Photographic Milestones – Products

GoPro

Millions of people have used GoPro’s wearable cameras to record their every sky-diving, drone-flying, shark-riding adventure. But the San Mateo, California-based company might have just pulled off the greatest stunt of all with the biggest initial public offering of a consumer electronics company in more than 20 years.

There’s a good reason we haven’t seen any consumer electronics companies go public recently (Skullcandy’s $189 million IPO in 2011 is the most recent), and that’s because smartphones—and the gargantuan companies that make them—can do and build almost everything and anything. On any given day, our phones can act as a GPS system, a video game console, a fitness tracker, a stereo, a camera, and oh yeah, a telephone, all in one. To launch a standalone consumer electronics company that does just one thing, even if it can do that one thing really, really well, is a risky endeavor in the age of the smartphone.

All of that makes GoPro, which raised $427 million at a valuation of $2.96 billion in its IPO, something of an anomaly. After all, it was just a few years ago that the Flip Video camera, another gadget that dominated the camcorder market for a time, foundered, rendered obsolete by the proliferation of smartphones with ever-improving cameras. Even as the Flip floundered, however, GoPro, which sold its first camera in 2004, flourished. What separates GoPro from Flip is that all along, GoPro has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can’t easily replace: the experience of using the camera.

“They don’t just sell a video camera, they sell the memory of the wave or the ski trip down the slope,” says Ben Arnold, a consumer technology industry analyst at The NPD Group. “I think we are entering an age where lifestyle in technology is becoming very important.”

iPhone/Smart Phones

Your phone camera is your best camera, because it’s always with you. When people say this about mobile photography, or iphoneography as it’s also called, they’re usually talking about snapping those unexpected moments: a man in a banana suit on his way to work; a celebrity involved in a punch-up; or maybe just a beautiful sunset.

But, for many, the initial snap is just the start. It’s the raw material for a new creative process. Most mobile phone cameras take very dull photos. But it doesn’t matter, because there are hundreds of apps to help you turn them into something amazing. And that’s what’s really at the heart of it. Costing pennies, mobile photography apps give you the creative power of Photoshop, and more besides, without being tied to your desk. This makes mobile photography incredibly liberating for the creative photographic spirit. Suddenly, every free moment is an opportunity to both take and craft images. These apps have accelerated the creative process, as well as allowing you, quite simply, to be more creative, more of the time, for less money.

Pillcam

The futuristic ‘Pillcam’ is a tiny camera fitted with a flashing LED light, designed to show up any abnormalities inside the human body.

The camera is swallowed in the same way as traditional tablets, and takes the same route as food. It travels through the body, capturing 18 photos ever second.

Canon 5D MK II

The 5D Mark II signaled a key moment in photography: the moment that any still photographer had the equipment necessary to become a high-def videographer. The 5D Mark II was the first D-SLR to shoot high-def video—others from Nikon and other competitors followed quickly after, of course. Canon engineers developed a D-SLR processor powerful enough to encode 30 frames of high-def video from the camera’s 21-megapixel sensor into video every second. And, because the 5D works with dozens of pre-existing D-SLR lenses, many already had the wares necessary for full-blown movie shoots. Only three years later, cinematographers have used the 5D in countless TV shows, commercials, and films, including scenes from The Avengers, the Oscar-nominated documentary Hell and Back Again, and the stop-motion film Paranorman. Not bad for a still camera.

Photoshop

Photoshop is arguably the most widely used, most popular and most powerful photo-editing software in the world and although many of today’s Photoshop users probably can’t imagine a world without the application, it’s important to remember that Photoshop has only been around for 25 years.

Apple Macbook Pro

Apple’s MacBook Pro has long been a favourite among professional photographers. A big part is, of course, that it runs the same OS X many of them run on desktop computers, but it also was an early pioneer of ultra-high resolution LCDs with a large colour gamut, and a relatively-compact, stylish, design. However, many PC vendors have caught up in features, and surpassed the now ageing MBP models in raw performance. Apple has made some recent improvements, including adding a Force Touch trackpad, faster SSDs, and improving the battery life.

