2016 wrap-up: ProCounter

We hit the ground running in 2016. As it turned out, our very first issue in early January covered many of the themes which would continue to be part of the agenda through the year.

accreditedOne of those which was to gain unwelcome mainstream media coverage was professional photographers behaving badly in all sorts of ways: ripping off clients, not showing up for weddings, not delivering images, stealing hire equipment, touching up models, poor quality, etc. We suggested several times through the year that some organisation – and that would be the AIPP – needed to step up and defend the majority of the professional photographer community who behave ethically and have the requisite skills.

Hopefully, the launch late in 2015 of the AIPP’s Accredited Professional Photographer program has given it a greater incentive to throw itself into the public debate.

Australians Jake Reeder took out the youth category in the Hasselblad Masters and James Smart won the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest.

On the business trends front we introduced Australia to PICR – a kind of Uber for photographers based out of the US. By the middle of the year it had crashed and burned but a local version – Snappr – emerged and is still operating (‘Book now from $59!’)

Not a million miles away in terms of pre-payment, we also wrote about Lisa Saad’s innovative ‘rate card’ approach to running a studio.  But one would have more confidence in pre-paying for the services of a Professional Photographer of the Year winner and her colleagues than someone offering a one-hour fashion shoot for $79!

Nikon announced the D500 and the D5. Lexar introduced its first portable SSDs – which we believe will begin to supercede HDDs in 2017 as the price drops and capacity rises.

Potato by Kevin

Potato #345 by Kevin Abosch.

Also in January we wrote the first of a couple of articles about renewed interest in film-based photography. And we reported the sale for around $1.5 million of a tastefully lit image of a potato – a mere pittance compared to the $7.8 mil trousered by expat Australian photographer/entrepreneur Peter Lik the world’s self-described ‘most famous photographer, most sought-after photographer, most awarded photographer’, and ‘one of the most important artists of the 21st century’.

 

 

February
Lead story in February, and one of the big local stories for the year was the divorce between the AIPP and Canon when the later unilaterally announced it was dropping its support of the APPAs. Our coverage of this story was by far the most robust and comprehensive in the industry – if we say so ourselves.  As it happened, the withdrawal of Canon proved a real benefit for the AIPP. It was able to work with Nikon and other sponsors such as Epson to deliver a successful annual conference and APPA judging.

A 550 percetn increase in media coverage followed the departure of Canon as APPA sponsor.

A 550 percent increase in media coverage followed the departure of Canon as APPA sponsor.

The AIPP’s suspicions that Canon wasn’t really pulling its weight in delivering positive promotion of the APPAs was proved true later in the year when the AIPP’s new PR manager, Kristina Keaney,  was able to show a 550 percent increase in media coverage for professional photography’s major national awards.

We looked at the exchange rate, speaking to a range of distributors who predicted price rises of around 10 – 15 percent in the coming months.

John Gollings was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to architectural photography.

South Australia’s Academy Schools Photography replaced its silver halide printing equipment with a stable of 13 Epson Surelab D3000 commercial inkjet photo printers. The clever order management software developed by Independent Photo Supplies’ David Slade for this installation featured on the Epson stand at Photokina later in the year. As did David!

Canon announced April availability of its new full frame EOS 1DX MkII. Nikon delayed the launch of the already announced D500. Pentax announced it was coming out with a full frame DSLR, the K1.

Both Sigma and Tamron announced new premium lenses, putting further pressure on the Canikon business model which has until now seen professional grade Canon and Nikon lenses command monopolist premiums. We predict the price differential between the Sigma and Tamron alternatives and the twice-as-expensive Canon, Nikon and Sony branded premium lenses to reduce in 2017. Ain’t competition grand!

Nikon innovated with three interesting-looking DL compacts featuring larg(ish) sensors, fast, high quality optics, DSLR-type functionality and SnapBridge connectivity. We are still waiting for them to see retailers’ shelves 10 months on.

March
Our first issue for March lead with an extensive feature on birth photography, coinciding with the AIPP introducing a Code of Professional Practice for Birth Photography.

