Happy media

June 18, 2009

SmartviewcamImprovements in photo taking with smart phones are fueling the newsworld. Uncontrolled, uncensored, irreverent and totally suited for Web and TV publications, these fast growing devices, now often with 3 megapixels, are giving an all new perspective to the notion of free press.

Their success comes from the immediacy and the ease of basic photo manipulation and editing. But the primary key is in their ability to connect seamlessly online, as remote controls, image/sound capture and transmission devices.

Connect, interface, exchange, these are the rules of the game. We do not expect anymore to be served a fancy lunch onboard a plane, nor to carry extra baggage in the belly of it. But one thing is sure, we are demanding to be connected online all the time, all the way. Removing the right to use a smart phone, even for a brief airborne moment, is viewed with great resistance (the adult equivalent of what amounts to a teenage hissy fit).

Perhaps it is altogether only pointing out that anything that works must work with the Internet. Simply put, that is why smart phones are smart. As professional photo capture devices they are, without a doubt, a compromise, but whoever uses them to get the news out is definitely reaching a happy media.

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Posted by nelsonvigneault

What is the real value of photo copyright?

February 26, 2009

Here is an actual case that just made the news and offers a lot of good insights. We’ve talked about photo copyright before. In fact, it is one of our most read stories. In an article by the National Post on Thursday, February 26, 2009, there is a story about a famous photographer, Annie Leibovitz, has pawned the copyright and ownership of her photos for around $16 million US to an art-based lender.

Her photographs are seen frequently in Vogue and Vanity Fair and throughout the public space.  In this digital age it would be easy to find a copy of one her pictures and put it up on a website. Some would see it as petty theft, but the copyright and ownership of those images are worth a great deal and are not for the taking. This event illustrates unequivocally the value of copyright, without the need of legal jargon.

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Marketing with connectivity (part 4)

February 23, 2009

For the next several weeks, the CEO of CleanPix, Nelson Vigneault, will be sharing his thoughts on “Marketing with connectivity”.

WHEN IT WORKS AND WHY … IT DOES NOT

For the journalist, pressuite.com provides a platform to discover, pick up content, or elect to receive RSS feeds that meet their specific interests. For our clients, the posting of several, short stories per week creates a momentum that works best. A very good example of use is by Space Coast CVB, where twice a week a new “landing” on pressuite.com of a newsbrief creates sparks of interest from the media. In this manner, stories are picked up and transferred from one Social Media news stream to another. We have also noted some cases where, after a few fervent initial weeks of positive results, clients suddenly slow down their posting activity. Almost immediately the stats register proportional slowdowns on their success score. Again, presence and consistency appear to be key … the “seeds” need nurturing. When asked, “Why did you stop?” The most common answers boil down to: “I ran out of ideas!” or, “I did not believe I needed to keep at it!” Hey!  It’s called s o c i a l  media … you have to keep interacting with it for it to work. Secondly, truer then ever, marketing on the Internet is the business of IDEAS. For success in marketing with connectivity you absolutely have to keep coming up with new and fresh ideas. This means finding new angles, new avenues to tell the story by reviewing and questioning upside down your knowledge about your product, destination or event. A sort of revisiting of your campaign and your product from a Web culture perspective, a perspective where the audience defines how they connect with you and dictates what they are looking for.

Because Social Media is a LIVE medium, its architecture is as digital as it is volatile. It appears that everywhere you look, speed of action is paramount — interaction must be prompt. The need to actualize content (i.e. make the news responsive, attuned to world events, trends and new emerging contexts) puts writing for Web at a premium even if the final destination may very well be print media (i.e. how you write for the Web differs from how you write for traditional media). One must constantly create fresh content.

Check back again soon for part 5 of this series.

Check out part 1 of this series
Check out part 2 of this series
Check out part 3 of this series

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Posted by cleanpix

Photo Copyrights: the Basic Principles

February 18, 2009

Simply said, copyright laws exist to protect the rights of the creators of information, industrial or cultural works. Not ideas themselves but, rather, the embodiments of these ideas.

