FocalPower…the blog

We just added a new feature to the FocalPower Blog:  Photographer Polls.

For the next two weeks, we’ll be asking “How has the current economic situation affected your photography related buying?”. Regardless of what you call it, the United States is facing tough economic times.  And with the global state of markets and their interconnectedness, this economic downturn reaches far past the United States. So, what has this done to your spending habits on photography related items?

Every two weeks we will be running a new poll to help dig into key issues facing photographers today.  So please chime in and tell us what you think.  You can always find the latest poll in the sidebar.  We are also archiving all polls for future reference; we’ll try to leave them open for a month after the original posting.

Many thanks to Lester Chan for developing the great WP-Poll plugin!

A lot of discussion has been going on lately about backup strategies for your photos.  The PhotoNetCast crew discussed this back at the end of May.  The TWIP crew have been bouncing around this in recent podcasts as well.  One thing that is a certainty with backup strategies: don’t store all your eggs in one basket, get a copy of your data away form your home/office.  This is exactly what ever business does that depends on data and has a serious backup strategy.  Luckily, there are now some solutions for photographers as well.

In general, the complexity of your backup strategy is directly related to your paranoia level.  This paranoia level tends to increase as soon as you have a failure and loose some photos.   The more paranoid you are, the more copies you tend to make of your photos.  The problem is that the more copies you make, the more work it takes to manage those copies.  When it comes to doing off site backups, the work level usually overtakes the paranoid level, which means most people don’t do it.

The most obvious way to do an off site backup is to physically move a copy of your data (i.e., a set of hard drives) to a off site location like a friend or family members house or to a safety deposit box.  Again, this requires considerable work by photographer because it is all too easy to let weeks or months go by without rotating a new backup off site.  Ideally, you want to be doing this as frequently as you are making substantial changes to your work.

The good news, is that automated, off site, backup services exist.  These work by having a small piece of software running on your computer and monitoring a specified set of files.  When those files change, the software will upload the new versions to the backup service over the internet.   Obviously, the pre-requisite for using one of these services is a broadband internet connection (besides having data you want to protect).  Most of these services run in the background when you’re not using the computer, compress files before transmitting them up to the cloud, and have a web based interface that check on your files and recover them if you need to.

Online backup services solve the backup problems of

1. Having an off site backup and
2. Having that backup accurately mirror your work, automatically.

The problem with these services has always been the expense.  Many are based upon how much you store up on the cloud which increase the costs dramatically for photographers with 100’s of Gigabytes of photos.

Now, that problem has even been solved!

Recently Mozy, one of the biggest online backup providers for businesses (which also happens to be owned by EMC, one of the biggest names in storage and backups for corporations), has lunched MozyHome Online Backup service.  At only $4.95 per month for unlimited storage, this is a dream come true for photographers.  If you hurry and sign up for the service before the end of July with the promotion code SDCMOZY, you can save an extra $10%.

You will need to run the Mozy client on your computer (supporting both Mac and Windows) and expect to leave your computer on for a week or more (depending on how big your photo archive is) to get the first backup complete.  But after that, you’re off site backup concerns will be a thing of the past.

When you compare this with other photography specific off site backup services the price advantage quickly becomes apparent.  With most photographers having 100’s of Gigabytes to Terabytes of photos, the economics of using other services that don’t offer unlimited storage make them economically unattractive.   And the economics of not having an automated off site backup strategy is no longer an excuse.

Apparently San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing for a closure of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (the road that sweeps around the city on along the bay).  This closure would happen just for 4 hours during two Sundays this summer.  The San Francisco Chronoical is reporting on the Car-free parties planned for Embarcadero.

The idea by Newsom is to shut down a 6 mile stretch of the Embarcadero (San Francisco is essentially 7 miles by 7 miles in size) to cars on August 31st and September 14th.  Allowing only pedestrians and bicycles on the Embarcadero from from 9am to 1pm.  The idea is to have a roller skating area, bicycle training wheels area, and yoga classes held on the Embarcadero during the closure. The idea is for residents to partake of physical activity in a wide, open space not usually available in this section of San Francisco.

