Ales Sokoloff
Hobbies/interests: travel, studying cultures, design, photography, snowboarding
Work: web development
Place of birth/current home: Minsk, Belarus (although I attended both high school and college in the states)
Website: http://alesandemily.com

1) Can you introduce us into your an ordinary work day?

I like to wake up early and get a good start on the day… my wife and I make breakfast and enjoy the morning and then we usually get to work. We work out of our house, so no commute makes life a lot easier. Depending what our projects are we distribute the work; I usually do more of the back-end programming while my wife takes care of the design end of things.

A lot of times I meet with clients or work on getting new ones throughout the work day.

2) Are you just a freelancer or do you rate yourself as a trade web developer?

Freelancer, and loving it.

3) When did you create your first web? Do you look back and think about it?

When I was 18 – so almost 7 years ago. I think about it some and think I’ve come a long way since then! I’m glad that I started early and learned as much as I could.

4) What are your goals? Do you want to reach some “webdesign” level in?

Well I am definitely planning on expanding the business. Our goals are to have up to 20 employees and free ourselves up to more traveling and choosing our personal projects.

5) Have you ever sold any photo to the photobank? Are you interested in taking a photos?

I haven’t sold any photos, hadn’t really thought about it much, but that is a great idea that I will be looking into.

And actually my wife is more the photographer of the family, although I dabble in it as well. My wife loves taking pictures and is very passionate about it.

Effective 12/01/2009, Pixmac no longer offers automatic keywording.
Photograph keywords may be added manually at Pixmac or through IPTC.

We are trying to increase quality of our services every day. With automatic keywording, we found out that most users give us pictures without any editing or preparation. Those pictures usually don’t make it in approving process, but cost money.

That’ s why we are focusing on skilled photographers, now.

The world will not be the same again. Pixmac brings two big microstock players to one place. Imagine one place for almost any picture. You’ll get simple and fast user interface and you know what? You’ll get a fair price. And that’s not all.

You may know Pixmac as a Fotolia reseller. Now it changes. There is no agency like Pixmac any more. Pixmac now sells millions of Fotolia pictures, millions of Dreamstime photos, their own Pixmac collection, fresh Celebrity pics and that’s just the microstock.

Well, as you may know, traditional stock photos help people for years. So let’s enjoy some of them at Pixmac! It’s called “Luxury collection” and we’re beginning with a hundred thousand pictures from Image Source. And you know what? That’s just the start. We’re working already on multiple traditional agencies to have them there for you.

Vitezslav Valka says: “It’s crazy to get it all on the Pixmac site in the easy way, but we’re powerful enough to make it. And we’ll make it soon.”

Still not enough? Really? Ok. Pixmac have something more for you. New easier Power Search. It’s nicer and works better. Lightbox is now called “Favorites” because it’s easier to understand for everyone. And there is a lot of tweaks and tune-ups on the Pixmac website and inside it. All that together is a sign of a new era where you play the main character!

Imagine one place for any picture. Imagine simple website where you can buy a photo in just 3 minutes. Imagine world without registration forms and credit packages, world without expiration. That is not an illusion. That’s Pixmac.

Place of birth: London, UK
Work: Professional web/graphic designer and photographer;
Branding, corporate identity, web site design, design for print
Study: BA Hons in Graphic Design, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication
Interests/Hobbies:  Photography, cats (anything feline), writing music, playing guitar, cycling

1) When did you start speculate about your future as an artist?
Pretty much as soon as I arrived in the world! As soon as I could hold a pencil I drew… and drew, apparently I was always attached to a pencil or crayon. I still have a fascination with any kind of pens, pencils, notebooks and stationery!  When I was about 13 or 14 I looked into what was around in the whole art world, graphic design really appealed to me. I spent five years at art college doing a  two year diploma and three year degree – which set me up and on course into the art world.

2) What art or website do you rate as your best?
I like really clean crisp looking web sites. The web sites that I have done generally follow that approach, depending on the brief and clients wishes. I guess I like the branding and web site I did for Chocolate Rain, who wouldn’t enjoy working with chocolate?! Also, generally, the latest thing I am working on I try to make my best!

3) Do you work with your own photos and paintings?
Yes I do – photography is a big part of my life particularly landscape photography. It is always a thrill to be able to blend the two things I love together. Sometimes I will do a shoot specifically for a client. But I also use a variety of other photographers depending on the brief, ie for product, food etc.

