How a College Student Used Creative Commons to Dominate Political Photography

http://priceonomics.com/how-a-college-student-used-creative-commons-to/

by gregdoesit • 10 years ago

150 70 10 years ago

Agustus• 10 years ago

I am not one to say that the rich get richer, but this may be a specific case of an individual being supported by his parents circumventing the normal process of working the ropes to progress up to taking photos of the people discussed.

On the other hand, it is great that these photos are available as they allow bloggers to use these to make their site look more professional.

Journalists cannot help inserting their views of candidates, Zachary Crockett, describes anyone who works for Trump as "Cronies." Since, @zzcrockett will read this now, you need to keep your opinion out, your other articles were great, keep them that way.

jccalhoun• 10 years ago

My thought on reading this was "how does he afford this?"

emw2• 10 years ago

Gage's work is probably not prohibitively expensive in terms of money. A few plane tickets to Iowa and New Hampshire every four years, lodging in each for maybe a few days. He also attends Comic-Con every year. He has a good DSLR and lens kit, but that's a one time cost. If he had a paid summer internship in accounting, a side job during the academic year, and supportive parents this all seems doable for a middle class college student attending a public university with in-state tuition.

The bigger cost in Gage's photography is almost certainly time. He's uploaded almost 40,000 photos to Flickr since December 2007 -- roughly 5,700 photos a year. Even with the one-person-many-angles style seen in his Flickr stream at https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/with/24744613302/, that's a lot. He also captions his photos, e.g. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/24744613302/.

The vast reach of his photography is likely a sufficient incentive for Gage to invest all that time and significant-but-not-immense money. I hope Gage continues his excellent work.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

I'm actually not sure how much is really new here. Yes, he's expended a lot of effort and done this systematically and he's released the photos as creative commons which isn't normally the default so a lot of people don't use it. However, as we speak, there are any number of students both on college newspapers and other amateurs taking many thousands of pictures of candidates at their stump speeches and rallies. And this has been the case for a long time. The photos just aren't readily available for reuse.

myNXTact3• 10 years ago

This is the exact opposite of the "rich getting richer!" Whenever we start discussing income and wealth trends in the United States we always neglect how we as a society have gotten richer through technological progress. Even the poorest houses in the USA have computers and tv's that would blow the minds of people from the 1990's and be incomprehensible to people from the 1950's.

Cameras have gotten better and better while getting cheaper. Twenty years ago the only people taking photos of this quality were professional photographers. Now we have college students who can work really hard over a school break and be able to afford a great camera setup.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

Twenty years ago the only people taking photos of this quality were professional photographers. Now we have college students who can work really hard over a school break and be able to afford a great camera setup.

Eh. Plenty of amateurs using SLRs were taking good, solid photos 20 or 30 years ago. How do you think the pros got their jobs if not by becoming good photographers first?

It is far easier these days is to take photos that are technically proficient especially in difficult light. (My brain probably still holds way too much arcane and now useless information about B&W film processing chemistry.) And, of course, it's far easier for amateurs to get their photos seen.

efuquen• 10 years ago

I think he was referring to the fact that his parents were able to pay for travel to dozens of political events, simply to promote their kids hobby. That's great, but I doubt that's an expense must people's parents would be able to incur.

Even with that in mind, your claim that even the poorest households in the US have access to computers at home is simply not true. The digital divide is still a very real issue within the U.S.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/share/heres-what-digital-divide-l...

URSpider94• 10 years ago

On the cost of cameras, if anything, they have gotten much more expensive. It used to be possible to buy a pro-quality film camera and prime lens for less than $1,000 -- so, let's say $1500 in today's dollars. More money might get you features like better auto-exposure, auto-focus or high-speed film winders, but a lot of pros didn't use any of those features, and back in the day when I was shooting sports events at my college, I often had a more modern camera rig than the pros sitting next to me. Digital cameras that give similar image quality as those film cameras start at $2,500 today, and go up from there. It feels like the divide between pro and amateur equipment in photography has shot through the roof over the past decade, with the blanket adoption of digital.

What has gotten cheaper / more accessible is the ability to publicize, duplicate and distribute one's work. Twenty years ago, short of dropping off prints at the local newspaper, there would be no way for an amateur photographer to get her photos under the nose of photo editors at major news outlets. Today, that's as simple as uploading to Flickr.

steveoc642• 10 years ago

Cameras have gotten better and better while getting cheaper. Twenty years ago the only people taking photos of this quality were professional photographers. Now we have college students who can work really hard over a school break and be able to afford a great camera setup.

