I read a report earlier this year that pointed out that TV is still a very social screen.

Families still watch together, groups of friends watch together, housemates, etc., etc. The TV is still, in many ways, our electronic campfire. This may be somewhat obvious, but it’s in contrast to a computer which is usually a one viewer situation. So the use case for a TV, generally speaking, is very different from a computer screen.

To folks developing applications for iOS and Android this is a significant difference. I don’t think most people will use the TV as just another computer screen. It will still be a more passive experience and one where the group of people watching it will have to agree on any apps or widgets that are viewable on the screen. Many apps will probably be info strips (think ESPN scores running along the bottom of your screen) or pop-up boxes, more than full fledged apps taking over the entire screen. Although, I’m sure games will be significant as they are everywhere.

For content creators, I think it matters a little less. However, if you’re creating content for the web it’ll make a difference if you think it’s likely to be viewed on a TV. That file that looks ok on a 17″ laptop screen may not look so hot on a 52″ TV. Is it a 60 second skit meant for youtube or a 10 minute episode of a regular program on blip.tv? The 10 minute episode is probably more likely to make it to a TV, and you’ll want to encode accordingly.

Does this mean you need to re-encode and re-upload all your content? Well, if InterwebTV was here, right now, then yes you would. But it’s not. At least, not in any meaningful way. If your audience is technology geeks, then that day is probably not too far off. Tech people will probably have  Google TV or some such thing sooner than everyone else. But if you’ve got a wider audience, you can’t listen to early adoptin’ tech folks. You’ll know TV via the net (or Over The Top TV) has arrived when your parents have it. This was my gauge for broadband and I think it’s more or less applicable here as well.

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Catering to female fashion is ages old but seems to be a new trend in photography. I did a little googling and didn’t any resources for female-specific clothing though there’s lots of material about how to dress your female models (hint: in very little).

I did see some merchandising at two trade shows, PMA and WPPI, earlier this year. At WPPI in March, for instance, the ShootSac company was a popular destination. They create fashionable messenger bags that are designed to attractively and securely carry photography gear. These bags attract female photographers — of course! — and to help along the marketing, Shootsac gave out colorful flowers to pin in your hair. A lot of female consumers were wearing them on the show floor and that’s what attracted my attention — yep, I’m a woman — though my male coworker didn’t notice the flowers at all.

See more images on our Flickr site.

Slightly off-topic but also at WPPI, the Boudoir Divas booth was very busy wearing jaunty little hats covered in flowers. This photography studio specializes in photographing female clients in sexy, intimate settings. They boast an all-female staff and sell their information with training workshops and social media outreach. Looks like a great business (and schwagg campaign) and many women at WPPI thought so too.

By the way, there were no men in the ShootSac or Boudoir Divas booths no matter when I passed by. If you were a single guy at this show, these were definitely the places to be.

regards -debbie

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We stayed and worked in the grand Hotel de Coronado, which is a grand hotel dating to 1888 and considered a National Historical Landmark. (Interesting history is here.) It was wonderful to be in a hotel that was next to the beach and lined with palm trees, especially during the winter, but the lush surroundings did present a small problem. Here was the entrance to the exhibit room:

Which faced this area of the hotel property:

You can see our dilemma. The show was interesting, as were the attendees, but boy was it difficult to stay inside, especially when it’s feeling like January in our hometown. The trees and sun kept calling.

Despite these odds, Jim Tierney and I managed to spend quality time at the SPA Event showing off our Adobe Photoshop plugins. We talked to a lot of interesting photographers and some speakers, all of whom specialize in High School Senior photography. We demo’ed our green screen masking tool, Primatte Chromakey, which is great for creating custom and unique portraits. Two other crowd-pleasers are always Backdrop Designer for generating digital muslin drapery and ToonIt! Photo for turning photographs into lovely cartoons. We also showed off our newest product, Beauty Box for Video, which does subtle digital skin smoothing on large images like HD footage.

Jim, Debbie and a large red logo at the Digital Anarchy stand:

If you photograph high school seniors or a related subject for a living, definitely consider joining the SPA group. Seems like good networking and information services. More info is here.

You can see more photos of the SPA Event and the gorgeous Hotel de Coronado in our Digital Anarchy Flickr group.

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In part 1 I discussed some of the habits that may or may not develop. Now I’m going to talk technology. While at the Digital Imaging conference a few technology things kept coming up… Cameraphones, the cloud, and social networks. Not exactly unexpected.

The interesting thing about cameraphones is 1) how they will evolve and affect point and shoot cameras and 2) how are users storing and managing their photos.

This little piece of work from Samsung not only has a 5mp camera, but shoots decent HD video as well.

