software tools to create images with perfect focus. The Leica M9 asks a photographer to take back the responsibilities that have been held firmly by technology for the past decade or more and gives the photographer nothing beyond exquisite glass and one of the best digital sensors on the market.

To accept the Lytro as the future of photography is to embrace an art practically devoid of error. Conversely, to accept the Leica M9 as the future of photography is to embrace human imperfection.

Creativity has never been, and surely will never be, stifled by progress. No tool, not even the Lytro, can extinguish the creative spirit. Light field technology joins the ranks of tools like RAW format and Photoshop, neither of which suffocated any artist that I know of. Quite to the contrary, precision has historically led to new frontiers of expression as Ansel Adams demonstrated by forming his f/64 group and defying the unfocused, painterly style prevalent at the time with his staggeringly sharp and detailed images.

Nevertheless, and at the risk of sounding unintentionally critical of Ansel Adams, there is always a human element in art and the less you can perceive of the craft, the further a work creeps from an embodiment of human spirit to a science of human mind. Surely an image of social gravity executed with infinite precision, lacking nearly any flaw, is nevertheless the vision of its creator. But is content, devoid of interpretation, the sole measure by which expression should be judged?

The Lytro camera is a tool that frees the artist from one more shackle, but does it also take away one more opportunity for the artist to express their humanity?

The Leica M9 is a tool that says to the artist, Realize your vision, control for yourself nearly every aspect of your work’s creation, and when you fail to perform at the level of a machine, burn the machine. It is a camera for those who see beauty in the flaws, and there is a purity and a nobility to that.

Descending from the clouds for a moment, I should also mention that the Lytro camera is now on sale for about $400 ($500 if you want it in bright red), and that the Leica M9 can be found for almost $7,000, without a lens. I mention this because I expect people to call me out for comparing apples to oranges. Believe me, I already know.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

• The Lytro camera, from Lytro.com
• Lytro Launches, via The Online Photographer
• Leica M9 Hands-on Review, from dpreview
• An M9 in Paris, via Luminous Landscape, an in-depth review

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Chris is quick to humbly share his experience and tips for aerial kite photography on his website (graciously hosted by Berkeley!)

I was blown away by the evolution of Chris’s camera rigs, which grew from fixed harnesses with rudimentary mechanical timers based on elastic bands, Silly Putty, and disposable cameras, to what he now uses, a remote-controlled, servo motor-driven, three-axis robot.

It’s definitely not commonplace for someone to possess both a grasp of electronic and mechanical engineering and a hawk-eye for artistic composition. Chris Benton has both.

Part Two: Cars

Aside from being an avid photographer, I admit to a streak of BMW fanboyism. When it comes to sports cars that are still solid daily drivers that make you feel like you’ve personally discovered the center of the universe and you’re sitting directly within it, nobody does it better than BMW.

To hype the release of their latest creation, the Z4 Roadster, BMW hired artist Robin Rhode to dip the Z4’s tires in multi-colored paints and drive it around like a fingerpainting on a warehouse scale. This was one of the most indulgent marketing campaigns I could think of.

I realize this isn’t strictly photography-related, but it is certainly art-related. If you feel gypped, go look at these photographs from the event

And here is a pretty cool video of how they put this thing together:

The next time you’re out shooting, or sitting around the house thinking about how next to use that studio space you set up in the basement, or the garage, or the attic… Think about breaking out of the box and doing something completely different. Robin Rhode did, and I think it came out pretty well.

My approach to inspiration is not to chase it; I tend to walk around in a place or idly browse others’ works until the desire to create something strikes. Still, it’s nice to have a “toolbox” of tricks to get you past those creative lulls in life. According to psychologist Jonathan Schooler (no, really, that’s his actual name), daydreaming is one possible answer.

Well, if you know you’re doing it, that is.

From Boston.com (Jonah Lehrer):

“If your mind didn’t wander, then you’d be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded.”

And who wouldn’t want to time travel? The key, though, is self-awareness of your wandering mind. The study concluded that people who were able to recognize when they were daydreaming demonstrated more of a predilection to creativity than those who were only able to identify their daydreams after they happened.

When I read this story I began thinking about my own daydreaming habits. I think I can say with certainty that I absolutely know when I’m daydreaming… Because I love it. There’s nothing like taking a little break from reality now and then!

Despite photography’s firm basis in reality—capturing real light reflecting off of real objects—it is in so many ways an escape from reality, and an art form that can benefit from your daydreams just as much as any other.

So the next time you find yourself staring off into the distance and traveling mentally through time and space, don’t pull yourself back down to Earth so quickly.

Via Lifehacker, via Boston.com

After the jump, more of Dan’s rantings followed by more of my rantings, hopefully to end with a meaningful conclusion… But no promises.

