Category: Stock Photography


Microstock Turns to Quality, Not Quantity

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
February 2, 2012

As top microstock figures complain about growing competition, rising saturation and declining returns per image, microstock companies are starting to push back. Warnings from figures as big as Yuri Arcurs, even as he rolls out a three-year study program, are leading sites to think about how they can best serve both their contributors, whom they need to continue supplying content, and their buyers who always want to pay less for that content and already have plenty of other places and pictures to choose from. Dreamstime, one of the biggest microstock firms, is both typical of the problem and an example of the measures that sites are taking to overcome it.

Dreamstime now has over 13 million images in its inventory and accepts around 300,000 new submissions each month from about 130,000 contributors. The company’s policy over the last few years has been to cover not just a wide range of categories but the entire range of prices. The site claims to have the largest collection of free royalty-free images (a growing inventory of 350,000 photos) but also offers a unique “SR-EL” license that grants full rights and exclusivity for $5,000. According to Serban Enache, the site’s CEO, though, the average price for an image still stands at “a few dollars.” That’s hardly the sort of rate that’s going to make it easy for photographers to justify the expenses involved in creating it, especially when the number of other photos available mean that each image will now sell fewer copies than it might have done in the past.

No More Photos from You

Dreamstime’s strategy is to improve the quality of the images it offers at the expense of the quantity. Since 2010, the site has been imposing strict submission limits which rise as a contributor’s approval rating improves. Photographers start with the ability to submit 20 images per week and have the potential to upload as many 210 photos per week.

“New contributors are more talented and/or more pros are joining the website. These facts along with technological improvements and the size of our database force us to constantly raise the quality bar,” Serban Enache told us. “We still accept the landscapes, nature shots, skylines, models on white, etc., but they need to be exquisite in order to be accepted and to sell.”

Rare images, such as pictures of remote places, can sell well and without competition, Enache continued, and shots of events taken at the right moment can be valuable additions to the editorial category.

“As competition grows, contributors need to constantly increase quality, provide diversity and fill as many niches as possible,” he advised. “Part of their duties is to research, not only to shoot. Learn to create, not to photograph.”

But Dreamstime isn’t just being more selective about the images it accepts now that it has enough images to cover all its categories; it’s also being more careful about the photographs it offers. That giant collection of free images is more than an attempt to attract designers looking for a bargain before hitting them up with better images for a fee. It’s also a place to store excess images that are puffing up the inventory. Images that haven’t sold in three years are either deleted or moved to the free section. Those free images are also curated, with some permanently deleted. Dated photographs, with wardrobes or props shot five years ago and which are no longer selling, are among those being pared away.

 

Microstock’s New Demands

  • Landscape shots of hard-to-reach locations.
  • Niche images (if you can find an unsaturated niche).
  • Editorial events and shots of conflict.
  • Technical perfection.

 

Dreamstime then is trying to its part to keep microstock viable by being more careful about what it offers to buyers. But Serban Enache also stresses that photographers have a role to play. Asked whether it’s still possible for photographers to make a living with microstock, he replied by asserting that full-time microstock photography is possible but only “if you are careful about your expenses and you work hard.”

He also noted though that not everyone who contributes to microstock is looking to make a profit. Amateurs just want to earn enough to upgrade their equipment while improving their skills. Hobbyists are just happy to see their image being used.

“This is in many cases more important than the revenue. Knowing your work is endorsed by people throughout the world gives you a great feeling and self-confidence,” he said.

Watch the Expenses

When stock first appeared, Enache argued, it was only meant as an additional revenue stream for photographers. Only later did it become a main source of income, and he warns photographers not to neglect other revenue opportunities.

If that sounds like a big qualification of his assertion that photographers can make a living out of microstock, it’s also sound advice. Enache warns that even when stock revenues do come in, they can do so slowly and over a long period (before the props and clothes make them unfashionable). And he points out that no photographer can expect to have a good ROI if he spends too much money creating the pictures.

None of this is particularly good news for photographers. Amateurs and hobbyists might get to enjoy the occasional fillip when one of the 20 images they’re allowed to upload each week is bought, but they’re still less likely to consider the expenses, forcing photographers who are looking to make money to reduce theirs. That makes it even harder to produce the higher quality images that microstock sites are now looking for.

Dreamstime’s emphasis on quality rather than quantity raises the entry bar and gives preferential treatment to better photographers. But those photographers include those who aren’t concerned about income and while greater selectivity and a more brutal approach to curation might slow the rate of saturation and improve the picture slightly for declining ROIs, there are no signs that sites are going to cut their inventories back to the kind of peak income levels last seen in 2009. For that to happen growth has to come from buyers. Serban Enache indicated that his firm had grown 50 percent year on year. If microstock sites and photographers are struggling then a cavalry of buyers might just save the day.

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The Secret to Shooting for $1,000 an Hour

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
January 26, 2012

Is it really possible to earn $1,000 an hour as a photographer? A regular photographer. Not the kind of high-end fashion photographer or Vogue cover-shooter that requires a lifetime of career achievement and first-name terms with media moguls. The kind of photography for which there’s constant demand, whose buyers are average Joes and which can still deliver the kinds of rates that even lawyers would be frightened to demand.

When we first asked this question back in 2007, the post became one of our most controversial. But what surprised us most about the dozens of comments we’ve received since publishing the article was the number of people who came out in support. “Yes,” they said. “It is possible to make $1,000 an hour as a photographer — and more. I’ve done it.”

The original claim had come from Chris Wunder, a photographer with more than 30 years’ experience who now sells workshops with the claim that it’s possible to make $8,000 a day doing school photography. The key, he says, is the number of portrait jobs available in schools and the speed with which photographers can get through them.

“Experienced photographers with an assistant can do a great job in only 30-40 seconds per student,” he explained to us then. “I normally budget about 90 students per camera per hour.”