Unsuccessful Photography endeavors over the last 25 years

Polaroid (The company, Not the product)

In October 2001, Polaroid Corporation, the pioneer of instant photography filed for federal bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Though it was a global brand name in 2007, the corporate entity of this pioneer got lost in the way.

Founded in 1937 by Edwin Land, Polaroid entered the imaging industry in 1948 with advent of first ever instant camera. Polaroid soon developed a cult status for instant cameras. But soon its golden years were over. In late 1980s, the digital technology revolutionised the photographic industry. Polaroid, under the influence of its immensely valued core business of instant photography, could not anticipate the magnitude of challenges from Digital evolution, a game they entered into late. The company not only failed to position itself in digital imaging but also lost its drive for instant photography.

In spite of being a research-and-development-driven company, Polaroid could not save its technology driven core business of instant cameras. In October 2001, the corporation filed for bankruptcy and sold most of the business (including the “Polaroid” name itself and non-bankrupt foreign subsidiaries) to One Equity Partners (OEP), a partner of Bank One Corporation. Although OEP Imaging Corporation changed its name to Polaroid Holding Company (PHC), the original Polaroid Corporation changed its name to Primary PDC Inc. In April 2005, Petters Group Worldwide (PGW) announced its acquisition of PHC for US $ 426 million.

Kodak

When companies go bust, we, the customers, rarely pay much heed. It’s all about judges, restructuring and then, if they are lucky, their re-emerging in some shrunken form to carry on as if nothing had happened. Not so in the case of Kodak, which is now taking the walk of ignominy to the bankruptcy courts.

For this is a company we care about – at least if we were born before 1986 or so, when Kodak was at the peak of its commercial powers. A hundred years earlier George Eastman, the company’s founder, had invented roll film, which replaced photographic plates and allowed photography to become a hobby of the masses. Kodak did not quite own the 20th century, but it did become the curator of our memories.

“One of the interesting parts of this bankruptcy story is everyone’s saddened by it,” notes Robert Burley, professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto. “There’s a kind of emotional connection to Kodak for many people. You could find that name inside every American household and, in the last five years, it’s disappeared.”

But 1986 was arguably also the year when Kodak, a company that for so long was the emblem of American industrial innovation, began to be eaten by others, notably from Japan, who learnt to innovate too – and more quickly.

Kodak was the great inventor. In 1900, it unveiled the Box Brownie camera. “You push the button, we do the rest,” ran the advertising campaign. Kodachrome film, the standard for movie-makers as well as generations of still photographers because of its incredible definition and archival longevity, was introduced in 1936 and only went out of production 2009. Nor should we forget the Instamatic, the camera with the little cartridges of film that spared us the fumbling of trying to get film to spool properly. Between 1963 and 1970 the company sold 50 million of those.

The trouble began 20 years ago, with the decline of film photography. In the 1990s, Kodak poured billions into developing technology for taking pictures using mobile phones and other digital devices. But it held back from developing digital cameras for the mass market for fear of killing its all-important film business. Others, such as the Japanese firm Canon, rushed in.

So who invented the digital camera? Ironically, Kodak did – or, rather, a company engineer called Steve Sasson, who put together a toaster-sized contraption that could save images using electronic circuits. The images were transferred onto a tape cassette and were viewable by attaching the camera to a TV screen, a process that took 23 seconds.

It was an astonishing achievement. And it happened in 1975, long before the digital age. Mr Sasson and his colleagues were met with blank faces when they unveiled their device to Kodak’s bosses. Even he didn’t full see its potential. “It is funny now to look back on this project and realise that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera,” Mr Sasson was later to write on a company blog.

“We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best: ‘The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.’ But in reality, we had no idea.”

For Kodak’s leaders, going digital meant killing film, smashing the company’s golden egg to make way for the new. Mr Sasson saw in hindsight that he had not exactly won them over when he unveiled his toy: “In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it ‘Film-less Photography’. Talk about warming up your audience!”

