Things are settling down at the Cape Town branch now that the Yuri Arcurs Boot Camp 2012 has wrapped up.

For the first two weeks of January, we hosted over 120 photographers from more than 23 countries. We ran them through our intense training course.

Here are the names of the lucky few who made it:

Teresa Arias – Spain
Dominique Baptie – South Africa
Jeffery Bergen – Canada
Jocelyn Concer – South Africa
Tylan Elliott – South Africa
Julie Francoeur – Canada
Stefanie Giglio – USA
Jason Hermann – South Africa
Tasneem Howa – South Africa
Stephen Lawrence – Australia
Duncan Marshall – South Africa
Mapodile Mkhabela – South Africa
Miko Moller – South Africa
Petri Oeschger – South Africa
Nicola Suttle – South Africa
Mariusz Szczawinski – Poland
Marius Venter – South Africa
Alexandra Wattamaniuk – Canada

As the top boot camper, Jeffery Bergen was also awarded a Yuri Arcurs SteadyPod.

The new students are getting settled into Cape Town life and started with their first official classes this week.

We want to thank everyone who participated in the boot camp, it was great to meet you and welcome you to our new Cape Town Studio! We hope you enjoyed the 2 weeks as much as we did.

Yuri Arcurs

The standard of applications has been great and we can’t wait to meet the young aspiring photographers who will be attending the bootcamp. During the bootcamp, students can expect to get to know the basics as well as the really technical aspects of using their camera and they will also have to do both group and individual assignments on various locations.

All that we ask is that you bring your motivation, passion and love for photography. You will have to work very hard and long hours but this is a bootcamp after all, we want you learning as much as possible in the 2 weeks. This is a very unique opportunity for you to meet other aspiring photographers and get some practical photography experience.

We will be sharing everything with you, we won’t hold any secrets to our success back, we want to make this the best experience of YOUR life! Even if you are not one of the people chosen for the 3 year education, you will still have the opportunity to learn an invaluable amount from one of the best photographers in the world for 2 weeks – for free!

At the end of the bootcamp, there will be a written and practical exam, those few selected who have the drive, determination and passion to pass will spend the six weeks training in Cape Town followed by the beginning of their international education in Hawaii, Australia, Denmark and more…

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity: the final students will not only receive a world class photography education, access to the best equipment in the world but all of their travel expenses and most of their living expenses for the next 3 years will be covered.

Good luck, may the forces of photography and the gods be with you! Don’t be nervous about the amount of participants and the slim chance of making it into the program. Do your best and leave a great impression, and you will certainly go very far!

We are looking to recruit 10 – 15 candidates, who will have to prove they are motivated, ambitious and bright. You will be given the opportunity to prove you have what it takes at our two-week long photography boot camp in January 2012. Very little photography knowledge is needed, we will equip you with what you need to know.

During the 3 year education you will have exams in the following subjects:
• The technical skills required to use all Nikon, Canon and Hasselblad cameras.
• Video recording and editing with SLR camera’s, RED epic and others.
• Basic and advanced photoshopping.
• Advanced RAW processing.
• Advanced digital image theory.
• Shoot planning and execution planning.
• Creative research, Image Critique.
• Branding, Client managing, Invoicing, Legal aspects.

How to qualify:
In order to qualify for the program, you must pass a 2 week boot camp in Cape Town, South Africa. The boot camp offers all it’s participants an opportunity to receive first-class photography training, even those who do not get accepted into the program.
To be considered for the photography boot camp you must:
• Manage your own accommodations and travel into Cape Town for the boot camp duration.
• Bring your own digital SLR camera that can produce at least 16 mega pixel images.
• Bring at least one 50mm or 85mm lens that can shoot no less than 2.0 in aperture.
• Bring at least 16 Gb of memory for your camera (CF preferred).
• Be able to stay 2 weeks in Cape Town for training and assignments from January 3rd 2012.
• Be able to dedicate 3 years of your life for this education starting from January 23rd 2012 and have no problem spending up to half of the year in all parts of the world with the primary base in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Have no criminal record or any other criteria that would not allow you to travel to Europe or other places.
• Agree to potentially being part of a TV production about the boot camp for reality TV.

How to apply:
Contact us no later than DECEMBER 1st on jobs@arcurs.com and make sure to mark the mail “Photography student” and include ALL of the following to be considered for the education:
• Motivation letter – tell us why you are interested in this education.
• Your CV.
• Any reference letter from previous employers.
• Something about yourself.
• A photograph of yourself.
• A statement showing a clean criminal record.

The final class candidates will be announced on JANUARY 17th 2012. The best candidates will be offered a job at Yuri Arcurs Photography after graduation.

Click here to see the flyer!

NB: PLEASE NOTE THAT ANY ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YURI HIMSELF DIRECTLY WILL DISQUALIFY YOU FROM BEING CONSIDERED!

For 2½ years Yuri Arcurs Photography has been working on a selling platform for the direct selling of the YA collection of images, videos, vectors, etc. We are well on the way and are now looking for additional freelance developers.
We are looking for the best of the best! People that have time, passion and are highly qualified. This is not a regular job-advertisement, but rather a search for talents.