Mall Photography on Steroids

That doesn’t leave any room for creativity; it’s mall photography on steroids. Students sit, smile, wait for the snap then make way for the next in line. According to Wunder though, the portraits sell for $24-$25 each with a typical take up rate by parents of between 70 and 80 percent. Ninety students an hour over eight hours is 720 portraits a day. If 70 percent of those portraits sell for $24 then total revenue for the day would be $12,096. Divided by eight hours that works out at revenues of $1,512 per hour — 50 percent higher than even the eyebrow-raising sums claimed in Chris Wunder’s marketing material.

And yet, some photographers greeted those figures not with a scoff but a shrug.

“Jon,” a glassblower who had worked as a school photographer for six years, reported that he had generated over $70,000 a week, shooting 30 weeks a year for a company called “Quality color GMBH.”

“Being 19 I had no idea what a cush job I had,” he said.

His description didn’t make the work sound very cushy. After spending a day shooting 700-900 “bratty kids” in a day (a rate in line with Chris Wunder’s estimate), he would then photograph their baby siblings after school for three times the amount. Shooting would finish at 9pm, after which he would drive to the next location, reaching the hotel around midnight. Often, the hotel would have given away his room by then and he would have to sleep in the van.

At the end of the week, he would head back to the lab so that the “Saturday lab woman” could print the images ready for shipping on Monday. The income from each enrolled child was $18.70 and the median package was $23.95.

“That means that if there were 1,500 kids enrolled in your school we could expect to bring in $28,000 in the 2 days I was at your school,” ‘Jon’ commented. “Plus there would be 50-60 babies out of that 1,500 kids and each of those were worth $50.”

Too Good to Be True

“Jon” wasn’t the only one endorsing Chris Wunder’s figures. Rick Poole of HyperFoto Photography in Seattle had been in the event and school photography business for eleven years. He commented that he was generating $3 million a year.

It all sounds wonderful… and too good to be true, as many other commenters were quick to point. The biggest problem was that the figures that Chris Wunder — and others — quoted were revenues, not profits. The costs would cut into those figures deeply. Processing the image can be done quickly, especially if the photographer is able to get the portrait right in camera, but would add some time to the 30-40 seconds needed to photograph the student. Printing costs money, as does travel to the school, and accommodation if the photographer is traveling a long way and doesn’t want to sleep in a van. Schools charge their own fees, a kickback that Chris Wunder himself notes starts at 10 percent of revenues in the Midwest, rising to as much as 40-50 percent in the southeast.

Add on the price of equipment and throw in the cost of staff — school photographers need to shoot in teams to keep the children organized and the shoot flowing smoothly; even Chris Wunder talks of having an assistant — and it’s no wonder that even “Jon” was seeing only $1,000-$2,000 a week of the $50,000-$70,000 he was generating for his company.

And if $8,000 a month sounds good, bear in mind that to earn that money “Jon” would have to spend long periods away from home, sleeping in a van and working twelve-hour shifts. Nor would he work the whole year. If he worked 30 weeks out of 52, he would still have made only $60,000. While that might be respectable and give him time to add to his income, few photographers with families would want to work those kinds of hours for long.

The answer to the question of whether it’s possible to make $1,000 an hour shooting something as simple as school photography is that it is possible. It is possible to generate that amount in revenues but if you’re shooting for a company, you’ll be paid a relatively low salary while the firm takes whatever is left of the profits after deducting other costs. And if you’re doing it for yourself, you’ll struggle hard to get your foot in the door and you’ll have to make do with whatever is left after you’ve fed the school and paid for your assistants.

Whenever you’re faced with giant revenue claims, it pays to be skeptical, especially if they’re coming from someone selling a course. But it doesn’t pay to dismiss them. There is (still) a lot of money in school photography and while your profits might not $1,000 an hour, the reason that school photography still exists is that photographers can make money out of it.

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Top Editorial Contributors Get a Share of Demotix’s Ad Revenues

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
January 17, 2012



Image: Demotix

Demotix might just have created a new revenue model for editorial photographers and aspiring photojournalists. The crowd-sourced news agency, which has licensed images to publications and outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and the BBC, is to begin paying contributors a share of its advertising revenue.

The company has partnered with Guardian Select, MessageSpace and Google to place ads on all the site’s story pages and news hubs. Demotix will work with the advertising agencies to make sure that the ads are relevant and ethical, and the photographers will receive an 80 percent share of the revenue generated by the ads on their pages.

Demotix was launched in 2008 by CEO Turi Munthe, a journalist who had worked for The Economist, Slate and the Financial Times among others, and his fellow Oxford University alumnus Jonathan Tepper whose background was in finance. The aim was to promote citizen journalism around the world as a replacement for the decline in foreign news desks. The company received praise for its ability to distribute images during the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict, when accredited journalists were excluded from the region, and in July 2009 Demotix received the only image of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates as he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Prices for licenses are set at rights managed  rates rather than royalty free microstock fees. An exclusive can sell for over $6,000, of which Demotix takes half as its commission. In March 2011, the company signed a deal with Corbis which now helps distributes Demotix’s images to its clients.

The new plan is intended to supplement image sales and to provide a way to monetize non-buying users who visit the site in search of news content.

“Many of what we consider our very best stories are not picked up by mainstream media,” explains Tom Barfield, Demotix’s community manager. “As traffic to Demotix grew, we began to realise we were becoming a news outlet in our own right, and that we could monetise this through advertising. That, finally, gives us the possibility of rewarding those extraordinary stories that nobody has bought but that make Demotix as varied and wonderful as it is.”

Top Photographers Only

The ad revenue won’t be paid to all contributors however. Demotix currently has 25,000 registered users of which 5,000 are active. Demotix will only share advertising revenue with the 100 photographers who have brought in the most unique visitors.

“We want to be paying out a usable amount of money,” says Tom Barfield “We have a very long tail which means that any other revenue-sharing model would result in thousands of payouts of fractions of pennies.”

The list of eligible contributors will be assessed on a monthly basis, so it’s likely that at least those at the bottom will change frequently. The number of eligible contributors may change too as the site grows, provided that the paid amounts are always meaningful. Demotix currently receives 400,000 unique visitors a month who generate some 1.3 million page views. That represents a growth rate of 120 percent over 2010.

