JESSOPS AXE MANAGERS!

• Jessops Axe Managers! – Jessops, the camera retail chain attempting recovery, is to axe pretty much all deputy- and assistant- manager posts throughout its stores.

The news accompanied the publicly quoted firm's latest trading statement, the last before its next report in May. [add comment]

PHOTOGRAPHY GETS TV!

• Photography Gets TV! – At least three online TV channels about photography have been launched in the UK this year. Peter Davey is piloting PhotographyTV, Ephotozine has launched ePHOTOzine TV and Digital SLR User magazine has spawned Digital SLR TV . Media folk must be betting video will be a good way to reach photographers. [expand story >>>]

Each of these three offerings takes a different approach to reaching the audience.

The fledgling PhotographyTV seems to put its emphasis on a monthly video podcast. Its pilot content is a purpose-made 30-minute magazine style show, a slick production with a professional presenter. Viewers can subscribe to the video podcast, and download each new show automatically. You can watch on computer, or copy the shows to a portable media player.



ePHOTOzine TV plays to the strengths of the established and successful ePHOTOzine community web site. It's a YouTube style site specifically for the ePHOTOzine community. It collects content magpie-like from all over, including manufacturer promos – and a lot of good instructional videos (such as Chris Burfoot's popular lighting workshops). Nikita from ePHOTOzine talked to us about the new site. She gave us the short piece to camera you see above.

Digital SLR TV is an off-shoot of Digital SLR User magazine and its online forum. It builds on the strengths of the established forum, adding video content. The content includes video presentations of the magazine's product reviews and features. (Columnists and journos can be seen jumping in and out of helicopters and playing with the latest kit from top manufacturers.)

It might be worth noting that Vzaar, the website that helps eBay sellers to use video, commissioned a market survey that indicated online shoppers trust sites with video more, and think they're more professional. It also suggests that when it comes to buying products online, consumers are more likely to buy them, and accept their prices more easily, if the products are illustrated by video.
[add comment]

UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF PRINT!

• UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF PRINT! – by Parinita Salian

Not just for photo books, digital printers are opening up new business lines for high street minilabs. Parinita Salian visited KAZ Digital Photo Store in East London last week. They've been a test site for EXENUX, the new digital printer from www.photomart.co.uk. EXENUX is ideal for photo products, but when she visited KAZ, Pari found the (typically adapatable) minilab had been using it for much more! [expand story >>>]

EXENUX is a digital printer that can work with a wide range of media weights, from 55gsm to 400gsm, in sizes up to SRA3+ and even 1.2m banner lengths.

I was greeted at KAZ by Seloua, the store manager. She told me she'd been using EXENUX to do quick printing for customers and local businesses. "This printer has single-handedly increased my business by 70%" she said. She had just finished printing some invitation cards, and moments later had a job of business cards coming out behind them. I watched the sheets whizzing from the versatile new machine.

Seloua has two graphic designers working in her store. They do all her Photoshop work, and also prepare designs for printing. Andy, the senior designer, told me "I am so satisfied with the results from this machine. Business cards, stationery, invitation cards – it can do just about anything. And there's none of the jamming or waste we used to have with other printers." [add comment]

NEW STAFF JOURNALIST AT PHOTOWEEK!

• New Staff Journalist at PhotoWeek! – Parinita Salian has joined the staff of PhotoWeek! Pari is a journalist and photographer with a BA in Media Studies and Journalism from Mumbai University. (She has a further qualification in Commercial Photography.) She worked for Asian Age and Asian Photography before coming to PhotoWeek! to do multi-media reporting.
[add comment]

ECONOMIC CLIMATE THREATENS WEDDINGS?

• ECONOMIC CLIMATE THREATENS WEDDINGS? – Easter means we're just seven weeks from Whitsun, traditional start of the wedding season (highest wedding numbers trace a curve from May to September, with a peak in June). This year's weddings are already booked, but what's going to happen next year? Will engaged couples find it easy to spend? [expand story >>>]

Couples and their parents generally need to draw on savings, and to borrow, to finance weddings and honeymoons. And couples need mortgages and help from Mum and Dad to move into new homes. Mum and Dad often provide this by releasing some of the equity in their own homes. What we're seeing at the moment, though, is that loans and mortgages are becoming very much harder to get. Savings tend to get left where they are too, when there's a lack of assurance about the future.