If this idea passes (there is considerable opposition by business along the Embarcadero concerned the closure will cut into their business during these two busy Sundays) it would make for some intersting photography during that 4 hour stretch.  I have images already be pre-visualized about a yoga class in the middle of this 3 lane road with the San Francisco Ferry Building or Finacial District buildings in the background.

Bay Area photographers should keep an eye on this story and be ready to photograph should this closure go through.  This is definately a photogrpahy opportunity you don’t want to miss.

(Photo Credit: MD111)

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the past day around Flickr, their API, and your privacy settings on your Flickr account thanks to a wonderful article by Jim Goldstein about How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale this Weekend.  Jim goes into great detail on his post, that is worth the read, to discuss how the privacy settings on your Flickr account are not being enforced by Flickr with regards to their API.  (the 120 comments on his posting, as of this posting, are also interesting to peruse).  Jim’s post also created a parallel discussion on Thomas Hawk’s blog posting.

What I find most surprising is how everyone seemed to loose site of the real issue here.  It’s not about a technical discussion on how Flickr should implement their API or each photographer’s opinion on how they license their work.  It’s about a large name in the photography (Flickr/Yahoo) and the fact that they don’t respect their customers enough to protect their work.  I can only image how this will propogate forward with the new arrangement between Flickr and Getty Images.  Will your “selection” by a Getty Editor to have your Flickr photos be licensed through Getty automatically change your Creative Commons licensed work to All Rights Reserved so Getty can make money off your work

If I’m using a service that claims to protect my work by allowing me to not let anyone but myself to download the images, then the service should do that.  In all access methods to the images.  When Flickr found out that this protection was not being extended to the API, they should have fixed it for the sake of their customers rather than ignore it for the sake of their API development community.  SmugMug had a similar security issue be raised in the recent past which they quickly fixed…this is how a responsible company should act toward their customers, maybe this is why SmugMug is actually turning a profit while Flickr never could?

(Note: I’m stopping short of talking about how I think Yahoo’s ownership and corporate problems might be related to the current state of Flickr and their customer focus.)

One of the frustrating points that the FocalPower team had with photo sharing/hosting was the the lack of focus on the photographer for the sake of the photo sharing/hosting provider. This has been one of the facets behind the FocalPower solution since the day we started building it.  We feel that control should be given back to the photographers.  If they photographer wants to protect their photo assets and legal rights, then the systems they use should help them in this cause, not hinder them.  Likewise, if the photographer is more concerned with their images being accessible to the larger audience to use under the Creative Common’s licensing, make it easy for the photographer to enable this and track the effect that this has.  Opening up your work to Creative Commons is done for a multiplicity of reasons, one of which is to help spread your brand…hence the with Attribution license.  I always found it shocking that Flickr allowed you to license your work this way but then let anyone take the work without providing you attribution…why couldn’t they provide that attribution for you?  Why make the photographer work harder?

These are some of the issues that we are working to address here at FocalPower.  So keep an eye out as we wrap up our development effort and move toward an open beta of our Photo Asset Management system later this year.

Update: Scott Bourne has a wonderful post on this topic over at the TWIP Blog.  A great view of this topic from a long time professional photographer.

Another topic that came out of the wedding album discussion with my photographer friend a few days ago was the DIY wedding album.  Since she is a photographer, she really wanted to put together the wedding album herself.  Thus, she looked for wedding photographers who would give her the negatives immediately after the big day and didn’t offer (or wouldn’t include) the album in their price.

During my friend’s wedding, there were a number of enthusiast and semi-professional photographers who were there with cameras in tow and taking pictures that the wedding photographers were not.  In the end, many pages of photos in my friends wedding album were taken not by the professional photographers she hired, but by the guests who were just doing what they love to do.  And at every wedding I go to, I continue to see more and more DSLR cameras of increasing quality snapping away.

The technology of photography is constantly forcing professional photographers to be nimble and adapt their business models in order to stay in business. Thus, with the rise of the enthusiast photographer and the continual price erosion of high quality DSLR cameras, I am wondering: are more wedding photographers seeing requests from clients for the negatives to do their own wedding album?

This seems like a natural evolution of the business trends that have been occurring.  But I would love to hear from some professional wedding photographers to see if this is the case.

There is still huge value that professional wedding photographers offer in both photographing the day as well as album design.  The trick for wedding photographers is to make sure their clients don’t forget this value.