Permission is required from all medical staff who appear in photos. Many may not want to be photographed while working their job. Letting staff know their faces will remain outside the frame allows them to concentrate on the job. Source: Supplied. Photo: Victoria Berekmeri

Permission is required from all medical staff who appear in photos. Many may not want to be photographed while working their job. Letting staff know their faces will remain outside the frame allows them to concentrate on the job. Source: Supplied. Photo: Victoria Berekmeri

Kodak, once a respected name in the industry, launched Kodakit, its own pathetic, rent-seeking version of Uber for photography in Singapore, with plans to launch in 148 cities ‘in the next few months’. But it was another gold-plated fail for a company which hasn’t had a decent original idea in years.

The World Press Photo Contest (WPP) organisers revealed that 16 percent of the 174 finalists in the penultimate round were disqualified for manipulating their images, a continuation of a rear-guard struggle against Photoshopping in photojournalism. The previous year saw 20 percent of finalists disqualified and a winning photographer stripped of his award. So the trend is positive – but only just.

As first flagged in ProCounter back in November 2014, Sony Australia announced it was launching a support program for professional photographers, called Sony Pro Support. Too late for Australian photographer Matt Granger, whose 16-minute video on what he saw as Sony’s horrible service attracted worldwide interest.

We put together a report – based on a financial report lodged with ASIC – on the financial health of AIPP. Not too bad, thank you, with a handsome $600K+ in the bank.

April
In April we were the first with the news that The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) had announced that from late September commercial operators piloting a drone weighing less than 2kg will not need regulatory approval. Our comprehensive story on the rise of the photographic drone featured comments from CASA spokespeople and photographers already working with the new aerial tool.  We also looked at DJI’s efforts to head regulators off at the pass with new safety features built into its newly-released DJI Phantom 4.

Drones are in demand for real estate photography. Pic: Dronzhead.

Drones are in demand for real estate photography. Pic: Droneheadz.

PSPA, the Australian schools photographers group, switched allegiance from the US-based PMA – which to all intents and purposes was winding up – to the AIPP, further strengthening the AIPP’s membership base, reach and influence in the industry.

weddingWe had a close look at the wedding photography business, which seemed to be blighted by a series of horror stories about inept professionals on the one hand, and the uncle with a DSLR on the other.

The Kumamoto earthquake began to have an impact on the supply of cameras, with the Sony camera sensor factory badly hit and out of action for months. Nikon was the most upfront of the camera makers in conceding supply problems. The others, including Sony itself, just ducked for cover. (‘Crisis? What crisis?’)

Maxwell International Australia, distributors for Lowepro, Joby, Tamron, Velbon, Lexar and a number of other photo-oriented brands, announced it was to shut up shop at the end of April.

Hasselblad announced its all-new H6D medium format camera, ‘completely rebuilt with new technical components and an all new electronic platform.’

May
We were the only photographers’ website in Australia to tackle the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to dilute the copyright laws, in which ‘fair use’ would be a justification for using someone else’s copyrighted works (so the notorious Richard Prince’s theft of images would be legal in Australia) and ‘orphan works’ – essentially any image for which an owner couldn’t be found – would be up for grabs.

A Richard Prince 'original'. Source: Richard Prince/Instagram

A Richard Prince ‘original’. Source: Richard Prince/Instagram

The AIPP followed up in June. With the assistance of Chris Shain, the board advisor on advocacy who worked alongside IP lawyer, Ian MacDonald, the AIPP made a six-page submission criticising the draft and defending copyright law as it currently stands.

The submission claimed the PC report had ‘no understanding of copyright-based industries’; was ‘informed by a barely disguised anti-copyright and anti-creative bias’ and had no evidence to support its conclusions. A welcome indication that the AIPP seemed up for playing a more robust role in public debate.

Chris Shain later spoke at a Productivity Commission public hearing in Sydney on Australian intellectual property arrangements, in a final attempt to dissuade the commission from recommending a Fair Use exception.

Photo: Brett Naseby

Photo: Brett Naseby

We also looked at how professional photographers in the bush were faring, finding that the characteristic spirit of versatility of country folk was alive and well, as professional photographers cast about to find ways to make themselves useful.

