DVPhoto

Just over a month ago, I wrote Selling your Photography; a far too brief look at some of the options available online for selling ones photography as prints. The aim, finding a online print seller who would sell your prints for you, without too much effort from your side. The saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch” is apt here and the results were predictably bad. While there are many sites providing the ability to sell art online, getting sales on them is always going to take work.

Today however, I will look at the actual prints that two of these companies produce. My reasoning went that, although I was selling prints on multiple sites, my own marketing efforts should be directed towards the site that gives me the best combination of print options, cost, profit and of course, print quality. It didn’t take much effort to whittle this down to just two sites, Deviant Art & Imagekind. Both these sites provide a large selection of sizes (with some limitations on both), both allow the artist to set the price (above a specified base cost).

Three of the four criteria are easily compared just by looking at the web sites; but the fourth, print quality, required that I actually order prints from both sites. I decided on an image that I thought would test the print quality in both resolution and colour accuracy; one of my newer photos, Autumn’s Warmth.

I’ve bought prints through DeviantArt before, the process is simple, the prices for artists incredibly cheap. The problem was the image aspect ratio. This was a 2:1 panorama, and Deviantart only provides one size in this aspect ratio, 8 by 4 inches. Deviantart offers a huge number of print size (a definite plus), but only in set aspect ratios; some ratios better represented than others (a definite minus if you love panoramas). The shipping options ranged from cheap to expensive and covered all my needs. Deviantart prints are on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with the options of Glossy, Luster and Matte.

Imagekind provides less size options, but the ratio of the photo is not limited. I chose the smallest print I could, which turned out to be 10 by 5 inches. The selection of papers is huge, and while the Epson glossy and enhanced matt are cheap quality options, I chose the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper. Shipping options were limited, with only two rather expensive FedEx options available. FedExing to South Africa was going to be more than I could afford. This is where Imagekind really impressed; I emailed their customer care person, and after discussing my problem with her, she organised that my print be shipped to me via USPO at a greatly reduced price from their standard FedEx rates.

So far so good.

Deviantart wins on cost, just over a $5 including shipping. Imagekinds print cost was more, and although I could have chosen a cheaper paper, the cheapest option would have still come in at about 3 times the cost when shipping is included. The larger the print size, the less of an issue this is, with both sites charging essentially the same price for larger prints.

Imagekind wins on sizes & paper types available. Also their customer service impressed me, though I do not consider this a win over Deviantart, since I have never had the need to ask anything from them.

Well both prints arrived at my local post office on the same day and I rushed over to pick them up. I’ll save my first impressions until after the more clinical look at the scans. Both prints were scanned at 300dpi, and the image cropped to one section of the print that I believe gave good indication of detail and colour accuracy. A crop of the original image is also included.

Remember these are 300dpi scans, the imperfections you see are close to invisible with the naked eye.

The Deviant Art print is sharp and saturated. The colours are very smooth but as I have experienced with all Fuji Crystal Archive prints, they are not quite how I wanted them. I have found getting a print to look the way I want with the Fuji colour profile is difficult, this is most likely a deficiency on my part, and a greater knowledge of working with difficult colour profiles would probably make all the difference. Deviant Art wants you to upload the images with the SRGB colour profile, and this makes it even harder to get right.

The Imagekind print is far more noisy, and I can indeed see this noise with the naked eye. This is a noise I see with all ink jet prints on papers that don’t smooth the inks enough, and looking at the Imagekind media pack seems to reveal that this is at its worst with the paper I chose. That said the colours are correct, the image sharp, though not quite as sharp looking as the DeviantArt print.

Now back to the first impressions of the prints.

The DeviantArt print looks great. At first glance, it is contrasty and well saturated, the colours bright and shadows dark. It definitely has a certain wow factor. The feel of paper reminds one of your standard 1 hour print shop photo prints. Overall I was very pleased with the result; though the colours were obviously different from the digital file, the average viewer would not know this.

The Imagekind print came packaged in so many layers that it took me well over a minute to get it out. I thought I had been pleased with the DeviantArt print; but this was even better. The print had the advantage of being slightly larger, and also had a thin white border which seems to enhance the viewing. The colours were close perfect, and the image sharp. Though I could see the pattern of the ink jet printer if I looked really closely when taking in the image as a whole this was invisible. That Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper is something to behold, it looks & feels perfect, and managed to make the photo look more than just a photo.

The final result is a resounding victory to Imagekind, though if I had chosen a cheaper paper, this might have been closer. I obviously need to do some more learning with regard to colour profiles, and until that happens Imagekind will win every time. I upload an SRGB image, and the print I get is the same as what I see on screen.

Overall Deviant Art wins on cost, by quite a margin on small prints; with Imagekind beating them, often only narrowly, on every other aspect. I have no doubt that you would be pleased with prints from both these sites, and they are close enough that there is no truly better option.

First I must apologise for the lack of posts over the last two weeks. Work has been rather time consuming recently.

