denyerec.co.uk

I stumbled across another stock photography site today called Dreamstime or something. Didn’t give it a thorough workout but I noticed that they’re flogging high-res stock images for 77 US Cents.

77 US Cents.

Gah. You know the issue is so tired with me I can’t even find the energy to rant about it. People say “You may as well put photos up on a site and get 30 cents per download off it” using the arguement that “You wouldn’t make money off it anyway, so why not?”
The “Why not” to me is painfully simple. Good images are simply worth more than that. Equipment, time, travel, expenses and gosh-darn, bloody **experience**. To see people throwing good images that have cost them to produce onto sites like this just makes me sad. Will there come a point in the future where there won’t be any such thing as a professionally produced image, because people have become too accustomed to paying $0.77 for a photo? I’ve had experiences in the past of people asking “How much?” and when they’re told they go crazy with things like “Why should you charge that when I can get photo’s off the ‘net for a dollar?” (Or worse, steal them from Google images…)

It seems to me as if there’s 3 broad categories of people who upload stock to these sites. Either they were never going to make a penny off their casual shots, so they’re giving it a go to see what they can make. Then you have the people who don’t value their work and think that $1 per copy is “all they can hope for” because they’ve been beaten into submission by a market demanding stupid cheap prices for quality work. Finally you have the people who treat it like a full-on enterprise. They’re Pumping thousands of images into the database using napalm tactics to ensure that they get a reasnoble financial reward, even if they’ve put in far more work than the cash value they’re getting out.

Why should I even care? I’m trapped in a moral (?) dilemma of sorts. I’m broke, I could use the money, but do I really want to sell out my artwork for a lousy 50p a shot? I could literally make far more working in McDonalds and wouldn’t have to stress about technique, location, new material, ideas, equipment, insurance… The list goes on.

Maybe I’ve just got the wrong mindset, perhaps it is all well and good, it’s a sensible way for photographers to make money etc etc yadda yadda. I just can’t feel it though, giving away your creativity for 50p a time. ..

People pay more for a king-size Snikers bar.

Hot off the press at the BBC we have our dear CotE Calling for Oil Producing Nations to Reduce Prices. Is he for real? Surely to be where he is now he must have studied, ohh, I don’t know, perhaps economics? Even basic accounting? Maybe even just General Studies?

The fact that oil supply is almost beaten by demand is now all over the popular press, meaning that it’s already sensationalist which means it has to be at disasterous limits. Lets face it, the press never report on anything unless it’s reached a newsworth level of “disastery-ness”. How, then, does Mr Brown expect the oil producing nations to help reduce prices? Make more oil? Emphasis on the *make* there, not pump…

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My dad, bless, is a closet geek. In fact I’m not so sure he’s even in the closet. Remebered fondly are my days of playing Quake2 with him lurking then, after going to bed, hearing the gunshots and grenades going off downstairs…

Today, talking about “Stuff” on ICQ (Real geeks don’t need telephones, see, ASCII’s all you need…) this little gem came out regarding Micro$oft and their policy regarding the “MS Office Treadmill”…

In writing terms it is a bit like selling an expensive pen, then saying you need a new one because we have invented new paper and the pen won’t write on the new paper. The pen is not broken… (so I am only going to use Linux pencils in future.. )

Penguin Pencils… Made me laugh

Just a minor update… The footer for all the Home Office documents reads:

BUILDING A SAFE, JUST AND TOLERANT SOCIETY

Safe? My GF couldn’t hurt a fly, despite some shockingly contradictory photographic evidence 😉
Just? Deporting a tax-paying, defacto-married partner of a British Citizen?
Tolerant? Not prepared to overlook a 3 month gap in bank statements caused by THE BANK ITSELF.

Don’t make me laugh. Their tagline should read “Building a mockery of a sham of a sham of a mockery of a shame we like to call a society”

Join me in lament, the world as we know it will soon be over.

The time of the machines has come.

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.” (Dorothea Lange)

Anyone living in the UK will know DFS. They’ve been around for a while, retailling (naturally) quality seating to residents of this merry green isle.
They also always have a sale on which, always, ends this Sunday.
Perhaps someone was a bit too zealous suggesting that the original sale (Probably started some way back in 1985) should end “This Sunday” and thought it’d be hillarious to continue ending the sale on every Sunday from the date they started until, well, at least until now.
Thinking about it, if you have a sale on every day of every week then your baseline prices would be said sale prices. That would mean that you are never really presenting a below-average-price saving to your customers and, really, shouldn’t be advertising the fact you have a sale on at all.

I wonder if the advertising standards agency has considered this?

Q: How many Loughborough engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two. Myself, and my housemate Marcel.

No, it’s not funny. A lightbulb went, tripped the upstairs light circuit and plunged us into darkness. I went to the cellar, flipped the breaker, balanced on a swivel chair (That’s what Marcel was responsible for, the steadying of the repair facilitator) and changed the bulb.
Yes we keep spare bulbs in the house, we are “right proper” boy scouts.