©Marcel Steger

Stock agencies frequently boast about the size of their image collections. Just yesterday, in fact, a well-known agency announced that its collection had reached 23 million images. It’s impossible to know how many images make up the entire stock photo universe, but suffice it to say the number runs into the hundreds of millions, at least. And the laws of probability dictate that some bad images–and I mean, really bad–are going to slip past the gatekeepers.

BuzzFeed.com has compiled a gallery of some of the worst examples. It’s hard to imagine how many of these pictures were even conceived, much less approved by photo editors. In fact, some are so outlandish that it occurred to us they might be hoaxes. We can’t vouch for the authenticity of all the watermarks indicating where the images came from, but Corbis confirmed that the image at above is indeed from its collection. It was shot by photographer Marcel Steger, and a Corbis spokesperson sent a link to his portfolio, presumably to help mitigate the shock of this particular image by giving it some context.

The BuzzFeed gallery also includes a dozen or so images from Getty, including the one shown at left. Asked whether this and the other images with Getty watermarks are really from Getty, an agency spokesperson said she’d get back to us. We’ll update the post if we get more  information.

To see the rest of the gallery, click here at your own risk.

Fall and Winter Trailer from Matt Manderson on Vimeo.

Photographer and filmmaker David Black, a member of the 2011 PDN’s 30, is part of the team producing a new documentary film, Fall & Winter, about the global environmental crisis. Through interviews with a wide range of experts, the film presents an “analysis of our failing institutions and culture so we may be equipped to handle drastic collapse and foster a vital, fundamental rebirth in the way we live on this planet.” The film is written and directed by Matt Anderson, and is scheduled to be released this fall. For more information visit: www.fallwintermovie.com.

©Reuters--Slain photographer Sabah al-Bazee

Sabah al-Bazee, an Iraqi freelance photographer who has contributed to Reuters since 2004, was among 50 people who died yesterday in an attack on a government building in Tikrit, the wire service has reported.

The 30-year-old photographer, who also worked as a cameraman for other news organizations, died along with the other victims after gunmen set off car bombs and other explosives before storming a building that houses the provincial council in Tikrit.

“I wish to convey our sadness at the untimely death of Sabah al-Bazee,” said Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler. “He was a valued member of our team in Iraq and will be much missed by colleagues. This tragic incident shows yet again the risks journalists face daily in doing their jobs and to bring news to the world.”

Iraq remains at the top of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list of “20 Deadliest Countries.” CPJ says it has confirmed that 147 journalists have died in Iraq since 1992 as a result of reprisals or while carrying out a dangerous assignment.

Adam Dean, a Beijing-based photojournalist represented by Panos Pictures, arrived in Japan roughly 20 hours after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck the northeastern coast of the country.  After he returned  home to Beijing  on March 26, Dean (one of the 2011 PDN 30 emerging photographers) answered our questions about the logistical challenges of covering the catastrophe, and also wrote about the story’s emotional impact. We reprint his email to PDN below.

(Some of Dean’s images from Iwate and Myagi Prefectures can be seen on The New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, and were printed in last week’s issue of the magazine.)

Dean writes:

“I was traveling and working with a British writer from The Daily Telegraph newspaper,  and between us we have covered earthquakes in China, Pakistan and Indonesia, cyclones in Burma and tsunamis in Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as undercover reporting trips to North Korea and Burma but from a logistical point of view this has been one of the hardest assignments to cover.

“When we first arrived it was almost impossible to find a car available to hire and a fixer or translator who was prepared to travel north. In Japan, obviously a wealthy country, it is much harder to find an English speaker who has the financial motivation to come and work in a potentially dangerous environment with journalists compared to poorer countries …. Japan is also a deeply rules-based society so therefore the ‘work-arounds’ that journalists might normally use when covering a story like this are less effective here.

