The age-old question for pro-photographers: to find a niche, or to diversify? Yorkshire based We Shoot Bottles had decided the niche route is a winner for them.

The clue is the name when it comes to their business; anything that comes in bottle form of any shape or size they will shoot in their studio, from mouthwash to Reggae Reggae Sauce.

Simplicity is very much the key in the company’s outlook, sticking to the less is more theory, and existing purely on the Internet. In fact the entire website exists on a single page, capped at no more than 150 words.

Unusually for a photographic studio, all the pricing is clear and up front, £30 is the starting price, reducing to £20 for large quantities of bottle photography, with every shot retouched.

An example of photographers who in a harsh climate haven't bottled out when it comes to their business model.

If you read APE or PDNPulse, you'll be aware that US-based photography blogs are increasingly obsessed with newspaper and magazine circulation – not surprisingly, given the editorial market is in freefall, with the Boston Globe the latest title under threat, and others such as Portfolio, Christian Science Monitor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News all folding or going online only. And some old staples are looking very shaky.

Some people are ringing their hands with glee that the media establishment is crumbling, while others worry what will become of news if it's left to the personal bias of one-man bloggers. But one thing's for sure – newspapers and magazines need to up their game.

At BJP, we think that print has a future (otherwise we wouldn't be putting out a weekly magazine), if it plays to its benefits. The big question is, where will future revenues come from? Advertising is migrating online, but few would predict that online ads will make the same money (or are as effective) as print ads in their heyday. Some argue the industry needs to introduce micro-payments for content. But, IMHO, the horse has already bolted on that one. So, we're giving it away free online, searching for more and more hits, and crossing our fingers this won't all backfire on us some day soon.

But, surely, somewhere somebody's got to pay? And it's not just media companies worrying about how they got into paying to supply content for free. The fastest growing websites – based on social networking – are predicated on the same model.

"It can't go on like this," writes Simon Dumenco in Advertising Age. "The digital Robin Hoods can't keep redistributing the wealth forever, because eventually the wealth runs out. Investors get sick of propping up private ventures that don't have viable business models, and shareholders of public companies, like Google, get cranky about flushing cash down the drain."

So, there’s no keeping up with Getty and its multi-billion-dollar resources, right?

Experts in stock photography have been banging on about keyword tags for years, urging libraries to add concepts as well as specifics (such as subject and location) so that picture buyers can search for terms such as ‘spirit’ or ‘success’ and come up with something meaningful. And when they don’t find the right picture immediately, your tags should point them to a bunch of alternatives.

Last week we got a note about Getty’s latest Mini MAP (What Makes A Picture) report, titled “10 Simple Things about The Simple”, illustrating “a new visual language that connects with people’s concerns in the economic downturn”, along with a lightbox giving examples of how simplicity can be interpreted through stock imagery.

The lightbox features 10 pictures, including a man covered in mud, another smelling saplings in a garden shed, several images of children, and quite a nice photo of a feather floating on the surface of a lake at sunset.

This last image (#85155531) seemed to illustrate the concept best, so I clicked on it, and then pressed the tab “Find similar images” at the end of the keyword search terms (Feather, Simplicity, Nature, Horizontal, Outdoors, Finland, Water, Cloud, Sunset, Reflection, Idyllic, Solitude, Scenics, Beauty In Nature, Floating On Water, No People, Photography, Tranquility). From there I was given a choice of searching by Subject, People, Location, Style or Concept. I chose the latter, and clicked the Simplicity box.

The results kind of surprised me. The first recommendation is from the 2nd Annual National Kidney Foundation Celebrity Golf Classic, a grip-and-grin portrait of US figure skating champion Michelle Kwan at Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank, California. Next up is a close-up picture of grass, which better fits the bill. But then I’m offered two photos from Sandown Races. Another grass picture. Two more from the Golf Classic. An apple on grass. Sandown. Golf classic. Sandown. Golf Classic. And so on…

Interestingly, the most relevant images (grass, apple, etc) were also tagged under Photographer’s Choice – an initiative Getty introduced in 2006, which allows photographers to choose the images they want to submit, but charges them $50 per picture for the privilege.

One assumes they also do their own keywording, and it seems they’re doing a better job than Getty’s editors.

I also came across an interesting article by Jim Pickerell on Black Star Rising, in which he surveyed (in 2007) Getty contributors and found most were making much less money from the agency, despite posting up more images. And more relevant to this discussion, they also complained about Getty’s keywording and editing schedule.