I couldnt agree less.

This is not photography that he is doing, its just some sort of expensive and glorified social media thing. Good on him for having an interesting hobby, but please stop confusing this with "Photography" ... it is not.

Modern Cameras (just like smartphones) are getting bigger, heavier, more useless, and more expensive than ever. Please stop thinking that this is some kind of "progress".

I totally agree with your comment about the quality matching that of "Professional Photographers". The "quality" of these photos is just crap. Soulless, 2 dimensional crap. Its right up there with "Wedding Photography".

He may as well just leave all that DSLR garbage at home and take his happy snaps on an iPhone.

Real photography is actually more accessible than ever. There is no shortage of stupid in this day and age, and so you will find plenty of excellent kit being sold for pennies, because stupid people think that : - "It cant upload photos to instagram" (Canon 700d .. makes for a great neg scanner) - "Its only 5 megapixels" (Leica Digilux 2) - "You cant buy film anymore" (Canon AE-1, in mint condition, with a whole box full of filters and lenses) - "Wont recharge, and cant get batteries anymore" (Leica M3) - "Not sure how to use it" (Olympus OM-2n, with accessories including a gorgeous 50/1.4 Zuiko)

A college student need not work hard to afford a real camera, they need not work at all in fact.

As for developing and printing ... coffee grinds, beetroot juice, washing soda, cheap wine ... they all work, and experimenting with them will actually teach the student a whole lot of valuable things across multiple disciplines. After all - that is what they supposedly at college for isnt it ?

zo1• 10 years ago

"Journalists cannot help inserting their views of candidates, Zachary Crockett, describes anyone who works for Trump as "Cronies." Since, @zzcrockett will read this now, you need to keep your opinion out, your other articles were great, keep them that way."

He puts in a few other silent "jabs" inside the article. Everything from "tea-partier" to "If you have the willpower to scroll past this image [of Donald Trump]". It's unfortunate, because it's a good article that conveyed and presented something very few knew of before reading it.

protomyth• 10 years ago

I am not one to say that the rich get richer, but this may be a specific case of an individual being supported by his parents circumventing the normal process of working the ropes to progress up to taking photos of the people discussed.

It basically the modern version of the rich kid doing an unpaid internship fund by his parents. The new thing is skipping the company.

8ig8• 10 years ago

Kinda like a VC-backed startup disrupting an industry.

notlisted2• 10 years ago

Admire his persistence and dedication to creative commons. That said, I can see why professional news photographers feel threatened and perhaps a little insulted too... Most shots in the article and on his Flickr feed look merely 'good enough' or 'usable' (as opposed to 'great').

amitparikh• 10 years ago

If 'good enough' and 'usable' @ a price of 'free' is what's becoming ubiquitous, hasn't Mr. Skidmore just locked in on a new-ish market equilibrium?

ghaff12• 10 years ago

To be fair, the vast majority of photos that even top professionals take probably just fall into the "good enough" category as well. It's often hard to do a whole lot exciting with someone giving a speech from a podium. Magazine cover shot material is relatively rare. I also suspect that, in at least some cases, the pros' press passes may get them better shooting locations and opportunities.

That said, I basically agree with you. And I've certainly met photographers shooting conferences and similar who nonetheless manage to produce images that are a cut above.

notlisted2• 10 years ago

Top professionals take many crappy pictures. If they have just once shot of a situation/person, that crappy shot may end up in the feed, but usually the bad stuff is filtered out by them or their agency. I see a lot in the flickr feed that should have been left out, or at least cropped.

kodablah2• 10 years ago

I see why they feel threatened, but I don't agree that it's this photographer's fault. If the consumers don't want/need high quality, paid photos in their publications (as voiced by their dollars) then maybe the market for them is disappearing.