Demotix wouldn’t reveal the number of page views currently received by the 100th most popular contributor on its site nor would it state the costs paid per mille by advertisers for the kinds of subjects covered by its photographers. If all page views were spread equally among the 5,000 active contributors though then each would receive a paltry 260 views a month. On iStock however, just 1.6 percent of contributors are responsible for half the company’s sales. If that rate of activity were replicated on Demotix then the top 100 contributors – 2 percent of active users – would be sharing around 650,000 page views a month. If news content receives about $6 for every thousand impressions then those top 100 photographers would be earning an average of about $312 per month.

Those are back of the envelope figures, of course. The gap between the amounts earned by the most popular Demotix contributors and those who just squeaked onto the list is likely to be substantial. CPMs of $6 may be optimistic too and Demotix’s long tail may be longer than that of iStock. But the top photographers on the site may well find themselves pocketing sums that provide more than a useful secondary income.

Gaming the System

The danger though is how that will affect contributions. Most of Demotix’s traffic comes from search engines so the company will be advising photographers on the use of good text, titles, captions and keywords to increase page ranking and improve views. They’ll also encourage them to use social media to alert their networks about uploaded images. But contributors now have a reason to do more than just optimize their contributions and spread the word.

Replying to comments on the company’s press release, Tom Barfield noted that Demotix chose to rank contributors by unique visitors rather than page views because it understood that people might try to game the system by clicking multiple times on their own page. Once photographers realize that certain subjects are more popular than others, produce more visitors and generate higher CPMs, there’s a good chance that some will start targeting their photography towards those topics. The under-reported stories about distant events, ignored by the mainstream press – and which Demotix was created to report – may now receive less attention from its photographers than in the past, affecting Demotix’s balance as a news site.

More worrying though is the admission that Demotix has so many popular and interesting stories that aren’t selling. The site might have been created to replace the falling numbers of foreign news desks but it hasn’t been able to create a demand from mainstream outlsets willing to pay for all of the images that people want to see. For photojournalists, licensing usage through companies like Demotix might be one way to sell their photos and crowdsourcing sponsors may be another. But giving away a view of the photos and earning from the advertising looks like an important and unavoidable additional approach.

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Crowdsourcing Photojournalism

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
January 16, 2012



Photography: Joao Pina

Documentary photographers are struggling to pitch their stories. Newspapers and magazines are now rarely willing to cover the expenses that photographers run up when they travel to distant parts of the world, and few outlets want to provide space for a photo documentary on Southeast Asian villagers when a thirteen-page spread of a celebrity on the beach would sell so much better. Some dedicated photographers though have managed to find a solution. They’re not just selling the image; they’re selling the photojournalist experience. And they’re selling it directly to the public.

Emphas.is is like Kickstarter for photography. Photographers describe projects, submit a budget and appeal for funding. Supporters can then submit pledges, allowing the project to go ahead if it’s fully funded. In return, those supporters receive a set of rewards that depend on the size of their support. The largest sums, often around $2,000 to $3,000, allow a company to display its logo on the books and material the project produces. For amounts as low as $10 though, supporters receive access to the “making-of zone,” an area on the site on which the photographer posts updates and answers questions from supporters.

For the site’s founders, photo editor Tina Ahrens and photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, that access to the photographers as they work in the field creates a closer and more active involvement in the production process. For the photographers too, it provides an outside perspective, a chance to understand what the audience wants to learn about the stories and locations they’re documenting, and to produce the images they want to see. Tomas van Houtryve, a photographer whose trip to Laos was one of the first to be fully funded on Emphas.is, told the site’s blog that his interaction with his supporters led him to shoot more pictures of daily life that enabled them to understand the country better.

“When you only show the extreme points of a story, it’s a little intimidating; it doesn’t always give people a bridge into the topic,” he said. “I’ve been working on this topic for a long time, so it was good to be reminded what pieces of context they needed to understand the story.”

Submit Your Project, Collect the Funds

It’s an  approach that’s been remarkably successful. Emphas.is launched in March 2011. By the end of April, projects posted on the site had already raised more than $60,000 from more than 750 supporters. Tomas van Houtryve’s project on 21st Century Communism in Laos raised $10,115 from 143 backers, more than the $8,800 he had asked for. He is now in North Korea shooting a second project, even as he’s collecting the funds.

Getting a project accepted to the site though isn’t easy. The submission guidelines demand short and long pitches, a profile and bio, a selection of images and a video pitch of up to two minutes. Three reviewers then assess each project, judging it on twelve criteria, including the applicant’s experience, knowledge and ability to build a crowd, as well as the significance of the story and the photographer’s body of work.

Photographers then have to collect the funds, an even tougher challenge that relies in part on social media marketing.

Joao Pina, whose two projects on the effects of Operation Condor in Latin America have both been fully funded, first used email to tell people about his idea. Some of those contacts then forwarded his message to their own friends. He also began posting project information on Facebook, asking people on the site to help spread the word. Many of the supporters of his first project also backed its continuation, often with larger pledges. Sergio Ramazzotti a veteran photojournalist who recently started using the site to fund a photo documentary about homosexuality in Afghanistan — a country he’s been visiting for the last eleven years — prefers to use a phone call than a Facebook message. But he too has been drawing on his personal contacts and social networks to bring in donations.

“I’m really not the salesperson kind, so I just tell plain and simple what I plan to do and why I think they should be supporting me, which is tantamount to supporting photojournalism,” he told us by email. “I ask them to imagine what a newsmagazine with 125 completely empty, white pages would look like.”



Photography: Sergio Ramazzotti

Supporters Want Rewards

The rewards offered are also important. Pledges on Emphas.is begin at $10 but most fall between $25 and $50, enough to receive an image. The average pledge is about $90. Although the rewards alone won’t determine whether someone will support a project, they can help to determine the amount someone will spend and the extent to which they’re willing to help it. Steven Duke, the editor of BBC World Service’s One World program, and a supporter of three Emphas.is projects, explains that he wants to be able to point at the photograph he’s using as a screensaver or a photobook on his shelf, and say “I helped fund that project.”