“The keywording is terrible,” says one anonymous contributor, “and at times the image title is wrong, making all the keywords wrong. I must inspect images in new uploads and write Getty to fix the keywords which takes four weeks or more.”

Another contributor reports that, “edits have been taking three to seven months. Art directors and editors seem to have been assigned too many photographers. The ‘Traffic’ staff was fired in the restructuring of the company, and it seems that therefore it is another three to six months until the work appears ‘Live’ on the website, once I have turned it in final files to my art director. So it is now taking nine months to a year to get work ‘Live’ on the website”.

Going back to the image of the feather on a lake, if I’d clicked on a separate tab, “More images like this” (under Image Details, to the left of the photo), I was given much more relevant suggestions, mostly natural landscapes. A few were by the feather photographer, Nina Monkkonen, plus a couple of rather beautiful images by James D Rogers and Marc+Crumpler. But I was taken to these images via the Reflections and Beauty in Nature keywords, rather than a real concept, like ‘simplicity’. So, for example, if I’d been looking for a picture to illustrate a story on a subject like downsizing or paired-down living, I’m not sure how relevant they would be.

I think what this illustrates is that small (or one-man-band) agencies still have something to offer that the blue-chip stock libraries can’t provide – service, specialisation and relevance.

Meanwhile, one area where Getty really excels is in art directed material, and in the trends research it produces to inform these shoots. “10 Simple Things about The Simple” (download it here) is definitely worth a read, even if you’re not in the stock business (portrait, lifestyle, still life, ad, editorial and reportage shooters will find it interesting).

In brief, the report says:

• Conveying simplicity is difficult
• Simplicity is a value in itself – a humanistic aspiration
• ‘Simple is messy’. Think personal clutter rather than minimalism. It’s about the things that matter, rather than how they’re neatly ordered. (Reportage style is favoured for a more naturalistic look.)
• Think simple pleasures – work life/balance, craft, making things, nature, tradition and continuity. And most of all, think childhood.
• Simplicity is about sensuous, tactile pleasures – taking time to smell the roses (or plant samplings).
• Strip it down. Allow space for images. Cut out noise. Create simple compositions that bring subjects to the fore. And be bold with it.

When filmmakers take a guess at how the future will look like, in most cases paper has disappeared, with commuters reading their dailies on electronic papers (Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica spin-off, is the latest to show such possibilities). With today's economics woes, it appears that most newspapers will cease to exist in their print form in the next few years (even the Boston Globe and the New York Times are threatened).

However, today's announcement from Amazon could bring some relief to print journalists. This summer, Amazon plans to release the Kindle DX, an 9,7-inch portable reader. The DX, which is much larger than previous Kindle models, sports wireless capabilities and has been specifically designed to display newspapers, magazines and textbooks. In fact, copies of the reader will be subsidized by the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal for its subscribers. One caveat, said subscribers have to out of reach of their paper's delivery trucks.

Newspapers, if they accept to offer the readers to all their subscribers, could benefit greatly from the Kindle DX and subsequent electronic readers (News Corporation is said to be working on its own). Much like the iPod revolutionised the music market online, the Kindle DX could allow newspapers to go back to paid content without losing (a lot) of their readers.

For more information about the Kindle DX, click here.

Picture © Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi, the celebrated young Japanese photographer whose books have taken the art world by storm, will be in London next month to deliver a one-off workshop.

Celebrated for her almost childlike view of the world – expressed in loose, free-flowing edits of her simply composed pictures and published in photobooks such as Utatane (2002), Aila (2004) and Cui Cui (2005) – she will run a five-day workshop, organised by award-winning photographer Leonie Purchas.

‘My husband and I participated on an Antione d’Agata workshop organised by the Arles photo festival in France,’ says Purchas. ‘It provoked me to question my practice in an intense and accelerated way, and my work developed more rapidly than it had done through years of studying.

‘It’s a form of learning that I find exciting and feel is missing here in the UK. I now live in a large studio that was originally a fabric workshop. It seems the perfect, and most affordable place, to host our first treat, Rinko Kawauchi, who will be followed up in November by JH Engstrom.

‘The workshop is open to people for whom photography is their life, but not necessarily their profession. It is being organised by myself, Lina Brocchieri and Camilla Gore - two friends mad enough to believe in a not- for-profit dream…’
The event runs five days, from 01-05 June, in Stoke Newington, and costs £480. There are spaces for 10 people, with three currently still available.

