Design and Photography Highlights

The debate over how to pay writers and split the royalties when their work goes online has been a heated discussion we are sure. I’m sure it is difficult to come up with a fair and agreeable payout, when no one is really sure what the revenues could be or what the future holds for digital content on the web. No big studio or network wants to be locked into a percentage deal or terms, when they have no idea themselves how the content could be used and how much they can make off it. We covered the writer strike before and continue to follow the story today.

So what is a writer supposed to do during this downtime? Well, according to the Los Angeles Times, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out, writers are pursuing deals to develop shows for the web and looking for money to facilitate this creation of content. The development makes us think about what happened in the newspaper industry, when writers during the first dot-com era launched news sites like Salon.com and the like. It’s probably not a far fetch that we will see a new wave of companies started in the same manner and an explosion of content created by these writers for video sites on the web.

So is there money out there for a writer to tap into so they can write shows and craft deals of their own. Jim Breyer, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners and a director at Facebook, told the LA Times that it’s “likely” the firm will put some of its cash into some “screenwriter/content-oriented companies” next year.

Buyers are more and more going to Flickr and contacting photographers directly to negotiate sales and the licensing of photos on the site. It’s happening. The lack of a great “consumer licensing vehicle” is a major issue in this photography and video licensing marketplace and that is what Cutcaster is trying to create. The combination of the traditional licensing world with a more Web 2.0 community and feel.

The problem with using Flickr to do this is that it’s not designed to be a platform to legally license content so you lack the protections that a site like Cutcaster provides you. Plus there is no checks and balances to make sure the person who uploaded the photo is the actual owner and that falls back onto the buyer. Plus without watermarks you can have your photos easily ripped off.

I’m glad to see that people aren’t just ripping images off Flickr and not crediting or paying the true owners. It’s good to see that photo buyers are reaching out over Flickr to the creators to legally license and use their work.

If interested check out Photopreneur’s write up on the same topic.

Thanks for the shout out from Kino-Eye, one of our favorite blog and not just because David Tamés wrote about us. He wrote a piece about Cutcaster and bid4vid. If you want to know why David chose the name Kino Eye click here.

My name is Drew and I am the author of The BenSpark. I was invited to write a guest post on the Cutcaster blog. My topic is the low cost ways that you can create content to enhance your blog. Personally, I usually skip blog posts that do not include images. They bore me. But if your post also includes an image, my eyes are going to be drawn to the image and I may look at your written content as well because of that image.

For almost three years now, I have been working on a personal project where I take a Photo-A-Day and post it to my blog. I have used a number of cameras as well as software programs to accomplish this work. I have also used a number of photo hosting platforms to host those photos. And in the end, I have also widgetized my daily photo stream so that others can host my content on their blogs. Getting started with photos and video on your blog is very, very simple.

Things you need:

* Digital Camera
* Photo Editing Software
* Photo Hosting Platform

Digital Camera – First things first, you are going to need a digital camera. Digital cameras have dropped dramatically in price and as each new and improved version comes out the previous versions drop even lower in price. Here’s a secret. Unless you are printing images in extremely large formats or going into professional photography you don’t need the latest and greatest gear. You can pick up last year’s model and it will be perfect for digital online content. So if you are shooting just for the web let’s say that $100 would be a good price point. As far as what camera is the best I cannot speak to that. I can tell you about the gear that I have used in the past and what I use currently.

For years I had a Sanyo Xacti C4 camera, but it was much more than just a 4MP (mega pixel) camera. This was a camera and video camera in one and it recorded video straight to an SD card. This was something I bought 4 years ago when this wasn’t the norm with cameras today and I paid through the nose. Now nearly every digital point and shoot camera has an option for shooting video included as well. So for around $100 you can get a decent camera that also doubles as a video camera. I have a point and shoot 7.1MP Canon SD800 and a 10MP Nikon D80 DSLR. I shoot with the intent of either selling my photos or having them be of high enough quality for print. However, most of the time I print only 4 X 6, the average size of the basic consumer and you certainly don’t need 10MP to do that. The photo will look better the higher the MP but you don’t need it, especially for web content. When I post to the web, I take those large images and format them to a much smaller size. Remember that with web images you are going for a fast load time so the images file size should be small.

When I take a photo, I edit it in Adobe Photoshop Elements and when I create a video, I use Adobe Premiere Elements. However, I am still using an old version of both programs. I haven’t even upgraded to the latest and greatest. You don’t need the latest and greatest to edit your images and send them to the web. A quick Amazon search of “inexpensive image editing software” and “inexpensive digital cameras” brought back many solutions for either the pro, enthusiast or easy user. There are many options. Set your budget and buy the most you can within that budget. Also look for packages where you get the camera and image editing software together.