In recent weeks we've seen lenders surprise borrowers by calling-in their loans and credit cards, and we've seen mortgage deals pulled before completion.

The market for wedding photography, always pressured by the steady decline in weddings, now looks to get just another bit colder and more bearish. Perhaps studios who didn't fill their books this year should think now about diversifying in time for next? [add comment]

BOWENS BRING OUT NEW RING FLASH!

• BOWENS BRING OUT NEW RING FLASH! – Bowens, the Clacton based manufacturer of the British lights that have been the de facto standard in photo studios for decades, have brought out a redesigned model of their venerable Ring Flash. [expand story >>>]

At over £800 it's probably fair to say it's a high-end model aimed at fashion and advertising photographers. Portrait people who like to emulate that fashion look could go for it too.

The new model is smaller and lighter than its predecessor, and uses just one neat power cable. It comes out not long after Bowens launched another ring flash product, their Ring Lite Converter, which produces a similar effect when fitted to a monobloc. [add comment]

ASDA PORTRAIT STUDIOS CLOSE SUDDENLY!

• ASDA Portrait Studios Close suddenly! – The Portrait Studios in ASDA stores in the UK have all suddenly closed down, leaving some customers with unfulfilled orders and missing images. The studios were owned and operated by PCA International (UK) Ltd, originally a subsidiary of the Portrait Corporation of America Inc., which went into Chapter 11 in the U.S. on August 31, 2006. (Yes, 2006!) [expand story >>>]

Portrait Corporation of America operated studios at more than 2,000 sites worldwide. They were the sole operators in ASDA/Walmart. They were bought out of bankruptcy last summer by rival CPI Corp., the operator of the Sears portrait studios, who coveted the WalMart relationship. CPI had gone digital, and cited its digital lead as one of the key things that would enable it to operate the former PCA studios more successfully. There were five branches of The Portrait Studio in ASDA stores in the UK prior to the closures.

ASDA gave us a prepared written statement for the press, which said: "We are really sorry to hear that some of our ASDA customers have experienced problems with PCA International (UK) Ltd who supply photographic reprints, canvasses and portrait crystals in 5 of our stores. The abrupt closure of their shops was totally unexpected and a surprise to us. Although we are not obliged to, we are where possible, fulfilling all outstanding orders or providing customers with a full refund to ensure they don't lose out."

PhotoWeek! is guessing the closures could be seen as just an aftershock of the long-ago and far-away PCA bankruptcy, not a failure of in-store portraiture in the UK. Shooting portraits doesn't seem to have been the core of what The Portrait Studio did.

[As this week's issue was closing, we had been unable to get through to PCA International (UK) management to ask the exact reason for the closure of The Portrait Studios, or to confirm whether PCA itself is still trading, and carrying on other activites around the manufacture and export of portrait crystals, or to establish its past and current relationship to CPI.]

Related Stories:

ASDA is doing portraits – from photographers.co.uk
Tesco Portraits? – from photographers.co.uk [add comment]

TURKEY MORE POPULAR THAN NAOMI!

•  "Turkey More Popular than Naomi!" Claims Irish Press Photographer! – Kyran O'Brien, a press photographer well known around Dublin, has said there's been more international demand for the photographs he took of Ireland's latest Eurovision entry, stuffed-toy Dustin the Turkey, then for news photos of Britney Spears and Naomi Campbell he's taken in the past. (Ms. Campbell might knock the stuffing out of her new rival if she finds out?) [expand story >>>]

O'Brien is a staff photographer on Dublin's Evening Herald. Dustin the Turkey is the controversial TV puppet Ireland voted in to the next Eurovision song contest. O'Brien was one of the press photographers who took photos of Dustin when the puppet won the Eurovision selection in Ireland. [add comment]

UNIQUE PADDY'S DAY PRESENTATION!