Purchas is also organising a talk in which Kawauchi will be in conversation with Martin Parr at nearby Campbell Works. The event on the evening of 01 June costs £5, and spaces are limited. Email photo.workshops@yahoo.co.uk to book a place or to apply for the workshop.
For news on further events, visit here (which wasn’t live yet as we posted, but is due to be so soon).

Parr introduced Kawauchi to the British public when he guest edited BJP in 2004. He also wrote a piece on her, which is republished below:

Photography is a curious beast. Just when you think every permutation has been tried and that all new work looks like something we have seen before, along comes a photographer who can make us look and say: 'That's so simple, why hasn't any one thought of this before?'

Often critics dismiss this work as banal or just plain bad because, as with listening to new music, it takes a while to appreciate it. Memorable examples of this are Robert Frank's The Americans, 1959 and more recently William Eggleston's Guide, published and exhibited originally in 1976 to damming reviews from the critics. Nearly 25 years later Eggleston's work is correctly hailed as being a milestone in colour photography and he is praised the world over.

The young Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is another candidate for this role as her work is so distinctive. No other photographer takes images like hers and it is even difficult to work out her lineage and influences, as one can often do when viewing contemporary work.

I was so convinced about the importance of Kawauchi's work that I curated not just one but two shows of her work for the Arles festival this summer, where I was guest artistic director.

Although they were her first major shows outside Japan, she has gathered a strong following at home over the last few years.

Her first book Utatane was originally published in 2001 but is already in its seventh edition. Over 20,000 copies have been sold - though bear in mind that the Japanese are the biggest photography book-buying public in the world. Utatane and the follow up book Hanabi won the coveted Ihei Kimura prize for new photography.

So what is her subject matter and why are so many people excited by her work? Well the simple answer is that it concerns the pleasures and terrors of everyday life. She has a knack for photographing the simplest object, animal or person, revealing both a feeling of beauty and a sinister undertone.

I talked to Kawauchi in Arles and we discussed her work and career. Her start in photography was pretty conventional, picking up a camera for the first time on a school trip and finding herself drawn to the medium.

But it took her a time to realise she was a photographer not a cameraman - Kawauchi's rather charming definition of boring or commercial photographers (to put it bluntly).

When I asked how many photographers she thought there were in Japan, she hesitated and said 'a few'. But, surprisingly, Kawauchi also does quite a lot of commercial work, including a whole book to accompany a film. As she says: 'It's the final use of the image that counts, not the reason it was taken.'

Her work is distinctively Japanese, so I asked her if she liked to shoot outside Japan. 'Absolutely,' she replied. 'My subject matter is spiritual, not factual so I can photograph anywhere.'

For me the most compelling aspect of her work is the everyday terror she finds, and I ask if she is frightened by the world. She says she is, but adds: 'I have a switch in my head that I can turn on when I am working and this is how I can locate these feelings. When I am not working I turn it off.'

She believes that we all experience these feelings when we are children, and are first questioning the meaning of existence. She also believes that these feelings are latent in everybody, and that she almost has a responsibility to show these qualities to other people through her work.

At Arles I exhibited her most recent show and book Alia, as well as her first body of work. Alia roughly translates into English as 'birth', a subject that has interested Kawauchi for many years. For the project she photographed both animal and human births, using the internet to make contact with a small group of midwives who put her in touch with some expectant mothers. She won their confidence, and arranged to photograph the upcoming births.

Kawauchi says that birth contains a fascination for her, adding: 'It is something you don't see when you walk down the street, and I wanted to see it and photograph it.'

Asked if she wants a baby herself, she replies: 'Of course, doesn't everybody?'

In Arles the installation for Aila was very distinctive, a scatter of small full bled, frameless images on the wall, while the Utatane exhibition showed larger images placed mainly in a row. Kawauchi insisted on installing this exhibition herself, aided by her agent and book publisher.

But she is humble about her success, only stating that she must be a real 'photographer' now because so many people are interested in her work.

Kawauchi has a refreshing and disturbing innocence and I believe that we will hear her name much more frequently in the years to come.

All photographers know it now, it's becoming harder for everyone to find commissions and to make it in this industry. So, a lot of photographers are now turning to competitions and prizes to get their names out there. One UK-based company seems to be banking on this trend.

