January 22nd, 2008
Stephan R. Lewis is a professional photographer. He accepted to share his knowledge with us, with this exclusive article.
The value of photographic prints
I have been in the photo industry trenches for a long time and have watched many things come and go in popularity.
When I say ‘trenches’ I mean not the glamour part of the industry that you see everyday on magazine covers, beautiful and famous people, but rather the nuts and bolts of mass producing press release photos of tired employees, photographs of products for advertising for small business, other time sensitive materials with a short shelf life, created for immediate usage with no value once the deadline has come and gone.
My actual primary concern at the beginning of my career was printing archival black and white photographs for exhibition and professional use, art prints designed to last 100+ years, so the disposable and transient nature of consumer photography amazed me.
Which brings me to the popularity of one-hour photo finishing of snapshots that existed until recently. Everything from birthday parties and Christmases, the latest vacation snaps and spontaneous party photos to out of focus and overexposed close-ups of newborn babies, dog noses and amateur porn.
Everyone seemed to be shooting like crazy and getting prints that ended up in a box or still in the envelope, if they (the prints) were lucky they were put in a photo album or even framed on the wall- or maybe just stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.
110, 126 and 35mm cameras made it easy and affordable to make photos, fun, quick and relatively cheap. Then came APS, the last gasp of film as a consumer product, and now we have the most insidious of all- the camera built into your cell phone and all types of image capturing devices. These devices are so great because once you have bought one your ongoing expenses theoretically are nothing- but computer time!
A big part of my photo lab duties has always been restoring old photographs. Photographs from 1890, torn and or folded images from the 1950s, photographs that had Dad cut out in the 60s after a bad divorce and the kids want him reinserted in the 90s! I have worked on wallet sized prints that had in fact been in a wallet for 20 years until someone realized it was the ONLY print of that person and now they needed an 8×10 for the wall, for the memorial service… the oldest photograph I ever worked on was from 1849. Plenty of those images I have worked so hard to restore and make like new had started out as ‘happy snaps’ and ended up being the only or last or best photograph of someone beloved and, sadly, now departed.
Why? People forget - photographs are priceless, one-of-a kind records of a specific moment in time, a moment that will never occur again, a method of capturing and preserving memory that mankind has only had for about 160 years.
As small children we go through the family photo albums, laughing at the way people used to dress, marveling at how much someone looks like great-grandpa, examining vintage cars and houses, looking at things and people that no longer exist. History.
Now we have digital photography, images that might never leave the memory card, maybe get stashed in a folder on the desktop, turned into a slide show that can only be seen on that specific computer, at best uploaded to share with friends and family online. Where will these images be in 20 years?
Is the current advent of technology creating an attitude towards photography that is undermining its inherent value as a historical record, thoughtlessly making it too disposable and transient to be appreciated and preserved?
I photograph lots of special events, large groups, and school kids and sales of prints from these sessions are down markedly. After spending 30 minutes setting up a group shot and capturing it with my high-end digital camera, with the intent of selling true photographic prints designed to last 50 or more years, a Mom or kid next to me will hold up their camera phone and grab a shot and figure: “Got it!” and good enough. As a result, they don’t buy a thing.
Then they get home and maybe look at their quickie capture, email it to grandma and forget about it. Ultimately it may be saved under an incomprehensible filename or not at all, put on a hard drive that will inevitably crash, or uploaded to a website that ceases to exist in three years, or even worse- forgotten about altogether!
Let me tell you people- that camera phone image, that image on your computer screen is not a memory preserved for all time! As long as it is not PRINTED, a physical hard copy that can be whipped out years and years later, it only exists for the moment.
Do yourself a favor. Print that photograph and put it in a photo album so your kids, your grandkids, maybe even their children can see what you looked like on your myspace or Yahoo profile in 2008!
Posted in Arts, Technology | No Comments »
January 19th, 2008
This article is written by web designer Josh Gutteridge who runs Skyte Media. Skyte Media is based in the Midlands (England) and is a professional web design company that specialises in web design and development. Josh would like to receive comments about this article on his blog. But of course you can comment it also here, on ManuelMarino.com!
How Has the Internet Affected the Music Industry?
Music has always been something that has inspired mankind. Sir Thomas Beecham once said ‘a musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it’. The pure beauty of music is that we can all listen to the same notes played by many different instruments, yet make our own individual conclusions with regards to what the music means to us; and nobody can argue.
It is not in the nature of this post to go in depth on musical history. Nonetheless, music has developed rapidly through the ages with the vinyl when it was first really used in 1948 by Columbia Records. Since then the music industry has seen the use of the Audio-Cassette and Compact Disc (CD).
Consequently, since the internet became more widely available it has made music more easily accessed by such means as Online Music Stores. There are thousands of these stores online including three of the most famous: iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody (US only). Let’s focus in on iTunes; an offshoot of the famous/infamous Apple Company (delete as applicable).
I refer to iTunes as the ‘pied piper of the 21st century’ lulling people into easily downloading content with minimal hassle. iTunes is a free piece of software developed by the Apple company at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This allows you to download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audio books, various pod casts and in the USA feature length films, and ringtones. Downloaded content can then be used to create your own play lists and personalised albums to burn to CD. It can also be transferred onto various different types of iPod including the new iPhone making music more accessible and easy to get hold of.