What are these rights? They may vary from country to country but, basically, they deal with the right for acknowledgment, compensation and restriction on usage. If you appropriate something that is not of your making (creation) and use it without permission, you are basically profiting from someone else’s property without their knowing. This is a NO-NO. Similarly, if you grab a graphic or a photo on the Internet and modify it a little (or a lot) to become your own, it is simply not OK either. You see, it is like fair play, a huge ethic dimension is involved in copyright.

This is all too heavy, let’s get practical: I bought these photos from a professional photographer they should be mine… should they not?  Yes, you bought the photos but not the right to use them. That is impossible! Then what is the use of these pictures, if I can’t use them? That is exactly the point, you cannot use them, unless you clear up the usage restriction with the photographer and this is what you have to do to make it OK with the copyright of the creator. One basic thing to keep in mind is that a good photographer can only survive if paid, and that is the very reason you can hire this photographer in the first place.

Topics ahead:

• Here is what you can do, if you commission a photo shoot
• The photo credit
• Your copyright rights
• Counterproductive copyright jargon
• A change of attitute toward copyright – avoiding the fiasco of the music industry
• Does Facebook own you?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by cleanpix

Getting It Right: Photo White Balance

February 13, 2009

floridarepdemo7

I got a phone call yesterday from Nelson Vigneault CEO of CleanPix. “Your white balance (WB) on your camera is all messed up SIR”! Not something you want to hear. This was in reference to a set of photographs I took to assist the Florida Rep theater.  I had done a studio shoot with strobes for their kids performance PR images. Nelson said that it took  demanding Photoshop skills to get the pink/red color cast out of the photographs.

I shoot with a 2 year old Nikon D70S. I went and googled the problem and found this site  by Ken Rockwell. The solution was toward the bottom of the page and this is what it said: “Try the Daylight setting to match carefully daylight balanced studio strobes”. Aha! I just excepted that the camera new best and had been setting it on the flash setting. Nelson commented: “In doubt, shoot a grey scale, that will tell you.”). I raced to my storage room and dug around in an old trunk of photo stuff from college days 28 years ago and found my grey scale. Then I did what I should have done in the beginning and ran a simple test with the camera. WOW! Sure enough the Flash WB setting gave a terrible cross curved pink photo. The Auto WB setting was a little better but still poor and the Daylight WB setting was pretty much spot on. Needless to say my computer screen is not calibrated. I sent the grey scale test pictures to CleanPix to be checked.

I stand corrected and somewhat ashamed but I now know how to better calibrate my camera for the white balance, or at least check if my settings are off. I would certainly recommend the purchase of a grey scale at your local photo store for some simple tests.

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Posted by geraldhoffman

Photo skills: a bit of digital polishing

February 11, 2009

click-photoThe Media, cannot always do a custom photo shoot for each news item they cover. And sometimes, Web journalist are happy to give a small article about it, if their posting can be supported with some hot visuals. This is where your photo collection becomes of great value. It is a good idea to have some great shots available, on demand, as long as they meet editors’ and journals’ and web standards, so they can be used to feature your story.

Here some basic tips and why:
Have your photos ready in high resolution. (A picture that will cover a magazine page needs to be at least 300 dpi at 8″X10″. A smaller picture will not give you a cover, so you may as well have a large picture ready.)

A) Look at you collection, analyze which are the most often asked-for pictures. This will give you great insight into what the media wants. Do not hesitate to get these shots professionally re-photographed from time to time to maintain a fresh and contemporary look to your product or destination. Be ready to provide new angles, new views or different times of the day versions. (The journalist gets tired of the same old shots.) It is not the product or the destination which is a deterrent, it is too often how it is portrayed.

B) Do not underestimate the keen EYE of a professional photographer. Whether the purpose is fashion, documentary, action, or scenic, a pro does give a shot that visual twist that makes it something like: great, attractive, actual, fresh, powerful and charged with emotion. (Discuss with your photographer the essence of what the pictures should be and launch them on a shooting “spree”. To get a great shot even with pros, it often takes hundreds of clicks.)

