Time to market (news photos, democracy and the loot)

Old news: My friend and colleague, Nick, in a sharp situation during the peoples uprising, April 2006. That's a cloud of tear gas behind him, he's trying to escape by the way.

© Morten Svenningsen

I’ve been looking for a better way to get some of my newsworthy photos out on the market. News photography is just a little part of what I’m doing, but we do have an election coming up here – probably. Right now I just have my web-site to use for fast turn-around times. In itself fine, but I’m afraid it’s still not that well known among broadsheet photo editors around the globe. And they usually don’t have time to surf around on the net and contact photographers they don’t already have a working relationship with. So I’ll need to affiliate myself with one of the big photo agencies or portals. Just not interested in joining a news agency who expect me to run around and cover every little event in the region.

So I was quite happy to come home yesterday and see in my inbox a solution present itself. My usual photo agency, Alamy, informed me that they intend to implement a 24h turn-around time from upload to online in stead of the usual 3 weeks! That opens up new possibilities within my existing business infrastructure. It’s still not quite upload-and-see-it-in-the-papers-next-day, but should be good enough for second cycle use. If just PE’s will start looking to Alamy for their news photos...

And here in Nepal the constituent assembly election date has now been set to April 10. Two years after the peoples uprising (v2), eight years after the last 4-year term election and 18 years after the first peoples uprising. Talk about a long time-to-market. Two years would have been okay, I suppose, if they’d just come out and said that from the beginning in stead of repeatedly setting dates and then postponing them.

If only they were as quick as the thieves of this country... Sabina had her mobile phone stolen Monday night – Tuesday afternoon she saw in on sale in a “second-hand” shop. Now that’s what I call time-to-market! Unfortunately, before she could get hold of some muscles (me - the police is a joke around here), the guy had taken it off the shelf and then tried to tell us that he just sold it. Right!

But if you ever have your phone stolen in Kathmandu, just look around in the second-hand shops on Bag Bazar. And bring some muscles or any other means of persuasion!