Image Editing Software – You can buy the image editing software with all the bells and whistles like Photoshop CS3 or you can go the more moderate route and buy the consumer version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements (version 6.0 is the latest, I’m on 4.0) or you can go the super simple easy route and download a free program like Picasa. Let’s stick with the theme of adding digital content to the web in the most inexpensive way so let’s talk about the basic things your image editing software needs.

Cropping – Cropping is the most important feature in my eyes. To me, “life is how you crop it”. Suppose you took a fantastic picture of your dog but also in the picture you get some goof making faces. Rather than junking the image as being lost you can easily crop out that goofy character. Cropping is a way of selecting a portion of the image to become the main image. I have a good eye but I almost always crop my images in some way. Your image editing software should allow you to crop.

Remove Red Eye – You’re going to get images where your subjects look possessed. You can fix that with a quick red eye removal. Your software should include that as an option.

Image sizing – I usually do my image sizing, when I crop. I use the size of 450px (pixels) x 350px (pixels) at 96 dpi (dots per inch) for my images on my blog. This way the images end up being quite small and I know exactly how large the image will look when displayed. So many people upload their images unedited and then get giant images blown out on their blogs. Having control over the image size is also crucial. You want to know exactly where that image will fall on your page. Make sure your images are not wider than the width of the content column. With Photoshop elements, I can set my cropping tool to crop an image to be 450px (pixels) x 350px (pixels) at 96 dpi (dots per inch). You can also avoid this by using a photo hosting site that takes your images and gives you multiple sizes to display on your blog.

Photo Hosting Platforms – Once you have taken and edited your images you are going to want to host them somewhere so that you can add them to your blog quickly and easily. Some blogging platforms allow you to upload your image directly to your blog and that is okay. I prefer to post my images to a photo hosting site and then copy and paste the image into my blog post. There are so many different hosting platforms and I am on a bunch of them. I usually upload my Photo-A-Day to Buzznet, Flickr and Zooomr.

Why all three? Well, for one thing it gets my content in front of many sets of eyes. Each time I post an image I can tag it or label it with keywords that people can search on. If I post an image of my cat I would tag that image with the keywords “cat”, “pet”, “tuxedo”, “shorthair”. That way when someone is looking for shorthaired tuxedo cats as pets they could easily find my uploaded photos of my two cats, Duncan and Oliver. I also add a link to my Photo-A-Day blog post on each of the descriptions on my uploaded images. This way I now have three links to my blog post (one on each platform). There are people who strictly use photo hosting platforms and are loyal to one or the other, by posting my images to multiple platforms I am able to put my content in front of many diverse audiences.

Some photo hosting platforms are free and some are for pay, if you can afford a pro account on a hosting platform like Flickr buy it, if you want all the best functions without having to pay for them then try hosts that have unlimited uploads like Zooomr. And if you decide to go the Picasa route with free image editing software you can also upload your images directly from Picasa to your blog.

The Internet is a full on multimedia experience. When you blog, think about providing that experience to your readers. Don’t just give them flat text, engage your audience with images, video and sound. Oh yeah, I haven’t even gotten into videos and how they can enhance your blogs… Maybe next time around…

Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker and Read To Me, Dad

Cutcaster is uncompromising when it comes to providing submitters with secure, trustworthy uploading, promoting and distribution services for their media files. Protecting our submitters content is one of the highest priorities we have at Cutcaster while maintaining a secure marketplace that has the trust of all participants. Most submitters of content, who are looking to sell/license it to others, are fearful that their footage or images will end up being used without their permission or being paid for it. A lot of people fear that their content will end up on YouTube or on someones compact disc that they are selling on eBay. We want to STRESS AND ENSURE our submitters that we have one of the highest levels of backend security. What are some ways to protect your submitters of content?

1. We will watermark your content and display your content in a lower resolution.

2. We will work tirelessly to identify any footage or image theft and make our users aware of it at once.

3. If you want to embed a file into your content to track it and see how it is used we can help you do that.

4. We will throw out unscrupulous buyers who use a piece of content in ways that aren’t allowed under the content license agreement or attempt to steal your work.

5. We will post up offenders of our rules in our Wall of Shame area so people and our competitors know who to look out for. We don’t mind working with our competitors as long as it helps everyone in the market.

6. We will work with our buyers to understand and let submitters know as best we can how your content is being used.

7. We will monitor our server logs so we can fish out suspicious behavior when people are searching for your content.

8. We will monitor all our content for trademark, copyright and clearance issues.

9. We are working on providing some feedback options like what they have in eBay.

10. your suggestions

How else can we help submitters of content to our site protect their work while at the same time making it available in the Cutcaster marketplace?