Alamy – a follow-up

The UK Press Gazette quoted The BPPA’s open letter to Alamy’s CEO in their piece about his video signalling his intention to reduce the photographers percentage of royalties to 40%. This morning the UKPG asked us to provide a response to James West’s latest video where he offers to keep the 50% split for exclusive content. We provided the following text:
 
“Alamy’s move to alter their commission structure has brought a large number of other issues to the surface such as the low prices they sell pictures for, their broken promise that when they reduced the photographers cut to 50% they wouldn’t go further and their somewhat grudging acceptance that it is the commitment and buy-in from thousands of photographers that has got them to the positive position in which they now find themselves.
 
The BPPA welcomes Alamy’s decision to reconsider their reduction in the percentage paid to photographers but in making this only for exclusive content they are still going to anger many of our members. One of them has said “exclusivity is appropriate to a delicatessen, not a Walmart” and this sums up how most feel.
 
Should they push ahead with this plan the details of how they manage this will be complex. Will photographers have to make some sort of declaration for every single picture retrospectively? Will the burden for proving exclusivity rest with the photographers? Our opinion is that Alamy are still not listening and are still cutting the income of all those photographers who for very good reasons do not wish to, or cannot, surrender exclusivity.”

New Board Member for Social Media & Web

We’d like to introduce you to the new board member who will all be playing an active role in making this yet another successful year for the BPPA and British Press Photography.
I am Julie Edwards and I have been a press photographer for just over 10 years, working mainly in the Entertainment Industry.
I have already introduced a series to the BPPA website called “Members Talks” but my second task is to ensure that all the new (and old) board members write an introduction or “about me” focused not on their photography but what they believe the BPPA should be and how they will help achieve that. It’s not fair that I ask others to do this without putting pen to paper myself first.
With this in mind, what follows is not the normal “I’m a photographer because I grew up surrounded by photography” type introduction  (although I did as my dad was in newspaper distribution and I was surrounded by all the papers every day).
At school I was a maths head and started my career just as the desktop computer revolution started. My father said “computers are the future”, so I combined my maths and design talent in the drawing office running computer aided design systems. This career grew and I ended up as a consultant selling and implementing some of the most advanced design solutions on PC’s, starting my own software company in the 90’s as the internet era was in it’s infancy. Luckily I was working with one of the largest organisations in the CAD field whose investment in Marketing and Sales training was second to none which I benefited from greatly. In about 2007 I gave this all up with a huge change in direction to return to my first love: photography. Well not just photography, press photography, using my sales and marketing skills to get into positions quite quickly that normally take many years in the industry.
Why do I detail this past? My portfolio for the BPPA is Web & Social media. I have a past well rooted in technology and problem solving, anyone who knows me knows I have some of the most bleeding edge and automated workflows possible. This gives me the right background to help to bring the BPPA right up to date into a modern, forward looking, helpful association that press photographers think vital to be part of.
UK Press photographers are not always the most creative but they are without doubt the most versatile, quick thinking and resourceful photographers on the planet. Our work is seen every single day by millions of people. No other group of photographers have their work this visible and yet, only last week, on a train, I was likened to being “no higher than an Estate Agent”. Why do we have this reputation? Probably because the only time we are in the limelight is when it is negative (privacy intrusion etc). The BPPA needs to help change that, it needs to show the world what we do and the web is the perfect platform for this. 
Julie

Members Stories: Boris goes for a run…

In the first post of what will be a regular feature of BPPA Members telling the story behind a photo, BPPA Member Peter Macdiarmid, photographer London News Pictures, talks about …. Boris goes for a run ….
It’s not often that a press photograph leads the news agenda, but it does happen now and again.
I have been working as a press photographer for 31 years starting out on local newspapers in south London then progressing to The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Reuters and 10 years as senior news photographer at Getty Images. Currently I work at London News Pictures, covering news and politics.
For me news photography is a passion and I put a lot of time and effort into looking for different images that catch the reader’s attention and illustrate a story in a unique, and hopefully original way. Sometimes this approach can make an ordinary image really stand out.
With this in mind I went looking for former foreign secretary Boris Johnson at his Oxfordshire home during last week’s Conservative Party Conference. Thinking that Boris would leave his house and head up the M40 to Birmingham for the second day of conference I positioned myself in the road outside by his driveway. Usually Boris will give a happy wave to any reporters and photographers as he gets into his car, but today I was on my own.
A short while after the sunrise began to cut through the October chill I spotted Boris leaving for an early morning run wearing his usual flowery shorts. I managed to capture a cheery wave before he disappeared down the lane that leads to the farmland surrounding his house. Normal practice, when there is a group of press doorstepping Boris, is to wait for his return and photograph him running up the lane back home, but today I decided to make use of the golden hour sunrise.
Having not ventured out into the nearby fields previously, I had to make an educated guess as to his return route. I located a spot that would enable me to photograph him crossing a path edged with long grass between two ploughed fields before turning left towards me.
I had guessed correctly and a few minutes later Boris emerged from the woodland leading to the path. He spotted me and waved. Sometimes he waves without looking up, and on this occasion he was also half raising his other arm for balance, all of which made a rather unusual image. He then jogged past me on his way home.