C) You cannot hire a top photographer, o.k., and sometimes some good snaps are all you can manage at the time or moment. There is nothing wrong with that. But do not forget to polish you photo skills a bit. Our experience has been that most snaps become unusable because 3 simple precautions have not been taken:
- WHITE-BALANCE
Insure you get the white-balance right to compensate for the light conditions (indoor, outdoor, flash, etc. No camera does this by itself, you have to make a selection in the menu of each photo-camera.
- RESOLUTION
Insure you take your picture in the best resolution possible (saving your file as jpegs is fine but delivering RAW files is questionable).
- EXPOSURE
If you are not sure about your light exposure, use the auto-bracketing, so you end up with 3 shots (from light to dark, you can always choose the best one afterward).

Oh, I almost forgot my secret tip: use a tripod or lean against a solid object, if you can, as you take the shot. For some pictures, a blurred effect, makes the shot but in most cases there is nothing sharper than sharp.

- Polishing compound
If this is all seems too complicated, you may brush up you skills by making a few tests. Where to start? What is white-balance, right exposure, etc.? We found great straightforward polishing info on this site among others:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm

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Posted by nelsonvigneault

Marketing with connectivity (part 3)

January 30, 2009

For the next several weeks, the CEO of CleanPix, Nelson Vigneault, will be sharing his thoughts on “Marketing with connectivity”.

BUSINESS LEADERS LEAD ON MARKETING

Typically with these clients, we have noted a business organizational shift from compartmental divisions between PR/marketing/communications toward a business model, where communication is more integrated and concerted. These shifts do not come from IT but, rather, through executive decisions addressing directly the purpose of marketing. Simply said, marketing in Social Media is not about computer networks, it is about people networks. In these models, for example, a photo collection is no longer the domain of a gate keeper, but is instead viewed as a live asset that can be pooled and tailored instantly to meet the demands of communicator teams, whether PR , marketing or media relationists.  We note that the BEST RESULTS, in posting news, come from quite brief (single focused) and targeted stories/headlines. One journalist user said it best when she said, “we want the seeds not the tree” — meaning: not several pages or even a page-long newsletter, but a news brief consisting of a few lines of text with pertinent and press-ready photos.

Check out part 1 of this series
Check out part 2 of this series
Check out part 4 of this series

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Posted by cleanpix

SMART photo captions are plain SMART

January 28, 2009

Amongst one of the biggest fears for a journalist is to misquote or make an error in naming a location, event, person etc. As a result, more often than not, a journalist not able to confirm the identity of a picture will simply refrain from using an illustration and may simply decide to move on to publish another story altogether. In short, “your great photo is not worth a 1000 words” to the media unless an identifying caption is provided.

What makes a caption:

- One sentence: (25-50 words)
- 4 words : Location, Object (or person), Date taken, Picture provider
- Optional: Instruction on copyright. (ie. if you want it to appear with publication)

What makes a GREAT caption?

- Adding some zest and pizzaz to your caption (20-40 words).

Here is an example on adding “LIFE” to a caption.

The ordinary caption:
“Hockey goal and skating ring on Lake-Louise, winter scene.”

The Zesty caption:
“Located in the winter wonderland of Lake Louise in the Rockies, despite its frosty appearance, it has become the hottest site in town as staff and clients from surrounding hotels join for a casual evening of hockey. By far, the best evening fun in town.”
(Lake-Louise, Canadian Rockies. Hockey ring. Photo: N.Vigneault)

If you have a better idea for a zesty comment, let us know!

The point to remember is that if you have a great shot with no caption, journalists likely will not use it. If the picture is THAT awesome, someone may use it but without the proper information (linked to you) and this will simply negate your promotional effort. If your picture has no caption, the smart thing right now is to make one and then polish it later when you feel creative.

Embedded Metadata

While this is technical in nature, it is good to be aware that modern systems and applications are able to read a myriad of information (text) that gets embedded into many different kinds of files.