As for the first point, it’s expected that camera phones will more or less replace point and shoot cameras over the next five years or so. The only standalone cameras that will be left will be the more professional DSLRs. This makes some sense. We’re already seeing a merging of functionality into smartphones. The PDA is pretty much history, despite being an important device to many people just 4 or 5 years ago (see any PDAs on palm.com?). The MP3 player may go the same way. The smaller mp3 players merge with smartphones, and the larger ones merge with gaming machines. People are leaning towards less devices, not more. Who the hell needs the headache of carrying around all those devices, power cords, batteries, etc.

As Moore’s law continues with cameras, we’ll get better optics and sensors on cameraphones until the quality is so good that, unless you need to change lenses or want RAW files, there’s no point in a separate camera. The general consensus was the point and shoot will be mostly gone in 5 years.

The other reason to suggest that this will happen is given by what people are doing with the photos they take. As mentioned in Part I of this blog post, folks are printing less, but emailing and posting photos to networking sites by the millions. The cameraphone obviously allows people to do this more seamlessly than a regular camera. There’s no need to download to yet another device to post the pictures. You can instantly send the photos to facebook, flickr, friend, family, etc. This is a huge advantage given that most photos have a short shelf-life. The value of the photo drops off rapidly, so immediacy is important. Yes, you could add a connection to the cameras (and I’m sure we’ll see that in some cameras), but I think it more likely the cameras will just get incorporated into the devices that already have a connection.

So lots of people are uploading photos to facebook and flickr. Hardly news. But do consumers really understand what they’re doing? Do they understand the ‘cloud’?

Some of the social networking sites, notably facebook, don’t keep high resolution files. They lower the resolution, so it’s not the original file that was uploaded. Some folks don’t fully understand this, nor do they understand all the implications of having their photos (hires or not) sitting around in a cloud somewhere.

So there was also a lot of discussion about getting consumers to understand their copyright/privacy rights when posting pictures to the cloud, what they should do about archiving their images, and how to manage them all wherever they are.

Many of the users posting pictures may not fully appreciate what it means to have a photo posted that may, potentially, never go away (if they even know that deleting something online doesn’t necessarily mean it’s deleted). Interestingly, the other side of the problem, archiving, is to deal with when images permanently (usually unexpectedly) go away.

There’s definitely some opportunities to provide services that deal with what users actually do vs. what they should do. A guy from SmugMug spoke at the DI conference, and they seem to know what they’re doing. Yes, users should manage their photos and know beforehand which photos are valuable, deleting ones that aren’t. In the real world, users upload everything, don’t manage them, and then two years later want to find that ‘one’ picture of granpa Joe. Further proof that human behavior is, well… wacky. But we all do it.

There’s also some opportunities that should arise from educating users about photo archiving. CD/DVDs don’t last forever (although a company called TuskerBlu claims that theirs do), cloud companies go out of business taking all their data with them (i.e. Digital Railroad), media cards die, and hard drives crash. So how to you educate folks on the need to backup their photos? It’s an important part of the digital imaging experience. Do non-techy families understand that a hard drive crash can wipe out years of photos? What can you do to make sure your customers don’t have a loss like that? It makes a good case for prints and photobooks, which last a lot longer than any of the other media mentioned.

And, of course, lastly… how do you manage all these photos with them spread all over the place? Eventually someone is going to come up with a good tagging system that will recognize everything in a photo and tag it. But that’s a ways off. In the meantime, better tools that make tagging easier are needed (along with, again, educating users why they want to tag).

So, lots of food for thought. But for other people. Because I KNOW you archive, tag, and properly manage your photos. Right?

cheers,

Jim

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One of the interesting observations at the conference was the way our picture taking habits are changing. We (as a society) are taking a LOT more pictures. However, these pictures tend to have a lower value on average, with a shorter shelf life so to speak. In the past, pictures were somewhat difficult to take and get printed so there was some value to them, even the crappy ones. Now we snap pictures everywhere, immediately send them around to our network of friends. We can immediately see our friends pictures who are doing the same thing. But a lot of these photos are ‘of the moment’. Pictures from very recent events that are not great photos, but are interesting because of their immediacy. Most are not pictures you’ll be looking at five years from now. There are a few things that can change the value of a picture immediately, for example, if someone passes away any pictures you have of them become more valuable.

Another interesting point was that the value of some pictures have a ‘V’ shaped curve over time. They are very valuable when first taken, but that value diminishes over time. However at some point along the timeline, because of the age of the photo, a death, or something else, the value of the photo starts to increase.

Ok, but why does this matter?