But it’s the project itself that’s key. For Steven Duke it was Tomas van Houtryve’s admission that some of his images of North Korea will be tainted with the “triumphalist propaganda” that pervades the country, a confession of the limits for any journalist, that impressed him. For Neil Osborne’s Return of the Black Turtle project, it was the positive spin on a story about an endangered animal that won his support. And for Nicolas Mingasson’s portrayal of the Arctic, it was the fact that he was taking ethnologists with him as well as his camera. The relationship between the environment and the people who live in it was vital.

“I like that Nicolas’ pictures are of people battling with the weather in harsh landscapes. I like that Thomas’ photos show us landscapes rarely glimpsed. And I like that Neil’s pictures come from the sea,” Duke explained. “That doesn’t mean they have to be exotic environments, but I want to see projects built on an environment and its people – rather than people in an environment.”

There’s no doubt that Emphas.is is fulfilling a need and enabling important stories to be told through photography. Joao Pina notes that he has been unable to win any support from publications or NGOs for his work on Operation Condor, and after six years of investing his own resources and time, his funds are now exhausted. He’s now spending the next couple of months in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, finishing the work that he started in those countries.

But perhaps the biggest benefit isn’t just that photographers are able to complete the projects they want but that photography lovers are able to see photostories and images that would otherwise have remained untold.

“There’s no point shouting at the demise of photojournalism from the sides,” says Steven Duke. “Crowdfunding allows us to get involved – for relatively small amounts – and support photo assignments we believe in. Plus we get to stick two fingers up at those editors who seem keen to swap photojournalism for Brangalina snaps.”

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Photographers Struggle to Sell Images for Five Dollars

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January 4, 2012



Photography: artbyheather

With photographers already battling against lower fees and increased competition, the last thing they need is another platform offering photography services at cutthroat prices. And yet, Fiverr, a service on which users pitch a range of different jobs for a flat five dollar fee, does now include a number of photographers selling their skills for little more than the price of a latte and a pastry at Starbucks.

The jobs aren’t pushed hard. Fiverr’s categories include gifts and graphics, programming, music and audio, as well as business and technology. Photography isn’t listed. But search for “photography” on the site and you’ll find around 537 people willing to do something image-related for just five bucks.

That might sound horrific, but the good news is that very few of those jobs involve image-creation. Of the first 30 gigs returned no more than six actually involved working with photos themselves. Most of those were quick Photoshop edits. One was an offer of an image and motivational quote, apparently for personal use, another was a shot of light-writing, which could be done quite quickly, and a third was a pitch from a seller in India of “5+1” images which, judging by the quality of the samples, were probably overpriced. The remainder of the photography gigs pitched on the site seemed to be made up largely of offers of advice, ebooks and even backlinks on photographers’ websites.

Jen Priester, for example, is selling the answer to any question “related to editing or photography.” If she can’t answer it, the buyer can ask another one. But she should be able to answer it because Priester is a professional photographer. She’s been shooting full-time for a year and specializes in families, babies and particularly newborns.

Priester learned about Fiverr from a friend when she was looking for some low-cost help with search engine optimization.

“It is a great, fast and easy way to make some extra money,” she told us. “It doesn’t take too long, and as for buying for yourself, it’s only $5!”

She considers the small sum she demands for answering a question “a very fair price,” even though she charges as much as $1,000 a day for photographers to watch her at work in her studio. Despite that “fair price” though, the job has been up for a couple of weeks and has yet to pick up a response.

That might be because Priester is pitching the wrong kind of service. Ben Evans is a British photographer, now based in Spain, who provides a range of different services on the site. He has been using Fiverr for two years, initially out of curiosity after buying low-cost SEO and web design services on the site. Like Jen Priester, he is also offering to answer any photography-related question for five dollars. That job has been up for two months and like, Jen Priester’s job offer, has had little by way of response.

Evans has, however, managed to sell some other photography-related jobs. An offer to process and optimize three images for Web viewing has picked up at least one sale. A photograph to “illustrate any concept you want” was sold at least twice over the last six months.

It’s hard to see how the image processing could possible pay for itself. Even if the total time spent on the optimization amounted to no more than a couple of minutes for each image, add in the time spent placing the ad and emailing the client and Evans would be hard-pressed to hit the stopwatch at fifteen minutes — an hourly rate of just $20. And Evans is a professional photographer who has been shooting events since he was at university and now combines commercial work with people photography.

That makes his offer of “any concept you want” even harder to understand — until you realize that he’s looking to get more out of advertising on the site than a crisp five dollar bill.

“I’m actually writing a book about photography at the moment, so this is more market-research than it is a money-making venture,” he explains. “I teach photography professionally with www.BarcelonaPhotographyCourses.com so I do get a lot of opportunity to see what aspects of photography people struggle with, but Fiverr just extends this internationally. The picture on any topic is again a personal challenge to hone my skills.”

That might be a little smarter. Enthusiasts have been known to pay to receive photography challenges; Ben Evans has managed to find a place where others will pay him to set one.

That would still be a bad deal though if the person paying was an advertising agency looking for an image to use in a national campaign. But those aren’t the kinds of people looking to buy photographer services on Fiverr. In fact, even when you can sell an image on the site, it’s unlikely that you’ll then be able to upsell more expensive services to the same client.

“I’ve learned, mainly through an experience with Groupon, that you cannot move from cheap to premium,” says Evans. “If people are shopping on Fiverr, generally they’re not prepared to pay for my photography services outside of Fiverr…. Clients on the site are happy with what they get, but are usually buying on an ad-hoc basis.”

Even as a rival to microstock where sales of images cost less than five dollars, Fiverr is too limited, says Evans, because scaling up is too difficult. Most of the jobs he’s sold on the site have actually been English accented voiceovers of up to five minutes each. At just under a dollar minute, with time taken off for client contact, that comes closer to a reasonable amount of money. He’s sold more than 30 of them.