4) Have you ever bought any photos?
I do buy stock photography and I commission photography, if it falls out of my comfort zone for me to shoot. Personally, I admire so many photographers, sites like Flickr and JPGMag have brought great talents together… so I am hoping to buy some work from a few photographers to add to our collection at home.

5) What do you think about amateur sites? And what do you recommend to beginners?
For either designers or photographers, get your stuff out there, join some communities and get involved, ask questions and talk to people. Some great talent has been discovered amongst the community sites and some have been commissioned by big agencies and companies. By get involved it allows you and your work to shine. There are also tools out there now to put your own site together without needing to know coding which are perfect for a first time out in the web world. Or perhaps team up with another designer that can put a site together for you, maybe you can do a skills exchange.

6) Are you going to any new project?
I have some great projects going on at moment, a CD cover for an inspiring up and coming vocalist. The CD is also going to use some of my landscape photography which is exciting. I’m also working on a web site for an international orchestra, a 40 page brochure for a communications agency that I have done the branding and website for, so moving onto their printed literature is great to be involved with and work with them in their development.  I have a solo show for my photography opening on Sunday, plus I am currently putting a book together based on my landscape pics….. never a dull moment.

The Pixmac microstock agency is proud to announce that we now offer 7 million stock photos for our customers. Only a few competitors can say the same. Our collection consists of 3 sources. Two are creative and one editorial called “Celebrity”. Pixmac is the fastest way to get a stock photo or illustration for your design for a price that might surprise you.

When the pink company launched its marketplace in September 2008 it might have seemed like just another microstock company that is trying to make it. But look how much we have grown in a year! Pixmac has partners in 9 major markets and its sales are growing faster than expected.

Our company is  growing faster than other competitors in the microstock market according to respected site Alexa.com and  the amount of pictures grows with it. Not only that, Pixmac invented the “One Stop Shopping” way to get inexpensive quality photos in a matter of seconds without need of registration. Lee Torrens, a well known microstock blogger, says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies…” Yes, Pixmac focuses on speed and user friendliness.

Pixmac offers a lot now and has more in the oven to offer our customers. For example, Pixmac is working with a University on a project that will change your searching abilities and will make searching quicker and easier. We are also adding another few million photos to the database soon and working on some nice stock photo searching tweaks.

This week we’re launching a new updated website together with features such as Moneybookers payment method which added with payments by PayPal and/or  Credit Card. Also we have included a popular feature that sorts search results by downloads or date.

Vitezslav Valka (CEO) comments: “I’m always thrilled to see our customers happy with the user interface. Everybody deserves an easy tool that just works. I’m watching everything that happens in the company and believe me, it’s better than Red Bull and Duracell together!”

And one last thing for insiders. Watch our Twitter for special offers!

We have decided to make a serial of few interviews with world top graphic designers and tell their life stories and experiences.
Here is the first one!

Place of birth: California
Work: Professional web/graphic designer and illustrator;
Write instructional books;
Create easy-to-follow Adobe Software Training DVDs on Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop Elements through Class On Demand;
Teach software design classes in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver;
Study: Fine Art in Photography
Interests/Hobbies: Cooking (especially baking), walking, going to museums, traveling, and watching movies

1 ) Do you always want to become an artist or it’s a just coincidence?

I think I was born an artist. My mother says I drew beautiful pictures on my bedroom wall when I was 2 years old and took a creative approach to everything I did growing up. As a child, I was an avid drawer and painter, did weaving, and worked with clay. I got my first film camera at age 12 and took photography classes all through Junior High, High School, and college. Since then, I’ve continued working in photography, took up oil painting and illustration, and formed a successful career in graphic and web design.

2 ) Where do you gain an inspiration for your masterpiece?

Inspiration often comes in the form of a feeling or a conceptual idea, or the intuition that there is some kind of problem that needs solving or some part of life that warrants examination. With photography, I will often take an idea (however vague or developed) and then go out and find it. For instance, the inspiration behind some of my photographs is simply “evoking childhood memories.” With that idea in mind, I just live my life with my camera and photograph the things I encounter that are consistent with that idea. It’s not really that difficult; the things to photograph are everywhere if you pay attention. With painting and design, I often let an idea inspire me and follow it where ever it leads to create the final product.

