Picture House NY / PACA 2009

How great to see so many of you at Picture House last week! We spoke with so many clients and had a great opportunity to renew our acquaintances face to face! With such a crazy digital environment we live in these days, it’s wonderful to put a face to a name after so many emails, phone calls and usage negotiations!

Dave Herbig and Danita Delimont at Picture House.

Thanks to those of you who were able to stop by our booth–we know how busy Picture House can be and we appreciate your time. We hope you got as much out of your time there as we did! When glancing at your badges, I was struck by how so many of you are now working for “Freelance.”  It seems like a pretty big company   Seriously though, we wish you all the best in finding meaningful work and projects that will fulfill you both financially and spiritually.

As the ASPP Co-President of the West coast chapter, we are putting on a program in San Francisco on November 7th about “Reinventing Yourself.” With so many people losing their jobs on all levels, we thought a program dedicated to the positive changes you can make during these down times would be great.  We’re bringing in career coaches and speakers that have tackled these scenarios and come out the better for it.  Now is the time to look within, find what really gets you excited and reach for a new star.  For researchers and editors, I would recommend developing some skills that include multimedia programming and footage editing.  These skills would be good to learn as much as you can in these ever developing website, advertising and educational uses of motion.

From Picture House NY, Dave and I headed on to PACA meetings at Miami Beach to meet up with our photo agency partners, many of whom came from far reaching areas of the globe. Comparing notes on how everyone has been affected this past year was valuable. Many have the feeling that we’ve turned the corner and business is definitely improving. There were lots of interesting sessions from “Social Media,” to the legalities of licensing and copyright abuse. One of the more interesting programs featured one of the Google “wunderkinds,” Matt Zitzmann, who at 23 years of age, is a Product Manager at Google, having earned three degrees from MIT! He spoke on some of the new semantic and visual search tools Google is making available.

Michael Masterson (ASPP President Elect), Matt Zitzmann (Google), Danita Delimont, Dave Herbig at PACA in Miami Beach.

We were thrilled that Google is taking an interest in our industry, especially with all the photos being indexed into their image searches. He heard a lot about our serious concerns about copyright and proper licensing and the need to put up some kind of notice on Google Images about copyright infringement. Nancy Wolfe, the PACA legal counsel will be doing her best to work with Google on that issue, as it concerns us all.  In this day and age with images so prevalent throughout the internet, it’s important to educate everyone that not images are free for the taking!

Now we’re back in the beautiful fall colors of the great Northwest.  We love to travel around the country for these various conferences throughout the year, but as many of you probably feel about your own areas, “there’s no place like home!”  Enjoy the Fall!