Last week a couple of site mentioned a new camera auction site, CameraGAS.com. You may well have already seen it by now; I still feel I should help promote it though. With a fixed $5 cost for listing a sale, this site looks like it could well become the preferred venue for selling camera’s and photographic supplies online. That is, as long as it gets enough support.

So go visit it, if you have something to sell or see something you want to buy, give it a try. Even if it doesn’t become the next EBay for cameras, maybe it will prompt EBay to reduce their costs, a move which would hopefully reduce prices and benefit all of us.

You’ve probably seen it on several sites already, the small thumbnail image, which when clicked opens up to the full size image over the current page. Well the javascript that allows this is called lightbox and the I have installed the wordpress plugin that allows me to use it here on this blog.

So Enjoy.

Many commentators have suggested that anything more than a thumbnail cannot be considered fair use. Mikes response was an image made up mostly of a freak copyright message.

Earlier this week Mike from TOP wrote a brief rant about copyright; or more accurately, a rant about essentially unknown photographers actively making it known they don’t want anyone using their work without prior approval, without giving people any way to contact them in the first place.

What seemed to me to be a reasonable request has turned into what Mike called a Copyright Brouhaha, and now a third post, Keep Your Freakin’ Hands Off My Picture, is causing even more arguments in the comments section.

While the articles are worth the read, the comments are where the meat is. There are two sides; the one, seemingly made up of some professional photographers and lawyers, claims that what Mike is doing (especially in his Random Excellence posts) is, if not legally wrong, at the very least morally questionable. The other side is made up of the rest of us, and seems to belief that posting images of other photographers to showcase their work (including linking back to their sites if possible) should easily fall within the provisions of fair use and is most certainly a good thing.

Now I can understand where the Pro photographers and lawyers are coming from. The pro photographer is out there to make money, as much of it as they can. A lawyer’s job is to twist the law to his clients benefit, if a law has some leeway in its interpretation, then all the better. Obviously when asked whether something is fair use, the default answer is “probably not”, since avoiding possible litigation is considered more important than the original intent of the law.

To my mind, the idea of fair use is there to allow others to comment on, learn from, and praise existing works. All of these are impractical unless you have the entire image to look at, and while you definitely do not need a full size image, a thumbnail will definitely not do.

While I do not dispute that the lawyers are correct when they say Mike could find himself in court for his current use of copyrighted images, I do think this shows that copyright law, and especially the concept of fair use, is currently broken.

Today there is an announcement on Strobist, that David has taken a 1 year leave of absence from The Baltimore Sun. The title, ” Blog, Newspaper, Family. Pick any Two.”, sounded rather ominous; newspaper and family being the choice I expected. It seems that running the blog, and doing seminars about lighting, is profitable enough for it to be an option.

This is great news, as Strobist is one of the best photography blogs out there, and an increase in dedication to it will only help to make it even better. Also in the pipeline is a DVD on lighting, which I’ll be sure to buy.

Congratulations David!

Well it seems that in less than one year after it started, What the Duck has been accepted by Universal Press Syndicate for syndication. Creator, Aaron Johnson, says “I’m now in decision making mode, keeping the best interest of the strip in mind.” So you might just find WTD appearing in a local newspaper or magazine near you.

Corbis, one of the largest traditional stock agencies around, has officially opened their new microstock site, SnapVillage.

The site is still very much in beta, so don’t expect it to all work perfectly, but at first glance it seems that Corbis are making a bid to change the way microstock works. There are a few things that make me want to join them immediately, and one thing that means I can’t.

At first glance I see the following.

Pros:

• You can set your prices yourself from $1 all the way to $50, which is more midrange stock than micro stock. There is a subscription model much like Shutterstocks, where the photographer only gets 30 cents, but you can opt out of that.
• Like with IStock, the top photographers will have the opportunity to be moved up to the more traditional stock business at Corbis. I assume you would have to be an exclusive photographer with them, though that remains to be seen.
• They will keyword and title your images for you if you want.

Cons:

• They only send payments via Paypal, so people like me who cannot receive payments from Paypal are a bit screwed. Please Corbis, add Moneybookers & Cheque payment please. Soon.
• So far it seems that when they keyword the images for you, they are very sparsely key worded. I think that while it seems like a very good idea, I’m not sure they will have the time to do it properly.

Obviously, since the site is still very much in development, there will be a lot of problems; but assuming you can actually receive payment from them, give it a try. And make sure you tell them any problems you encounter so they can improve the site as fast as possible.

If you enjoy reading Dan Heller, then you need to listen to EXIF & Beyond: Dan Heller Interview – The Business of Photography over at JMG Galleries. It’s over an hour long, but well worth the time.

I recently added Empty Easel to my daily reading list. While it focuses mostly on traditional arts, there are a number of interesting articles on selling your own art. A few months back there was a post on the best websites for selling your art.

Reading through it highlights a problem of trying to sell your art on the web, if you don’t want to do it yourself, then you need to find a site dedicated to selling other peoples art. Seems like a good idea, up until you realise that most of these sites are filled with other people trying to sell their art. It’s like trying to sell you photos at a business class at art school, everyone else is trying to sell their own work, and thus don’t have any interest in what you are selling.

