Can A Photographer With a Large Base of Prints Survive?
If your collection of stock images is mostly in print form, they may become useful to you as a part of your stock photography inventory of the future.
Ten years ago, it was near impossible to market stock images in print format, as opposed to slides (transparencies). Ten years later, however, the editorial stock photography market is slowly catching up to the "Digital Times." Because prints can be scanned, the digital world is giving new life to print photography.
GOOD NEWS
If you are an editorial stock photographer (that is, you enjoy capturing life around you with your camera and building a stock file that will appeal to book and magazine editors), you are going to find that our stock photo industry is moving gradually into the Digital Revolution. This means prints are going to become more marketable.
At this time most editorial stock photobuyers still require slides rather than (film) prints. However, they are accepting digital submissions (from prints or slides) for preview. After the preview is made and an image selected, a high resolution image can be sent by the photographer via courier or digital scan, which again means prints can be used.
Newspapers have been the pioneers in this digital\print revolution. Newspapers, however, pay far lower fees than magazines, books, and corporate work.
FULL-BLOWN DIGITAL
Commercial stock photobuyers, buyers at ad agencies, graphic houses, and corporations, have taken to using high quality prints much faster than editorial buyers.
Also, your prints can easily be digitized and employed on the web. This market area holds promise, but so far is growing slowly.
You'll find that some of your editorial buyers are getting equipped to digitize your prints for their particular use. This saves you the expense of using a local service bureau to produce high-resolution digitized images from your prints.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of "Sell & ReSell Your Photos" and "sellphotos.com," has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: "8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer," visit http://www.sellphotos.com
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The Problem with “Good” Royalty-Free
by Dale O'Dell
Advance Note: Royalty Free offers stock photographers a new avenue to sell their work, but it also proposes a marketing principle they shouldn't forget: "Don't sell yourself short."
The stock agency owner was in tears. She was dismayed that royalty-free imagery was cutting into rights-protected stock image licensing. She couldn’t believe photographers would sell their works for so little; she was angry that royalty-free distributors were taking advantage of photographers. “There’s nothing good about royalty-free!” she cried. Six months later her agency published its first disk of royalty-free images.
She found one good thing about royalty-free; it was profitable for her.
Royalty-free demeans and devalues photography and photographers. It fills a low-end market niche at the expense of photographers.
Of course if I were a publisher of RF imagery, my opinion would be transformed, like that of the above-mentioned stock agency owner.
Previously in this publication, I wrote that rights-protected agencies would have to concentrate on licensing more innovative, conceptual and artistic imagery to survive. They’d have to do this because what had been their bread and butter ---the commonplace, nuts-and-bolts image--- would go the way of RF. I thought the generic landscape, and the non-creative, hole-in-the-layout filling picture, would all be royalty-free. I thought since the crap was royalty-free, the art would be higher-priced and rights-protected.
AUDACIOUSLY AVERAGE BUT...
I was wrong about royalty-free. It is not all crap, not any more. Sure, the majority of royalty-free images are audaciously average, but…. there is some surprisingly innovative, interesting and artistic imagery showing up in RF collections. This is distressing.
I’m surprised to see works that are unique, innovative, thoughtful and artistic offered as royalty-free. I wonder why some photographers, who obviously have spent hours or days creating truly expressive works, are offering them for pennies, or at the most, a few hundred dollars, royalty-free. Apparently these photographers have no faith in the value and future earning potential of their ‘art.’ They are content to trade valuable artworks for a few dollars today instead of thousands of dollars tomorrow.
Royalty-free is the appropriate marketing tool for commonplace, dime-a-dozen imagery. Why not make a few bucks off a boring cliché that anyone could shoot? But RF is not the instrument for selling imagery that’s unique and potentially highly profitable.
One of your RF “artworks” just might see widespread use. It could become a famous, iconic image. The user of that image may generate a lot of money from your picture. Because it was acquired royalty-free, you won’t get rich and you won’t be recognized. You will remain anonymous and underpaid.
Why sell high-end imagery to the low-end segment of the market?
Dale O'Dell is a regular contributor to PhotoStockNotes. He produces cyber-generated stock photography from his studio in Prescott, Arizona. Email: dale@cybertrail.com; Web: http://www.dalephoto.com
Business
Notepad
During downturns in the economy,
(we’ve been through four so far), photobuyers don’t like to spend precious time surfing the various picture sites, looking for a specific photo need.
Instead they place a listing on the PhotoDaily with us at 2pm (CT).
A subscriber who has the picture responds directly to the photobuyer. Not only does the member make a sale, but establishes a new contact with a photobuyer who seeks pictures in his/her photographic ... Full
Story
Editorial Photos lend themselves to photobooks that can sell well, providing you choose a specific subject. A good example is this small (6"x6") coffee table book, that follows the theme, "Observations on Life." The book combines B&W photos with splashes of color, clever observations, e.g. "In truth… they've all been good years" (close-up of worm baseballs); "When there's nowhere else you'd rather be you've found the one" (two pairs of feet in white socks); "With every ending comes a new beginning" (a fallen maple leaf against a rake). "Because There's Color in a Black & White World," by Maria Magistro and Meg Schutte, Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-7407-2897-0. Price: $9.95 ($14.95 Canada). 64 pages. Andrews McMeel Publishing, c/o Simon & Schuster, 100 Front Street, Riverside, NJ 08075. http://www.photosourcefolio.com /bookstoreone.htm#0740728970 .