As a photographer, it matters because you may be asking yourself, “with all these cameras around, will there still be a need for me?”. So it’s important to understand why people are taking pictures and what they’re doing with them. Not only from the perspective of will you have a job, but are there products or services that you can sell to them that will incorporate their photos as well as the images you take of them.

The other reason it matters, is the industry as a whole (especially companies that make printers) is asking whether consumers will still want prints. Now that you can email photos around and view them on beautiful high resolution screens, why would you ever want to print?

My takeaways from the conference:

I don’t think prints are going anywhere. People still live in boxes (houses, cubicles, etc) and they want to hang stuff on the walls of those boxes. Electronic photoframes are nifty, but what parents house would be complete without a Wall of Shame featuring their progeny? I find it unlikely that you’ll see tons of photoframes up on the wall displaying slideshows, if only because you would have to have 50 power outlets.

Consumers ARE printing less, taken as a percentage of the number of pictures they take. However, because they’re taking so many more pictures, the absolute number of prints being made is staying about the same. This makes sense. You no longer have to print out an entire roll of pictures to get the one or two you really want. Many of the cameras out there, especially camera phones, don’t take great pictures. They’re fine for posting on Facebook to let folks know what you did last Friday, but they aren’t exactly keepsake quality.

And speaking about Keepsakes… what about professional photographers? Again, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Photography is a skill and getting consistently good shots will continue to be valued. But the value of the experience of going to a pro photographer will go up. If someone is going to go to the trouble of getting a professional portrait, they’re going to expect it to be an experience worth remembering in and of itself. Many photographers already understand this, so its hardly news. But I’m guessing it’ll become even more important. This may involve stuff like shooting video from the moment they walk in and giving them a DVD of the photo shoot process, a sort of  ‘behind the scenes’ documentary. This becomes another selling point or thing to be sold. Creating a photo book of all the behind the scenes images, for example.

And in terms of what consumers want, photo books are way up there. It’s one of those things that can be difficult for them to create themselves, especially when you’re talking about high quality photo books. It’s really what people are looking for and there are tons of options out there. So as a photographer, you’re not just selling a print, you’re selling a multimedia experience that culminates in a great 16×20 photo, photo books, and even a DVD.

We’ll talk about cameras and other technology in part II.

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At least, I think that’s what Silverlight does. Have to laugh because when I went to Microsoft.com’s Silverlight section, the website couldn’t show me its content because I didn’t have Silverlight installed. Wouldn’t it be better if Microsoft showed me why I should WANT to install Silverlight before they require me to install Silverlight in order to read about it?

Ah well, I can always find Silverlight info on Wikipedia. There was also talk at NAB, and elsewhere on the web, about Adobe Flash coming to our TV’s soon. From Salon.com:

“Adobe is making a major push to bring its Flash platform to the living room, announcing a version of Flash that’s optimized for televisions, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Monday.”

And maybe, just maybe Flash will come to the iPhone. That is, if Apple and Adobe can decide who will yield first to the other company’s requirements. From The Apple Blog a few months ago:

“So far, nothing seems to have come of efforts to get the tech working on the device because Apple has qualms with the high demands of the full version of Flash, and doesn’t feel the Lite version offers enough muscle to merit inclusion… [I]t does seem like Adobe realises the importance of getting their product on the platform, and have decided to put in the serious development time required to produce something that matches Apple’s specifications.”

Happy Monday! -debbie

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This was the first year since 2001 that Digital Anarchy was not a vendor at NAB. We sold our video/animation product line in August 2008 and are a Photoshop-only developer now. But we love the event and people, and it’s always cool to see new technology, so there we were. Drinking a little more than working, for once, often with colleagues from other plugin companies.

Representing below: Folks from ReVision FX, Digi Effects, Automatic Duck, Grid Iron, and Digital Anarchy.

There are still reports streaming in from the graphics news sites about NAB. You can get great back coverage on Studiodaily.com by clicking from their NAB blog summary pages. In particular, I like Debra Kaufman’s posts called ‘Future Buzz at NAB‘ and and ‘Some Final Thoughts‘.

My favorite booth design was by Autodesk. The booth was interesting looking and used a green concept. They took cardboard rolls, the big long thin kind that come inside carpets perhaps, and used that build a bamboo like structure. Very cool.