Dan Heller is a prolific stock and travel photographer and a somewhat prolific writer as well. His experiences with the Creative Commons began in the software and technology arena, but his latest article is very much aimed at the stock photography business world. Although it gets off to a good start and presents valid and convincing arguments from a business perspective, it soon begins to lose its footing and creep down a slippery slope into generalities. It is there that I have the most to say, so I will preface this essay with the concession that the Creative Commons licensing structure may very well be eroding the business of selling photographs, even though I think Dan’s reaction is somewhat alarmist even in that regard.

Before I begin to wax philosophical, let me examine the first concrete example Dan provides of the Creative Commons doing harm to photographers and their customers. He describes a hypothetical situation in which a photograph is misappropriated from a private photographer who has withheld use rights (“all rights reserved”). A thief (described in this case as a “12-year-old”) removes any watermarks or copyright notices and places the image on Flickr or another photo sharing site under a Creative Commons license. A business with a need for such a photo simply uses it, conforming to the rules of use set out in the Creative Commons license under which it was (illegally) published.

The original photographer gets wind of this wrongful use and takes legal action against the business, ultimately winning damages up to $30,000 in a clear case of copyright infringement. In Dan’s example, the thief gets away clean because chasing him down would probably cost more than what might be recovered from him, though he is still legally culpable. The business, having been burned in court for many times the cost of legally licensing the image, sets a policy of avoiding Creative Commons work from then on. It’s a pretty good example, except for a few glaring holes:

• Any photographer who posts his work online at a resolution that would be considered even remotely usable to a business customer is setting himself (or herself) up for disaster. As I have stated in previous articles about watermarking (Protecting Your Digital Rights), the low pixel count of an online gallery image should serve as adequate protection against any use that may otherwise be a considerable source of licensing revenue. For example, a kid who prints out your gallery image and wallpapers his bathroom with it is not someone who would have paid you fair licensing fees in the first place. Similarly, a business willing to place your photograph at web resolution into any publication of merit is not likely to be a discerning and profitable client for you. Fundamentally, you have a responsibility to police the wrongful use of your work, but from a pure business perspective, misappropriated web-resolution gallery images shouldn’t be considered a financial or professional liability, even in the cases where your watermark or copyright information are wrongfully removed.
• Dan seems to imply that by avoiding any Creative Commons licensed image, the business in question has now become a less likely consumer of photographers’ work. It seems more plausible to me that they will avoid using images off of photo sharing sites altogether and become more likely to purchase licenses directly from photographers or agencies, which is actually a benefit to those photographers who sell independently and through organizations like Comstock, Getty, or iStockPhoto. In this way, Creative Commons has benefited professional photographers even if it has damaged its own goals.
• If one of the goals of Creative Commons was to provide a more robust licensing structure for salable work such as stock photography, then they have surely failed themselves in that regard. My interpretation of their goal, however, was to catalyze the evolution of culture by aiding creative people in sharing their work with others who may be apt to build upon it or to disseminate it further. To my mind, the Creative Commons has little place in business, and to claim that they have harmed their integrity by doing a disservice to the business of selling creative work is to overlook the nature of their organization.

Dan goes on to say:

Photographs only take 1/250 of a second to make, and they can be made available online instantly. There are billions upon billions of them online, with millions being added daily. Monitoring and enforcement of CC licensing for photos is unrealistic, unmanageable, and highly prone to both non-compliance by licensees, and to fraudulent attributions by others. This, in turn, degrades the integrity and reliability of the CC system, thereby compromising confidence in it.

First off, as I mentioned in bullet #1 above, any work placed online in a form that is usable to a discerning potential customer, no matter what license or rights for use are expressed in, on, or around the image, is a gaping hole in the hull of your ship, pure and simple. Second, the monitoring and enforcement of any licensing for virtually any work is functionally unmanageable. If you presume that people are misappropriating your web-resolution images for any legitimate use that could represent lost revenue for you, then you must face the possibility that this is already happening to your “all rights reserved” images, because the only thing protecting them is probably a watermark and a bit of EXIF data. This is why technologies such as Digimarc were created; to track the potentially hundreds or thousands of anonymous misuses of your intellectual property, no matter what license was applied to them.

So Dan’s point is actually that restrictive Creative Commons licenses are harmful because they are easily confused with less restrictive ones, especially to an increasingly technology-bewildered marketplace, whereas “all rights reserved” is very clear. I say again, Creative Commons has little place in business, so if you are selling your work, don’t use a Creative Commons license. Reserve all rights and make individual exceptions where appropriate.

Dan then asserts that Creative Commons is simply adding noise to an already complicated world of digital law. He may be right about that, but his reasoning is tenuous at best. The example he uses is from a talk given by David Pogue, a journalist for the New York Times. Pogue essentially asks a group of 500 people whether they think downloading a copyrighted movie or album is “wrong,” and only a handful of people raise their hands. In a world where 1% of people recognize the legal liability of copying creative work that is under full and complete reservation of use rights, how can Creative Commons possibly make the situation any worse? Assuming that Pogue’s 500 people were a statistically representative group, that would mean that 99% of the American population will copy your photographs without a second thought, no matter what you do.

