Cameron Davidson

AerialStock now resides as a sub domain via PhotoDeck on my camerondavidson.com server. PhotoDeck is a new option for photographers who wish to sell stock directly from their sites. Jef Maion, the founder, is a friend of mine and a technical SEO whiz. I thought I would give it a try and add new images plus reprocess many of my favorite aerials and give them a new look. Expect much more material soon. The design echoes my current A Photo Folio web site.

I have made my PhotoShelter site into a site for aerial prints. This is a test and I will see how it goes. I think competition is good for the industry and my hope is that Grover and Company (Ie, PhotoShelter) continue to innovate and grow. They are good guys and are doing a great deal for the industry. I also hope that Jef grows PhotoDeck into a mean clean stock machine.

Time will tell.

I now have 347 RM images in the Corbis collection.

My Getty collection has grown quite a bit by the inclusion of the Workbookstock collection into the main Getty archive. Current count is 838 photographs. The majority of these are Rights Managed.

AerialStock.com is undergoing a tightening of the collection. Expect to see new images soon. The goal is to whittle down the galleries and images presented within them. Of course, you can still search by subject and location.

http://www.stockphotorights.com/

New Getty Images site explaining the whys and hows of photo usage. Interestingly, they use a video to inform visitors on what rights are and how they are licensed.

Two years ago, I spent quite a bit of time shooting aerials of the coastal marshes and islands of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana for Ducks Unlimited. This shoreline is amazing: there are vast unbroken stretches of pristine marsh intermixed with canals constructed for the oil industry tugs and barges. The BP blowout and loss of the Deepwater Horizon is going to significantly impact the Gulf Coast shoreline for years. The shoreline of Louisiana has receded in recent years due to siltation, development and mangrove destruction.

Aerial Louisiana Coastline Marshes – Images by Cameron Davidson

I’ve shot on quite a few deepwater rigs, primarily for a couple of clients who produce natural gas. The SPAR rigs are quite amazing – much like an iceberg, the majority of the vessel is underwater held to the seafloor by gigantic chains, such as this one I shot on another SPAR rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

For many years I have been drawn to the interaction of our imprint on the shorelines. I’ve shot marshes and rivers around the world and continue to shoot personal projects on watersheds. I am glad that I was able to shoot a few of the Louisiana marshes before they become impacted by this tragedy.

I hope you enjoy the views. These were shot from a Bell Jet Ranger and most of the flight was between one-hundred and three-hundred feet above the water.

Corbis created a gallery of my Arizona border fence construction images that I shot two years ago for an editorial project. The first gallery is a collection of images shot in late afternoon and the early evening near Naco, Arizona. The photographs range from the border fence under construction to paths through fields that cross the border and the three strands of barbed-wire that constitute the international boundary line.

A second set of images, all aerials of the Arizona border shot between Nogales and Naco will be uploaded by Monday.

Aerial of Port au Prince that Wired ran in the current issue. From my aerial shoot over Port au Prince in late February. Wired looked at a set of my selects plus the images I placed with Corbis. They choose this image from the Corbis News Collection to run as the lead double truck in the Organizing Armageddon piece brilliantly shot by Q. Sakamaki. (Corbis #42-24605172)

PhotoDeck is written by my friend Jef Maion, a brilliant French photographer and IT guru. It is set-up to be YOUR stock site. As an example: Let say an art director went to your site and wanted to see your stock collection of images that you did not place or were not accepted into the Getty or Corbis collections. They can easily do that by clicking on the area of your site that you have set-up as stock. It is completely seamless.

Set up a page on your site called archive or stock or whatever you choose to call it. When you set up your photodeck page – you can make it look exactly like your web site. You use CNAME to have the address as archive.acephotographer.com. Your client never leaves your site nor are you sending them off to Getty or another agency. Take a look at the video and the site. This is a killer approach written by someone who knows how to create a site that is elegant, functional and simple. http://www.photodeck.com Videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/jfmphoto

Basically you are creating your own fully ecommerce stock site with delivery of your images directly from your site. It is clean, simple, easier to use than the other options and it works. You keep your client on your site and offer something unique to them without them having to jump ship (your site) to go look for your stock images.

I finished uploading three new galleries to my Aerialstock.com site this morning.

Aerial Haiti

Aerial Hog Island (A Virginia Barrier Island)

Aerial Norfolk, Virginia (Aerials shot at dusk)

Aerial Hog Island, Virginia – Images by Cameron Davidson

Sierra Magazine | Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Sierra, the magazine for the Sierra Club.  Update story on the problems with Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia and Southern Appalachia.  The Photo Editor for Sierra wrote me last month about my Mountain Top Removal images that I had shot in Logan County, West Virginia.

This collection of images were shot in 2005 and 2007 as a personal project.  Audubon were the first to run the images as an essay and several continue to be licensed for editorial and book projects.  I have also been a big believer in personal projects and feel that they help me grow as a photographer.

Mountain Top Removal is shocking when seen from the air.  On the ground, the companies practicing this type of coal mining can use beauty strips of trees to keep the public from seeing how the earth is torn apart to reach the seams of coal.  From the air, it is impossible to hide the scale of devastation to the Southern West Virginia landscape.

A writer once asked me how I felt that my photographs of MTR were beautiful even though they showed the destruction of these mountains.  It took me by surprise.  I never thought of them as beautiful.  I felt that they were effective in presenting the truth of MTR. I tend to shoot in early morning or late afternoon light and I liked the sense of calm from the fog surrounding these mountaintops and how that contrasted with the ragged scars of surface mining in the sunlight.

If you would like to see more of my MTR images, please follow this link.  To read the article on Sierra magazine, follow this link.  To read about the continuing controversy about MTR, follow this link to the Huffington Post.

My collection at Corbis is starting to grow.  Since signing in May, my editor has consistently chosen images that are marketable to advertising and in annual reports.  Another set of thirty-five aerials will go on line soon.

Here is the library to date: Cameron Davidson Images at Corbis.