Duckrabbit, a new production company, is offering "fresh hope to the struggling editorial photograph community in the UK," it claims. Formed by photographer David White and ex-BBC Radio 4 documentaries producer Benjamin Chesterton, Duckrabbit, which just won a Pictures of The Year International Award and has been nominated for a Amnesty International Media Award, is introducing a series of training workshops.

The seminars, held at the Trinity Centre in Bristol, offer photographers tips about how to present their stories and win awards. "Photojournalism is far from dead, we just need to get smart about how we present our stories," says White.

You can check them out here: www.duckrabbit.info.

The police advises its officers that photography is not a crime:

“Given the City’s prominence as a tourist destination, practically all photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct. Since photography and/or videotaping is rarely unlawful, absent any other forms of criminality, an investigation of a report of suspicious photography or videotaping thought to be terrorism related is governed by [normal rules…]”

“Members of the service may not demand to view photographs taken by a person absent consent or exigent circumstances...”

Shame its only New York City cops.

These are the same police that lost lives on 9/11.

Can someone at The Met take note...

via APE

Today, Pentax unveiled its new flagship digital SLR camera this week, following the trend by adding HD video capture to its feature set, alongside an enhanced pixel count and ISO range.

Read our full article here: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=858028

Here are some official shots:

Researchers at Cambridge University have found that seven social networking websites failed to delete photos from their servers even when a user asked for them to be removed, the BBC writes.

The team put photos on 16 different websites, noted the direct links where the images were stored, deleted them, and finally came back 30 days later to see what had happened. On seven of the sites, using the direct links, the Cambridge University researchers found that the images had, in fact, not been deleted. Facebook is one of these sites (MySpace, hi5, Bebo, LiveJournal, Xanga, and SkyRock also failed the test).

However, Flickr, Photobucket, and Fotki removed photos within one hour, and Blogger, Picasa and Orkut within 48 hours. The biggest surprise is Windows' Live Spaces, which removed photos instantly.

Photographers, you have been warned.

Next month, it is widely expected that Olympus will unveil its Micro FourThird compact digital SLR. A prototype was first unveiled last year at Photokina, and the small interchangeable lens camera drew thousands of visitors. It looked like that:

Olympus was quick to point out that it was just a prototype and that the final model could be very different. However, it appears that Olympus could keep the compact aspect. A new feature on the Olympus website teases us with a complete history of the Olympus PEN line of cameras, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

The original PEN was released in 1959. While most models were fixed-lens cameras, the PEN F was a half-frame 35mm single-lens reflex cameras with interchangeable lenses. The half-frame led to a smaller image format, but also made the PEN F one of the smallest SLR ever produced.

Now, with the Micro FourThird technology designed by Olympus and Panasonic, the compactness of the PEN F could be reproduced in the digital age. Who's ready to bet the new camera will share the PEN name?

Dan Chung, who's living and working in China on an increasingly long-term basis, just called. He's shot an HD video campaign for Oxfam on the Canon 5D Mkii, the first HD video the charity has commissioned. Publicising the effects of climate change on three women's lives, it's moving stuff in more ways than one. Click here to see Sufia's story.

'Climate change is a really important issue for Oxfam this year, so we wanted to do something a bit different, with the ultimate aim of producing innovative content for our website,' says Oxfam's multimedia content editor Ben Beaumont. 'Everyone here is delighted with the results - the quality and depth of using a digital stills camera to do video really shines through. You need that look to make people stop and watch a film for two minutes, and to make them really feel what life is like for this community. People have told us they haven't seen anything like this from an NGO before.'

For more information, check out Oxfam's site. Oxfam has also posted the videos on YouTube.

Yesterday, we were reporting on rumours that the long-awaited first Olympus Micro FourThird camera could revive the Olympus PEN brand. Today, competing title Amateur Photographer has a similar report (you can check it out here). The magazine quotes Pen News Weekly, a Japanese trade magazine, as saying that Olympus' June announcement will be about a camera that features 'a considerably different outer design, that bears a close resemblance to the legendary Pen 18x24mm camera.'

Olympus president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa adds more details by saying that Olympus wants to appeal to customers that want a compact digital camera but with DSLR features. And he goes as far as to admit that Olympus has lost ground in the imaging business (ten years ago, Olympus was a leader in the digital camera market with its µ line).

Less than a month now before the new camera is unveiled (Olympus has already started advertising the new camera, teasing readers with the word: "Envy")

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to test the new Pentax K-7 digital SLR sporting an excellent HD video mode. Until we release our full review, here is one video shot in Soho. More videos will come soon...