Creative Commons is meant to grease the wheels of the creative machine (notice how “creative” is in their name?), to allow your work to become a part of something more than itself, to contribute to derivative creations, to promote yourself through the spirit of sharing. Dan says that photographs “serve no foundation for anything—they are their own beginnings and endings at once, and provide no opportunity for new development, services, or growth.” Such a naive, business-oriented statement deeply insults me as an artist. Of course photographs serve as a foundation! Not only are photographs inspirational to artists in photography and in other media, but in this atmosphere of digital art, the media has become much less important than the subject matter. Photography as an art form is more pliable and evolutionary than ever before, and we would be fools to try to resist that.

In his article, Dan goes on to say that Flickr is damaging our industry by promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses and doing a fairly ham-handed job of explaining what the licenses mean and what risks are inherent in using them. On that count, I am wholly in agreement with him. I think that Flickr was originally created as a sort of “MySpace for pictures” and was expected to be populated with careless snapshots of kittens playing with balls of yarn. It surely is populated with a great deal of such images, however, as its popularity has skyrocketed it has drawn in countless very serious hobbyists and professionals with intellectual property to defend.

Now I get to quote myself, which is always fun:

It’s always, always your responsibility as a creator to understand the full extent of the concessions granted by a license you release your work under. If you decide you want to use a Creative Commons license, you should actually read it. Not just the “human deed,” but the full text. If you don’t understand the license… Don’t use it!

Does Flickr bear the burden of explaining these licenses to its users? Yes, I think they are responsible for being conscientious communicators of the message of Creative Commons and of the repercussions and/or implications of selecting certain options on their own website. Are they legally vulnerable in connection to the way they handle the licenses now? Perhaps. Who’s fault is it if someone’s photograph, posted under a free-use Creative Commons license is used in business for significant financial benefit of a third party? The photographer. As a creator, you have the last word when it comes to the use of your work, so be as cynical and discriminating as you can bear to be.

I do not believe that the existence of the Creative Commons, nor its use by photographers and other artists, is detrimental to any professional creative industry. Though it may add confusion to an already troubled and labyrinthine forest of copyright law, and may seem a target of convenience for burgeoning professionals who mistakenly allowed their work to be used without consent, the core mechanics of licensing creative work have not changed. This is both an exciting and confusing time for digital media creators, but it remains our responsibility to act with informed judgment.

Before I close, I would like to thank Dan Heller for taking the time to write such a thorough analysis of Creative Commons from the stock perspective, which was a viewpoint conspicuously missing thus far from most discourse. His article did serve to expose a lot of interesting licensing issues that are hot-button topics for professionals nowadays, especially anyone participating in Flickr as a promotional tool.

Sometimes, though, inspiration doesn’t come. That’s when a few little tricks can come in handy to help you see the world differently, or to add interest to otherwise mundane surroundings. These are just ideas; they won’t always work, and there’s no guarantee you’ll even like them, but here they are anyway, for your approval.

$random:right$

My favorite piece of advice, which is often suggested by photography teachers (and art teachers in general), is to change your altitude. Get higher up, or get lower down. Granted, it’s not always possible to get higher up, but you can always kneel or even lie down on the ground. Once you’re up there (or down there), look around. Look straight up, look straight down. You may see things differently.

The second trick that can give your compositions more interest is to change the autofocus point on your camera. If you are using a digital SLR that has multiple autofocus points, try setting it to use the one on the far left or the far right of the frame, rather than smack in the center. I admit that I tend to use the center AF point 99.9% of the time, and even though I often focus and then shift the camera to the left or the right before releasing the shutter, setting the AF point explicitly on one side of the frame will force you to think off-balance. It’s a good thing to get used to.

$random:left$

If you’re out during the day and the sky is bright (or overcast, which is even better), don’t forget the possibility of making silhouettes. Even the most common subjects can be exciting as silhouettes, especially against a rippling, cloudy sky. This was covered on the Digital Photography School blog (How to Photograph Silhouettes) very recently and it reminded me of what a powerful technique it can be.

If you have any creative lenses, sometimes strapping one of them on at random times can help you see things you would’ve missed. When I say “creative” lenses, I mean lenses that don’t reproduce a scene faithfully, but that distort it in some way. My favorite creative lenses are the Canon 15mm fisheye and the Lensbaby 3G. I don’t own any tilt/shift lenses, but those would also be candidates, as well as effects filters. If you don’t have an SLR camera, or don’t have any creative lenses, shoot through a glass! Despite what photography purists may try to tell you, art isn’t always about making the sharpest image possible.

If you have any of your own tips for getting creative in the field, share them in a comment! And remember, as a wise man once told me, you shoot what you shoot.