I am surprised that a protectionist, union-esque good-ol-boys club of photographers hasn't emerged that would use money to encourage organizers to prevent this person from taking photos. Seems every industry threatened with technology and the cheapening (or "hobbying" or "freeing") of their product tends to fight the producers at the expense of the consumers thereby accelerating their downturn.

tamana2• 10 years ago

How is it "accelerating", not " delaying it a little "?

njharman2• 10 years ago

They feel just as threatened as book publishers, MPAA, RIAA and all the short-sighted content producers who have been relying on quirks of technology that allowed them to monopolize distribution of content. Quirks that no longer exist in Internet/Digital age. These people have and continue abusing the legal system to shore up their previous monopoly.

tamana2• 10 years ago

You show a lot of disdain for people trying to scrape out a living.

bobby_9x• 10 years ago

Distribution of content is easy, yes. But creation of content is still just as difficult.

Intellectual property laws are a bit extreme, but they also protect the small inventor/business owner.

Without these protections, we would have an increase in trade secrets and any individual or company that had enough money and resources could just sit there and legally rip everyone off.

China is a good example of this. With weak IP laws, tecnology moves at a snails pace and small business owners really can’t compete.

sangnoir2• 10 years ago

To project your comment onto the software world:

"That said, I can see why professional software developers feel threatened and perhaps a little insulted too... Most projects in the article and on his Github profile look merely 'good enough' or 'usable' (as opposed to 'great')"

Which isn't too far off the mark, if I correctly recall Microsoft and Oracle's attitudes to free software circa 1999. Yet here we are.

mwsherman• 10 years ago

Here Comes Everybody.

autarch• 10 years ago

Hilariously, I'm pretty sure that this article is violating the license! This person's photos are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/). Among its terms are "ou must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use."

Maybe I missed it but I did not see any link to the license or indication of whether changes were made. Simply crediting the copyright owner is not sufficient to satisfy the terms of the license. Also, with CC < 4.0 you need to include the work's title.

The Trump site is doing exactly the same thing, not linking to the license

ghaff12• 10 years ago

I use (and attribute) CC photographs all the time and I have to say that I wasn't even aware of a couple of those requirements. Sadly, I think terms like these, as well as the optional non-commercial variant, are serious issues with CC. Attribution can be hard to carry along with a photograph consistently but at least the idea of a photo credit is pretty deeply ingrained in professional publishing circles if not the Web more broadly. I expect most of the other requirements and limitations are rarely followed to the letter.

thephyber• 10 years ago

They aren't "serious issues" with CC.

They are the legal terms under which you are allowed/licensed the use of the copyrighted content. If you don't know the license and the requirements of the license, how you can pretend to fulfill them? You are just waiting for a lawsuit and "ignorance is no excuse" in the eyes of the law.

thaumasiotes• 10 years ago

Among its terms are "[Y]ou must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
I did not see any link to the license or indication of whether changes were made.

It doesn't say you must indicate whether changes were made. It says you must indicate if changes were made, which leaves the case of "no changes" ambiguous.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

And what are "changes"? Does a minor crop or sharpening constitute a change? (Or, more precisely, a remix, transform, or build upon.)

Leaving aside whether they are free licenses and whether that matters, my issue with the CC variants is that both NoDerivs and (especially) Non-Commercial are nearly impossible to define in the general case and therefore cannot be safely relied upon as a grant of permission if you're being legally conservative.

raphman• 10 years ago

Given that Gage Skidmore owns all rights to the photos, and that Priceonomics apparently had contacted him for this article, it seems quite plausible that Gage allowed the photos to be used outside the CC license.

Furthermore, one might argue that showing photos in an article about them is covered by Fair Use principles. In this case no reference to license or source would be needed.

ThinkBeat• 10 years ago

What impresses me most when I look through his stream on Flickr is his access.

It is not easy to get into as many events as he has managed, and it even harder to get a seat or being allowed to get close enough to get a good picture. If he is not working for, or assignment for a media company he probably doesnt have a press pass, or at least not one that gets bouncers / security people to step aside.

Presumably he gains more and more access as his pictures are published. This is the key thing that will help him if he ever wants to get paid work out of it. Leading powerful politicians will know him, and know him as a photographer. Getting that recognition is not easy for a photo journalist.

Getting started in photo journalism is really hard, and its getting harder as news agencies downsize both regular journalists and photographers The market is turning more and more toward video and crowd sourcing images.

Lets say you went to school, studied photography, getting started as a freelancer, you take ok pictures and you submit them and pray for a publication. If you are luck you get picked up a little here and there, but unless you get lucky, no one really pay attention to who you are.