About our upcoming site:

There are no short cuts in our code as it is now, and we take the long route if that is required. We are completely independent of any 3rd party platforms or solutions and have even custom made our framework for dealing only with our project. Our site is completely different from any other sites selling media content out there, so you must be able and willing to think outside the box and search for good solutions.

We work in the following languages:
• PHP
• MySQL
• Apache
• Subversion / Git
• Linux / Unix
• Smarty
• OOP / MVC
• jQuery
• CSS

About the jobs offered:

We are looking for the following talents and if you can say “that’s me” or it fits perfectly for somebody you know, we will be thrilled to do an interview on Skype in the upcoming weeks. Do not apply if you are not a highly motivated person who can put your heart and soul into this project.
All jobs below are freelance and can be done from home. You must speak close to perfect English, be online on Skype during your chosen working hours and there is enough work for potentially full-time in the first 3-4 months if you like.

Chief heavy load analyst and developer, code-optimizer, field experienced:

You must be able to analyse problems/benefits of code-structure, server-structure and come up with good solutions. You must have years of experience in building and running large websites and love the challenges of doing so. We are looking for a person who will take on this job with pride and with an investigative spirit explore, optimize and analyse potential problems and find solutions. Your job is to outsmart our current solutions, provide better ones and show the results. The perfect candidate for this job has had his/her own IT projects which have been successful; has built IT projects from scratch and followed them through and knows the challenges as traffic and demands grow. This project is part-time, well paid if your qualifications are good and for the right kind of person quite fun
Keywords: High IQ, Perfectionism, Thinker, Experience.

Chief Security Analyst:

This job entails finding and fixing security bugs/issues with our current platform. We are using a unique bonus structure system for sign-ups that must not be exploitable. Your job will also be to create parsing traps, IP-blockage systems, alarms and alerts, and, in your own way, secure the current platform against a range of potential attacks.
This project is well paid if your qualifications are good.
Keywords: Experience, Knowledge about Hacker methods and techniques.

Developer with industry experience in the field of online stock selling:

We are looking for developers that have been part of either terminated stock agencies or have discontinued working with other stock agency. You have in-depth industry knowledge and feel passionate about re-entering this arena.
Based on your industry knowledge you like userbility, finding small mistakes and double-checking so the final project does not have errors. You like coming up with good solution and thinking smart.

Work-horse Developer:

The perfect candidate for this job writes code fast, can get an overview fast and knows solutions to most issues based on experience. Can recognise bad code and fix it. Keywords: Lots of experience in PHP, MySQL and CSS, Fast thinker, High IQ, loves being #1 on the “finished items” todolist, a good colleague, service minded. This job is part-time to full-time, depending on you. Salary depends on experience completely. You must be ready to work day and night if the server is down or major problem arrives.

All Freelance staff will be invited to our headquarters in Denmark for a 2-3 week well paid work period prior to and after launch of the site.

Interested?

Then please complete the following assignment:
Make a script, which reads an RSS-feed from an external server and writes the title in a MySQL database. Afterwards a simple list of titles should be displayed, read from the database. It must be written in PHP, and if the script needs special settings or frameworks please inform us.
Send it to our recruitment officer Anne, on jobs.arcurs@gmail.com no later than July 29th 2011 and make sure to mark the mail for example “Chief Programmer” or “Work-horse Developer” and include:
Short motivation letter, CV, assignment solution, any reference letter from previous employers, something about yourself and when you can start. Don’t make a huge essay; we are primarily interested in your solution to the assignment and talking to you on Skype.
If you do not complete the assignment, your application will be irrelevant to us!

NB: Please note that any attempt to contact Yuri himself directly will disqualify you from the job!

Little more than a week ago I launched a contest on my facebook page. The task was to find out EXACTLY where I was when I recorded the video, and I have to say that I am truly impressed by all of the people who participated. I did expect people to guess that it was in the Maldives fairly easy. The plane from Maldivian Air Taxi was visible in the background, the male model was trying to help by signaling the letter “M” with his hands, and in my previous facebook update there was a HDD visible which had the text “MALDIVES FOR JT” on it if you looked really carefully. None the less there were a lot of great guesses. Like for instance “The island of the Pirates of the Caribbean”, “Yuri’s Island”, and even the small Danish island “Anholdt” was mentioned.

The exact sandbank was actually located by 3 different people, but it was Dane Wirtzfeld who got closest to my exact position. He even made a map of me and the Yuri Arcurs SteadyPods on the sandbank along with the plane from Maldivian Air Taxi.
This means that it is Dane who have won the full Yuri Arcurs SteadyPod which will by shipped to him by Custom Brackets.

If you want to keep updated on contests and other things that might be going on in the world of Yuri Arcurs, make sure to ‘Like’ the facebook page and follow me on twitter.

are not the most exciting part of our job. However, a legal mess can completely ruin you or create major obstacles in your business

In this document I have collected all the legal information that I wish someone had whispered in my ear three years ago. Well now I know and consider me the person whispering it in your ear.



