United Global Images is Back Online

International outdoor, nature, wildlife and sports photographer, J. Brett Whitesell, has finally returned online with United Global Images. In the new ecommerce web site http://www.unitedglobalimages.com,

Brett has galleries set up for Nature, wildlife, Travel, Landscapes, Panoramics, as well as, a “portfolio” section that includes samples from decades of soccer photographs and editorial images dating back to the 70’s and 80’s up through a few years ago. You can review images, comment and purchase downloads or prints. There are even a few shots form his father’s (James C. Whitesell) collection of “Early 50’s Japan”.

Film or Digital? “While we shoot for tomorrow will we lose yesterday?”

by J. Brett Whitesell/UGI

A lot of people are asking the same thing. Valid question. Newer arrivals to photography, starting out in digital, will say, “Film, what’s the point?” Then there are die-hard film users who won’t touch digital. Many in this category don’t have a “need for speed” in their work.

I am a photojournalist, predominately sports. News demands speed. However, not all of us liked the idea of digital. In the beginning cameras were slow and image quality was poor. Film still held most of the market. As digital cameras got better and image quality began to equal that of film, photographers looked more favorably at digital, reasoning that it would cut costs on film and headaches on processing.

Digital still was only creeping into the market. It was new and in photography that is a hard sell. Then came the web. Newspapers and magazines converting to “Webzines” needed images much faster.

Years ago, deadline for magazines and weekly sports newspapers was Tuesday. You made deadline either by shipping whole rolls of film or processing it and shipping prints via overnight on Monday to get there by Tuesday. With digital, web editors started asking for images at the end of the game, then at halftime. One agency recently was boasting “real-time” pictures for the web. If you are to survive in the editorial world now you had to be digital whether you liked it or not.

The good news is the quality of cameras has advanced at unprecedented speed. The bad news is the cost of owning these “machines” was increasing as well. With film, a camera lasted about 8-10 years in sports. It could conceivably last a lifetime if taken care of. There are many film cameras sitting in offices of sports shooters that they have owned a long time and will probably keep the rest of their lives.

Digital cameras were costing 2 to 4 times that of their film predecessors. Along with each new camera being released (sometimes twice a year) so goes the cost of staying in the game. With each new camera came a better and larger file size. Sometimes better color and most certainly speed. If you didn’t get the newest body with the bigger and better chip you fell behind. Your images were now obsolete. This never happened with film. Also with digital, and auto focus, and speed came more and more newcomers to the field.

We have now literally entered the age where “anybody can do it”.  The concept of “point and shoot” has climbed into the professional world of sports and news photography. With that brought out every fan with a camera. Beginners were now showing up weeks after buying their first camera with the misconception “this would be a cool way to make money”. Sports writers were now taking pictures.  Photographers, good photographers are slowly becoming a thing of the past.

It is now about which image is on the editor’s desktop first, not which is the best. Along with the internet, came electronic editors clueless to what made an image good or bad. This has now reached to the top newspapers and magazines now on the web. Picture agencies are filled with amateur camera holders willing to shoot on “spec” (they only get paid if the agency sells an image of theirs) just to see their snapshot on an agency website. With people willing to work virtually for free, agencies have exasperated almost every real photojournalist out there trying to make a living. Photojournalism is not going to revert back to film. Digital is here to stay.

Digital is also working its way into other areas of photography, such as, studio, commercial, and advertising. Due to new and huge file sizes a 35mm style camera is now producing images surpassing 120/645 format scanned film. You now would have to shoot 4×5 in order to get an image equal to the new digital cameras. The art field is also accepting photography more and more even in the top-level galleries.

So what’s the downside you ask? At first I didn’t think there was any. I am getting fantastic, almost grain less photographs that I can produce in my office without chemicals, huge machines and generally as fast. But then one day I was going through my father’s slides. He worked as a photographer in Japan and I wanted to see how they were holding up. Many of the Ektachromes were failing now. The Kodachromes, on the other hand, if not scratched were still perfect. So I began scanning them on a film scanner. I was amazed at how many of these slides were holding color as true now as then. What hit home was not how good the slides were. It was the simple fact I could view my fathers photographs 55 years later.