Even before film began to fade, other manufacturers, notably Fuji, were nibbling at the company’s dominance: at the 1984 Olympics it was Fuji that supplied the official film, after Kodak declined the opportunity. In recent years the company has been weighed down by its pension responsibilities, born of a paternalistic culture introduced by Mr Eastman himself. And its efforts in the last 10 years to shift its focus to consumer and industrial printers have faltered: the company has posted losses in six of the last seven years.

In 1976, Kodak sold 90 per cent of the photographic film in the US and 85 per cent of the cameras; 10 years later it still employed 145,000 people worldwide compared with a global payroll today of 18,000. Historians may one day conclude that most of the company’s slow unravelling can be traced to the failure of its leaders to recognise the huge potential of Mr Sasson’s invention.

Don Strickland, a former vice-president, who left the company in 1993 because even then he couldn’t persuade it to manufacture and market a digital camera, put it this way: “We developed the world’s first consumer digital camera but we could not get approval to launch or sell it because of fear of the effects on the film market.”

Everpix

The service seamlessly found and uploaded photos from your desktop and from online services, then organized them using algorithms to highlight the best ones.

In two short years, Everpix has gone from a dream shared by two French graphics experts to one of the world’s best solutions for managing a large library of photos. It attracted 55,000 users and earned enough each month to cover the cost of the service, if not employees’ salaries.

But while its talented team obsessed over the look and features of its product, user growth failed to keep pace. Starting in June, Latour tried to raise $5 million to give Everpix more time to become profitable. When those efforts faltered, he began pursuing an acquisition. Everpix had tentatively agreed last month to be acquired by Path, according to a source close to the social network. But Path’s executive team killed the deal at the last minute, leaving Everpix adrift.

With the service’s remaining lifespan now measured in days, Latour scrambled to find a home for the product and his team. He worked on one potential deal for a so-called acqui-hire, in which the team would stay together at a new company while the product shut down; and another for a true acquisition, in which Everpix’s core technology would live on in some form. He also tried to negotiate a last-minute, product-saving infusion of cash from an investor who loved the product.

The question in the room was whether any of it would come in time. The bills were starting to come due, and there was no money to pay them. Silicon Valley prides itself on being a place where great ideas win, and yet here was an excellent product teetering on the edge of oblivion. “It feels like we’re going 100mph into the brick wall,” Fan said. “And we’re still picking up speed. But we don’t know if the wall is going to be there.”

Redeye Photographic Network

https://www.redeye.org.uk

Redeye, the Photography Network, is a not-for-profit Community Benefit Society set up to support photographers at every level, and build networks across photography. It is based in Manchester, UK, and has subscribers and users across the UK and globally. It aims to form a clear picture of the ways photographers and photographic artists are working now, and give them access to events, opportunities, advice and information that are relevant to their work and difficult to find elsewhere. Alongside this it works to bring photographic and other organisations together, to encourage ethical and best practice, and to build a voice for photography.

Photobooks

Here is a selection of some online companies that produce photobooks of your work.

Cewe

https://cewe-photoworld.com

In the first year, I used this company to produce a photobook of work I work from our trip to Seville, Spain. You have to download a piece of software that you use to design the layout your book. It was quite simple and easy to use. I was very happy with the quality of the book and would definitely use them in the future.

Blurb

http://www.blurb.co.uk

Bobs

https://www.bobbooks.co.uk

 Photobox

https://www.photobox.co.uk

 Loxley

http://www.loxleycolour.com

 Aperture

http://www.aperturebooks.com

 Lulu

http://www.lulu.com

 Marrutt

http://www.marrutt.com/presentation/books/marrutt-pro-photobooks

 Saal

http://www.saal-digital.co.uk/photobooks/

 Folio Albums

http://www.folioalbums.com

Exhibition time

As part of the CDSS conference I am attending, there is an exhibition being held at Prism, a new gallery that has recently opened in Blackburn. This is for people that are holding talks and somewhere for all attendees to see any work that has been talked about in presentations.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a photograph of my work in situ so I will upload one when they are up

The allusions of American artist Elaine Sturtevant

Sturtevant has bestowed a particular importance to photography throughout her career and perhaps this medium epitomizes best her resistance to the categorization of her work. Rather than creating exact replications, she engages a dialogue with her sources by complicating the basic mimetic process and often turning it against itself. An exhibition entitled Undeniable Allusion, currently on view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, in Paris, gathers rare photographs and objects by Sturtevant. The works on view, completed between 1966 and 1998, reflect the specific companionship Sturtevant maintained with the work of Beuys, Duchamp and Warhol throughout her life, while highlighting the performative nature of her radical artistic approach.