To me, it seemed like this year the new technology came in a few containers:

- One was figuring out the delivery of video streams across the internet.
- A second was better, smarter media management and image acquisition.
- Perhaps the third was more powerful, high speed digital cameras. The line between still images and video continues to get blurrier.
- And 3D. Lots of it. Not sure how these technologies, like a huge monitor that displays images in 3D, have the ability to monetize, but the ideas are cool.
- There was still a lot of buzz around the RED ONE video camera, even though the Red Camera Company didn’t show at NAB this year. But there were companies who had released competing and accessory 4k hardware and software

Personally, my favorite thing at NAB (and the IBC show in Amsterdam) is the big broadcast booths with their full-service weather software/hardware combos. Maybe this is because I had a year-long infatuation with the Weather Channel when it first launched years ago. I also love seeing the booths that show high end large format video screens, the kind that is used in stadiums, like this monitor display by Wagner Media.

The hardware-ladden back:

The gigantic LED front:

People were also buzzing about show attendance levels. It seemed like there were fewer attendees, maybe 10-20% less, but I saw many booths that were packed or working briskly. Word on the Vegas street was that the people who did come to NAB were the ones who tend to buy, not just window shop. And those are the people that NAB vendors love!

regards -Debbie

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I guess I should have suspected this would be the case when I received no less than 6 emails from PMA over the last two weeks and one phone call begging me to sign up for a free exhibits badge. I can’t recall a tradeshow more earnestly trying to get someone, anyone to show up at their show.

I was just at WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers) which had great attendance. So what’s wrong with PMA? Would love to hear from you all as to why you did or did not go. It’s definitely looking like a show we will no longer do. Judging from the exhibitors we talked to, it may be the last year for many of them as well.

But… was there anything interesting?

For those of us on the pro photography side, the answer is not really. Everything of interest was announced at WPPI a couple weeks prior. One of the cool things announced at WPPI was the Canon Studio Solution software. This is a customized version of Express Digital’s software modified for their cameras and printers. Giving pro photographers a shoot to print solution that incorporates all sorts of features like client scheduling/invoicing,  sales database, image retouching/processing, and color management throughout the whole process. It’s looks very cool. We are, of course, bugging them to allow plugin developers to enhance it.

And then there was the Samsung booth. Which was either really cute or really freaking bizarre. Animated teddy bears and a ‘it’s a small world’ sort of theme? Weird. Got me talking about it, so I guess that’s sort of what they had in mind. But now I associate Samsung with strange, blue teddy bears and bad acid trips at Disneyland. Of course, that may say more about me than Samsung… but ya gotta wonder who designs these booths.

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Frankly, as a small software company that’s been trying to keep up with their hardware and OS changes since OS X was birthed, whew, I’m glad Apple isn’t bringing out anything startlingly new right now. It’s nice that they have stopped ‘innovating’ for awhile and allowed us developers to create new products, instead of spending time recoding our older ones to work with the newest processor and platform changes.

heh, anyway….

Cribbed from two play by play of the keynote, one from CNET and the other from Macworld itself, here are the major announcements from Macworld:

– An entire new version of iLife ’09. Also a new version (yawn) of iWork ’09.

Hmm, I don’t use iLife at all. I suck my photos in through Aperture or Lightroom. Every once in awhile I will open iPhoto and the ’09 has a new ‘Faces’ technology that sounds interesting. It finds the same person across multiple photos. Goggle’s Picasa Web Albums introduced that feature in fall 2008 so I suppose Apple had to jump on it.

The technology centers around ‘geotagging’. You can also send a photo directly to Facebook or Flickr. That’s cool integration but a little scary to know how closely tied all of these large technologies are. Apple, Facebook and Flickr, all bedding together to make your photo life easier. I’ve read that Facebook is resisting Google’s data (dating?) advances but I guess Yahoo (= Flickr) is less scary somehow.

Organizing photos by ‘Events’ or ‘Places’ doesn’t resonate for me personally. People are really only interested in looking at your photos if they are in them.

The star power behind the iMovie and GarageBand demos is impressive. Movement stabilization for home movies of, errr, Africa. Rock musicians in training videos? Zoinks!

– A new 17″ MacBook Pro.

Very pretty as usual. But the battery isn’t removable or replaceable? I heartily disagree with this. Mac battery life has always been horrible, in my opinion, though it’s just the nature of the beast. My Dell batteries die too.

The demo explains that the battery will have 7-8 hours of life and should last for five years, which means people won’t be throwing out batteries. I find it hard to believe that a single battery will not crap out before the laptop does. A point that I have seen raised on news sites is whether folks will be able to upgrade their RAM if the case is locked down.

– DRM-free music through iTunes and a three price structure.

About time. I don’t know enough about this subject to figure out if the music industry has been the holdout or if Apple has. But I am happy to see that Apple is removing DRM from their iTunes music. I do legally buy all of my music but I’ve done it through Amazon exactly because of this format lockdown.