Noboro Akahane, president of Ricoh Imaging Company flew to Australia to take part in the CR Kennedy & Co launch of the full-frame, 36-megapixel Pentax K-1 DSLR. Prior to the launch, he spoke with ProCounter. 

We were first in Australia to address what was to become a retouching scandal involving ‘Afgan Girl’ photographer Steve McCurry, when it was noticed there was a lot of Photoshopping out of details – even people – in his images.

McCurry claimed he was a ‘visual story-teller’ these days rather than a photojournalist, so the rules didn’t apply. It then emerged, as they say at the footie, that ‘he’s been doing it all day, ref!

June
In June we looked at the new breed of professional photographer, the ‘social influencer’. ‘They…blur the line between what might be considered professional photography…and celebrity endorsement’, we wrote. ‘They also blur the line between honesty and deceit.’

25-year old Australian influencer, Sara Donaldson, has influenced for Mercedes Benz and Qantas. ‘They read my blog, they follow my Instagram and they actually buy what I tell them that is trending, so I know that my audience, when I put something up, they actually do convert into sales,’ she told The Business. Source: Sara Donaldson/Instagram

25-year old Australian ‘influencer’, Sara Donaldson, has ‘influenced’ for Mercedes Benz and Qantas. ‘They read my blog, they follow my Instagram and they actually buy what I tell them that is trending, so I know that my audience, when I put something up, they actually do convert into sales,’ she told The Business. Source: Sara Donaldson/Instagram

We reported that the nation’s two dedicated photography centres, the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) and the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), lost funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. On a more positive note, the State Library of NSW The State Library of NSW was planning to digitise the entire Max Dupain archive. 

There were developments in the story about the Fairfax image archive, which seemed to be stranded in Little Rock, Arkansas after a deal to have it digitised went wrong.

According to the agreement with Fairfax, Rogers Photo Archive (RPA) was to pay $300,000 for up to 8 million original photographs and negatives from Fairfax publications. After they were scanned the ‘digital library’ was to be delivered to Fairfax, and RPA would assume ownership of the physical materials. Fairfax would own the digital copies. Only it hasn’t happened.

Fortunately, not everything has been Rogered. Two million negatives from The Age have been scanned and returned. The Age print collection never left Australia, according to Fairfax. Fairfax NZ’s print collection and the SMH print collection were last heard of in the US. And the last we heard of the principal of Rogers Photo Archive, John Rogers, was that he is to face a $10 million FBI-instigated fraud charge next February.

The Head On Festival faced a crisis when it was excluded from being a component of Sydney’s VIVID extravaganza due to Canon apparently enforcing its exclusive sponsorship rights against the not-for-profit, largely volunteer organisation. Success was extra sweet, then, when Head On nonetheless showcased hundreds of exhibitions featuring 877 photographers’ work across 93 spaces – all on a shoestring budget.

Photo: Stephen Godfrey

Photo: Stephen Godfrey

Organiser –  and all round great guy – Moshe Rosenzveig estimated the festival’s audience soared into the millions, exposing photography from emerging and established Australian photographers to the general public.

And it lives on in 2017! 

At the Mossgreen Gallery the Max Dupain (1911-1992): Estate Photographs auction saw 500 original photographs, inherited by his son, photographer Rex Dupain, auctioned with total sales of $1.67 million, and a large print of the iconic Sunbaker selling for $105,400 with buyers premium.

We upset the delicate sensibilities of the APPA judging establishment with a story on the 2016 NSW Epson Professional Photographer of the Year Awards. This saw Sydney-based fine art photographer and graphic designer Alison Lyons scoop the pool, with a Gold Distinction and three Golds for the four images in the portfolio she entered in the Illustrative category. Although she was the only entrant in any category to achieve four gold awards, and was a mile in front in points, she didn’t take out the NSW PPY award. What’s that saying about justice needing to be seen to be done?

But this was just the entree when it came to PPY controversies. Ken Duncan stirred up a hornets’ nest in September by criticising the AIPP’s direction with its national Professional Photography Awards, after the top prize was awarded to what he described as ‘photo illustrations’.