“When we first arrived in Tokyo about 20 hours after the tsunami, we were hearing reports of water shortages up north so we bought up as much food and water as we could find in stores in Tokyo where many of the shelves were already beginning to empty.  In the first 36 hours most of the flights and trains north from Tokyo were canceled, all the highways were closed to all but emergency vehicles and as a result the minor roads were clogged with traffic. The other real supply issue was fuel. Some of the oil refineries were damaged in the earthquake so there has been a shortage of fuel which has been compounded by residents fleeing from areas affected by the nuclear reactor leaks who have been constantly topping up on fuel fearing a meltdown. Over a week after the earthquake, there were queues of up to seven hours for fuel in some areas.

“Communications has also been a problem in the tsunami-affected areas where the network infrastructure has been badly damaged but generally it is not too bad. I hired local mobile phones and 3G data cards on arrival at the airport which allows us to be online in most areas and I have a satellite phone and a BGAN for transmitting images when conventional networks are down.

“Once on the ground,  the access has not been a problem. Soldiers, police and other officials have been very helpful in allowing us to work. The real problem has been a logistical and supply issue and access to the remote areas that were affected by the tsunami.

“The catastrophic tsunami was sadly eclipsed by the potential threat of a nuclear meltdown so I have been covering both angles of this story. Once we had sorted out the logistics after our arrival, we headed north to Sendai and stopped on the way in Fukushima at some of the evacuation centers for people living in the exclusion zone close to the failed nuclear reactors. Since then we have been working our way up the tsunami devastated northeast coast in the Myagi and Iwate provinces.

“Covering stories like this is always harrowing. You are photographing people on what is likely to be the worse day of their lives. Many whom I met had lost everything; family, home, savings etc and were now living in cold temporary evacuation centers with little to eat and no idea what or how they would recover their lives. Despite this, without exception all the people that I talked to and photographed in Japan were kind, gracious, generous and optimistic. There was very little complaining or even criticism of the government response.”

Photo © Adam Dean/Panos. Dean’s March 15 image of rescue workers piling bodies onto a truck in Rikuzen-Takaata, Japan, was recently published in The New Yorker.

This is the story of Sebta, who belongs to the Abu Eid Tribe from the Bekka Valley in Lebanon. The video was made by photographer Laia Abril for COLORS magazine issue #77 (The Sea) when the magazine’s editorial team took seven people to the sea for the first time. Abril, who shot both stills and video for the project, started shooting multimedia stories for COLORS in 2010. Here she used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with an external microphone. (The final video was edited by Pablo Pastor and Bryce Licht.)

In a word, Yes.

The federal court judge who rejected the proposed settlement agreement between Google and a consortium of authors and publishers on Tuesday said the agreement was not “fair, adequate or reasonable.” The losers would have been many copyright holders whose works Google wants to vacuum up in a massive project to digitize millions of library books and periodicals, and Google competitors who objected to a plan that would have given Google a monopoly over so-called orphan works. The decision has put the Google library project on hold for now.

Authors and publishers sued the search engine company in 2005 for copyright infringement after it began digitizing library books without permission. Google’s original plan was to make “snippets” of the books available to users of its search engine. The proposed settlement would have allowed the company to do much more: distribute the entire contents of the books, and collect licensing fees. Google planned to set up a registry to disburse a share of the fees to authors and publishers.

A primary problem with the plan, the judge said, was that it would have required authors to opt out of the registry, rather than opt in. Copyright law is opt in: publishers have to get permission from authors before exploiting their works, rather than exploit the works first and then stop only if a copyright holder asks them to. Had the agreement been approved by the court, Google would have effectively been granted a big, fat exception to copyright law.

While the decision affects authors primarily, it also has important implications for photographers and other artists. ASMP, PACA, PP of A, other trade groups representing photographers and artists, and a number of individual photographers have sued Google (separately from authors and publishers) to prevent the company from digitizing and distributing their works from library books and magazines without permission.

“The decision in the text authors’ and publishers’ case is certainly of great interest to us, but it does not have an immediate legal effect on our case,” says ASMP general counsel Victor Perlman. If photographers and artists enter any settlement talks with Google, he adds, “the decision in the authors’ case provides a definite roadmap” for the terms of any settlement with photographers and other artists.

Perlman won’t comment further about the court’s decision to reject Google’s proposed settlement with authors and publishers. But it is obvious from reading the ruling that a federal court declined to give a single corporate special rights under copyright law at the expense of copyright holders. And that isn’t a bad thing for photographers.