While Craigslist has become renowned as a place to pitch for budget event photography, it’s some relief to see that there is a limit to how far the market will drop. Photographers might be willing to hawk their knowledge on the site but few buyers see the value in trying to commission a photography for a fee that would barely pay for the coffee they’d drink on the shoot.

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Become an Independent Photographer in 2012

Filed Under: Stock Photography by laurie — Leave a comment
December 29, 2011

As 2011 comes to an end, it’s time to start planning for the year ahead. For professionals, that means looking at the most successful marketing channels of the last twelve months, understanding which demographics were most likely to hire them and increasing efforts to bring in more work and at higher prices in the coming year. For enthusiasts, it means trying to figure out how they can increase  — or at least hold onto — their current rate of sales. In 2012, that’s likely to mean a more independent approach to marketing, a move towards relying on their own efforts to reach buyers instead of hoping for stock agencies to do it for them.

The problem is most clearly seen in microstock where saturation has spread revenues among contributors and lowered returns per image. It is still possible to make sales on microstock, and enthusiasts looking for a little extra boost to their incomes with some low-cost imagery can still send in their photos and hope for a small second revenue stream from commercial photography’s biggest open gate. But even though less than two percent of market leader iStock’s photographers are said to be responsible for half the site’s sales, the trend on returns is clearly downwards. More photographers are earning, but they’re taking home smaller amounts each, making the costs of shoots harder to justify economically.

The easiest alternative isn’t great either. Getty’s deal with Flickr, which lets the stock giant negotiate and administer sales of images on behalf of Flickr members who opt into its program, moved thousands of images within months of its launch. But with royalties as low as 20 percent for the photographer, it’s little wonder that 500px chose not to follow the Yahoo-owned photo site into Getty’s arms.

Do It Yourself

The reason that Getty’s deal is so questionable for Flickr’s photographers also suggests what may be the most powerful solution in general for enthusiasts looking to make a little extra cash: why give 80 percent of your revenues to Getty when it’s possible to negotiate your own deals?

That’s not entirely straightforward, of course. Flickr photographers who want to sell their own images need to make a note in the description that their photos are available for licensing. They need to respond quickly and professionally (flaky sellers are a major reason that buyers prefer to deal with reliable middlemen like Getty) and they need to indicate that they have model releases available when appropriate. Most difficult of all, they need to know how much to charge. But Getty’s own price quotes can provide a good source of comparison, and when you’re taking home 100 percent of the sales price, you can also undercut them, making up for the lack of Getty’s reputation.

It’s that direct approach to winning clients and customers that can work for any kind of photographer.

All photographers, both amateurs looking for occasional sales and professionals who need those sales, should have their own website. There’s no shortage of easy and low-cost options, from Photoshelter’s templates (which are used by some of the world’s leading independent photographers) through services like FolioLink, which has ecommerce built in, to simple Flash-based modular sites like those offered at MoonFruit. The building and hosting is now easy, giving all photographers their own unique space on the Web to show off their style, their approach and their very best work.

No less importantly, it also gives prospects, having viewed their work, a way to contact them and enquire about pricing, commissions and sales.

Facebook for Events, Etsy for Art

But while the building is simple, bringing in the traffic won’t be. Search engine optimization is time-consuming, unreliable and difficult. Online advertising is competitive and the days when you could buy clicks for five cents each are long gone. Advertise for “wedding photographer New York” on Google’s AdSense program and you’ll be paying around 50 cents per click.

Having built their sites then, enthusiasts will need to rely on more guerilla methods of generating sales and building a client base. Social media will clearly be one of them. Although Facebook advertising has proven to be notoriously ineffective for most kinds of business, with high prices and low clickthrough rates, photographers have been able to enjoy the viral effect of face-tagging as well as the ability to target advertising to specific demographics. It’s a method that works for some kinds of photography: wedding photographers are doing well on the site; stock photographers not so much. Those photographers would be better off licensing directly from their own sites and using blog posts and forum contributions about their particular niche to build their reputation and establish a unique place in the market.

For fine art photographers, sales have never been easy, and art always struggles most when economies are in the doldrums. But there are independent options for them too. Etsy is pretty full of photographers, and buyers usually want a bit of image manipulation on photos that match the seasons or which show famous locations. But it is possible to make sales on the site — and having made sales, it’s always possible to convert those customers into a fan base by collecting email addresses, sending a newsletter, keeping them informed on Twitter and thinking of the site as a place not to deliver the odd image but to find regular buyers who love your style.

And while online selling can be frustrating, technical and time-consuming, selling at art fairs can be a lot of fun. You’ll only be able to do it occasionally. Winning a spot at the fair might not be easy (competition for photography places can be as high as ten or even twenty to one). And the expenses involved in obtaining a booth and display materials can be eye-watering. But photographers who do sell at art fairs report healthy profits, and in judged fairs awards can lead to new interest from gallery owners.

That would take you back to a middle man — one who will usually take 50 percent of your sales price — but it would make the marketing efforts a lot easier.

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Video Game Photographer Shoots in Virtual Worlds

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
December 22, 2011



Image: Duncan Harris, from Tera

Photographers attempt to freeze a moment. They capture the beauty of a scene, the character in a portrait, the drama in an event. But would it still be photography if the images were made without a camera, only a monitor, if the landscapes were virtual and the portraits were of people who really are two-dimensional? The technical process might be completely different, demanding coding and hacking skills rather than a knowledge of f-stops and lenses, but the artistic skills are the same: the “photographer” still has to think about framing and focus, lighting and effect. And the results can be no less dramatic, moving and eye-catching. ­

Duncan Harris likes to think of himself as a “videogame tourist” but compares the work he does in finding and capturing photogenic moments in computer gameworlds to that of a Unit Stills Photographer creating shots for a movie’s publicity material. Like the photographer, his goal too, he argues, is to reflect the flavor of a scene and its movement in a single frame. Harris has created thousands of landscape images, portraits and dramatic shots captured while exploring the giant worlds created by computer game designers and populated with animated characters.