One of the four entries in Lisa Saad's APPA-winning portfolio. Source: AIPP

One of the four entries in Lisa Saad’s APPA-winning portfolio. Source: AIPP

‘The initials obviously no longer stand for the Australian Professional Photography Awards so maybe they really need to call them what they have become – the “Australian Professional Photoshop Awards”,’ he wrote.

Ken Duncan has campaigned to differentiate between ‘photo realism’ and ‘photo illustration’ for some time. He launched the REAL Australian Landscape Awards last year with the aim to distinguish the two emerging genres of landscape photography.

Needless to say, Ken was also scolded by the APPA establishment for his outspokenness.

Oh, and back to the ‘naughty photographer’ theme. (Or should that be ‘trope’?) Consumer Protection, the West Australian government’s fair trading and consumer rights body, has told couples to exercise caution when hiring a wedding photographer, citing 55 consumer complaints lodged in the past 12 months in that state alone.

July
In our first issue of the new financial year we had a look at three businesses doing professional photography differently – Snappr (which we have already encountered) GownTown (graduate photography) and Kapcher.

We reported on a presentation by Ron Kubara, Noritsu’s director, Worldwide Strategic Sales and Planning, who gave an unequivocal endorsement for dry inkjet printing over silver halide (AgX), effectively laying down the gauntlet to photo labs which hadn’t done so already to switch. To inkjet printing.

He said that the high colour gamut and resolution of smartphones, tablets and even the latest TV monitors, were leaving people increasingly unimpressed with photographic prints from silver halide printers.

‘Why aren’t people printing from their phones? Maybe it’s because the picture looks better on the phone.’ he asserted. Kind of obvious, but easy to overlook.

August
By August it was becoming clearer that the Kumamoto earthquakes had hit camera manufacture hard, although with the exception of Nikon, getting information from the camera companies in plain English was near impossible. Sony sent ProCounter a statement confidently confirming everything would be back to normal by Christmas and then insisted it wasn’t used – which didn’t exactly inspire confidence! Here’s what US website Image Resource – about the only other outlet besides ProCounter which seemed interested – had to say about the matter: The industry didn’t lose just 36 days or so, it lost more than four months of production. A third or so of an entire year’s output. 

That lovable giant octopus Getty Images found itself defending the indefensible when US photographer Carol Highsmith discovered the stock agency had lifted 18,755 of her public domain photos and started licensing them.

Idaho farm and field. Carol M. Highsmith, June 19, 2005. (Source Library of Congress)

Idaho farm and field. Carol M. Highsmith, June 19, 2005. (Source Library of Congress)

And damned if they didn’t get away with it, using the classic ‘Finders Keepers’ defence.

September

Hillvale - not your average shopfront.

Hillvale – not your average shopfront.

We featured Hillvale, an independent film-only photo lab in Melbourne and one of the first photographic businesses to cater to what we termed in the story the younger ‘alt photography’ demographic of photographers. (We have banned ‘hipster’ from the ProCounter lexicon.)

We had a correspondent at Photokina, the indefatigable John Swainston, who sent reports from the Kolnmesse exhibition halls on media day and concluded with a wrap-up. And there was much, much more. Our coverage of Photokina was unparalleled in Australia.

We also dove into the detail of the wet lab/dry lab argument (see July) with a report on a panel discussion at the IPI conference in Las Vegas in June.

October
Coinciding with new CASA rules on flying drones and the launch of the DJI Phantom IV, we ran an overview of the market, once again with input from CASA and an interview with Craig Parry, who won International Landscape Photograph of the year with one of his drone shots. This was followed up by self-publicist extraordinaire Nick Xenophon, who predicted that nothing good would come of CASA’s red-tape-cutting, anticipating a devastating mid-air collision with a plane.

The Great Ocean Road from above – by Zhongda Wang. Source: Flickr.com/zeropmel.

The Great Ocean Road from above – by Zhongda Wang. Source: Flickr.com/zeropmel.

Ken Duncan, fresh from his skirmishes on photo manipulation, met with NSW Premier Mike Baird to argue one of his other passions, the excessive permits and fees for commercial photography in public locations.

