Go Go Stockimo!

[wiskerke]

Stephen,

 

Thanks for that wonderful read! And an appropriate day for it too, being Thanksgiving.

Could you revisit your archives some more? There must be some interesting stuff there that you own the copyright of.

In the small collection on Alamy there is some very thoughtful imagery, maybe somewhat too understated for the current UK market perhaps. Or should we say: current clients.

There certainly are some situations there where a small unobtrusive camera that makes no sound at all could have been useful.

 

I never owned a  Rolleiflex nor an MPP, but I had a Speed Graphic (olive drab!). And while you were using Canons and Nikons I was a devoted Olympus user.

 

 

Small neat cameras with pretty good glass, and quiet too.

 

I had a small pocket Canon digital Elph very early on and enjoyed the ability to use it as a Hasselblad, but with the viewfinder the right side up.

I got my first one because an artist I was arranging a show of pen and ink work of, told me he had recently taken up photography again after hating it in art school.

 

 

I bought one the next day and had to agree: this brought back fun! A bit later I got the first Olympus dslr and loved it for portraits: instant feedback from the sitter was great. It was much easier to push them to new heights.

When 10 years ago I shifted to a digital SLR for then mainly architecture and travel, it felt like handling Hummers in stead of Porsches. The Canons are huge and ugly beasts.

So for me the RX100's are a new liberation all over again. Quiet and unobtrusive, sadly with a horrible user interface.  There is much extra time required in post too, but not for cloning out 400 dust bunnies any more.

And then with the mk2 came wifi. OK the wifi actually sucks and the app is hopelessly limited, but the idea is brilliant and the results quite good and certainly very useful.

Cameras always are, or need to be, a solution to a problem, but sometimes they are en answer to the question what if...

 

Yes I have a decent camera in my phone as well.

I can see the attraction of the Stockimo idea. It's all about directness, unfiltered life, and being in the moment.

For the fact that it wants to be unfiltered it uses an awful lot of filters most of us have ditched at about Photoshop version 5.0 or 5.5 and I don't mean CS5.

It's like fashion: everything comes back, just not the same.

 

Now here's a thought: all of us greybeards, we must be able to shoot our peers like a twelve year old, or a twenty something shoots his/her friends? Must be a huge market for that.

 

Until then, why not think of subjects and situations this camera is answer to? You're familiar with commissioned work. So there it is. Sell it when the challenges dry up, or you need a different tool for some new task.

Remember when you work with it: it's actually a stripped down Hasselblad ;-)

 

All this of course is written with respect: you're ten years ahead of me and who knows how many light years in experience.

Ah and you know how irreverent the Dutch are ;-)

 

wim

[Stephen Markeson]

Hi Sultanpepa,

Thanks for the idea. As you could tell, for most of my life I worked with film, and I still prefer it to digital.

However, whilst your idea could work and it would be just up my street to carry on shooting film, I don't think it would be cost effective at least for shooting stock. The bottom dropped out of the stock market a while ago now and the cost involved in film/processing/scanning etc.etc. would be too high for the possible return.

 

I hate to say it, but that is where digital scores. With no costs apart from the initial investment, one could shoot till the cows come home and not go bankrupt in to the bargain !

 

My wanting to carry on taking pictures is really now a hobby or distraction. Keeps me out of the betting office (not always!) and i'm told that keeping active could ward off alzheimers! 

As I said in an earlier post, I bought what I thought was the smallest digital camera on the Alamy Permitted list, the Sony Cybershot RX 100 but that was version one and didn't have a viewfinder. That was a bridge too far for me really. dipping my toe in the digital world was one thing, but working without a viewfinder... not for me even though I tried hard enough.

 

I now learn that the latest version 3 has a viewfinder so my V1 will find its rightful place on ebay and maybe just maybe Father Christmas will be persuaded  to get version 3. Problem is even going down the digital path which as you realise is against all my feelings, the cost of the camera circa  £699.00 would mean i would need so many sales on Alamy that the chances of recovering the cost would be nowhere near reached before I fall off the perch.

Theres a thought!

[Allan Bell]

Reference Sony RX100 mk3. You have the option to use either the ELVF or the rear screen to compose your shots or even shoot from the hip if that is your bag.

 

Allan

[Stephen Markeson]

Hi Wim,

 

Pleased you liked my ramblings. Actually a couple of years ago I  set about writing my memoirs. It proved a very difficult task as it spanned so many years and so my assignments. I kept remembering stories, writing them down, remembering another then another. However on reading my drafts, I realised they were all out of date order and I gave up!

Son Oliver to the rescue... Dad, he said, don't worry about the dates or even the years. He told me just to write it all down as I remember it and we can edit it into the correct years when you've finished. Good advice, Thats what I did and it was a great cathartic exercise and I was very pleased to have done it at long last!

 

Several friends told me I should get it published, which wasn't my motive at all. I resisted, but could see how the subject matter would be of interest, particularly to fellow photographers. So I eventually made contact (with degree of difficulty) and spoke to a couple of publishers.

They wanted me to re-write it in a more commercial way which I can understand, but that wasn't why I wrote it in the first place so I didn't pursue the matter.

 

I have written a record of my working life, which as you can imagine contains some wonderful stories, however my motive in the first place was to have a legacy for my children, grand-children etc. A purely personal account of my life which I'm very happy to have achieved.

 

I was very interested to hear your views on the RX100. As you probably read from previous postings, I have the v1 without a viewfinder.

Yukk! going digital was a difficult enough step for an old film hand like me but no viewfinder...try as i may it was a bridge far to far and it has to go!