If you can remotely keep up with the advancements in technology, especially in digital imaging or video, you know how fast and how drastically the industry changes within then same year. It’s gone from videotape, to CD, to DVD, to HD-DVD (with the question of Blue Ray), to merely transmitting digital files to an off-site hard drive (location unknown) without any physical piece of storage to hold in your hand at all. You simply “Call Up” the images when you need them. That’s scary!

What if technology advances to a place you can’t buy the equipment to read the hundreds of thousands of images on my CDs? How will anyone view these images? 55 years from now will you be able to look at the pictures I took yesterday? You will still be able to look at my pictures on film, as well as, my fathers’ slides that will be 110 years old by then. This presented a real dilemma. I can’t survive as a photojournalist without digital and I may not be able to view my favorite photographs 40 or 50 years from now due technological advances.

Conclusion: Shoot everything time sensitive on digital, news, sports etc. Then shoot my landscape, nature, wildlife pictures on film for longevity. So I went back and bought a film camera. The next problem is going to be purely the ability to buy film, much less good film. Kodak’s film catalogue resembled that of Sears or JC Penney. Now it’s a small pamphlet. Kodak also stayed in the film side so long they might not survive. Kodachrome has been removed from their inventory and what film is left in the marketplace, is now being processed by someone else. So, soon you won’t be able to buy film or get it processed.

For now I shoot what I have to on digital and what I want to on film for longevity. But, isn’t the news, major sporting events, time sensitive images worthy of future viewing? I’m not sure the digital camera industry, the web gurus, the electronic editors thought about it much. Their world is “If I want it tomorrow, I will call you tomorrow”. Just don’t call me for something from yesterday.

What Sells-Part 1

To purchase:

Print Only

5×7 $17.00 8×10 $25.00 11×14 $35.00 12×18 $49.00 20×30 $75.00

I’m going to go here quite a bit because no matter what the ultimate indicator is “What Sells”. Oh, photographers will go into this award winning act about how “They won’t compromise their artistic integrity”. Nonsense! In order to get a job with certain people or sell a gallery image, or sign a contract with a major advertiser, they would sell their mother. I have to laugh every time I hear that comment. When I do I know they’re not selling anything. I haven’t found a photographer yet that was busy that ever thought of that ridiculous statement.

So, let’s look at what gallery images sell and what doesn’t or at least my experiences. The first picture is a great shot of Foster Falls along the New River Trail in Southwest Virginia. Just getting fog ads mood to any scenic or landscape. But to get the fog rising and a tad of sun spotlighting through was a stroke of luck. It snapped out some of the fall colors and reflected on the New River, nice. Has it sold………..no. Not even a comment.

Now that in itself doesn’t tell you anything. It could just be no one likes it. Hurt your feelings? It shouldn’t. You just go on to the next one. But in this case it gets a bit more confusing. The first picture doesn’t even get a glance but when cropped to the tree in the second image (actually re-shot for the tree by itself) everyone loves it! And when people respond pictures sell. Sometimes I don’t care why but here I like the first image better than the second.

Is it confusing? Certainly at times it is. It’s not what people like that drives me nuts, although important if you want to eat, but WHY they like it. I have literally hundreds of thousands of images spanning over more than 30 years. I can’t edit every image, scan every image, print every image nor frame every image to try and sell them because I don’t know the market. That’s why questions concerning WHY people like something is important to me.

This is one of many we’ll look at in this blog. Stay tuned.

We’re Off!

OK, here we go! I have worked in the photography field almost all my life. My father was a photographer and his father dabbled in it. My father had me in the darkroom at 7 and I pretty much hated it until I was a teenager and we were receiving incredible images from Viet Nam. Since then my dream was to work for Sports Illustrated, do a book, and cover a war. 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. I might even consider covering the coal strikes in West Virginia in the mid-70′s as close to a war. Certainly a good skirmish. Anyway I’m here and blogging. Stay tuned!