The Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild (OWPG) has written to the Office of Fair Trading expressing concern over WH Smith Travel’s plan to make publisher Penguin the sole supplier of foreign travel guides in its airport, motorway and railway station outlets.

The deal would mean only Rough Guides, Dorling Kindersley and Sawday guides would be stocked at the 450 stores, while popular names such as Lonely Planet, AA, Berlitz, Thomas Cook, Bradt, Time Out and Michelin would disappear from the shelves.

According to industry magazine The Bookseller, Penguin is offering WH Smith Travel a 72 per cent discount on the cover price of its imprints.

“By creating a monopoly situation in a very significant section of the retail guidebook market, this deal is manifestly anti-competitive and will reduce choice for consumers,” said Jon Sparks, travel photographer and secretary of the OWPG.

“Although our members’ prime focus is on the outdoors, there are many among us who also produce travel guides, and many more who produce walking, cycling and other outdoors guides for overseas destinations. This move places other publishers at a serious disadvantage and thereby directly undermines our members’ future earnings potential.

“It also appears to be wholly at odds with WH Smith’s well-publicised corporate responsibility policies.”

His sentiments were echoed by guidebook author and editor Sue Viccars (CORR), who is also a member of the OWPG. “This unprecedented step will limit choice for the consumer,” she said. “Customers have – quite rightly – grown to expect a broad range of guidebooks at popular sales points such as airports.

“The industry owes its diverse customer base – family, trekker, independent traveller, retired couple and the rest –  this opportunity. Limiting the number and range of authors used will not give a sufficiently broad view of those destinations covered, and many destinations will be excluded altogether.

“This move will severely curtail customer options, and will be highly detrimental to the potential development of the guidebook industry as a whole.’

MANY photographers habitually use layers from everything. I don’t! In fact, I try to minimise my time spent on post-processing shots for stock library sale, and work very quickly. If it needs complex setup or demands working using layers to be able to go back and change things, I’ve probably already wasted too much time.
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Libraries like Alamy are demanding model releases even for crowd scenes now, if the image is to be sold as Royalty Free or offered with Rights Protection for commercial advertising. Either way, they want signed paper! This restricts all street scenes and many place-shots to Licensed (normal, editorial-only) status. Other libraries or portals will not accept unreleased people shots of any kind at all

The latest DSLRs – notably the Pentax K20D, Samsung GX20 and Sony Alpha 350 – offer over 14 megapixels in the small 1.5X factor format. Later this year we get 24 megapixels in full frame, but 14 on APS-C is higher density and will reveal more detail in the cropped area of the shot.

Here, snapped with the Pentax K20D (14.6 megapixels) is a crowded beach in Gran Canaria on a Spanish bank holiday Sunday before Easter. At this stage it is relatively empty No-one gives a second thought to a camera with an 18-55mm kit lens. It is not as if this overdressed British tourist is waving a big white tele at them.

What they do not realise is that every single person on this beach is identifiable right down to the wrinkles on their cellulite, and worse things. Today’s DSLRs can pull out a section worthy of Breughel (though parts look more like Bosch) and show as much detail as you would once have expected from rollfilm:

This is cropped and reduced from an export using Adobe Camera Raw from the original .PEF file up to 6144 pixels wide (75 megabytes file size) – to view the full size crop click the image. It is exported with Sharpening set to 0, NR set to 0, and no post processing is applied to enhance detail. It is, as you would expect, slightly softened by the anti-aliasing filter and de-Bayer process but with a wealth of detail present.

Ten years ago you would have been happy to see an 640 x 480 digital camera picture looking as sharp as this crop. So, given web use of images, the picture libraries are right. A model release is needed for any commercial use of any scenes with people in, no matter how many people and how far away.

Today’s and tomorrow’s digital SLRs are going to capture scenes the photographer is not even able to spot when composing the shot, and may cause anything from embarassment to lawsuits because of the clarity of their information.

Be warned! And remember, too much sunbathing is damaging. Cover up…

- David Kilpatrick

 Cut and pasted from the Adobe Stock Photos site: good news for all the loyal Adobe Photoshop users they rather dumped on from on high with this venture to start with! Read the rest of this entry »

CANON may get some stick from their own users who reckon Live View is not much use, and Sony’s decision not to put it in the A700 may well be defended on the same basis. How wrong that is. Here’s one (plus another two) good reasons why Live View is your best friend in the studio. Read the rest of this entry »

We have come across this site which presents an exceptional analysis of microstock sales:

 http://www.perrush.be/SYF_micro_E_1.html

Not that, in your editor’s opinion, the results are all that wonderful – it would be easy enough to secure the same monthly earnings from a single direct sale to any publication, and it’s more interesting by far to try to place work directly with clients, talk to them, deal face to face or by email. But this is the best and most detailed analysis of microstock we have yet seen.

-DK