From the Cape Town School of Photography website:

We have invited a selection of photographers to contribute to our semester show; Jodi Bieber, Terry Kurgan, Nikki Rixon, Sara Gouveia and Sandy Bailey. The official opening will be 27 August, 18h30 and Annabelle Wienand will host the walkabout.

Not only will we be exhibiting the work of professionals, but also work produced by various high school learners from the Frank Joubert Art Centre, Vanessa Cowling’s group of Fezeka students and work from our Subliminal Vision Workshop.

The work on show and subsequent lectures will be the inspiration we will draw from for our September exhibition.

Above: Photojournalist Nikki Rixon is one of the APEP participants who has a new MEMAT 3.0 web site. She is one of five Africa Media Online contributing photographers who has been selected to be part of the Twenty Ten project which Africa Media Online is running together with World Press Photo, FreeVoice and lokaalmondiaal.

Today I want to introduce you to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) side of your MEMAT 3.0 site. Your CRM is the place where you keep track of and control your buyers. Managing buyers is obviously essential for your business and the CRM is the place where all the details about your buyers gets stored. On the top right hand side of your web site, next to the “Login” button, is a link to “Register”. Click on that and you will go through to a form that captures a client’s details. These are the details that are then stored in your CRM.

Above: The “Register” form which appears on your Register and Login page. The form captures all the important contact details with which you can market effectively to clients.

The fact that a buyer has taken the time to sign up on your site means that they are seriously interested in engaging with you. You would do well, then, to take them seriously and be in touch. Fortunately, your MEMAT 3.0 site does this for you immediately as the potential buyer gets an automatic email off the site to say thank you for signing up.

Okay, so how do you manage these buyers that have signed up? There is currently no link to this from your own web site to the CRM. So this is a bit of a manual process. What I like to do is to have it sitting on a different tab in my browser programme from where the main site sits. Open a new tab. Type in your web site URL and then put the following extension /crm/login.php – so all in all it should read [yoursiteURL]/crm/login.php.

Above: An example from Felix Masi’s web site where his URL is felixmasi.africamediaonline.com and then he adds the extension /crm/login.php

Once you have filled this in to the address bar at the top of your browser, click refresh or press enter on your keyboard to tell the browser to actually access that address. That will take you through to a page where you actually have to login. Here you use the administrator login that was provided to you.

Above: You will be required to fill in your administrator login when you get through to the crm login page. This is to ensure that only you can access the details of your buyers. There is a facility to reset your password if you have forgotten it

Once you have logged in, then you will be taken through to a page that has the controls for your CRM. There is a link at the top which says “Add Buyer” where you can actually go in and add a new buyer yourself. Just one thing to be aware of here. The CRM will not allow you to add two buyers with the same email address.

Next to the “Add Buyer” link is an indicator of how many entries you have in your CRM. Many of you with new sites will have zero. It may be worthwhile signing up your regular clients yourself and giving them a username and password, or you might want to invite them to sign up to your site by sending them the URL of your “Register” page which is [yoursiteURL]/user/login_register (if you forget this, just go to your login page and you will see the link in the address bar at the top of your browser window).

Above: The control panel of your CRM. If you want to view all of your buyers at once, click “Proceed” without filling anything in the “Search Name” box

The next element of the CRM is the search box. This allows you to search by name, organisation or email address. Type in the person you are looking for and then click on “Proceed”. That will then load your buyer’s details in the area below the control panel. If you want to bring up all your buyers at once, click “Proceed” without filling anything in the “Search” box.

Currently the Search Organisation International and Search Organisation South Africa are not activated. What is activated though is the Search Customer by Country. If you chose to do this and you select a country, without filling anything in to the “Search” box you can click proceed and it will bring up every entry where a country has been selected. Please note that if you had a MEMAT 2.0 website, a country may not have been selected for some buyers and you may need to go in and update the details of particular buyers.

The “Proceed” button is what activates a search and the “Reset” button clears what you have typed in the search box. Then beneath these you have three very useful buttons – “Send Email”, “Download CSV” and “Delete”. These buttons are dependent on your selecting entries from your list of buyers by ticking the tick box next to particular buyers. You can also elect to “Select All” on the top left of the list of Buyers.