• Unique Paddys Day Presentation! – This time last year a photographer, one of Photomart's innovative eventing customers, called in to the company and asked them to set up an urgent meet with Sony. Intrigued, Photomart management scheduled the meeting. The photographer was a little the worse for wear, having neither slept nor changed his shirt since St. Patrick's Day. He later made a unique presentation to SONY Professional Systems Europe. [expand story >>>]

He wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of using particular Sony products in an application he'd been told the products weren't suited to. "You don't know how good your equipment is!" he told Sony. In front of independent witnesses from the world of eventing, and a representative from SONY, he demonstrated a proven event photography solution of his own, based on the unlikely combination of a SONY SnapLab dye-sub photo printer and a SONY UPX-C200 ID Photography System. (You can watch a short clip from his presentation in the YouTube video below.)



His entire solution packed into a Kata bag slung over his shoulder. Using only portable battery power, he took photographs on the Sony UPX-C200 ID camera, and printed simultaneously to two printers, a tethered SnapLab, and a wireless Sony ID printer. The ID printer output prints through a slit in the Kata bag.

Throughout St. Patrick's Day, in Irish pubs all round London, this event photographer had sold numerous 7"x5" SnapLab prints in mounts, and Sony ID photos in key rings, all from this bag. From his enterprise he had earned what he described modestly for tax purposes, as a "respectable profit"! As we said at the time, Slainte to you sir, and never mind the begrudgers! [add comment]

DARLINGS GREEN BUDGET OFFERS LITTLE!

• Darling's Green Budget Offers Little to Small Business! – As expected, there was little for the self-employed and independent small business people in Alistair Darling's "green" budget last week. And the Chancellor was so restricted by circumstances that even his vaunted "green" measures appeared only in watered-down or deferred versions. [expand story >>>]

Fuel duty rises are deferred. The changes to Capital Gains Tax will now include Entrepreneur's Relief in place of the old Taper Relief. Income shifting for husband and wife teams is retained. There will be modest increases in how much we can hold in ISAs. And there will be a fund to encourage more women entrepreneurs.

So, not much for us. But what about consumers, our customers, the bread and butter? New household formation is the driver of any economy – social photographers know that viscerally. Our customers get married (click! click! click!), they have children (click!), buy bigger houses, with new walls to hang portraits on (£Kching!), put the kids through school (click! click! click!), the kids leave and have a prom (click! click! click!), do embarrassing things in night clubs (@@@@!), graduate Uni (click!), and eventually produce grandchildren (click! click!) or form civil partnerships (click!), or get divorced (bummer! – divorce photography hasn't taken off yet!).

We depend on how easy it is for them to do all that. And at the moment, it doesn't look like it's getting easier. There are a lot of dark clouds gathering over the lives of our Mr. and Ms. Bread and Butter – house prices, interest rates, inflation, credit squeezes, recession. Mr. Darling's budget hasn't done much for us, and it hasn't done much for the bread and butter either.

The best that can be said of the budget is that No. 11 has recognized the weather warning, and hasn't pressed ahead with measures that, in the current circumstances, would just have made things worse. [add comment]

FUJIFILM GREEN COMMITMENT PAYS OFF!

• Fujifilm Green Commitment pays off ! – The Fujifilm Group, which believes in sustainable development and has a green policy, looks set to finish this current financial year with bumper profits again. Fujifilm Holdings Corp. announced net profits for the nine months to end December 2007 that were double the previous year's. [add comment]

PICTURE BUYERS FAIR OPEN TO ALL!

• Picture Buyers Fair Open to All! – This year's BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair in London in May is open to all exhibitors, not just members of the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies. For photographers, the fair could be worth a visit if you're thinking about contributing your images, or launching a small, specialized new picture library of your own. You should find consultants and other support services there. [expand story >>>]

Most of the visitors to the exhibition will be picture buyers, ie. graphic designers and magazine staff. Amongst the exhibitors this year will be Action Images, Alamy, DK Images, Image Source, Lonely Planet, Wellcome Images, Reuters, Rex, Masterfile, National Geographic and PA Photos.

The BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair is on the 7th & 8th of May, 2008, at the Business Design Centre in London's Islington. You can pre-register on the web for free entry.[add comment]

KODAK MPA WEDDING & PORTRAIT AWARDS 2008!

• Kodak MPA Wedding & Portrait Awards 2008! – It's come around again! The 2008 MPA Kodak Wedding & Portrait Awards is now open for entries! Entry fees are just a pound a pop, you can submit as many entries as you like, and all the money goes to the PACE Centre, a charity for physically disabled children, based in Aylesbury, Bucks. [expand story >>>]

The competition is open to any professional photographer (not just MPA members) but the materials used need to be from Kodak. Closing dates for entries are May 31 and August 30, 2008.



The Pace Centre (shown in their YouTube video above) helps children with motor disorders (such as cerebral palsy). PACE provides education and therapy for children from 6 months to 12 years and beyond. [add comment]

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS SURRENDER TO POLICE

• Wedding Photographers Surrender to Police! – Two wedding photographers surrendered to Police last month after they were detected allegedly making purchases on a credit card stolen from a bat-mitzvah they had photographed. The husband and wife team, Steve and Susan Raab, surrendered in Philidelphia, USA, and were released on bail within hours. [expand story >>>]

Mr. Raab has been charged with credit card fraud, and his wife has been charged as co-conspirator. 6abc Action News has the story on video.[add comment]

ALAMY GETS TOUGH ON MODEL RELEASES!

• Alamy Gets Tough On Model Releases! – Stock agency Alamy has put a post on its blog describing tough action against a contributor who knowingly supplied inaccurate information about an image. The agency was contacted by a member of the public who had found an image of themselves marked as having a model release. The contributor admitted not actually obtaining a release, and Alamy terminated his contract! [expand story >>>]

Alamy's terms and conditions state that "Alamy gives no legal assertion that an image marked as having a model and/or a property release has these releases."

In related news, spoof online newspaper The Onion pubished a story last year, Hero Firefighter Loses Lifelong Battle With Fire, illustrated with an image of the allegedly deceased firefighter. But when the image was brought to the attention of the actual living firefighter recently, he complained. He had signed a release, but believed his image was only to be used by The City of Ottowa. [add comment]

VAN MAN WINS DARKROOM AT FOCUS

• Van Man Wins Darkroom at Focus! – Full-time mobile home live-aboard, portrait photographer Stewart Wall, won a free copy of ExpressDigital DARKROOM Professional software on the www.photomart.co.uk stand at FOCUS on Imaging last month. Online photo supplies company www.photomart.co.uk has always been a favourite with the UK's legion of mobile van-based photographers, and it's great that this year one of them walked away with a top prize! [expand story >>>] Stewart is a portrait photographer who lives aboard his motorhome full-time with his partner Shona and their daughter Jessica. He won his prize by entering the business card draw that www.photomart.co.uk ran on their FOCUS on Imaging stand. He has posted a message about his win on one of the motorhome forums. Congratulations, Stewart! (Hey, why not come to the ExpressDigital Training Day in London on March 27 ? The ticket price is refundable to anyone who already owns the software, or buys it reasonably soon after the training.) Related Stories: photoweek/2007/09/photographers-van photoweek/2007/09/vans-fitted-for-power photoweek/2007/09/marine-batteries [add comment]

UK BANKS FINANCE GETTY SALE

• UK BANKS FINANCE GETTY SALE! – Getty Images' board has recommended to shareholders a $2.4 billion buy-out offer. This is the sale to private equity the corporation had been seeking. Getty is as good as sold! The private equity firm Hellman & Friedman will take Getty out of public ownership by offering shareholders a 55% premium on the pre-sale share price. The bid is enabled by financial backing from Barclays Capital, GE Commercial Finance and RBS Greenwich Capital. [expand story >>>]

Getty is striving with the challenge of adapting. Its business model has been disrupted by the digital and Internet revolutions. Its share price has been taking a hammering on the public market. Public investors have seen the problems in the corporation's traditional business only too clearly, and the promise of its emerging microstock endeavour dimly if at all. The Getty board bet private equity would be less blinkered, and they bet right. There had been some speculation that, given the current US credit squeeze, private investors might find it hard to get finance for the buy-out. But investment banks with origins in the UK, in a syndicate led by Barclays Capital, sallied in and won the deal.