One need only look at internet search patterns to realise where the problem lies. Using overtures search history tool for search strings buy art and sell art. These values will change over time, but right now while I am writing this, buy art was searched for 1088 times, and sell art 1392 times. More people are interested in selling their own art and there are in buying it.

Then of course you can do a Google search on the term Buy Art. The results are not entirely what one might hope for. There are some giant online art stores (art.com and allposters.com) which won’t directly accept new artists, and a whole host of smaller shops; most of which either won’t accept unknown artists, or are there for selling original art (which is fine if you are wanting to make the prints yourself, but then why not just focus on your own web page).

The 10th result (at the time of writing) is for a small online art store called Blink Red. They appear to accept new artists, and will do print on demand sales for you. So why are they not mentioned at empty easel (or anywhere for that matter). Well one only has to look at the traffic they receive; with compete.com reporting a mere 424 visitors per month, they don’t seem like they could make you many sales. So if being in the top 10 of a search like “buy art” gets you a mere 400+ visitors a month, how on earth does art.com and their ilk receive the reported 2 million plus? Simply, they receive a large portion of their traffic through advertising, and of course through the many artist searches where they come up tops.

Of course, if you are just getting into selling your art, then this isn’t going to help you. So you’ve got to try and figure out what site drives the right kind of traffic to your work. While writing this article, I decided to focus on three sites: Image Kind, Artist Rising, & Deviant Art.

Imagekind
I recently found out about Image Kind, and while their site wasn’t anything to write home about, the shear number of options available for paper, sizes, mattes, & frames makes it an attractive option for the photographer who wants provide a variety of options to their client. You can submit images with any aspect ratio, so if you are into your 3 x 1 panoramas, this is the place for you. They have recently added integration with Flickr; so if you have a Flickr pro account, you do not need to upload your images to Imagekind again. The number of frames and mattes available is amazing, possibly providing just a little bit too much choice. You get to set your own mark up from the base prices, and you also get a percentage of the frame cost (if the buyer chooses to frame their order).

While there is free membership, you are limited to 25 images and 1 gallery. Upgrading to a pro account gains you unlimited galleries, but only 50 images. A platinum account is needed if you want to get rid of the image count limit. The biggest drawback if you don’t want to market your own work appears to be the buyers. Much of Imagekind’s traffic appears to either be artists themselves, or buyers directed to the site through individual artist’s galleries.

Imagekind appears to be a good option for the photographer who is marketing his own images, but doesn’t want to get involved in the printing and shipping himself.

Deviant Art
I have been a Deviant Art member since 2001; it was large back then, and has grown rapidly ever since. The traffic there rivals that of art.com, and you’d be hard pressed to find a site with more artists on it.

The shopping side of deviant art isn’t as well done as the rest of the site. It looks good, but seems to lack any desire to be marketed to the outside world. The site is filled with poor artists looking to sell their own work, and very few art admirers with the credit cards to back their purchases. So sales are slim to non existent; with even the most popular of artists there reporting low sales numbers.

That said the prints are beautiful; done on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper, they are vibrant and long lasting. There are many other print options, such as canvas, puzzles, calendars, mugs, and many more. The sizes are limited, so if you like panorama’s or some other lesser used aspect ratio, you may be out of luck.

Artist Rising
While merely looking at Artist Rising’s traffic would lead one to believe that it is not worth the effort, a closer look at who owns them will probably change your mind. Art.com (and thus allposters.com) owns Artist Rising, and while you can only show your art on the Artist Rising and Sistino sites right now, they are apparently working on giving some access to their two much larger sites.

While the selection of print sizes is very limited, and the system slow, the promise of gaining access to that many buyers is extremely tempting. However a post from Empty Easel today casts some doubt about the long term future of Artist Rising. With most of the staff apparently retrenched, and the possibility of being brought back directly under the art.com team, I wouldn’t want to make any commitments to them just yet. The potential is there, but we just have to see what they do with it.

When I started doing a little bit of research for this article, I was hoping to find a good site for the photographer who was just beginning to sell prints of his work. Obviously to make any real money selling prints, you are going to have to market yourself, and spend a lot of effort doing it. Yet I was hopeful that there would be at least one option that could make you a bit of money while you build up a portfolio. Unfortunately it seems that the only option that seemed to have any potential is in a state of flux, with the other options providing a good printing service, but not much in the line of bringing customers to you door.

JMG-Galleries has an interesting article on the 5 Most Common Digital Photography Mistakes. An good selection, and I have been guilty of all 5. Of course I am very careful when changing lenses, so #2 hasn’t really affected me at all. Yet the one that I have heard many times and still don’t believe is “3. Not Reformatting Your CF Cards Between Use”.

I formatted my CF cards when I bought them; and that has been the only time I ever did it. I have shot many thousands of photos, and to this day have not once suffered corrupt data. Admittedly I have only bought CF cards that are not cutting edge in terms of capacity, and this in turn leads to them being more stable.

So of the question is, just how many people have suffered from repeatedly corrupt data due to not formatting their CF cards?