Peter Macdiarmid, photographer London News Pictures
© Licensed to London News Pictures. 01/10/2018. Thame, UK. Boris Johnson waves at photographers as he runs near his Oxfordshire home. The former foreign secretary is due to attend Conservative Party Conference this week. Photo credit: Peter Macdiarmid/LNP

Rather pleased that I had found a different way of photographing the MP that was the talking point of the Conservative Party Conference, I set off back to the car to edit and transmit my images.
Within a couple of hours the images started to appear online, but with a headline that was markedly different to my caption ‘Boris Johnson waves as he runs through fields near his Oxfordshire home’. The Mirror online headline was ‘Boris Johnson commits greatest trolling in world history by running through a FIELD OF WHEAT’…. referring to the Prime Minister’s confession that the ‘naughtiest thing she has ever done’ was to ‘run through a field of wheat as a child’
My images of a man out jogging in the morning sunshine began to take on a life of their own. I spent the rest of the day fielding calls from ITV, Channel 5, BBC TV, CNN International and German TV asking for the picture for news bulletins. Multiple newspaper online websites were publishing my pictures and it was being talked about on radio bulletins by lunchtime. That day’s Evening Standard ran it on page one and another inside.
Tuesday’s papers ran the image across four front pages and on inside pages too.

I have received a few phone calls asking me if it was a stunt – as you can see – it wasn’t.
Peter Macdiarmid
London News Pictures

The Darkroom Boy – 40 years on Fleet Street

Roger Allen

 
A peek into life in the glory days of Press Photography from the perspective of Fleet Street legend Roger Allen. An auto-biography illustrated with fantastic photographs from around the world by the former Daily Mirror staffer, with tales to make you cry with laughter including the infamous John Major ‘mooning incident’ and stories from the war zones of The Balkans to really scary battles of wits with showbiz celebrities. NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
Find a comfy chair and crack open a bottle of Rioja.

“The Darkroom Boy is the story of a lad from a poor council estate whose working life was destined to be spent on a building site slapping glazed tiles on the walls of bathrooms and toilets. A chance meeting with his old art teacher in the early 70’s sent him on a different path… jetting round the world covering some of the biggest news stories of the late twentieth century as a newspaper photographer.

In the process, learnt a great deal about life, death, celebrity and how to behave at the awards ceremonies where he was twice crowned British Photographer of the Year.

He drank with Ollie Reed (copiously) tracked George Michael in the Hollywood hills, hunted showbiz fat cats like Michael Barrymore in America and real life lions on Woking high street. He travelled with John Major (exposing the parts that should never be mentioned let alone seen).

He also dodged bullets in war and peace, from Bosnia to Belfast and from Kosovo to Cape Town.In spite of this he still kept a sense of humour and an innate sense of right and wrong. This is the story of Roger Allen and his journey from a news agency run by two northern hacks who punted stories and pictures to the daily papers to the heights of his trade.

Through the murky days of the darkroom- dipping and dunking prints and processing film before taking the train to London to be shouted at and abused by the great and good of Fleet Street as he delivered photos to picture desks of the nations papers. Press photographers are seen as heartless coves. But The Darkroom Boy tells a different story- one of heartbreak and love, joy and laughter, rib-tickling humour and spine-tingling fear. He shows compassion not only to humans but also bears – Just ask the one Roger saved in Bosnia.”

The Copyright Fight – David Bailey weighs in…

 
Today is the day when the UK Government could vote to include a seemingly innocuous clause in an otherwise largely uncontroversial piece of legislation that will not only harm our industry but also place this country at odds with a vital international treaty. It is upsetting, bizarre and unnecessary to the point of being farcical.
The BPPA has been trying very hard to get the Government to see sense and drop the copyright clause from the Enterprise Regulatory Reform Bill for a while now. In a world where the intervention of a celebrity can unclog jams and open doors we decided to ask UK Photography’s biggest celebrity, David Bailey, to write to cabinet members on behalf of all owners and creators of intellectual property. He decided to write to George Osborne MP, The Chancellor of the Exchequer personally and he has given us permission to circulate that letter as widely as we wish – and here it is…
The text of the letter in full:
Dear George
I am writing because I am appalled at what the government is doing to our rights in the ERRB (Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill). Why the ERRB by the way? Why can’t copyright be dealt with properly in a proper Copyright Bill? I’m told everyone will be able to get their hands on our so-called “orphans” so libraries and museums can publish old photographs whose authors have long been forgotten. But never mind what’s lying around on dusty old shelves, what about the millions of “orphans” that are being created now every day!
Why? Because social media, and everyone else for that matter routinely strip our names and contact details from our digital files. They simply should not be allowed to get away with this. They can because our government refuses to give us the right to our names by our pictures (Moral rights). So now commercial organisations will be allowed to make money from our “orphans”, but not us, the creators.
This legislation should never have been even considered without first giving us our moral rights, and is contrary to our rights under the Berne Convention. Why the rush? A scheme, the Copyright Hub – a scheme backed by the government – is being developed to ensure that those who wish to find our pictures can not only do so quickly online, but also find the contact details of the pictures’ owners. You are about to put the cart before the horse.
I’m told the real reason for speed is that “releasing” orphans will create growth. We all understand the need for growth. But where’s the evidence? The seemingly impressive financial figures presented originally in the Hargreaves Review have mysteriously had to be revised – down by 97%! Which now apparently amount to no more than 80p per taxpayer per year. Given the damage this legislation will now cause to taxpaying creators, damage no-one has so far taken into account, the effect of this legislation on economic growth will in fact be negative.
It’s not too late to think again!
Best,
David Bailey