3 ) How long have you been working with graphics?

For the past 13 years I’ve been working with graphics and illustration professionally as a web and graphic designer through my own company, Luckychair.com, and I’ve been doing fine art photography for nearly 20 years. In addition, from 2000 to 2004, I ran my own greeting card company where I created my own line of cards with over 110 different illustrations. I’ve also been a design software instructor at Noble Desktop in New York City for about 5 years, teaching classes in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator. More recently, I’ve written 5 instructional books for Wiley and McGraw-Hill and appear as the instructor in 4 Adobe Software Training DVDs from ClassOnDemand, two of which have won prestigious industry awards:

Books:

• Web Design All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
• How To Do Everything Illustrator CS4
• Dreamweaver CS4 All-in-One For Dummies
• Web Design: The L-Line, The Express Line to Learning
• Dreamweaver 8 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies

DVDs:

• Fundamentals of Photoshop Elements – Training DVD
• Dreamweaver For Designers – Training DVD (Telly Award Winner)
• Designer’s Guide to Photoshop – Training DVD
• Designer’s Guide to Illustrator – Training DVD (Communicator Award Winner)

4 ) What tools do you often use to create something significant?

For graphics, I primarily use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, though for my illustrations I prefer to draw in ink first, then scan the line art into my computer and enhance it in Photoshop. For photography, I use a variety of film and digital cameras including a Nikon FE, a Nikon D40, a Holga 120, and a low-res VTech digital camera. For my film cameras, I prefer using Kodak Tri-X film and developing in Dektol or PMK Pyro.

5 ) Do you exploit possibility of your photos (taken by you) and drawing? Or you can afford to pay and download official photos?

As much as possible, I have tried to use all of my own graphics, illustrations, and photographs in my books, DVDs, and training sessions. Most of my web and graphic design clients, however, require very specific imagery. Therefore, whatever I can not create myself must be found elsewhere on sites like Pixmac. Thankfully it is usually easy to locate, pay for, and download the photos and graphics we need.

6 ) How many photos, for example per month, do you buy?

The number of photos I download each month is tied directly to the projects I am working on. If I’m doing mostly logo design, business collateral, and website maintenance, the call for purchasing photos online is low. However, when I am working on new web sites and web site redesigns, I might download anywhere from 2 to 20 images in a month.

7 ) Have you noticed the world crisis in your business?

I wouldn’t say there is a world crisis in the graphic/web design business, but I would say that clients have been more frugal with their spending. Summers are typically slower than the rest of the year, and this year has been a little leaner than in the past. That said, with autumn approaching and year-end budgets that need to be spent, I’ve seen a gradual increase in customers over the past month which I think will continue through the end of the year and well into 2010.

8 ) What are your plans to the future?

The future looks bright! As I continue working as a professional web and graphic designer, I will be writing another For Dummies book this winter and possibly a new title on Photoshop. I am also in graduate school right now pursuing a Masters of Fine Art in Photography. After graduation I will continue with web and graphic design and hopefully also begin teaching art and design at the university level. My ultimate dream is to continue doing design while I teach and show my photographs at galleries and museums across the country.

Many of you searching for photos were confused with credits, our virtual currency. Pixmac has solved that now for you. You don’t have to learn what credit is and you even don’t have to register at Pixmac if you need just one picture.

This idea came up from our research that most buyers are searching for just one picture first. Usually they realise later that Pixmac is so easy that they can use it twice or more times! The second thing is most users don’t have time. When they’re in a hurry and they don’t have time to learn how the credit system works. Or perhaps they don’t have the time to register at Pixmac. And finally they don’t wanna purchase more credits just because they may not use them in the future.

Our solution? One Stop Shopping.

You can just search for picture you need, click the download button, pay the price and that’s it! Your project and your life is saved. We’ve saved some electricity, you can take more time to watch the wildlife out of your office window. And if you want a better price, then credits are there for you!

Lee Torrens says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies so I’m very glad to see you leading the way with this. I imagine there’s a minor loss of leads through not collecting email addresses, but as the market reaches further toward less sophisticated buyers, I expect this easy transaction style will be particularly handy. Great work!” – More about Lee at Microstock Diaries

It is as easy as 1-2-3

You’ll need 3 minutes to have the picture on your disk.

