For more information, read this post.

Thanks, and I appreciate your visit – please stop by my new domain and blog above.

This new series has over 40 images of a multi-generational Caucasian family preparing and enjoying a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner.  The grandparents, parents and children all join in creating and enjoying the meal, highlighted, of course, by the roast turkey.  They’re making crafts, garnishing the bird, watching tv, pouring wine and passing the potatoes.

I’ve tried to provide a wide variety of compositions here, both with the family looking at camera, and more candid ones.  Some simple processing, some a bit more edgy with alternative color.   The palette is mostly light, pastels and blues, with the darker cabinets to provide contrast.   These images would make great accompaniaments to blog posts or advertising campaigns about the holiday, or dining at home in general.

By the way, if you’re interested, the turkey was a real simple creation.  I used Alton Brown’s famous recipe as inspiration – keeping the same aromatics for inside the bird.   A stick of butter mixed with a few tablespoons of poultry mix, plus some extra sage and rosemary went under the breast and leg skin, and was rubbed on top as well.  Note, there’s a reason he suggests oil – the 500 degree first half hour made a lot of smoke with the butter, so I had to turn it down and cover with foil.  The occasional baste, and it was ready for photos 3 hours later.

Check these out and click the link at the bottom to see them all.  Thanks! (giving)

As you can see, most of the time I was flying using just natural light.  The kids were already antsy from having to dress up, and I didn’t want to waste more time then was necessary when I really wanted to spend my time on getting the right poses.  The shade of the house gave the pictures an early evening look, until some of the later in the series that had the light cast across the lawn.  I did use an off camera speedlight while on the porch as there was not much sun bouncing into there.  On one hand, I think I should have bounced it off the porch roof, but on the other, the more direct light gives it the look of coming from a porch light.

One particular issue I had was that the kids kept trying to eat the candy, and most of it was from a shoot several years ago.  Stale!

This shoot featured 10 models, 2 pop ups, a 3 foot sandwich, 5 pounds of spicy buffalo chicken wings, 2 foam fingers, 2 signs and a football.  This series has a variety of shots that would be great for advertising – cheering to the camera, friends playing ball, cooking food on the grill, and some great copyspace set ups.  As opposed to my older tailgating series, we did this one in the parking lot of a stadium.  These images are a great accompaniment to my other recent “football fan” series – “watching the game” and “isolated in studio”.  I’ve featured some of my favorites below, plus a link to the series.  I’ve got “behind the scenes” images of these as well to come in the future.

This week’s iStockphoto portfolio update has four elementary aged kids dressed up in costumes as a witch, a pirate, a 70′s disco girl, and a vampire, doing some traditional trick-or-treating for the US holiday of Halloween.  There’s also an adorable three year old girl dressed as Dorothy with her parent, and a mom handing out candy at the front door.  There’s lots of copyspace in these shots as the kids do some posing, as well as some ‘in the moment’ images, including trading candy, taking photos and running from house to house.  Here are some of the images from the series, as well as a link below.

Later this week, I will post a few “behind the scenes” images from the shoot as well.  Keep an eye out.

This time, however, I didn’t write it.  It’s by iStockphoto user anchev, who has contributed some previous GM work.  The script is called iStock Lightbox Tool, and is available at this link, just by clicking.  There is a forum post about it here.

It puts a clean interface at the top of a lightbox/search return page that lets you easily deal with things like picking your current lightbox of interest to add images to, add all the images on a page, remove all the images on a page, and new buttons to add individual images.

It really is pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just add another image here to show the beautiful “+” and “-” buttons you’ll get by pushing the “Show Controls” button.

This script is definitely a time saver and a great improvement to the lightbox interface.  I highly recommend giving it a whirl next time you are squirreling away images for later viewing.

The News

I don’t hang around on the microstock site Fotolia at all, so I don’t see their news, announcements, or anything, until it gets posted on Microstockgroup, an industry forum.  This week, the site administrator posted this email received from Fotolia:

Over the last few months, we’ve seen new competitors offering pricing and commission rates that are lower than our white ranking levels. This is a threat to our business, for the market as whole, and for you, our contributors. This is an issue that must be addressed for us to remain competitive.

We have been obliged to modify our pricing and payment policies to allow Fotolia to adjust prices/commissions on a case by case basis. When a contributor sells on sites with significantly lower pricing and commissions, we will reset their rank to white to allow for competition.

Together, we’ll work towards building a stronger stock photography market, and continue to enhance Fotolia’s reputation and competitiveness as a leading microstock agency.

This can also be found in a small blurb on their site, so we’re not sharing any private secrets here.

If Fotolia becomes aware that a contributor is distributing any images, vectors or videos (the “Works”) through another stock agency or website (regardless of whether such Works are the same as the Works being distributed through Fotolia), and if the commission/royalty rates and/or pricing (the “Rates”) applied on such other stock agency or website for such contributor’s Works are comparatively lower than the Rates applied on Fotolia for “White” ranking contributors, then, subject to applicable law, Fotolia reserves the right, at its discretion, to lower such contributor’s Rates on Fotolia so as to match the Rates applied for “White” ranking contributors on Fotolia. Subject to applicable law, Fotolia reserves the right to inquire, from time to time, with any given contributor as to whether such contributor is distributing any Works through any other stock agency or website, and such contributor shall promptly provide this information to Fotolia. For clarity, Fotolia is under no obligation to make any such inquiries.