Above: An entry is selected in the CRM by ticking the tick box on the left. Having selected this I can then elect to click on “Send Email”, “Download CSV” or “Delete”

“Send Email” sends an email to as many buyers as you have selected.
“Download CSV” downloads a spreadsheet file of the contact details of all the buyers you have selected. This means that at any time you can access all your buyer’s information and input it into an address book or other email programme you may be using.
“Delete” allows you to delete the buyer. It won’t allow you to do so, however, if that buyer has added anything to a lightbox.

Above: When you click on “Send Email” this is the screen you get. Fill in the name you want to send your email from and the email address you want it to go from. You can also add an attachment. The “Add More” allows you to add more than one attachment. The Subject is the subject line of the email. In the body you can write or paste what you want to say. If you are sending to more than one person, be careful not to get rid of the “Dear [First Name],
” because that is the code that allows every email to use the first name of the person you are sending to. For this reason it is also worth making sure that every Buyer in your list has their first name in a decent form (some buyers will sign themselves up with all caps or all small letters). “Preview” allows you to preview the email before sending

If you want to send an email to a particular buyer using your normal email programme, simply click on their email address from the main window that gives the listing of the buyers you searched for. If you want to edit a buyer simply click on a buyer’s name and a pop up window will open with that buyer’s details. Here you can edit the buyer’s details.

Above: The window that appears when you click on a buyer. Here you can change buyer’s details and you can also control the buyer’s status allowing them to be able to download files immediately

Even more importantly this window allows you control an individual buyer’s status. Right down at the bottom of the window is something that says “Download Status” and next to it are radio buttons that allow you to select “Yes” or “No”. This is the way in which you control who gets access to your high resolution files. Normally (with “Download Status” set to “No”) beneath each image a buyer will see a link which says “Order” which takes them through to a place where they can email you. If you turn a buyer to “Yes” when they login, instead of seeing “Order” beneath each picture, they get to see “Download high res”. If that buyer clicks on that, they can immediately download the high resolution file for that picture.

Above: What buyers see when logged in the the system when their Download Status is marked “No” and when their Download Status is marked “Yes”

This allows you to give a buyer the ability to download high resolution files from the system. How you might want to use it is to give a buyer Download Status for a day and then to turn that off at the end of the day. Or if it is a trusted buyer you may want to leave it turned on permanently. You don’t need to worry about clients downloading files and you not knowing about it because every time a file is downloaded you receive an email telling you who downloaded the file and the image number of that file.

Above: A buyer can’t download a file until they have agreed to pay for it.

Above: A fragment of “Cassarinas at Dawn, Maputo, Mozambique” by David Larsen, is one of the images that forms part of the IZWE de Africa exhibition that has travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina as part of a cultural exchange programme.

Clare Louise Thomas writes to participating photographers from Buenos Aires:

So, we opened the exhibition on Thursday evening and it was a roaring success. The space looked amazing and the feedback was just magnificent. Every single one (I love this) of the photographers were singled out as someone’s favourite and people were just thrilled to be seeing the work that was coming out of South Africa. The cultural TV channel (Canal A) came and did an interview and I made a speech about what an honour it has been to work on this project and how valuable it is for emerging South African photographers work to be getting out there.

Africa Media Online exhibition organiser and photographer, Clare Louise Thomas being interviewed by Canal A at the opening of the “IZWE: Desde Africa” exhibition as part of the Proyecto 34˚S cultural exchange between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. PHOTO: Clare Louise Thomas

The Economic, Political and Cultural Counceller from the South African Embassy Vicor Rambau was there and showed great interest in the exhibition. I will be meeting with him next week to see what future possibilities may hold, as well as with the director of the Borges. Marta Camponara is a well respected African Art Collector here who is touring her exhibition of African sculptures around Argentina and we are looking into our exhibition travelling with hers… The options are looking good, but even if it just stays as is where it is now. it is a great thing. The pictures look incredible and as a collection really work wonderfully together. I can’t wait till we can bring it back home and show the people there…

Members of the public browse the exhibition at the opening in the prestigious Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires, Argentina. PHOTO: Clare Louise Thomas

Watch the media for information about the exhibition as it filters out bit by bit. The Cape Argus featured something this weekend with their own selection of photos and quotes from the information provided. So check that out and I will keep you updated on more as it happens.