He has taken a bold step, and his name is now known to editors at major publications. Getting that network is far more difficult than learning how to take pictures.

mc32• 10 years ago

The article mentions where he sees this as a hobby and is more interested in pursuing a more traditional career in business.

On the other hand, in the comments section you witness some bitterness by more well known photogs who see him as an amateurish interloper.

He knows it's a career that's dying that it'll be overtaken by crowdsourced images taken from cellphones as their image quality improves (for the telephotos), so he's uninterested in it as a career.

sandworm101• 10 years ago

The kid has money. Traveling to all these events isn't cheap. So I think it safe to assume he and/or his family are donors at some level. It doesn't take much of a donation to get a seat close to the front, far less than the cost of traveling to the event.

brudgers• 10 years ago

Parents in the US spend money on their kids' activities. This probably is equivalent to mid-level travel sports, selective musical organizations, and beauty pageants. It is almost certainly less expensive than traveling with horses.

Ten hours of driving each way and a budget hotel runs a couple of hundred dollars and provides a substantial operating radius...and that ain't much money for a lot of people.

michaelbuddy• 10 years ago

once you get connected to people like he seems to be, he's probably getting rides with people and crashing at houses and other hotels too. hell do you know how many hippie bernie supporters are riding around in the 'mystery machine' living on $6 dollars a day.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

Agreed. There are, admittedly, a lot of political rallies and speeches and they're not particularly exclusive. That said, just looking at the first few pages of his photos, he was right up front at some Rand Paul event shooting with a wide angle lens. And he was at one of the Republican debates that I assume (perhaps wrongly) you can't just walk off the street into.

acomjean• 10 years ago

Access isn't too hard if you can get up early and hustle. I went to NH (invited by my SO), the candidates like publicity and photographs (bring a camera they said). Though I had to go through a metal detector they were fine with my rig (slr and 100-400mm lens, not small) I posted a couple "cc".

Though in the age of the cell phone, these photos pretty much they way things are going.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/23968845552/ and the tablet: https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/23450142553/

tv still seems to employee more than still photos.. https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/24076930115/in/photos...

and the candidate: https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/23450138963/

As former photo editor of my college (UMass daily) paper and someone who knows a couple people that make a living at it (though one is a freelance "stringer"), its truly is a hard way to make a living. Oddly I talked to one and after 15 years he's not loving like he used too, sees to much of the same things, finding it hard to keep a fresh perspective.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Ok, and all this time I thought Gage Skidmore was a "fake" name like Alan Smithee[1] that photographers who didn't want to dilute their own brand used to get their work out. That it is a real person, and has such a wide swatch of candidate pictures, is pretty cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee

ikeboy• 10 years ago

Wow.

The film's creation set off a chain of events which would lead the Directors Guild of America to officially discontinue the Alan Smithee credit in 2000. Its plot (about a director attempting to disown a film) eventually, and ironically, described the film's own production; director Arthur Hiller requested that his name be removed after witnessing the final cut of the film by the studio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Alan_Smithee_Film:_Burn_Hol...

nefitty• 10 years ago

It's interesting that there is a backlash brewing against Skidmore from the pro photog community. Giving away his work for free seems similar to the way bloggers pour countless hours into creating content for their sites. People don't expect to pay to read your blog post, but of course they should expect to pay you if they need custom content made for them. Competition is fierce, and I'd be surprised if this type of thing isn't happening in every content-creation industry. I can actually think of an example relevant to HN: the ubiquity of free, open source software.

saulrh• 10 years ago

The complaints about undercutting real photographers actually kind of amused me. The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer's year, and they're not going to skimp on something that important. There's no undercutting going on here - they decided that this guy's photographs were the best options. Maybe it's because the marginal value of a higher-quality photograph is not worth the money for some reason, in which case political photography as a business is doomed. Maybe it's because he's not making technically great photographs but is somehow better at political photographs. Maybe it's because the licensing is a bureaucratic nightmare and the cost to a party of using a professional photograph is 90% the manpower required to deal with it costing any money whatsoever. Whatever it is, I seriously doubt that it isn't the major political parties cheaping out.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer's year, and they're not going to skimp on something that important.