How does this affect the ordinary person who enjoys listening to their preferred genre(s) of music?
In this case, music has never been so easily manipulated and accessible. We live in a convenience obsessed world with personalised portals such as Last FM where you can listen to any artist known to mankind, you can listen to personalised internet radio with Pandora and also listen to all the music and view the videos on YouTube. It doesn’t take much effort to rip music (ripping is the term for digital audio extraction). The cost of downloading an album from the net is generally cheaper than an album brought in the shops, after all, downloads should cost less as there are less overheads for the record label to pay for: CD sleeve, CD case, CD cost, copying equipment etc.
How does this affect the music industry?
Some artists find the concept of the internet hard to adapt to; however, as they are forced into the mould of technology modern artists tend to embrace the internet as a friend rather than a foe. They view it as a ‘creative and inspiration-enhancing workspace where they can communicate, collaborate, and promote their work’ - Mary Madden (Research Specialist) in her project ‘Artists, Musicians and the Internet’. Sites such as MySpace have helped Artists and Musicians address their target audience rousing more interest in their style of music.
But let’s face it; there will always be people that are looking to find a loophole. I’m talking about those who engage in illegal music downloading. Experts admit that illegal downloads will never be stopped. This messes up the system and makes it unfair for both the artist and the people who are paying for downloads. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has joined forces with the Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) to take legal action against internet file-sharers.
How will illegal downloader’s effect record labels? A record label makes, distributes and markets sound recordings; basically at the end of the day they’re out there to make money. The music industry produce mainly alums…how many albums have you brought just because you like one song? I have! We’re forced to buy albums to get the songs we love. As sales figures are falling record labels will be forced to look at the logic. Are people going to buy a whole album or just download one song? What effects do you think this will bring? Might we see a rise in the cost of internet downloads?
So in conclusion we have seen that the music industry has created stronger ties with new technology over the past decades and now can only go forward. We have seen that internet music downloads can be both an advantage and a disadvantage as we see the battle between the illegal downloader and the record companies continues. However, it is safe to conclude people – adapt or die!
Posted in Business, Music, Technology | No Comments »
December 3rd, 2007
Marcos Marado wrote this exclusive article. Is the situation really so dramatic as he explains? Leave your comments, this could be our first really important debate on ManuelMarino.com.
The State of Music Business
I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.
The music business is in a chaotic state. The record industry is declining, and is throwing the guilt of it to what they like to call “piracy” - the unauthorised downloading of music. While they blame it, the truth is the fault is from the music industry itself. Doug Morris, Universal Music CEO, recently admitted he knows nothing about the music industry of nowadays. They decided to sue their customers by suing music fans that do unauthorised downloads instead of suing those who really make money out of copyrighted works, and restricting their clients’ rights with technologies like DRM.
It is surely true that it’s hard to find a completely fair way of compensating musicians while promoting the access to culture, but there are efforts to design market models that work - at least better than the actual one. The biggest problem is that the music industry - defined by the four major labels - doesn’t get it. The music market has changed, music, musicians and music lovers adapted themselves to new trends and technologies, but the music industry decided to ignore all the signs, refusing to see the big elephant in the room, and kept doing business in an obsolete way. The proof that they simply don’t understand what’s going on is right in front of everyone wanting to see it, when we get news that Elton John wants the Internet shut’ed down, or when countries try to impose Internet Services Providers to “filter illegal downloads“, even if that’s technicly impossible to do (illegal stuff surely don’t have an evil bit), and the music industry does political pressure that even makes countries change their laws. They spend tons of money implementing DRM systems, and others sell the rights that were restricted to listeners back, making money from what they first took, even if it’s known that DRM systems cause sales losses, music artists and fans are against such systems and new businesses are arising just by the fact that they don’t adopt DRM technologies, radio stations create petitions against DRM. Now, it’s too late for them - but what’s going to happen to the music market?
Well, we’re also seeing a lot of emergent business models. First of all, we have to realize that while CD sales are decreasing, music consumption is rising twice as fast. Also, if you open your eyes and start considering the music business as everything around music and not just music sales, then you’ll see that, for instance, in North America, the music business will total $26.5 billion in 2011, growing at an average annual rate of 2.8% from $23.1 billion in 2006. Recorded music revenues will still declining as declining CD sales cancel out the sharp gains in digital sales. Music publishing and live music will grow. Norway has a party that wants to free file sharing and sampling, shorten the commercial copyright and ban DRM. The number of web services for bands is wildly growing. Artists have now the means of making money while giving music for free, for instance. Musicians are finding new ways of doing their work by themselves, even if sometimes things aren’t simple. While there’s no formula on how to create the perfect record label, there are some labels and distributors that understand nowadays music market and know how to do business in it.
The future is smiling at us - we just have to let obsolete formulas and vices die.
Of course, new issues to be solved will appear. New fights have to be fought and won, or we’ll end like citizens of a dystopian world.
But soon enough it is going to be a great time to live - as a musician, a music lover or even a technologist.
Posted in Business, Music, Technology | 51 Comments »