Again, congratulations. I am so thrilled at the outcome of this experience.

Clare in Buenos Aires
(Africa Media Online)

Last night saw the opening of the IZWE de Africa exhibition featuring the works of South African photographers in a prestigious venue in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A collaboration between Africa Media Online and Proyecto 34°S, this six-week exhibition provides a mix of emerging and established photographers with the chance to share their views on Contemporary African Culture.

Proyecto 34°S is an artistic exchange between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa. Its primary objective is to promote and facilitate the exchange of African and Latin American performing arts, culture, heritage and literature. Curated by Nadia Strier, the Izwe de Africa exhibition features as part of the South African Embassy’s heritage showcase at the Centro Cultural Borges, as well as online at Africa Media Online, where buyers will be able to select and purchase art prints.

Above: Jeremy Jowell’s image of Seychellois fishermen is one of 23 photographs by Africa Media Online photographers featuring in a prestigious exhibition in Argentina which also serves to launch our new print-on-demand service

Each of the photographers was asked to describe how their photographs reflect their views on the theme. Tammy Gardner, whose image is of a young man striding with his briefcase before the crumbling façade of The Empire building in Muizenberg, on the False Bay coastline, sums up the overall tone of the exhibition in her commentary:

“The obvious statement of crumbling Empire in Africa, the dilapidated building still showing its beautiful design form, the optimistic morning light, the purposeful stride of the black man with his shabby clothes and briefcase. A perfect metaphor for the complexities of African life as we know it today – not so shiny, not so picture perfect, but hopeful, working with what we have.”

Africa Media Online is a South African organization that specializes in giving African photographers a voice and an opportunity to compete on equal footing in international markets. “A balanced view of Africa and her rich heritage cannot exist unless we as Africans are able to consistently tell Africa’s story from our perspective in the global information economy,” explains David Larsen, Director of Africa Media Online.

Larsen refers to Africa Media Online’s role as the provision of a ‘digital trade route’ – this includes training, the provision of online systems and an image library that markets content directly to editors and publishers, curators and art directors around the world. Now this exhibition launches yet another platform that the company will be providing: the opportunity for international buyers to select African images online and have art prints delivered to their door.

The exhibiting photographers are:
Sean Wilson, Marinda Louw, Kim Thunder, Christine Nesbitt, Simone Scholtz, David Larsen, Jeremy Jowell, Karin Duthie, Craig Urquhart, Chris Kirchhoff, Nikki Rixon, Tammy Gardner, Clare Louise Thomas and Toni Jade Efune.

Six of these fourteen photographers were a part of the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme run by Africa Media Online in 2008, which was focused on growing photo entrepreneurs to compete on the global stage in terms of photo production and market savvy.

Right Click to download PDF slide show of the exhibition

For further information please contact the Media Manager, Dominique le Roux: +27 21 788 6261 or +27 82 823 0460 dominique@africamediaonline.com

Winner of the “Tudor Sigma African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award” for 2008, Karen Agenbag (centre) with Africa Media Online’s Media Manager, Dominique Le Roux (left) and Africa Media Online’s Managing Director, David Larsen (right). PHOTO: Alan Nambiar

The 2008 African Photo Entrepreneur of Year Awards
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: November 12, 2008

A Johannesburg photographer and Kenyan photographer based in Johannesburg took top honours in the first African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Awards which were presented by Africa Media Online at a gala dinner at the Ascot Conference Centre in Pietermaritzburg on Wednesday November 12. Twenty-seven professional photographers stood to win prizes in six categories, with women photographers taking four of the six awards.

One of the images from Karen Agenbag’s winning assignment for the “Tudor Sigma African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award.” Karen scored consistently high with every one of her 17 top images.
The 27 photographers were all participants in Africa Media Online’s Global Competitiveness Masterclass, the final stage of the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme aimed at ensuring that African photographers are globally competitive ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Close to 150 photographers applied to the programme in June this year and 40 were selected to attend Africa Media Online’s Digital Campus in August where they were trained in working with digital images at the standard required by global markets. At the end of that week the professional photographers were given an assignment to “capture the essence of the proud, stylish and technologically-savvy African of today.” Of the 40, 27 photographers completed the assignment to the required standard and were invited to attend the Global Competitiveness Masterclass in Pietermaritzburg being run this week from November 9 to 13. Africa Media Online’s African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Awards is the culmination of the whole process.

