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Archive for February 12th, 2008

On Tuesday, nearly a year and a half after the company first broke into the professional photography market with its editing suite, a new version was released.

Apple says about 100 new features are included in this latest release, as well as performance enhancements and a new image processing engine. Additionally, it has dropped the price by $100 to $199.

The company is likely hoping to expand the reach of Aperture beyond the professional market. Competitor Adobe offers its Lightroom product for $299, so the move could be seen as a shot across the bow in expanding its market share.

Cupertino certainly has a long way to go if recent market share data is any indication. Among professionals it only holds a 6.5 percent market share, while Lightroom holds a 23.6 percent share.

A new user interface has been developed for this release, which adds new keyboard shortcuts and a tabbed inspector panel. Some organizational features have been borrowed from iPhoto, including an Events-like viewer to quickly scan through projects.

Performance enhancements allow for quick navigation through images in a library, and images can be exported in the background to allow for simultaneous work on several projects.

More on the new version’s feature set can be found on the Aperture website. The software is available immediately through Apple and its network of retailers.

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Pentax plans to phase out digital compact camera production and concentrate on DSLRs, according to a report in a leading Japanese trade journal, which has not been denied by Pentax Europe.

Pentax, which is one of the most famous brands in photography, is due to merge with Hoya Corporation on 31 March.

Hoya’s CEO Hiroshi Suzuki is reported to have told Japanese trade magazine Pen News Weekly that Pentax will concentrate on DSLRs and ‘gradually phase down development and production of compact digicams in future’.

At the time of writing we were waiting for an official comment from Pentax.

It is thought that, in the short term at least, Pentax will use a third party to manufacture its compact cameras.

The Pen article adds that Hoya ‘will focus its development resources on DSLRs and will gradually phase down marketing operations for compact digicams under the Pentax brand and specialise in OEM businesses in order to improve the profit profile of its digicam business operations’.

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One of the biggest frustrations for photographers is knowing you have a hard drive full of valuable images which no one ever gets to see. Sure, you could upload some of them to a Flickr stream and you could submit the commercial photos to a microstock site, but neither of those options guarantees either views or sales.

Wouldn’t it be great then if a publisher were simply to ask if anyone has a picture of a duck in a pond or a car driving down a road? Or if they were to canvas suggestions for the cover of a self-published book, a design for a t-shirt or even images for a gallery show?

That, more or less, is what Derek Powazek aims to do with Pixish, a new site that attempts to harness the power of the artistic community both to generate images and to sort out the best.

“The big idea is to connect communities,” Derek told us by email. “There’s a large, distributed community of talented artists online. Photographers, illustrators, etc. And then there’s this other community of publishers, creative directors, and people who need images. The best products happen when these two communities find each other, but that’s hard to do. We want to make it easier.”

Submit, Vote, Win Prizes
Publishers are able to advertise assignments on Pixish, and photographers and other visual artists can submit their work.

So far so simple. It’s at this stage though that things start to get a little more interesting. Other members of the community can then vote on which submissions the buyer should pay most attention to. The buyer, of course, is free to make his or her own choice but the reaction of the community should make the selection easier.

“One thing I’ve learned about publishers is that they know there’s all this talent on the web, but they have no idea how to go about inviting it,” Derek, a photographer, publisher and social media consultant, explains. “They’re afraid they’ll get crap, or get too much to deal with. The community vote is a great way to solve both those problems…

If an assignment is a runaway success with thousands of submissions, the community vote is a great way to help the best submissions float up.”

If that sounds little like the way JPG Magazine operates then that’s because Derek was one of the magazine’s founders. He left after a somewhat bitter split with the magazine’s CEO (which you can read about here on Derek’s blog) but he retained an appreciation for the power of online communities to submit, vote and enjoy the chance to be published. Part of the idea behind Pixish, Derek says, is to let the virtual community do its thing without the site having to worry about printing in the way that JPG Magazine does.

Help Derek Find a Tattoo…
Pixish only launched on February 9, 2008 so it might be a little early to say what sort of jobs it’s likely to attract. At the moment, several websites are looking for art, musician Jonathon Coulton is asking for t-shirt designs, South by Southwest Interactive wants up to 300 images to be displayed at SXSW’s first gallery show (the judges include Derek and his wife Heather Champ, Flickr’s Community Directory), and Derek himself is looking for a tattoo design.

As for the rewards, Jonathon Coulton is offering an iPod Nano, and other prizes include $50 for a picture of a girl with a orange cat… and plenty of pats on the back. While Derek does have plans to better enable monetary rewards for meeting assignments, at the moment, the emphasis is on the opportunity to help another member of the community and to get your work seen.

“A lot of professional artists balk at contests like Pixish and that’s totally fine. If you’ve already got a career and you’re making a living from your art, mazel tov! Pixish may not be for you,” Derek concedes.

“But the truth is, there are a whole lot more people struggling to start out in their careers. We want to lend them a hand and help them to get noticed. Plus, future features will enable publishers to directly commission specific artists.”

For now then, the biggest benefit that Pixish offers photographers might be the chance to get images off the hard drive, and into use — and to get known in the process.

But it’s also an opportunity to join a community, to browse through submissions, vote and to get a feel for what it’s like to be a publisher. And besides, who knows where that participation may lead? Contributors to JPG Magazine have, after all, seen their images in print and on gallery walls.

“The day I see a Pixish member published in a magazine somewhere, I’ll consider the project a success,” says Derek.

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