By David Arnold and Gail Rutman
Digital photography in 1990? Absolutely. In October 1990, at the Photokina trade show, Kodak showed the world’s first professional digital camera, the $30,000, 1.3 megapixel Kodak DCS (for “Digital Camera System”) 100. The 55 pound system consisted of a Nikon F3 with a digital back, tethered to a large external pack containing the electronics, batteries, and external hard drive. And a few weeks earlier, just in time for fall classes, McGraw-Hill published our college textbook Computers & Society Impact!. Naturally our coverage included the impact of computers on photography. Here are some excerpts:
“Computers are electronic levers: they increase our power while decreasing our effort. Computerized cameras are a good example. Determining the optimum shutter speed and lens opening are complex operations, but today’s cameras can do these tasks for us. One 35 mm camera, the Nikon FA, even analyzes different parts of the scene, compares the pattern with 10,000 picture-taking situations stored in its memory, and bases its exposure decision on that. A number of cameras also provide microprocessor-controlled focusing to ensure a sharp image.
“With embedded computers handling exposure and focus, it might seem that there is no longer any role for the photographer. If that were true, we would no longer have to take vacations: just send the camera, and let it bring back the pictures. A photograph, however, is a selection of time and space, and the photographer still exercises full control over these; exposure and focus are just technical details.
“In time, electronics may change not only the nature of picture-taking, but the nature of pictures themselves. Several manufacturers are experimenting with cameras that do away with film. Cameras such as the Sony Mavica digitize the image and store it on tape or in a chip. Such an image can then be manipulated, pixel by pixel (“I’d like those gray hairs removed, please”); it can be combined with other images or transmitted electronically. But don't expect such cameras to put Kodak and Fuji out of business right away. Present models produce pictures that are too low in quality and too high in cost to tempt large numbers of buyers.
“If cost is no object, however, you can use a Scitex digital-imaging computer to manipulate a color slide so perfectly that the resulting fake is indistinguishable from an unaltered photo. Colors can be enhanced, elements shifted around, and people or other objects added to or removed from the picture. Despite a price tag ranging from $200,000 to several million dollars, digital-imaging technology is used regularly in national ad campaigns, glossy catalogs and brochures, the annual reports of Fortune 500 companies, and the pages of USA Today, Time, National Geographic, and other equally well-known publications.”
We also included a few photos in the chapter, including one of PhotoStockNotes publisher Rohn Engh in front of his computer, with a Nikon F2 and the first edition of his book Sell and ReSell Your Photos nearby.
Now let’s see, 1.3 megapixels for $30,000 works out to $23,077 per pixel. At that rate the new 16.7 megapixel Canon 1Ds MkII should cost more than $385,000. Suddenly its $7,995 price seems like a bargain. And compared to $200,000 to several million for the Scitex, $649 for Photoshop is a virtual give-away.
David Arnold and Gail Rutman are Oregon-based photographers who have been writing about photography, computers, and other topics since 1980. Their web site is at http://www.arnoldrutman.com.
Of
Interest
Your Digital Lightbox
When a photobuyer wants to see a selection of your images, he or she up to this point in time would typically ask for low-resolution previews by email. Now, an alternative to email is quickly gaining ground and becoming more and more popular: namely a Digital Lightbox, sometimes called a viewing platform.
When a photobuyer requests to see a digital lightbox, the photobuyer
wants you to put up a selection of images for viewing on your website. (Compared to a traditional lightbox that you use to view your slides.)
A digital lightbox doesn't have to be fancy or complicated. It
can be something as simple as a separate page on your website that you can direct the photobuyer to. The important thing here is to enable the
photobuyer to view selections of your work side by side.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SHARING
Another crucial detail when it comes to digital lightboxes is to make it easy for the photobuyer to share the lightbox with other decision-makers or clients. ... Full
Story
COST OF TRAVEL OVERSEAS is always prohibitive for the stock photographer
just starting out. One way to skirt around this problem is to become a
Travel Agent.
BETTER VIDEOS COMING Canon, Nikon video-shooting SLR cameras ready for action
Two new SLRs can now shoot high-definition video, taking advantage of
the superior lenses (much better than video cameras,
way better than point-and-shoots) available for SLRs.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-10-01-slr-video_N.htm?csp=34
GOOD SAMARATIN -- One Photo Editor - Doing Good by Doing Right - Photo editors often get a bad rap. They're often (incorrectly) blamed for the bad contracts they are required to foist upon us. Thus, when a photo editor does the right thing, as is the case here, we feel it of value to let people know.
http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2008/11/one-photo-editor-doing-good-by-doing.html
HOW DO THEY DO IT? Yuri Arcurs - Microstock Entrepreneur - Not content with an
annual microstock income of US$1.3 million and being the top selling microstock photographer, Yuri Arcurs is creating a microstock empire. Here's a summary of his new entrepreneurial activities.
http://www.microstockdiaries.com/meet-the-new-yuri-arcurs-microstock-entrepreneur.html
WHO SAID PHOTOGRAPHERS CAN’T WRITE? History in the Buffer - David Burnett, photojournalist, wrote this piece about his experience "in the buffer" covering the election night in Chicago. A remarkable diary of his election night experience.
http://werejustsayin.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-in-buffer.html
TAKEAWAY: When TIME Magazine made “the computer” the Man of the Year, they sent David Burnett to Pine Lake Farm to photograph me and my new Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. You can see the picture TIME used at:
http://www.photosource.com/rohntime