While the NSW government has set up a task force to look into the matter, and the premier has expressed sympathy with the plight of photographers, there is no sign of a new set of photography-friendly rules just yet. Maybe next year. Interestingly, Ken Duncan made the point that he wasn’t getting any support from the AIPP on the issue: ‘The AIPP went against me on this issue – they told me they couldn’t be seen siding with a view that breaks the law,’ Duncan said. ‘I feel like I may fight this alone, and I was very disappointed my own industry had this useless response to it. We’ve got to have a voice, and this is an issue we can all agree on.’

While the AIPP might be lodged firmly on the fence on commercial photography in public spaces, executive director Peter Myers came out swinging in defence of the AIPP Accredited Photographer program and against Snappr in an article he wrote for The Australian. ‘Booking photographers as you would an Uber is a threat to the concept of professional photography,’ he wrote.

November
In November we learned that the Federal Government didn’t see photography as a profession at all – more a lifestyle choice.  So the 63 percent of ProCounter readers who have a formal qualification in photography are simply pursuing a lifestyle choice, apparently.

Five Diploma-level photography courses will no longer be supported with student loan assistance under the Federal Government’s proposed overhaul to the Vocational Educational and Training (VET) FEE-HELP program. Among those were courses at Melbourne’s Photographic Studies College, which a few months earlier won the AIPP’s Australian Tertiary Photography Institution of the Year award for the sixth consecutive year.

Getty, having effectively monopolised mainstream photojournalism around the world and rendered its photographers nameless, decided to push into corporate PR and commercial photography via an offshoot called Verbatim. Award-winning Getty photographers who signed on as photojournalists were transformed overnight into commercial shooters: ‘With the launch of Verbatim, we are excited to expand how brands can access our unmatched photographer and videographer network and leverage the power of editorial photography to achieve their commercial aims,’ said a high-ranking Getty suit.

The World Press Photo people changed tack on the photo manipulation debate, deciding to run a parallel ‘no-holds-barred’ photo competition next year without all the rules. The new contest permits photos from ‘storytellers’ (a term Steve McCurry identifies with) using all the creative techniques under the sun to create a narrative – from posing and staging, to double exposures and stitched images.

The debate on restrictions on commercial photography took an interesting twist when Uluru Wedding Photography was launched. Commercial photography has been notoriously difficult in the Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park, due to the ‘Ulurules’. Uluru Wedding Photography is targetted at Asian – primarily Chinese – couples, in an effort to boost tourism to the Northern Territory. The business received a grant of $40,000 from the Government’s Big Ideas for Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park initiative. Strict guidelines on what can be photographed are still in place. And no Photoshop! Ken Duncan would be pleased.

Pic by George Frag, Uluru Wedding Photography.

Pic by George Fragopolous, Uluru Wedding Photography.

That other great monopolist of the photographic industry, Adobe, was finally being challenged at the end of 2016. We reported on three contenders which emerged at about the same time: Serif’s well-reviewed Affinity Photo, Macphun’s recently announced Luminar, and On1 Photo Raw are described across the board as ‘serious alternatives’ to the Photoshop/Lightroom/CC range.

With the price of the Adobe suite of products going up, GST now being applied, innovation having slowed to a crawl (why bother when you’ve locked the entire market into a monthly installment plan?), and potential new customers maybe not as rusted on to the venerable brand, could 2017 be the year that cracks start to appear in the Adobe fortress?

December
In Germany a court found against Facebook in a potentially ground-breaking copyright lawsuit for its policy of stripping out metadata in photos and thus obscuring right holders’ information. Effectively setting up circumstances where images can easily be claimed to be ‘orphan works’.

While only bound by German law in this instance, the social network has no borders. It would be challenging for Facebook to isolate Germany – or Germans – as the only users to retain metadata in photos. This is potentially good news for Australian photographers who would like to keep their metadata intact on Facebook.

…And now we are a few days off the end of the year, and there are two or three stories we’ve published in the last fortnight which could also be added to this summary of the year. We hope you’ve enjoyed the ProCounter website and newsletter this year.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Back in a few weeks.

 

 


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