1. Search for the desired picture in the Pixmac stock photo gallery and click on it.
2. Choose the required size and click on Download.
3. Pay for the picture via PayPal or Credit Card. That is it!

We are browsing websites all the time to find useful tools that can help our users to work with their images. Recently we have found some applications that can be worth trying – tools for invisible watermarking, searching for those invisible watermarks online and debluring and denoising images. We are in contact with Filip Krolupper – the leader of developers of those applications so we have asked him several questions.

What is the history of Advanced Photo Tools?
Everything begun with the application SignMyImage 1.0 that was released approx. a year ago. In four months the application got rid of childrens diseases and the version 2.0 was released. In the same time the first version of Image Spider was employed. Image Spider is a web crawler responsible for searching signed images.

In the meantime we developed image denoising tool called DenoiseMyImage.

In this time we have two professional applications and we are about releasing the third application for image debluring – DeblurMyImage.
In the beginning the project was one man show, but now I cooperate with other 3 programmers, who are experts in their area.

Emil – the author and maintainer of Image Spider
Petr – a guy responsible for Mac and Linux versions
Vlado – an author of GPGPU version of DenoiseMyImage

We are mostly located in Prague, Czech Republic, European Union. Emil is from Sweden.

There are some competitive applications, why is SignMyImage better?
SignMyImage allows to sign the photo/image by an invisible watermark and detect the invisible watermark automatically as well. This product was developed primarily for advanced photoamateurs/professionals that earn the money selling their photos. This application is appreciated by people/companies that don’t want to let thiefs download photos from their websites. Moreover we employ web crawler (Image Spider) that crawles the web and searches for signed images. We can say that SignMyImage is cheap equivalent of well known DigiMarc. Here are others rival in this field – Eikonamark, Icemark, Photopatrol.

German prestigious c’t magazine made a comparison between these five programs (incl. SignMyImage). SMI was considered as the second best software. We have to point out that the price of SMI license is a fraction of the others price. For example the price of DigiMarc (the best one) is $500 a year if you want to protect up to 5000 photos. The price of SMI for an unlimited license is 14.99 Euros without paying any annual fee.

What i s the development in the digital watermarking in last few years ?
In this area the number of papers grows rapidly. Here exist at least two conferences with this topics. But honestly, the combination of image scaling/cropping/jpeg compression is deadly. Most papers deal with one of these transformation and don’t care about the others. But all of these appears together in most cases. Lets imagine, if we consider all the transformations, we have no stable information because of crop, we cannot use information based on single pixel because of jpeg, and we don’t know the scale of image. One of the way often followed is probabilistic approach. This approach allows to store information in many instances in every part of the picture. That means if one part is damaged or cropped you can get the information from the rest of the picture.

What technologies are you using?
Our approach is different. We use moments of continuous areas. One of moment is center of gravity. This information is very robust to noise, scaling, jpeg. Unfortunatelly its not robust to crop, so we have the information insert to the image to several different areas.
We cannot forget the second part of the project, that has the same importance. It is Image Spider – our web crawler. It uses wide spectra of technology. It consists of SQL part, PHP frontend, C++ backend, Linux scripting support, SFTP interface …

What is your vision?
The main goal of the SignMyImage is to make Internet safer. We want to help people protect their knowledge, art abilities and skills. We want to help them protect their property rights. In our opinion nobody should be non-punishable, if he steals something what belongs to someone else. Including pictures, images, drawings and photos.

The goal of the ADP Tools group is wider. We are interested in bringing image processing techniques into live. Much theory from image processing is not used in application for photographers. We are going to fill this gap.

There are always some photographers  who are not quite satisfied with their microstock agency. The same thing seems to be happening at Apple App Store. Why does that happen? How to avoid it or fix it? After almost a year of Pixmac  service  being up and running, I’ll try to find answers.

First things first. Be sure I want to have Pixmac as a social responsible company. We are nothing like a bank or large burger chain that seems like a black box that just takes your money and does nothing with it. No! Not when I’m here. Sure, the company has to generate revenue, sure it must satisfy its investors. But why  push it to the edge? Why to cut affiliate programs in half, when the company believes it will be no pain?

