AboutSteve Meltzer Expertise I am a professional photographer and I've been shooting for newspapers, magazines, commercial clients and artists for over 30 years.
I have shot stock photography for dozens of years and in 1977 created West Stock (Seattle, WA) which was one of the first to produce stock photo CDs and later one of the first to establish an online stock photo slaes site.
I have a new book on digital photography "PHOTOGRAPHING ARTS, CRAFTS AND COLLECTIBLES (Lark Books, 2007)which is available at Amazon.com, eBay.com and in bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. I have another book, CAPTURE THE LIGHT which will be puiblished in November, 2008.
I write 20-30 feature articles and columns for regional and national publications a year.
My education includes studying with photographers like Cornell Capa, Duane Michels and Oliver Gagliani (from the Ansel Adams Center.)
Question Hi, Does photoreflect have any competition? I get tons of complaints from customers. They just make a lot of mistakes.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Answer Prior to your question I had never heard of photoreflect so I took a moment and checked it out. Went to the web site and asked to see photos by the photographers in my zip code to see if I knew any of their suppliers.
Turns out I knew none of these photographers. How odd I thought. But okay I don't know every one of the 50,000 people in my area. So the next step was to look at their work.
Two things were abundantly clear. This is a web site for amateurs and there are no editors. That means "photographers" load tons of junk images on the site and no one edits for quality.
Worse still when I clicked on one of the photos that included a person whose face was clearly visible in the photo, I could find a model release notice. That makes this image totally useless for any real--read commercial well paying--use.It also means that the photographer could get into big trouble if the photo is used for a commercial use without the person in the image giving their permission. It is also a sign that the "photographer" doesn't understand the laws around photographs.
Competition wise, there are sites like iStockphoto and others that are open to amateurs and professionals and have editors that look for releases and edit out bad images. The charge $1.00 and up for uses. But they are professional operations you can trust.
But sadly there are sites like Photoreflect that attract wannabe photographers and offers them a "sales" site. Whether or how they make money and notify the photographer is beyond me. I didn't check it out but I wonder how reliably they pay "photographers".
As for complaints, that would be the result of their loosy-goosy operation.