The Ranking System

Now, to quickly review the ranking system on Fotolia, the more downloads the contributor has (ie, the more licenses purchased for their work), the higher up the “ranks” they move, from “white” to “diamond”.  As they move up these levels (there are 8 of them), most importantly the royalty percentage the contributor receives moves up, from 20% to 46% (for non-exclusive contributors for per image downloads).  Also, the credit pricing of your work rises at certain levels, which you can see on this page.  So a “white”‘s pricing based on size ranges from 1 credit to 20 credits, while a “diamond”‘s ranges from 3-100.  Also, I believe at the emerald level, the contributor can choose to bump their pricing level to a higher one.  So, a high selling Emerald level has quite a few benefits for their past performance.

What it Means

What this week’s announcement basically says is “If we find your content being licensed on a competitor who either sells for less, or pays a lesser royalty amount, we will drop you to the starting level at Fotolia”.  A company spokesman steps into the MSG discussion with:

It has come to our attention that some new agencies are selling the same contributor content at prices far less than most other microstock agencies. We feel that this is bad for both photographers and stock agencies. We do understand photographers are free to choose their own destiny in a free market economy, and our intention in these actions  is to encourage everyone to support fair pricing for customers and commissions for contributors. Only a handful of sites and contributors have been identified thus far, and we will communicate with them before taking any action.

By sponsoring and uploading to sites that undercut prices, photographers put the whole industry in jeopardy – and we feel our duty is to take action. If the community agrees with our approach, the status quo remains. If the community wants to place down pressure on pricing, we’ll adjust accordingly, as a measure to be fair and respectful to our costumers and stay competitive. Keep in mind that when rankings drop, the ability to charge more for images goes away – and that hurts everyone’s bottom line, including ours.

The Beatings Will Commence…

So, they are attempting to justify this taking away of status as some attempt to exert a force on contributors to not support lower priced/royalty percentage sites.  In effect, they are actually punishing the independent contributor for … being independent.  And some independent contributors are stating that the low earnings they receive from Fotolia due to recent royalty percentage cuts is actually what has pushed them to submitting to many more microstock sites in an attempt to make more money:

I don’t get the logic behind the threat at all:

1. Big agency cuts commissions and thereby reduce contributors’ income.
2. Contributors start contributing to smaller agencies to make up for their losses.
3. Big agency threatens contributors with further commission cuts if they don’t pull out of smaller agencies.

Many contributors have actually gone to the step of removing their content from Fotolia, ensuring that Fotolia’s customer base may suffer and revenue may drop even further.

Irony

With a history of recent royalty cuts lately, many are calling this a disguised attempt to grab more money from the contributor, that it isn’t really about the industry survival, since, ironically, Fotolia brags that it has the cheapest subscription plan around for stock images.  In fact, contributors are noting quite a bit of irony around this issue:

I hope Fotolia understands the hypocrisy of all this. It was companies like Fotolia and istock that came along years ago and undercut the traditional stock agencies, selling images at prices far lower that the major royalty-free stock houses. So it was ok for them to do it back then, but now when someone does it to them, contributors are at fault.

The Confusion

Contributors are noting that, even if they wanted to play along with this plan, Fotolia is being purposefully evasive about just what agencies they are referring to with generic terms like “new competitors”.  Is it Getty’s recent beefing up of “Thinkstock”?  Could it be “Depositphotos”?  Or is it really a newcomer like “Photodune”?

Name names, Chad. You’re asking us to redefine how we do business in microstock and take a financial hit for your benefit. The very least you could do is list the agencies you disapprove of.

In addition to this issue, the paragraph on the site contains the mysterious “Fotolia reserves the right, at its discretion“.  So contributors are left wondering, “Is this about me?”  “Are they targeting small contributors?” “How are they monitoring this?”.  Not to mention some contributor anger that deals will be cut with some of the largest contributors who tend to upload dumptrucks of content onto any new site without a discretionary look at pricing or royalties.  So, if this was just about building a “stronger” industry, and not a money grab, that that would be the first thing addressed:

Those would seem to be the biggest targets/offenders in this, and it will be interesting to see what happens and how it is applied. Oh well, I could argue about this topic forever with Chad, but it’s probably time to bow out because it really doesn’t affect me. He’s been a good sport in humoring us. And… there is really no sense in continuing a silly argument.

There Went the Boat

I’m not saying that sites that license content at either terribly low prices or pay ridiculously low rates are good things.  I’m also not sure that what almost appears to be collusion to drive down pricing and/or royalties is particularly legal.

So, how did Fotolia miss the boat in this controversy?

