Eastman Kodak Company today announced a comprehensive settlement agreement with the U.K. Kodak Pension Plan (KPP), its largest creditor, with respect to its Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization. Under the agreement, which will be filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Kodak’s Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses will be spun off under new ownership to KPP.
I used to order so much paper from them. So crazy how they missed the how switch to digital so badly.
Looks like Danklife Retouching is featured on AD Week again! Awesome project shot by Mike Powell and directed by Arnold Worldwide for New Balance.
Thanks everyone for a great project.
The Portland Egoist Gave a lovely write up of my March Madness Project done with Travis Barteaux as the AD for Nike in 2012.
There's something that we deeply love about the art of photo compositing. When it's done well it is a great mix of fantasy and reality. We hadn't seen much of the work from Portland-based illustration and re-touching crew, Danklife, before today. What we're seeing though we're digging. The hyper-realistic, fantastical nature of the work is what we look for in this type of work. The above illustrations were created in conjunction with Nike for last year's March Madness. The effects add to and heighten the already amazing physical nature of young ball players in today's game.
Awesome sauce! Link
Today a sluggish economy and tectonic changes in the media landscape are squeezing editorial outlets. Publications understand that they need to compete on the web and in social media, and to compete they need to maintain a hyperactive content cycle. A handful of long articles every month won't cut it. With a requirement for daily content, hiring two creatives for every story is an unaffordable luxury. Since, through a sort of institutional inertia, the writers have remained the prime movers for most media outlets, publications have addressed this problem by asking authors to take up photography on the side. The results: predictably poor.The irony of this situation is that it is happening at a time when the visual image is achieving ascendancy.
AN EXAMPLE Last September USA Today unveiled a new website design devoting prime real estate to photography. Somebody in the design process understood the visual nature of the web—photos sell stories and increase click-through rates. The layout highlights photography and dedicates the entire area above the fold to images on many pages. The design is smart and attractive, but although the designers understood the value of the image, the editorial staff has yet to catch on. USA Today doesn't seem to be commissioning photos to fill this space. Instead they are relying on writer-supplied images with the occasional wire or stock photo.
The New Balance Run Light Project shot by the talented Mike Powell made it to the Ad Week Talent Gallery today!
Check it out and all our other work on Behance.
In the two photographs above, the bottom image is a photo-manipulation created using the top image. Are they completely separate works of art? What if we told you the second photo was created without the original photographer’s permission and submitted to a contest as an original artwork? What if we told you it actually won?
I'll side with it being a rip off and he should lose his award of a new mac laptop.
The industry has so drastically changed that the art director’s position can be very difficult. I think art directors are saints who are coming up with brilliant ideas that they wish could be a certain way, and sometimes they are thwarted by the client. I am there to help the process come together as smoothly as possible for them. It’s a collaboration.
About a year ago, I mentioned a lawsuit by a collector, filed after William Eggleston decided to re-print older photographs, using inkjet printing and a larger size. A judge now ruled that the photographer had the right to do that. On the surface, that’s great news for photographers. It also blows a huge hole into the whole editioning game that galleries have been relying on. (more) Most photographs can be printed in large numbers, so it’s not all that obvious why someone would pay a lot of money for a photograph. Editions provide an easy solution: Even though there could be thousands of copies of a single photograph, the promise is that there will be merely, let’s say, eight. If you buy a print you got one out of only eight, and this - artificial - scarcity then justifies your investment. Thus, as a photographer you need to think about editions if you want to work with a gallery, since that’s part of the game.What this means is that if you want to re-print a photograph that was issued in some edition you can’t - unless, and here’s the trick, you can show that your new edition is very different. That’s essentially what the Eggleston lawsuit was about. And why wouldn’t a somewhat different size plus a somewhat different process truly be a different edition, right?
The mega-sized image lowered visitor bounce rates by 27%, plus it increased leads generated by 36%.Dell was so impressed by these results that the testing team ran out similar redesign tests for other B2B product lines… and so far they’ve all raised lead generation and contact form conversions as well, sometimes into the triple digits.
Bigger images lead to better sales. Can I ask if BETTER images do anything? ;)
Something to keep in mind when talking to clients.
For Magnum, the collaboration with Vice is a positive one, says Bell, as it will allow the agency to showcase the scope and breadth of its offering by including interviews with photographers who are not typical of the Vice brand. "Vice has featured [Magnum] photographers in the past who are perhaps more traditionally suited to their market but we've always wanted do something broader. We hope to feature a range of Magnum photographers - not just those who are working on subjects that are in the news but photographers working on long term projects or those who are outside of the spotlight. It's important that [the series] represents Magnum across the board," he adds. "There are a lot of photographers at Magnum who have work that hasn't been widely seen; I hope we'll have the chance to represent all the different sides of the agency and its membership.
Since the Carlyle Group (read their wikipedia page actually, it’s fascinating) has taken over Getty Images, things seem to have changed. Maybe Getty’s parent is trying to wring as much profit as their stock business as they can, but it feels like artists are getting the short end of the stick even more these days.
...
While Stocksy isn’t exactly “occupy” stock photography, rather than me getting 20% and Carlyle getting 80%, I’ll be paid a much fairer 50% payout. The exciting part about Stocksy though isn’t just the higher payout, it’s that the members of Stocksy actually OWN the agency. That’s right, after paying out costs, Stocksy will distribute profits to it’s members — so members will get dividends and actually hold real equity in the business.
...
If you are a photographer, consider signing up. One bit of warning here though, Stocksy is being *very* selective about the photographers that they are adding. I have felt a little bad because some of my good friends and talented photographers haven’t been asked to join
And here is more on Stocksy via Cnn.
"Photographers kept coming to see me, coming to visit, telling me how bad the industry was, telling me they were disenfranchised, telling me about the competition, this sea of images. That, combined with declining royalties -- they were super frustrated," he said. "They were looking to me to get back in the game. I just couldn't ignore it anymore."
He's not aiming to conquer the world -- something iStock did as it pioneered the "microstock" market that exploded when an army of digital photographers mobilized to sell photos globally on the Internet. That growth accelerated dramatically when Getty Images acquired iStock for $50 million in 2006. This time around, Livingstone is looking for "sustainability," concentrating on a high-end foothold