First, Free the Camera

A journalist specializing in video games, screen captures used to be a part of Harris’s review process. Although those early gameworlds were lacking in architecture and furnishing, they presented the same challenges that Harris faces now: removing the head-up display that gamers need to play, and unlocking the camera so that he could explore the world beyond the game’s narrative to search for unusual views and attractive scenes. As games became richer and more complex so the opportunities for capturing beautiful images increased.

“It’s several things that all come together to make it worthwhile,” he says of his work. “Freeing the art of games from the technology, hardware and rituals of gaming is the obvious one; exploring and celebrating overlooked games with great art is another; then there’s the idea of broadening the hobby of gaming beyond the obvious gameplay, taking it to a place where everyone can appreciate it…. Games can create enjoyable standalone art in realtime now. It’s not all about concept art anymore.”

The process is technical and complex, and varies from game to game. Each title will require a few hours of investigation as Harris examines the options available and how much of the world he can open up with a few modifications. Specialist tools include Dolphin, a Nintendo emulator, which has a “free camera” and lets Harris remove the head-up displays and pause screens. Unreal Engine, used to power many gameworlds, includes generic developer functions that can give a knowledgeable user control beyond the gameplay itself. Other games have software development kits and consoles hidden away but accessible to people who know how to dig them out and use them. And then there are the tricks involved in capturing the images in 1080p and bringing them from an Xbox 360 to a computer for rendering in 2160p. (This apparently involves a process that requires hacking “a few EDID values in the monitor driver” and tweaking registry settings for the videocard drivers.) The amount of freedom Harris can give himself to explore a gameworld can range from “absolute” to “harsh austerity” so he looks first for a clear screen, a free camera and — every photographer’s dream — the ability to stop time.

Suggesting Movement in a Shot



Image: Duncan Harris, from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl

But while the process of image capture is unique to gaming, the aesthetics involved in choosing and creating that image would be recognizable to any photographer. Harris has no formal background in photography and says that he has no idea how to properly use a camera. He thinks of photography as a “higher art form” that can strike your heart immediately and “haunt you forever” while games have “to insinuate their way there” through exploration and the life or the world around the viewer. Photography, he believes, has much to teach the gaming world about landscapes and objects, and he made a point of looking at car photography before working on racing game Gran Turismo 5.

And yet there’s no questioning Harris’s photographic eye.

“I know shapes and symbols, and the emotions they convey,” he says. “I know the value of framing, and how adjusting field of vision can ‘compress’ a scene to push out any dead space. I know when something should and shouldn’t violate the edge of the frame to suggest scale. The right frame of an idle animation, a flicker in a character’s eye that stops them looking like a zombie for a second, the right balance and placement of light and shadow: you just pick these things up after a while. And motion, of course; there are countless ways to suggest motion in something that doesn’t move.”

Making money from these images though might just pose a bigger challenge than the difficulties involved in actually creating them. Game development firms occasionally pay Harris to capture shots of their games, and magazines will sometimes ask him for images to illustrate their stories. But while landscapes belong to everyone and the freedom to use a portrait can be signed away with a model release form, ownership of the artwork that Harris captures while exploring The Exiled World of Arborea (Tera) or The Need For Speed Hot Pursuit belongs to the publisher and developer of the game not to the “photographer” who captures them.

That just leaves Harris with the pleasure of doing something that he loves: overcoming the technical challenges involved in creating an image; exploring the scenery to find the right shot; enjoying the thrill of spotting a moment that’s perfect for capturing — then going back and doing it all over again.

“A lot of these games I do several times over because new things are discovered,” he says. So when people ask if this is ‘art’, that’s where I’m comfortable saying yes.”

 

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500px Only Wants Your Best Images

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
December 15, 2011

Success on Flickr can bring rich rewards. Buyers use the site to source photographers with rare images and strong talent for commercial projects, magazines and even commissions. But that success isn’t easy to achieve. It’s not enough to upload great pictures and hope that someone notices. Contributors have to upload their very best images, then network to build views, comments and attention. Even the Explore page, a daily selection of the site’s best images, uses an algorithm that identifies photos that are already popular then gives them even greater attention. 500px was created to make it easier for photographers to win exposure for their images by taking on much of that promotional work for them.

The site was launched in 2004, the same year that Flickr went live, but has only a fraction of the more than 50 million members registered at the Yahoo-owned subsidiary. According to Evgeny Tchebotarev, one of 500px’s founders, it has “hundreds of thousands” of photographers and far fewer photos than Flickr. In fact, he notes, the total number of images submitted to 500px over the last two years equals the number of photos that are uploaded to Facebook in just a few hours.

Hundreds More Views Than Flickr

That doesn’t make for a weaker selection though; a quick browse through the site turns up one high quality image after another. Photographers, most of them enthusiasts rather than professionals, are encouraged to upload only their very best images — the first step in the upload instructions is “Choose only your very best photos”  — leaving the more general images for either social media sites or to Flickr’s large sets and collections.

“We are here to show and exhibit the best photos, so majority of Flickr’s market will actually never become our users,” says Tchebotarev. “I think of 500px as a funnel — we are standing between viewers’ eyeballs and photographers, helping photographers get noticed, be faved and loved, and helping viewers get inspired and discover amazing photos.”

The smaller selection might give viewers less to look at but it may deliver more results to photographers. An image on 500px can expect to receive a hundred times the number of views a similar image might receive on Flickr, says Tchebotarev. (That may not be true for all images though. This editors’ choice image, which won Digital Camera World’s Portrait of the Year 2011, picked up just under 5,000 views on 500px; on Flickr, the same image, shown smaller, has won over 13,000 views.)

Nonetheless, a site that has only a fraction of the members of other photography services does manage to give photographers a great deal of coverage. That’s helped by the site’s more human approach to image promotion. While Flickr counts views, comments and faves to decide which images make the Explore page, 500px relies on a handful of editors around the world and with different tastes to identify the pictures that they believe are worth more attention.

“Their goal is to try to choose the photos that might push photography beyond, move it forward and show something that is very unique or very hard to achieve,” says Tchebotarev. “That helps other photographers become better artists.”