A prestigious panel of award winning photographers and photo editors was gathered to judge the awards. These included Pulitzer Prize winning photographers Greg Marinovich from South Africa and Rick Gershon from the US. Gershon is a multimedia specialist at Getty Images in New York. Marinovich’s wife, Leonie an acclaimed photographer in her own right, was also joined by former picture editor at the Associated Press, Katherine van Acker, and professional commercial photographer and Microsoft Icons of Imaging member, Peter Krogh. The judges gave scores to each image from the assignments of each photographer. The scores from the top 17 images in each assignment were calculated to give the results in each category. There were four class awards and two regional awards. No one photographer could win more than one class award.

Johannesburg photographer Karen Agenbag was the winner of the top award, the “Tudor Sigma African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award,” awarded for the best overall assignment. Tudor Photographic (Pty) Ltd., South African agents for Sigma, presented the top-of-the-range Sigma SD14 professional digital SLR camera and Sigma 24-135 f2.8-4.5 lens. The 14 Megapixel camera uses a unique Foveon x3 sensor which, unlike most digital cameras, captures red, green and blue light on different layers of sensors, somewhat like film used to do.

Above: Anthony Kaminju, winner of the “Adobe Best Picture of the Year Award” poses with Africa Media Online’s Managing Director, David Larsen, after receiving his award at the Gala Dinner of the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme held in Pietermarizburg, South Africa on Wednesday evening November 12, 2008. PHOTO: Alan Nambiar

The “Adobe Best Picture of the Year”, awarded for the image that the judges consider is the best image of the year, went to Kenyan-born photographer Antony Kaminju, who received Adobe’s latest version of the award winning professional imaging programme Adobe Photoshop CS4.

In the hard fought over “Adobe Best Picture of the Year Award,” this picture from Kenyan born Anthony Kaminju won out from a series of images on Rock Soweto.

The “FotoFinder Award” was given for the best assignment from a photographer outside South Africa. Kenyan photographer Felix Masi received airtickets to fly to South Africa, courtesy of FotoFinder GmbH, an image portal in Germany (http://www.fotofinder.com).

Kenyan photographer, Felix Masi, took top honours in the “FotoFinder Award” for the best assignment from a photographer outside of South Africa for his images of the emerging middle class in Kenya.

Johannesburg-based Toni Jade Efune won the “Microsoft Woman Photo Entrepreneur Award”, presented by Microsoft’s Professional Photography division. As part of this award, Africa Media Online will be digitising the top 300 images from this photographer including scanning on a prepress scanner, retouching the images so that they are market ready, and associating keywords with them so that they can be found on an online search. Microsoft presented a Crumpler laptop bag, Microsoft Vista Ultimate, Microsoft Office 2007 and their professional imaging software Capture One 4 not only to the winner of this award, but also to all the other award winners.

Johannesburg photographer, Toni Efune took honours in the “Microsoft Woman Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award”.

The “Tudor Sigma Documentary Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award” is given for the best assignment from a photographer who took a documentary approach. This could include environmental portraits. This went to Cape Town based South African photographer Nikki Rixon. Tudor Photography (Pty) Ltd. presented her with the Sigma DP1 14 Megapixel compact camera. This camera has all the power of a digital SLR in an unobtrusive package ideal for documentary work.

Cape Town based photographer, Nikki Rixon won the “The Tudor Sigma Documentary Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award” for her series of environmental portraits.

The “Africa Media Online KZN Photographer of the Year Award” honours the top photograper from KwaZulu Natal province where Africa Media Online is based. Africa Media Online will also be digitising the top 300 images from the collection of winner Anwen Evans.

Anwen Evans took top honours in the “Africa Media Online KZN Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Award” for her KZN lifestyle shoots.

Find out more about the 2008 African Photo Entrepreneur of the Year Awards
Find out more about the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme

This project is supported by the European Union