Related Stories:

photoweek/2008/01/getty-is-for-sale [add comment]

PHOTO REFLECT TAKES UK CREDIT CARDS SOON!

• Photo Reflect Takes UK Credit Cards Soon! – The UK presence of PhotoReflect.com, which launched here last week, will soon be accepting UK credit cards on behalf of its photographers, ExpressDigital have said. PhotoReflect from ExpressDigital provides photographers with an Internet storefront and e-commerce facilities for selling images and prints. [expand story >>>]

PhotoReflect storefronts have no storage fees, no upload fees, and no monthly fees. All photographers can start a PhotoReflect.com website for free! Commission on each sale depends on volume and works on a sliding scale beginning at 15% plus payment processing fees. All financial transactions are handled on the site and ExpressDigital will post cheques to all photographers for storefront earnings every two weeks.

Users of ExpressDigital DARKROOM will be able to integrate PhotoReflect into their workflow. In the US, PhotoReflect (established in 1999) is already the largest professional photographer Internet storefront, with over 28,000 customers. [add comment]

DOLI 0810 MINILAB WINS DIMA

• DOLI 0810 MiniLab wins DIMA! – The Shanghai Doli 0810 minilab has won the 2008 PMA DIMA Digital Printer Shoot-Out competition in Las Vegas this year, in the Industrial High-Speed 4"x6" RA-4 printer category. [expand story >>>]

The DIMA win is based on image quality, as measured by quantitative factors used by colour scientists, and also by qualitative factors, such as flesh tones and neutrality, that were assessed by a panel of expert judges. The win is a testimony to the engineering and design of the Doli 0810. It sends a message to photo lab owners that when they buy the affordable Doli 0810, they're getting a machine that will produce better prints than some systems costing twice as much. [add comment]

FOCUS ON IMAGING REALLY ROCKED!

• Focus On Imaging Really Rocked! – The FOCUS on Imaging show really rocked for the team from Photomart this year – and for all their many guests from ExpressDigital, Mitsubishi, Olmec, Sony, and PxlSoft, amongst others.

The multi-faceted www.photomart.co.uk stand was the biggest ever this year, and was like a chocolate box of surprises for imaging professionals. Walking round it, you were presented with the latest in id card printing, high-end album production, modern digital minilabs, dye-sub printing, and many other meaty and juicy solutions. – Professional and commercial imaging really is alive and kicking at FOCUS still! [expand story >>>]

From pretty much wherever you stood in the exhibition halls for FOCUS on Imaging at the NEC this year you could see the famous www.photomart.co.uk "P" logo towering above the ceilings of the many other stands at the show. And whenever the photographer Keith Trainor stepped forward to demonstrate greenscreen shooting, and started speaking through his head-set, the already busy stand drew even further crowds in front of it. Keith's model was dressed as a pirate, and worked hard throughout the show.



The success was all very gratifying for www.photomart.co.uk staff, and a great reward for all the hard work they put into the show. The company's Sales team reported strong interest on all fronts, and they were very happy with the footfall through the stand. [add comment]

PHOTOREFLECT UK LAUNCH TODAY!

• PhotoREFLECT UK Launch today! – The UK presence of PhotoReflect.com launches today! PhotoReflect from ExpressDigital provides photographers with an Internet storefront and e-commerce facilities for selling images and prints. [expand story >>>]

PhotoReflect storefronts have no storage fees, no upload fees, and no monthly fees. All photographers can start a PhotoReflect.com website for free! Commission on each sale depends on volume and works on a sliding scale beginning at 15% plus payment processing fees. All financial transactions are handled on the site and ExpressDigital will post cheques to all photographers for storefront earnings every two weeks.