My friend told me that there’s a cost of .30/per tune to upgrade existing DRM-ed music to iTunes Plus and unlock that file. That feels very unloyal of Apple. More here.

Well, that’s my backseat driver’s chatter, along with the rest of the pundits. Written on a G5 while texting on my iPhone, of course.

regards -Debbie

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As I noted in an early post, tradeshows have an incredibly low ROI and with so much happening online now, the real value of them needs to be questioned. I think Apple is recognizing the cost and effort to do these shows just doesn’t add up. Many companies, including Digital Anarchy, have scaled their tradeshow activity way back. In most cases it’s just not a smart way to spend marketing money. I would much rather support photography forums, like photographycorner.com, with ads and giveaways than do tradeshows.

Oh… and as it happens, this year we’re releasing Knoll Light Factory and ToonIt for Apple’s Aperture during MacWorld! Stay tuned…

cheers, Jim

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Not that it’s impossible to get all this uploaded, but it’s unwieldy. I think moving to online apps is an interesting idea, but for graphics I just don’t see it as being practical. At least, not until bandwidth is increasing as fast as the file sizes.

cheers, Jim

I mean, the networking is great and useful, but with everyone having broadband I’m really beginning to doubt that I need to give one on one demos to every attendees for four days. There really has to be a better way of interacting with customers and showing off new products.

I’d love to see some comments on why we should keep going to NAB as an exhibitor. It just seems like there should be ways of reaching more of our customers, and doing it more efficiently than with tradeshows.

cheers, Jim

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Since I’m hardly above such things (”I was young and poor and needed the booth space”), I joined in, attempting to move our Plugin Pavilion into the now vacant space of the Avid Developer Community booth. I even had the person from Avid that managed the ADC to call NAB on our behalf. All that got me was a terse email from our NAB rep saying we would definitely NOT be getting it. It’s the new sport in HD, groveling for Avid’s booth space. Look for it on the LVCC cafeteria monitors (instead of the usual strip club ads).

Somewhat more seriously, I think Avid’s decision says more about tradeshows than it does about Avid itself (or anything else). Personally, I more or less believe the official line that Avid is going to roll out some customer service initiatives and the money is being better spent there. There’s been some speculation that a merger is in the works and I think that’s unlikely. Usually mergers are preceded by less noise, not more. Avid’s gone out of their way to make a big deal about this both publically and internally to employees. The other reason to discount a merger is that they’re giving up the best booth location possible. If you’re going to exhibit, that’s the location you want. Also, Avid hasn’t done a booth at IBC since 2005 and doesn’t appear to be worse for it.

The other issue to consider is whether tradeshows really give you enough bang for your buck. As a smaller company, NAB is still critical to us. However we’ve stopped doing smaller shows, like DV Expo, because we
don’t get enough out of it. Judging from the size of the DV Expo show floor we’re not the only ones. If you’re Avid and dropping a million+ bucks on NAB… what else can you buy with that million+? If you’re spending that much money, are you really getting that back? Tradeshows aren’t going away. I think people still like to get together, network, go for drinks, and test drive the products. Sending messages over LinkedIn and reading press releases just isn’t the same. However, many shows are diminishing in importance. For us, a 10×10 is plenty of booth space, especially as part of the Plugin Pavilion. Folks can come out, say hello, see new products, make sure we’re still in business, etc. A much larger booth doesn’t really buy us that much more, IMHO. For a company like Avid, it’s different because you can’t really downsize the booth. If you do, you end up with all the same speculation that people are doing now. It’s either go big, or don’t go because going small gets pretty much the same reaction.

I think the main reason tradeshows still exist is we need to convince ourselves (and perhaps the IRS) that there is legitimate business stuff going on. The important stuff is the dinner, drinks, gambling, etc. (Truly critical to developing business relationships)… so do you really need to spend a ton of money on a booth? I don’t know… Just show up and do the dinner and drinks part. And as a bonus you don’t have to be at the booth at 9am! (yeah, I know… wishful thinking on my part)

So if they want to take the money and do a bunch of roadshows instead, that might not be such a bad idea. Given that the economy seems to be slowing a bit, hotel rates and plane fares are increasing at a good clip, I wouldn’t be surprised if NAB had a flat year anyways. It might not be a bad time to go out to customers instead of requiring them to come to you. I don’t know if this is Avid’s plan, all I’m saying is that there are ways of reaching out to customers that don’t involve tradeshows.

Either way I give them credit for going against the conventional wisdom and blowing off NAB. Maybe it’s a mistake and they’ll be back in 2009, but maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg and we’ll see some changes in the way conferences and tradeshows are done, who participates, and who attends

cheers, Jim