An early series of photographic collages based on Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion sets the tone for the exhibition and shows her longstanding interest in images in action. Walking naked in front of her own versions of works by Duchamp, Johns, Rosenquist, Warhol or Beuys, she subjects both her own work and her body to the objectifying lens of the camera. As Art Historian Peter Eleey points out: “Equating these paintings with the gridded backdrop that Muybridge used to take the measure of his subjects, Sturtevant uses theses photographic effigies of her own work as a kind of scenography against which to gauge her appearance and progress through the frame, and implicitly, beyond it.”

Sturtevant’s Warhol Flowers revisits the series that famously launched her career. It was in 1964, the year they were exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery, that she made her first “repetition” of Andy Warhol’s seminal floral silkscreens. For this series Warhol sourced his imagery from photographs of seven hibiscus flowers featured in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. To create the composition for his works, Warhol cropped the photograph so that four of the original seven fit into this new square format. This unauthorized use of another artist’s photograph is directly connected to Sturtevant’s own serial method, through which she would continue to explore a subject without ever exhausting it.

Curated around the repetition of this iconic image, the Beuys-related and Duchamp-related works demonstrate Sturtevant’s subjective involvement in questioning image making. Of Duchamp she says, “The ready-mades, the most crucial body of work, lack unity, form and meaning, thereby opening a space that allows for posited, subjective or arbitrary meaning.”

By redoing Duchamp’s Fountain and Coin de Chasteté in her own way and by photographing herself with shaving cream in the manner of Duchamp’s famous portrait by Man Ray, she goes to the inner core of the works and creates an intimate link with the artists. Dressed in Joseph Beuys’ iconic archaeologist/safari garb, Sturtevant becomes, in some sense, an art historical adventurer. Her concept of ‘repetition as difference’ has enabled her to revisit art historical narratives and reconfigure our traditional understanding of artistic practice.

The exhibition display aims to echo the sense of circularity that pervades Sturtevant’s oeuvre. From her early conceptually based work to her later interest in cybernetics she has always sought the same forward movement. “What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that’s the way to go.”

Wedding Shoot with Nathan

I assisted Nathan D’amour to photograph a wedding. It was a very, very long and busy day.

Unfortunately, because of this, I wasn’t able to get any ‘Behind the Scenes’ shots of what we were doing

Forecast Summery

This is a very basic forecast summery I knocked up

As you can see, to make a living or even to just survive, you have to have well paid jobs

This is the reason I won’t be becoming a working photographer. I will be getting a job with a set wage and producing photographs in my own time in the hope that my work will get seen

Online presence

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/reeceimages1

Twitter

https://twitter.com/search?q=reeceimages

 

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/reece_images/

Website

 

Not yet up and running due to funds

Where I would like to be

Over the last couple of months, I have come to the realisation that I don’t want to be a photographer as a main job. There is far too much competition and people willing to undercut you with inferior photography. Becoming a wedding photographer doesn’t interest me in the slightest.

The type of work I would like to produce is personal work, projects. I don’t want to be told how my photography has to be. Im a creative person and I will not be held back or told how I have to create something.

I hope to become an photographic activist and bring some sort of change or at the least, make people aware of what goes on in the world. One person seeing a photograph could change anything.

I attended a talk by Sebastiao Salgado whilst at The Photography Show this year and from listening to him talk about his work in such a positive way, I now have an aim within my photography. He has managed to turn his personal work into something he makes a lot of money from and also brings topics that people might not be aware of to the for front