I went over several threads at Microstock Group and found out that there is always people posting that some (in fact any) agency is the worst and they will delete their portfolio right away. Usually the agency owner doesn’t even read it and if they do they propably don’t take it seriously. I think that this is not the right way for our users(customers?). We’re all on a same boat, we’re here to help people that need pictures and we’re here to feed ourselves – together. So, let’s talk about the pain and find a cure!

Pixmac after a year of service

Pixmac is still a newcomer to microstock. Since our start in September 2008, we have had a few bumps in the road, and we’ve made some mistakes. We’re learning from them.  But I am proud to report that we made a huge jump forward since  Pixmac was started. But believe me, we have always kept our customers in mind every step of the way.

Good news

I’m really proud to sum up what we’ve achieved in last 11 months. And I’m looking forward what we can do in the future. There will be some challenging times ahead, but I am confident that I and the Pixmac team will be ready to face them.

Better sales every month

We are still growing! No matter in what season, no matter during a time of  crisis, and  no matter if CEO is on honeymoon! Pixmac proves that fast and user-friendly interface is the right choice for serving your needs. Tell your friends, tell your family, spread the word over Twitter and Facebook! There is still place for some more figures in the gross sales number. We do banners, promos, articles, contests to attract buyers. But it’s the word of mouth that makes the difference.

Low subscription prices

We know that  trying to beat the competitors with a rock bottom price was not the right choice. So we took down the advertisement on that in the first place. We pushed the prices of subscription to a  higher  rate. Still, we know it is not ideal. But trust me, there are some bright new ideas in the oven already.

Nice revenues from bonus credits

When we’re giving bonus credits to contests or on any other occasions, we have to set their price somehow. We used the subscription prices as a measure before. But I thought it’s time to reward you when  you spend time uploading to Pixmac. So now we’ve set the price of a bonus credit to $0,9 (as same as in the $500 credit pack). So you should get noticeably more if some user comes to your portfolio to buy a picture.

Slow/bad approving process

Fixed already, but worth noting. In the early months there was a lot to fix. Even when we came up with the idea to pay you for just uploading  as your first agency. Now it should be faster (matter of hours to few days) more positive and easier to use. We’ve also added a dispute option to the process. So you can always complain if some of your recent uploads were not approved and we will get back to you as fast as possible.

Lock-in time

If anybody remembers this. We started with 2 year lock-in. But, in February 2009, we’ve changed this to 1 year after a discussion with photographers. Sure it can be less and it will be. It just needs time to convince the owners, that they will not loose anything if they open the system a bit. Believe me, I am looking for a way to satisfy both sides.

Sliding commision without explanation

This is our fault. I’ve explained this issue on Microstock Group, so I’ll do the same here. Basically it’s about splitting the earned money into a few parts. First is the photographer, then from the rest something goes to affiliate and rest to Pixmac. Sure, the time of registration matters, because the options change as time goes by, so if you’ve registered today, your contract is the same for a lifetime unless you request a change (if the offer becomes better than what you have).

More features for buyers

We want the users to be happy, that is our way to satisfy photographers in the long term. For example, our latest great feature is  the similarity search. Even now we’re still working on improving, every result as an icon, which finds similar images. The user  doesn’t even have to know the keywords! Another  thing  worth mentioning is the eg. Facebook App that shows your stats to others;  A widget that can be used in several ways to promote your portfolio or any theme etc.

New languages and local people in team

This is my personal favorite. Pixmac has been translated into 6 languages already: English, German, Russian, Czech, Spanish and Finnish. Dutch, Italian, Brasilian Portugese, French and Polish are in the progress these days. And not just that! We have people in those regions that take care about the customers, preparing marketing strategies and are in everyday contact with  our headquarters in Prague.

Upcoming partnerships

We’re doing a lot in this field. Stay tuned and we hope you’ll be impressed. Pixmac should be much more than just another microstock site. I’m doing my best and the rest of the team  is too. By the way, have you tried Ginipic tool?

Yes, we can do more. And we will. Vitezslav “Zager” Valka, CEO of Pixmac

Pixmac will be unavailable on Thursday, 30th July 2009 from 7pm to 7.30pm GMT (1am to 1.30am EST). We are upgrading our hardware and unfortunately that will interrupt the service.

We apologize for the inconvience and we will be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for visiting Pixmac and we hope to see you back again soon.