When a photo is downloaded from a proper digital asset management system like the CleanPix service all of the metadata you entered in for that image will be embedded straight into the file. This includes caption and copyright. This same information is viewable from the “View Caption” button on our website. Top media outlets such as L.A. Times, Condé Nast Publications, Stern Germany, Paris Match (to name a few) source this embedded metadata regularly. Editors and journalists have contacted us to verify information if it is missing. With the proper metadata included with your photo, it can be sent all over the world and journalists will not hesitate to use your photos with their stories and link them to you.

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Posted by cleanpix

Marketing with Connectivity (part 2)

January 22, 2009

For the next several weeks, the CEO of CleanPix, Nelson Vigneault, will be sharing his thoughts on “Marketing with connectivity”.

REVISITING THE 4 Ps OF MARKETING

Long-established newspapers find it hard to attract advertisers. Is the automotive industry, amongst the largest players and supporters of this medium, also rethinking its effectiveness in reaching targeted audiences? The new reality is that a large sector of the audience gets its news neither from the papers nor even from TV, but from the Internet instead. TV anchors advise, “To find out more, go online”. Obama placed advertising in Xbox  games, courting an important sector of his audience right where they are located. Some say, “traditional advertising is dead” and it may well be. But one thing is for sure: journalism is thriving in the Social Media arena. It is a question of attitude, a definite shift in culture. Creating feeds is the new art and it comes with a magical twist: In Social Media, the audience is now also author — users control the content through full “LIVE” interaction with the information. In turn, this also implies that the traditional 4 Ps of marketing need revisiting (PRODUCT, PRICE, PLACE, PROMOTION) and consequently so do the tools and methods for reaching an audience, or rather I should say “participating with” the audience.

TOOLING FOR THE DIGITAL WORLD

Despite the fact that having a solid asset management service was paramount for our clients, the CleanPix team soon discovered that using it simply as a tool for photo management was not sufficient. The need to act as a seamless visual support for getting our clients’ news out, in a concerted effort to foster media relations, was why the asset management service was created initially. Subsequently, what was critical was the creation of tools to enable our clients to tap into the Social Media space and they needed to do this while making rich media files available on demand.

We did it. Pressuite.com is effectively a bridge to Social Media. Clients who use pressuite.com in that fashion get unprecedented results, for a fraction of the cost of conventional means.

Check out part 1 of this series
Check out part 3 of this series
Check out part 4 of this series

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Posted by cleanpix

Marketing with connectivity (part 1)

January 15, 2009

For the next several weeks, the CEO of CleanPix, Nelson Vigneault, will be sharing his thoughts on “Marketing with connectivity”.

From every side we are hearing the dreaded words: “budget cuts”. This is not all bad news, but certainly an indication that world economy has changed both suddenly and drastically. From a marketing perspective, it means that money is severely restricted for … just about everything.

For reliable results, one needs proof of ROI (return on investment). The problem is, to some extent, that the practices of marketing and PR deal with so-called “soft” measurables — built over time, from a combination of repetition and message consistency.

As a result, when the lack of measurable returns derived from classic tactics combines with steeply rising costs of delivering the message via traditional means, a new breed of SMART is definitely needed — or at least, a new business model — to promote business in challenging economical conditions.

SOCIAL MEDIA: A NEW PLAYGROUND OF CONNECTIVITY

What are the avenues one can take and what are the tools one could use? Certainly a good pointer is the success of the recent Obama campaign. One word comes to mind: CONNECTIVITY. Connectivity is a type of viral information dissemination where the recipient gets involved in enhancing the story path. This, in itself, keeps the news fresh, but best of all it ensures it is READ/VIEWED. Social media is probably the richest, yet least tapped source of connectivity.

The one thing we all have in common is a product or a program to sell or to promote. The unshakable certainty of classic print and TV mediums as the means to reach markets is definitely questionable. The way in which audiences are sourcing content is reinventing journalism. SOCIAL MEDIA is becoming the new playing field. Revamping websites for tens of thousands of dollars, budgeting a mass-media brochure distribution or orchestrating a PR strategy that does not prioritize Web connectivity may be decisions that require serious reconsideration.

Check out part 2 of this series
Check out part 3 of this series
Check out part 4 of this series

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Posted by cleanpix