Positive reinforcement, of course, not punishment, in my opinion.  Contributors are already upset about royalty cuts, forum bannings and mysterious credit pricing, among other things.  So, how about spreading some goodwill and good cheer by trying to reverse what many are upset about right now – dropping royalty rates.

If it is the “industry” that Fotolia is upset with, in effect that they are losing business to newcomers who see price as their selling point (the cheaper the better), and they believe that Fotolia’s pricing level provides a “sustainable” base for royalties while being the right price point for buyers, they should encourage contributors by increasing the contributor royalty rates.

They could do this the hard way, with some sort of pledge that a contributor won’t sell on X,Y and Z site and that would be fine, or they could just try to make a statement they do appreciate the hard work contributors do, and they should be rewarded with higher royalties.  It could be accompanied by a mission statement or just an announcement that they are trying to better the industry and raise things to a sustainable level.

A gesture like this would boost the contributors’ impression of the value of their work.  After that, a contributor may not be so willing to accept the lower prices/royalty rates that Fotolia claims they are trying to stop.  By paying contributors more, they may actually succeed in shutting down the content stream to the agencies they portend they are fighting against.  Thus, increasing their revenue.

Back in the film days I was working with guys like Tony-Stone, Stan Kanney, even Mark-Getty of the original Getty images. When the market went sour, too much competition, price fights, etc,  know what they did?  they slightly INCREASED, percentages for their members, ” keep your life blood happy”  that was the policy, and the life-blood of any picture agency is ofcourse their photographers. So ? well obviously the photographers will stay, remain.

The “crowd” isn’t dumb.  Discussion abounds across the active contributor base, and consensus is often arrived at that, generally speaking, doing X is a bad idea (against their interests), while Y is a good idea (good for the bottom line).  So, getting contributors to accept that Fotolia is actually trying to act in their best interests, would likely result in the reversal of the above statement that Fotolia’s past actions are what got them where they are now.  In fact, with this action, Fotolia may well have sped up the race to the bottom:

If FT did get away with this, the sites with higher prices and higher commissions than FT could try the same trick.  They really need to forget about this and concentrate on the real reason why FT is failing.  The sites that are thriving haven’t cut commissions as severely and they have kept their buyers.  FT need to make a massive change in direction, making the site more popular with contributors will bring in more buyers than forcing them into yet another commission cut.

Conclusion

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Fotolia in the stock marketplace.  However, it seems to me that common sense would say that making your contributors happy is a great way to build a business.  Making punishing and greedy (and arbitrary) policies would be a bad thing.  And why would you want to drive away contributors for doing the exact thing they were encouraged to do?  After all, these agencies are nothing but a big database setup and a bunch of servers without the content from the contributors.

I blogged on this three years ago, but wanted to revisit it to remind you of this set of searches.

Clicking on these main categories will bring you to a subcategory page, where various major themes for that holiday are split out into photo, illustration and video subcategories.

Keep in mind that these are not editor selected, pre-made lightboxes, but living searches of the collection, so the contents will obviously change over time as more content is added to the collection.

The other thing to mind is the keywords used for these pre-made searches, like:

http://www.istockphoto.com/search/?facets={“35″:["hanukkah"],”34″:["1"]}

Most will make sense, like the search for Santa searches for “santa”.  However, the “Christmas” search is a search on both the words “Christmas” and “Jesus”, which eliminates everything from the return that isn’t a nativity scene.  I’ve complained about that for four years, but you can see it hasn’t made a difference.  So just keep an eye on the search terms in the box in the upper left, and you can “x” out or add anything new you want.

As a side note, if you’re in the mood for user and iStock created/edited lightboxes, you can always search for “Halloween” or whatever your favorite holiday, from your lightbox management page, which has a search entry box at the upper right.

To find the Seasonal Search page, click here.

One series is new images featuring my favorite Santa Claus model.  This gentleman is a real Santa, with a genuine fluffly white beard and a luxurious Santa suit.  I’ve created a whole new background for this series of a wall of wrapped presents.  I also added a younger female model into the set, posing with both him and by herself, with Christmas gifts, and various other props.  Sure, there is lots of copyspace to add your text to, and some even have the models looking into that space.

The second series is my favorite mature/senior Caucasian couple around the house at Christmastime, stuffing stockings, carrying gifts, shopping online and writing Christmas cards.  Both this and the other series are very strong in the traditional red tones that are so useful this time of year.

Below are some samples, and then a link to the series.  I also have plenty of other holiday images in my portfolio from past years, so check those out as well for all your needs.

Sort Type and Images Shown

The default sort type for the search is “Best Match” and the default for images shown is “50″.  Of course, you may want to search by upload date, or display 200 images so you don’t have to page through repeatedly.  These two options are easily found at the top of the search return.

Image Title, Contributor, etc.

All the checkboxes for the meta-data that appears under each image is at the bottom of the page.  This is where you click to display/show the contributor name, downloads, title, file number and the loupe pop-image preview image.  Again, this is a bit harder to find, right below the last row of images, but above the footer.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon so you can set it and forget it.