These days ten new microstock agencies appear each year and just as many disappear. The new guys will contact you and try to get you to send them your images, and this is where you need to be really careful. A serious agency will have their contracts and the legal side of things covered and will present you with a good contract. A sloppy agency will give you some google translated ukraine contract with ambiguous wording or say “that will come later”.

Here are the biggest pitfalls to watch for if you’re signing a contract:

No clear termination clause.
You should not sign a contract that does not promise you to be able to remove all your images from their site and subdistributors’ sites within a minimum of two years. This is the very longest you should sign a contract for and ideally you should negotiate this down to one year or less.  



Bad contract.
When you encounter a bad contract, walk away. A contract that you can’t make heads or tails of even after you’ve read it three times is not worth signing. If you’re really interested in joining the company, demand the contract be rewritten.



No signature back.
You sent them your hard copy, but did you ever get one back? Bad news: it won’t work if you didn’t.



Wrong entity, wrong name, wrong/misspelled company name.
Check the company name and the position of the person signing on behalf of the company. If not you might not be signing anything valid, but will act your part out because you don’t know this (before end up in court, that is).



Look at the jurisdiction:
Do you want to go to court in another country? Choose a jurisdiction that has a legislative history of cases in stock photography and licensing of media, copyright law. etc. The best jurisdictions are New York, Alberta, UK, Australia and New Zealand (We can thank Getty for this)



No user restrictions defined on the site.
This is really dangerous. Do not run the risk of letting an agency sell your images without user restriction that does not follow the stock industry standard. The industry standard for forbidden usage restricts resale or distribution of your image, restricts print runs over 250,000 (without special license) and forbids the use of an image alongside pornographic, defamatory or pharmaceutical or political content (i.e., images may not be used to promote tobacco products, adult entertainment, dating services, personal hygiene products, political endorsements, etc.).



No allowance for due diligence.
“Due diligence” is your right to check all the financial statements and finances of an agency to see if they are in fact keeping track of all sales and providing you with the right amount of money. If an agency does not allow this it is a really bad sign. You NEED this in the contract or you are making a deal with the devil.



Commission offer is too low.
If a new agency approached you then you should not go for anything below 40% commission. They will probably say…”well sorry, that is just too much,” and that’s okay. Wait another two months and they will warm up to the thought, and surprise, you will get yourself the contract.



Trying to squeeze in an submission minimum.
Some agencies have upload minimums or insist that you have to supply images every quarter etc.



Don’t say yes to this ever. Period.



Trying to squeeze in a “non-compete” agreement.
If they try to squeeze in a clause about you not being able to work with agencies or another of their already existing partners, this is a big no-no. A lot of contracts have this section and you should respond with a flat out “NO” to such agreements. If I signed a non-compete with a small agency and that agency had Getty as their partner, I could basically be sued for having my images on Istock.



No payment rules defined.
Payments must happen regularly, monthly or when requested. A contract needs a section about this so the agency cannot drag the payment process out forever. Also, your contract must contain clear terms on a sales statement reporting system.



Are there any dodgy subdistributors you need to know about?
Ask for a subdistributor list. The contract terms you are signing with the agency must be the same as the agency has with its subdistributors.



Who will do submissions, uploading and organizing into their collection?
How will they do this and how much effort is required by you? Get clear lines right away.



NDA
Some agencies will want you to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement, which basically states that you agree to not disclose (talk about) any of the confidential information you might have heard about the agency during the negotiations or contract formation. An NDA is ok, but it must be time limited and must go both ways. Make sure the confidentialinfo is defined.

Below is the standard autoreply I use when new agencies contact me. Feel free to use the same one yourself, or tweak it to make it your own. It is important to send a professional signal to new agencies and not to support legally messy agencies.

Dear agency XXX.
Thank you for showing interest in distributing my collection of images. My collection sells very well and I am sure we can mutually profit from a distribution agreement. When negotiating new contracts there are a couple of things we are looking for and that we would like you to clarify for us so we can move forward:

1. What is the commission offer you have in mind?
2. Will you do the submission and organization of our files on your site if we send you a hard drive, upload by FTP or other means, or are you looking to have us do that? Timeframe?
3. Please send us a copy of your contributor contract.
4. Please send us a copy of your user restrictions defined on the site.

Your contract must include the following:
1. A clear termination clause with a clear promise of complete removal
of all images within 2 years.
2. A allowance for due diligence.
3. Must not include a upload minimum or submission minimum.
4. Must contain a clearly defined payment structure and sales
statement reporting system.
5. A list of subdistributors if any.
6. A specified jurisdiction.

To my big surprise I am on the list of the most influential photographers of this decade. PDN magazine, the biggest photo magazine in the world and host of the PDN Photo Expo in new york every year, has asked the photographic community to list the most influential photographers of this decade.
I feel terribly humble in comparison with the other names on the list and sitting here writing this post I look at my bookshelf and can see at least five of the names on the list together with me.

You can check out the other names on the list here.