The site also has more featured options. In addition to the editors’ choice, viewers can look at “popular” images, “upcoming” images, “favorites” and “fresh” images. A Stumble option throws up random photos that are surprising both in content and quality.

Free Blogging Included

500px also provides photographers with a great deal of dynamism — if they want to use it. In addition to creating a profile, describing images and adding comments to other photographers’ work, members can also write blog posts and place status updates on a Facebook-style wall. For an annual fee of $50, members can buy unlimited uploads and bandwidth, portfolio designs that are iPad and iPhone-friendly, access to Google Analytics and the ability to connect their 500px portfolio to their own domain.

The portfolios, says Tchebotarev, help photographers “by taking away pain from updating or managing their personal site. It is a set of tools to create beautiful custom websites, and we take care of everything. It is something me and Oleg (co-founder) were missing in the space, so we made it the way we ourselves would use.”

500px then has managed to attract photographers with beautiful works to offer, and it excels at highlighting the best of that work and bringing it to the attention of people who might enjoy it. Financially though, the site currently offers less to those talented photographers than Flickr provides. While it’s possible to add creative commons licenses to images, there’s no link that leads directly to all of the photos that publishers might want to use for free — one way to show those same publishers better images that they might want to buy. In fact, a search for creative commons images turned up just 114 photos. Flickr offers more than 200 million images with one creative commons license or another.

Some photographers are explicitly making their images available for licensing and sale, but 500px doesn’t have the same kind of agreement that Flickr has with the stock industry — a decision that appears to have come from the site which didn’t think it would have been in the interest of its members.

“We actually talked to Getty,” Tchebotarev said, “and while I cannot share the details, very few Flickr users benefit from that.”

That combination of broad exposure of great images but limited opportunity to sell them may change soon though. The site is working on a new sales platform which Tchebotarev promises will be an “absolutely different experience.”

And as Flickr struggles to compete against Facebook as a place for people to share images, 500px’s more selective approach appears to be a winning formula. The site is expected to achieve a remarkable twenty-fold growth rate this year, says Tchebotarev.

For photographers,  500px does have plenty to offer. Its portfolios are attractive and its ability to push the best pictures forward — and from a smaller crowd — make it an easier place than Flickr to win attention for great images. How easy it is to sell those images on the site will depend on what 500px rolls out next.

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More Creative Ways to Sell Your Photos

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
December 7, 2011

Start thinking about selling your photos and your first thoughts are likely to be of prints and licenses. A myriad of options from Buy Now buttons on websites and photo-sharing platforms to garage sales and galleries let photographers offer framed versions of their art. Microstock’s open policy means that anyone can now upload and hope for a royalty. But offering prints means selling in a hugely competitive market while microstock is both saturated and low-paying. Fortunately, there are plenty of very creative ways to get paid for your art.

  1. Publish a Photography Magazine

Blurb and Lulu, among others, have long made it possible for photographers to create their own photo books — an option often generally taken up by event photographers looking for an easy way to create a photo album — but it’s also possible to publish a regular photo magazine.

MagCloud, a service provided by HP, allows publishers to create print-on-demand subscription-based publications. It currently offers around 5,350 self-published magazines related to photography. Some, like Maree Slaven’s magazine, function as portfolios. Others, like DCist Exposed, are annual catalogs containing shots taken by competition winners. A few though, such as Visions, act as real magazines with articles and contributors.

How many of those magazines make money is questionable. The print version of Visions costs $17. That price includes access to the digital version which usually costs $3.25 but is unlikely to ensure high numbers of sales. Delivering a profit of $4.80 over the cost of printing alone, it’s also unlikely to deliver high revenues.

But producing the magazine could be fun. You’d get to put your images in print, work with other photographers in your field, and explore photography issues that you find interesting. The selling would be hard and the profits small, but MagCloud makes the publishing easy and enjoyable.

  1. Art Cards

Selling art is never easy but one genre that’s recently been enjoying some sudden popularity is ACEO — Art Cards, Editions and Originals. The movement started in Switzerland and requires artists to create works that can fit onto a card measuring just 2.5 by 3.5 inches. The size is the only rule; artists can use any materials they want to create their works, including photography.

Although ACEO are traditionally exchanged, like collectors’ cards, some are also sold, often on eBay or Etsy. A typical price is usually around $5 for a card, an amount small enough for quick buys and a good price for bargain purchases at art fairs and garage sales.

The big advantage of ACEO, other than the opportunity for impulse buying and the absence of a need for an empty wall to display the print, is the creativity. ACEO are meant to be collectible. The more artistic and creative you can make your ACEO, the more desirable you can make it too. Niver Daduryan combines photography with colored pencil, watercolor, ink, marker and even sparkle to produce his cards. Felicia Kramer adds a poem to her montage. With art cards, you can really let your artistic juices flow.

  1. Wall Decals

Photography can go on walls, but they don’t have to go in frames. The estimated $8 billion spent on wall décor in the US every year includes money spent on decals — giant peelable stickers.

Usually, wall decals are produced by designers who use graphics of trees or animals to decorate children’s rooms and offices. A few decals though make use of photography rather than drawing. Designer Dan Witz has a series of decals called “What the %$#@…” that show a photo of a goat, a person and a Tasmanian devil poking through a ventilation grate. The decals are sold through Blik for $30.

Dan Witz’s decals are fairly small. Photographers who want to make the decals of their own images can go further by using Shutterfly which lets anyone turn photos into stickable wall art. It’s not cheap though, with prices starting at $59.99 for a sticker of 36 inches by 27 inches. That doesn’t leave much room for profit while still being affordable but photographers of college sports teams or even nature scenes might be able to win some sales — or land a better offer from a local printer.

  1. Duvet Covers

Art cards and decals might go on a wall but that’s not the only location you can place a picture. You can also take it to bed. Like decals, duvet covers are usually made up of graphic images but a few smart designers have been playing around with printing photographs on the bed covers.