 

you may have read my comments to Sultanpepa:

 

... so my V1 will find its rightful place on ebay and maybe just maybe Father Christmas will be persuaded  to get version 3. Problem is even going down the digital path which as you realise is against all my feelings, the cost of the camera circa  £699.00 would mean i would need so many sales on Alamy that the chances of recovering the cost would be nowhere near reached before I fall off the perch.

Theres a thought!

 

Stephen

[Stephen Markeson]

Hi Allan,

 

Thanks for that. It seems that the V3 of the Cybershot would suit - but see my (cynical) comments to Sultanpepa and Wiskerke!!!

 

Stephen

[wiskerke]

Stephen

 

I just looked up real searches for %betting% in All of Alamy.

I think you should treat the family to an afternoon in various betting shops, take loads of pictures with that stealthy Sony and have them all sign releases.

Make sure the release includes a clause for sensitive issues. ;-)

Only shoot situations that will get your image on page 1 for a search for relevant keywords of course.

That may pay for the next Sony. Unless you win.

 

wim

[Stephen Markeson]

Wim,

 

Nice betting shop idea...!

 

Actually your earlier comment about revisiting my archives whilst a good one, has its limitations.

As you know, most of my working life I was a staffer.

Whilst that had huge benefits- big salary, big expense account, car, all cameras supplied,

six weeks paid holiday and a pension! The downside is that copyright belongs to the employer as you probably know.

 

So all my work over those years just sits in a library somewhere never to see the light of day again...what a crime!

Nothing I can do about that.

 

When I left the newspaper industry to work in the advertising and corporate arenas, the copyright situation was completely different, and belongs to me.

 

Having said that, the majority of my clients wanted extended licences (to protect the integrity of their product), and that was always good news because that meant loads more money in the bank (I mean loads). Different areas of licensing attracted various multiples of an already large day rate and they all rolled up. Sometimes a big client would want all usage areas covered and for several years.

That was a big big pay day!

However, because of that, a large proportion of my work was 'locked' and quite a lot still is.

 

I haven't looked for a while so maybe some material has come off-licence. If that's the case it would certainly be worth looking at and downloading to Alamy.

 

Stephen

 

 

[wiskerke]

So all my work over those years just sits in a library somewhere never to see the light of day again...what a crime!

Nothing I can do about that.

 

Yes been there, done that. Never been on a paper though.

 

Day rate usually meant just dropping off the slides / negatives at the end of the day.

But in case of prints, I was sure to retain all rights.

Usually nothing ever came from it: who wants a chicken feeder in theatrical light?

We had wrestled with it for a whole weekend. On Sunday night very very late we decided to leave it. So on Monday morning the people entering the workshop found it still welded to the rafters.

 

And then there were these funny things like that prototype machine that made little white boxes. No way I was allowed to keep any negatives or slides. Later I recognised the now yellow new flip open Kodak film boxes; and the slides had all been Velvia 4x5 ;-)

Another time it was an ugly machine in an ugly workshop: some sort of agricultural thing, but no you can not move it outside in the sunlight although it's on wheels. No not with the overhead doors open either.

Ok you're the client. Can I have two days extra for that? A week if you need to, but your access time will be 30 minutes. And it will be moved tonight. After dark. It later turned out to have been a mechanism for things that our government still denies ever having been on our soil. It was a nice and great paying client, but there and then our ways did part.

 

Never did any betting machines.

 

wim

[Stephen Markeson]

Had some pretty dull commissions in recent years myself although nearly always involving people and always well paid!  One you might find amusing:

 

I was asked to photograph the CEO of a major brewery for inclusion in their Annual Report.

Simple job, took me an hour or two in their London office. 

 

Sent the material to the agency along with an invoice for £1500.00 (in 2000) with the usual licensing options.

Two days later I take a phone call from an ecstatic creative director telling me how brilliant I am and how they loved the pictures.

 

Thats good I thought.

 

Another day passed and anther call from the creative director apologising and asking me what my diary looked like for...

a re-shoot ! What? but you told me you loved the pictures. We do he replied but the CEO was far from happy.

 

Why not was my obvious question. It took me a while to get to the bottom of it but I couldn't believe my ears when I did.

 

Well, you see, he said, he has a new Rolex watch and it wasn't visible enough in the pictures so can you go back and do them again?

Of course I said and sent them another invoice for £1500 !

 

I wondered what the share holders in this publicly quoted company would think if they knew about that?

 

Easy life eh! 

 

Stephen

[Betty LaRue]

 

Personally, I gave up my iPhone last year for the Android LG G2. 13mp, and the pics I took with it in St. Croix rivaled the DSLRs until it came to high contrast areas.  It rendered the light portions beautifully, but the shadows were a tad dark.  They could be lifted in PS, though. Save as a tiff, fix, then back to jpeg. The colors from it are spectacular.  The LG G3 is out now, but I think they stuck with 13mp.  I don't see a reason to trade up for it, yet.

 

I'm somewhat steamed that Alamy has had no breakthrough on the Android phones.  I'd no sooner traded for the droid when Stockimo came out. I'm afraid if Alamy does come out with the Droid version, it'll be restricted to one of the droid phones only. 

 

I'd be all over Stockimo like a bee on honey, if I could.

 

 

 

Betty

 

 

I was just looking at the LG G3 on their site. May I ask you about your monthly contract? My iPhone used to run me $80 or $90 a month . . . and I just didn't use it that much. Now I really need a good phone. Are you with AT&T?

Sorry I didn't see your post, Ed.

Yes, I'm with AT&T. I have a package with 2 phones, unlimited talk and text, but only one Gig of data. Most of my Internet use is at home using Wi-Fi, which doesn't use up my data.

When I go on a trip, I can add more data for around $15 more for that month only.

I bought the iPhone 6 a few weeks ago after testing the photo quality and liking it. Much better than the 4s. That's when I changed packages, and I believe the new bill is under $100.