Trends in Photography: Annie Leibovitz

Trend: Leibovitz Schadenfreude.

The Worst Photograph Ever Made

But for inspired badness, this recent "photograph"* by Annie Leibovitz for the Lavazza calendar has it all: a pandering (unto capitulation) to empty style; excessive color which is nevertheless unattractive; an attractive model who is also unattractive ...

Lawsuits Claim Leibovitz Owes $778K For Photo Services

The suits offer a rare glimpse into the big budgets behind Leibovitz’s celebrity portraits, which are surely among the most expensive shoots in the industry. A wardrobe stylist who worked on a Disney campaign with Leibovitz claims the photographer owes her $386,467 – including $109,960 for one shot alone.

Annie Leibovitz Looking Like a Deadbeat

Though she's paid handsomely ($2 mill/year) for her consistently newsy (King Kong LeBron! Naked Miley! Tina Fey!) VF work, there's been a stream of reports about the portraitist facing some financial straits. In addition to her cute little pair of lawsuits, she reportedly took out a $5 million mortgage on her Greenwich Village home earlier this fall. If the financial downturn affects even our most populist and wealthy of mainstream artistes, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Trends in Photography: Free! Edition

Trend: photographers arguing about working for free.

Four Reasons to Consider Working for Free

"As for me, what am I really giving up? Not money, unless someone would have hired me that day to do something equally interesting. I am giving up time I would have spent shooting something less useful for me."

WORK FOR FREE?

"IF YOU ARE WORKING FOR FREE - simply to get “a” job - you risk destroying the entire business for everyone. In fact - your dream job - that you do for free - will be a job that some qualified person will no longer be getting paid for. And you’ll hurt that person’s chance of feeding their family in accepting to do that job for free. It’s quite that simple."

Free is Killing Me!

"The next day I heard from them: Both schools are going with someone else. I asked them who the photographer was and how much was he charging and I was told it was a professor from the UCLA Science Department."

A Rant about “Free Photography” Rants

"Come on, Vincent... destroying the entire business for everyone... that's pathetic. Does this mean that you will go back to shooting film so that those who manufacture and develop film can feed their families? I could insert a thousand similar analogies here, but the point is that technology has already changed the entire business. The only “destroy” part is what those who refuse to recognize and adapt end up doing to themselves."

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

"The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."

Trends in Photography: Sony Alpha 900 Edition

Trend: people are starting to realize that the Sony Alpha 900 is a great camera.

The Sony A900 and the Nikon D3

"If I were an art photographer, especially shooting for fine printmaking, I'd get the A900. Its image quality is superlative, yet it's still reasonably portable, fun and comfortable to shoot with, and easy to use."

Sony Alpha 900: Camera Test: From megapixels to viewfinders to sensors, size matters.

"Resolution? Excellent across all ISOs. It was best at ISO 100, with 3230 lines. For comparison, Canon's 21.1MP EOS-1Ds Mark III ($7,500, street, body only) scored 2830 lines and Nikon's 12.3MP D700 ($2,700, street, body only; $3,375 with 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR lens) turned in 2350 lines in the same test."

Judging Value

"That's something of what I feel about the D3x and why I cancelled my order. Yes, I can afford it, but I simply find it not to represent good value. After testing the 24MP Sony A900 (which I purchased for less than the equivalent of US $2,500 here in Toronto last month) the thought of paying US $8,000 for a camera that that has the same resolution, the same frame rates, a similar large and bright viewfinder, etc, just seemed to me to be a bad value proposition. The Canon 5DII at well under $3,000 is another current alternative in a full-frame 20+ MP camera."

Sony A900 Field Review: And Then There Were Three

"In the light of the just announced (Dec 1, 2008) price for the Nikon D3x (US $8,000) the inherent goodness of the Sony A900 comes into focus (no pun intended). For the cost of a D3x one can buy a Sony A900 plus the exceptional Zeiss 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, the very fine Sony 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, a Sony A700 body as a backup, a flash, a couple of 16 GB high speed memory cards, and still have enough left over to pay the sales taxes. The same goes for the Canon 5D MKII, though you'll have to pick two or three of your favourite lenses from that company's lens line-up and something like the 50D body as backup instead."

Trends in Photography

The hot trend in photography? The anonymous blog.

Now, I happen to think anonymity turns people into the worst version of themselves -- visit any Web forum if you want to discover that for yourself -- but I do understand the impulse to blog freely, with the minimum of consequences.

And I'm all for any site that talks about photography or visual culture. So take a glance at:

Bitter Photographer
A Photo Editor
A Visual Society

Still, the test for me is always: What Would Elliott Erwitt Do? I'm pretty sure he'd put his name in his profile.