Target sells a simple cover made up of a photo of a marigold, with matching pillows. The range also includes gardenias and orchids and sell for between $69 and $89. Lazybone, a UK gift shop, sells “cheeky nude” duvet covers for £33.99, while BagsofLove, another British store will print your image on bedding for £99.

You don’t have to be as cheeky as Lazybone or as expensive as BagsofLove to put your photos on people’s beds though. Find a designer who’s willing to work with you (Etsy forums could be one place to look) suggest a joint venture and split the revenues. While you’re unlikely to hit giant sums unless you manage to find distributors as big as Target, you should be able to land a few helpful sales.

  1. Web Comics

Decorating bed covers might be fun but not as much fun as turning your images into comic strips. Photonovels are a small genre within the small, nichey world of comics but it does have a market. Some, like Alien Loves Predator, use models to create compositions while others, like A Softer World, transpose haiku-like prose over meaningful imagery. The creators of that strip, Canadians Joey Comeau and  Emily Horne have been able to make a living from their comic.

Few other comic creators are that lucky but with a large enough audience and a good line in accessories and merchandise, you can still have some fun telling stories, using images and earning a few dollars.

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Medical Photographers Document the Doctors

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
November 29, 2011

Browse the images on the website of photographer Patrick Pfister and you might be in for a bit of a shock. Past the commercial photos of executives and tower blocks, and beyond the aerial shots of Louisville and Kentucky, you reach a black and white picture of a surgeon holding a heart. Next to it is a color shot of a hand attached to an arm by little more than a strip of bone. For more than twenty years, Pfister’s list of professional services has included medical photography, the shooting of images of doctors, hospitals and medical scenes.

Some of those scenes have been pretty momentous. Pfister was in the operating room to photograph Kentucky’s first heart transplant. He was standing next to the anesthesiologist during the world’s third installment of an artificial heart, and he was present throughout America’s first hand transplant, performed at Louisville’s Jewish Hospital. It’s a difficult job that combines photographic skill with medical knowledge and, to some extent, a high threshold for squeamishness.

The limited field of view can be helpful in tackling the sight of blood. The only part of the operating table that’s undraped and visible is the field on which the surgeon is operating. Pfister can’t tell the patient’s age, gender or identity as he shoots, and he knows that he’s not photographing an operation that’s being performed on anyone he knows. That helps to deliver the necessary distance for most jobs, although not all.

“That is not me or a family member on the table, so I really don’t get very emotional about it at all,” says Pfister. “The only time I was taken aback was when I was covering a neurosurgeon and came into the OR. Seeing the human skull open and a brain was somewhat arresting.”

Stay Out the Way

An operating room isn’t a studio and doing a photographic job in a place where medical professionals are trying to do their job does pose challenges — beyond the difficulties of staying upright while looking at the contents of someone’s skull. Pfister tries to limit the amount of equipment he carries with him and cleans everything down with alcohol wipes to reduce the risk of infecting the patient. He also tries to stay out of everyone’s way unless invited to get closer for a shot. The anesthesiologist usually has the best view for open heart surgery, and Pfister tries to stay next to him.

The images are generally used for external communication, to illustrate the work of the hospital or to include in brochures. But some medical photography can have even more important uses. Mike Samuels was the Head of Photography at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London whose library of medical conditions and pioneering use of art and photography have led some to call it the home of medical photography. He was later Head of Medical Illustration at the UK’s merged UCL and Royal Free Medical Schools, and now runs a business that trains doctors, dentists and healthcare professionals to take medical photographs.

Working in a country whose hospitals are publicly funded, Samuels’ photographs may be used to support the hospital’s publicity goals but they’re more frequently used for medical purposes. Samuels specializes in mole mapping, recording the presence and growth of moles to identify malignant melanomas in people whose family history may suggest a predisposition to skin cancer.

“Some of the first changes that occur to a  mole are visual. Photographic record is therefore ideally suited to assisting this monitoring process and patients find it useful to have a record of their skin condition so they can self examine for change,” says Samuels. “By using a structured protocol of views, medical photographers assist dermatologists in ensuring patients are seen at the earliest possible time when any change occurs.”

Other uses of the images are no less practical. The photos can provide a document of a patient’s progress, especially for plastic and reconstructive surgery. They may also help to train and educate staff, while other images can be used in medical litigation and even forensics, particularly in the case of abuse.

Know When the Patient Will be Sewn Up

In addition to technical skills, medical photographers need to be aware of the special issues surrounding patient consent and the confidentiality concerning the storage and use of the photos. An understanding of physiology helps too. Samuels did have aspirations of becoming a doctor but was able to learn about the body as a trainee medical photographer at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, first in the pathology department and later in the clinical department.

Experience can help as well. Patrick Pfister’s presence in the operating room has given him a good idea of what to expect when someone is about to have their heart removed.

“Having shot heart transplants a number of times, I know how the body will be transferred from the defective heart to a heart lung machine that takes over the pulmonary function of the heart and lungs,” he explains. “I know when the donor organ will be sewn into the patient and the process of rewarming the blood causes the new heart to beat on its own, hopefully. You sort of learn as you go in the OR environment.”

Picking up that experience though isn’t easy. Pfister’s reputation as a medical photographer began when he was freelancing in the late 1980s. His clients included both the local newspaper, the Courier-Journal and Louisville’s Jewish Hospital. When the hospital announced that it would perform the state’s first heart transplant, Pfister asked the hospital’s director of communications if he could shoot the stills. The images — the result of fourteen hours of shooting in the operating room — ran above the fold in two newspapers for a week and put him in demand from other hospitals in the area for five years. Today, he says, hospitals tend to have photographers on staff who shoot everything from hospital activities to portraits and medical work. Meeting one of those photographers to supply non-medical images might provide a connection that could lead to an opportunity to shoot in an operating room.

It’s also possible to pick up some professional training. The Rochester Institute Technology has a program in Biomedical Photographic Communications, and in the UK, the Institute of Medical Illustrators runs a part-time, distance course conducted while working in a hospital. The University of Wales also has a postgraduate degree in Medical Photography.

However you decide to break into medical photography though, just make sure you’re prepared for the contents of the operating room.

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