Users of ExpressDigital DARKROOM will be able to integrate PhotoReflect into their workflow. In the US, PhotoReflect (established in 1999) is already the largest professional photographer Internet storefront, with over 28,000 customers. [add comment]

SONY UPDR150 IS A DIMA WINNER!

• SONY UP-DR150 Is A DIMA Winner! – The SONY UP-DR150 photo printer won the DIMA Digital Printer Shoot-Out in the 6" dye sub roll printer category at PMA in Las Vegas last month. The competition was judged on image quality. [expand story >>>]

UP-DR150 has been a great success for SONY. In the UK it spearheaded the corporation's further penetration of the event photography market, where it was well received by 6"x8" users for its unbeaten speed, and for image quality the public loved. In the kiosk arena, it was the machine at the heart of the scores of kiosks sold by SONY to ASDA in what must have been the coup of the year in 2007 in the imaging industry.

Related Stories:

photoweek/2008/02/sony-up-dr200-revealed-at-focus.html [add comment]

DRY LAB - AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?

• DRY LAB – An Idea Whose Time Has Come? – Those who went to FOCUS on Imaging from the photo lab sector this year probably noticed new dry labs being offered by Fujifilm, Kodak, KIS/PhotoMe and Noritsu. The Fujifilm and Noritsu offerings are (hardware identical) inkjet systems, but the Kodak combo is primarily thermal (conceptually similar to the Mitsubishi Flexilab package, available here for some years already). And that prompts PhotoWeek! to ask this question, Just what is a dry lab anyway? [expand story >>>]

Conceptually, dry labs need to be a superior substitute for current minilabs. Brand manufacturers strive to present them as exactly that. Fujifilm are marketing their Dry Lab 400 as just another member of the venerable Frontier family. To be a dry lab, any solution has to aim to be functionally equivalent to a minilab, and needs to represent a similar economic proposition. Minilab buyers are resistant to dry labs that can't approach the cost-per-print of wet labs.

But are dry labs really so certainly the heirs-in-waiting to the minilab inheritance, or is the whole concept of a minilab redundant in future photofinishing? Can we predict with confidence how long consumers are going to continue to get 4"x6" prints from retail outlets – for another decade, for longer?

Dry lab is a concept that predates the digital revolution. The original promise of dry lab for the manufacturers was that it would enable minilab sales to penetrate even further into the retail market – back in the days when expansion was impeded only by resistance to wet process! But minilabs are rolling back out of retail anyway, and it's not because of chemistry. With the new economics of declined print volumes, retail can't afford to give minilabs their floor space anymore. ASDA has had to replace some of their in-store photo labs with kiosks, for example. But even kiosks may be just a transitional technology, with the consumer ultimately returning to home printing.

There's another possibility. The small-footprint machines that could replace wet labs may have already crept into photo shops without us recognizing them. Minilabs these days are for doing work in small batches, run every half-hour or hour. Given the right software, this kind of work can be layed up on the wide-format inkjets that most photo labs already have. Schools photographers work this way now, using RIP facilities to output whole jobs on wide-format. In some ways, the right software RIP can enhance an inkjet so much the RIP could be considered a 'soft' minilab! So ponder this – future 'minilabs' may be neither wet nor dry, they might just be soft!

Related Stories:

photoweek/2008/02/dry-labs-debut-at-focus.html [add comment]

JUST OUTA FOCUS!

• Just Outa FOCUS? – An interesting feature of the marketing for this year's FOCUS on Imaging show was the use of the Justin Focus character. This was effective, but we're guessing some of you will have missed the most creative (and probably most expensive) aspects of it, the 'viral' videos. If you did miss them, you can still find them on YouTube. [expand story >>>]

One of our semi-favourites is the good-in-parts but overly long (and somewhat confused) "Blow Off" – a reference to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960's swinging London movie, "Blow Up" (see classic clip below).



OK, Justin has got a propellor – but didn't "Blow Up" star David Hemmings, not Michael Caine? – Oh yeah! Work Me Baby! WORK Me![add comment]