Anne Geddes eat your heart out! We think we’ve discovered the newest trend to hit baby photography since placing them in pumpkins was all the rage back in the ’90s.

Dress them up like Mr. T and pity the fool who calls you crazy.

More Mr. T “Mini Me’s” here.

(Via Dangerous Minds.)

Several weeks ago, a trustee in charge of millions of old news images in the Sygma archive tamped down rumors that the archive would be destroyed. That quieted the general outrage, and may have left photographers who still have images in the archive with some hope that they might be able to reclaim the images.

But no. The trustee has told PDN (and various photographers who have also inquired) that it is too late to claim the images. The trustee is mum about what will become of the archive, though.

“I inform you that rights of photographers to make claims for their pictures and slides has expired,” a spokesman for the trustee, Stéphane Gorrias, told PDN in an e-mail last week.

The images have been under the control of Gorrias since Corbis, which bought Sygma in 1999, walked away from the collection in May, 2010. Corbis abandoned the collection because it was fed up with financial losses and lawsuits over missing images.

When rumors began circulating at the end of February that Gorrias had said he would destroy the images, photographers and their trade groups began circulating word on Twitter and elsewhere to encourage former Sygma photographers to claim their images.

But it is too late to do that, apparently, and Gorrias’s spokesperson informed us that the “pictures and slides will be simply archived.” She added, “Remaining at your disposal for further information.”

We certainly asked for further information: Who is paying to archive the images? And for how long? Surely there must be a plan to dispose of the archive somehow, because it makes no sense to archive the images indefinitely. So what is the plan?

We received no answer to those questions. The images have apparently gone to picture purgatory, out of reach of the photographers who own them, and headed for some unknown fate. Will they be destroyed after all? Put out on the curb with the trash or recycling? Hocked at a pawn shop in Paris? Put into a cave where future generations can rediscover them, and marvel at them?

Only one man knows, and we await his call.

Related:

Did Twitter Just Save 10 Million Sygma Images?

The 5th annual Oslo Photo Festival, which took place from March 16 to 20 in Norway’s capital, hosted talks by photojournalists and documentary photographers Carolyn Drake, Stephanie Sinclair, Pieter Ten Hoopen, Thomas Lekfeldt, Andrea Star Reese, Justyna Mielnikiewicz and Eugene Richards. Speakers offered insights into how they win the trust of subjects, what it takes to develop a strong personal project, and advice on surviving under difficult conditions and in an increasingly demanding profession.

Many photographers and photo students who attended sought advice on what it takes to be a successful photojournalist. Others, like festival attendee Chris Harrison, came to meet colleagues from the Norwegian photo community. “We all live in our own little worlds most of the time so it’s good to get out socially and chew the fat,” Harrison said. “All in all it’s kind of like getting a vitamin shot—going to these things you realize you aren’t alone and in some ways you’re quite privileged and its good to be reminded how fantastic photography is.”

Here are notes from some of the Festival’s presentations.

(more…)

The Libyan government has released three more western journalists captured in the fighting between rebels and troops loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, according to an AFP report today.

Getty Images photographer Joe Raedle, AFP photographer Roberto Schmidt, and AFP reporter Dave Clark rejoined other journalists at a hotel in Tripoli after their release earlier today. Meanwhile, two Al-Jazeera journalists also captured by Libyan government forces remain in captivity.

Two days ago, the Libyan government released four New York Times journalists who were captured by Libyan troops last week. They included photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario and reporters Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell. (The Times published the journalists’ own account of their captivity yesterday.)

Clark, Schmidt and Raedle disappeared over the weekend after setting out to report on fighting between Qaddafi’s troops and rebels in the eastern portion of Libya, AFP says. Their driver reported on Monday that they had been captured by Qaddafi’s forces.

The release of the journalists came after an urgent appeal to Qaddafi from AFP chairman Emmanuel Hoog for their safe return.

Related:

Getty, AFP Photogs Missing in Libya; 4 Times Journalists Released