I'm actually surprised that a major campaign would just see a CC photo on flickr and decide to use it (assuming that's what happened). Pretty much no ad agency or other non-editorial user would do such a thing. There's too much risk that the photographer could object to the use (in spite of the CC licensing) or didn't actually own the rights to the image in question or had exclusively licensed it to someone. As someone else pointed out, they're not even using the image in a way that technically meets the letter of all the CC license requirements.

castratikron• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the letter Bill Gates wrote about hobbyist programming (almost exactly 40 years ago). "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

To answer the question of whether his work is "undercutting professional photographers", look at the Free Software Movement. The movement has been wildly successful; GPL code is pervasive. Yet, the number of programming jobs today is at an all time high, and still growing. No undercutting happening there. Instead, GPL projects (like Linux) enabled the creation of programming jobs that wouldn't have existed otherwise (like jobs at Google, or Facebook, or Netflix, or...).

He's doing what he loves, and there will always be people who do what they love for free. But I don't think what he's doing is taking away the ability to still get paid for the same kind of work.

cooper122• 10 years ago

Yeah the parallel to open-source software is quite interesting. Notably that the license doesn't prohibit resale. Ultimately though, they both face the same challenges: time. The only reason the guy was able to do this was because his parents sponsored his flights and he had the free time. FOSS developers are only able to work on their projects when they have the time or sponsorship. In both cases the usually argument against them is that they are "amateur", but like we can see, amateur is usually good enough for most people as opposed to paying. Like you said, those who need custom work will be willing to pay and the software industry is doing just fine. In fact, one could argue that FOSS actually enables businesses by reducing startup costs—even big companies are known to use certain libraries.

vaadu• 10 years ago

The professional photographers display the same arrogant entitlement mentality that's seen by so many of those being obsoleted by innovation. Skidmore is not putting professional photogs out of business, the professional photogs inability or unwillingness to compete is putting themselves out of business.

ghaff12• 10 years ago

Yes, it is indeed difficult to compete with free even with a better product. This isn't about competing with "innovation." It's about better distribution channels for the free stuff that has always existed.

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting photos up on the web and allowing for their free reuse. But, yes, it is the collective use of free/cheap photographs that are good enough for their target purpose (and sometimes as good as anything a pro would have created) that are cutting into the professional photography business.

JabavuAdams• 10 years ago

Will it seem so arrogant and entitled when it's your job?

I recently took a cab for the first time in a long while -- I've mostly been using public transit and Uber. The cabbie was a nice 57-year-old guy who's scared that he won't be able to provide for his family in another couple of years.

Who's going to hire a 57-year-old ex-cabbie to service Uber's self-driving cars? This is a real social problem that we need to address.

MCRed• 10 years ago

Calling Ron Paul a "tea party" candidate is accurate only if you recognize the Tea Party as a grassroots libertarian movement that, among other things, supported gay rights. Calling him a "libertarian" candidate would have been more appropriate.

While the TEA PARTY was a libertarian movement (That supported gay rights) the term was not trademarked and was quickly hijacked by propagandists on the left and the right to try and pretend like it was a neocon movement.

This shows the wisdom of Linus Torvalds and Satoshi Nakamoto trademarking Linux and Bitcoin respectively.

Alas, having read this blog, I feel it is pretty well spun to support a vary specific political bias and I'm not surprised they made this statement-- probably attempting to portray Ron Paul as a neocon deliberately.

I know they are YC alumni and thus I risk being banned for daring to criticize them. But at some point you gotta get out of your filter bubble and realize there's a real world out there.

cooper122• 10 years ago

I don't think professional photographers are in danger yet. The guy was only able to succeed because of several factors: access to elections is open to everyone (he probably doesn't even need to be close if using the right lens), it isn't too difficult to take a picture of someone speaking at a podium, and if the subject is putting any energy into speaking the photo will come out looking decent. Professional photographers on the other hand have to deal with open environments with varying lighting and subjects which requires a lot more skill.

I think what he's doing is great. A creative commons is an absolute necessity in today's age. Imagine a blogger had to pay for each image they used; they wouldn't even be able to illustrate their subjects. Freely licensed content is also the lifeblood of Wikipedia, which doesn't allow images of living people under fair use. For things which can't accept amateur quality, professional work will always be available. It certainly says something about the profession if Trump's campaign is willing to choose amateur photographs over theirs: they're not selling themselves hard enough or networks are not worth as much as they used to be in today's digital age.

How a College Student Used Creative Commons to Dominate Political Photography

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