Category: Stock Photography


Judge a Photographer By His Book Covers

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February 22, 2012



Photography: Zach Cordner

Zach Cordner decided that he needed to look like a wooly mammoth. A large beard wasn’t a requirement of the job but flying up to Wasilla to photograph Levi Johnston, the father of Sarah Palin’s grandchild, was going to mean spending a couple of days trekking through cold Alaskan woods shooting the outdoorsman doing what he loved best — if not killing animals then at least looking the part. Cordner’s image of Bristol Palin’s former fiancé wearing a camouflage jacket and peering out from behind pine trees was later used on the cover of Johnston’s book Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. It was the fifteenth book cover that Cordner had been commissioned to shoot.

Although book covers are little different to any other photography commission, the special use to which the images are put does give them an extra appeal. A book cover won’t just sell a product in the way that the result of an advertising shoot will do. It will appear in stores across the country, on bookshelves around the world and it will help to summarize a cultural product. We might be told not to judge books by their covers but we do anyway, and we certainly buy them and recognize them by their covers. A photographer whose image appears on the cover of a bestselling book can know that his image has been printed thousands, if not millions, of times, has helped to create success — and will act as a calling card for future work.

The Cover Comes Before the Copy

Not of all that success is down to the photographer. Art directors at publishing houses are as much a part of the process as the photographers they hire. They’ll usually produce general ideas and use them to guide the photographer towards an image that the publishing company can use.

“Usually the art director will tell me a few concepts and I have to narrow it down to the right setup,” explains Cordner.

Nonetheless, Cordner will try to learn as much about the book and the author as he prepares for the shoot. That might not mean reading the book itself. The cover may be shot anywhere from three to eight months before the book’s release, and before the copy is available. When that happens, Cordner has to make do with the chapter outlines. Once he can understand what the book is about, he says, it’s easier to come up with the right concept for the cover.

And the concept he’ll be looking for is something simple, a hard-hitting image with little background noise and which can blend well with the design and the layout.

“The image has to be balanced with the book title so they complement each other and deliver a one-two punch that makes it stand out on bookstands,” he says.

It’s something that Cordner has managed to do with some success. His portfolio now includes the cover of Big Boy’s An XLife: Staying Big at Half the Size, which shows the formerly overweight disc jockey standing in front of his now unused 9XL sized t-shirt. The image that Cordner shot of Chelsea Handler’s Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea ended up on the cover of a book that went on to reach the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.

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Winning Book Covers

1.     Build a portrait portfolio.

Covers of memoirs and much other non-fiction depend on portraiture. A record of expressive images will help persuade buyers.

2.     Know what a good book cover should do.

An effective book cover should be simple, communicative, free of distracting backgrounds and well-matched to design elements.

3.     Create connections.

Not easy to do but if you can get to know art directors — or people who know them — you’ll be on your way to building a client base.

4.     Don’t depend on them.

Even for established professionals like Zach Cordner, book cover jobs are occasional treats complemented by magazine jobs and other commercial shoots.

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Connections Help

That cover was designed by Michael Nagin, an art director at Simon and Schuster, with whom Cordner also collaborated on Kendra Wilkinson’s memoir Sliding into Home,” and it’s those connections that are vital for a regular flow of book cover commissions. Cordner won his first book cover shoot after being recommended to Simon and Schuster by another photographer. Other art directors who saw his work then began contacting him to shoot covers for their projects, giving him a network of art directors at several publishing houses.

Not all photographers rely on those connections or even on commissions to produce book covers though. Spanish photographer Edward Olive has received commissions to shoot book covers but his stock images, sold through Getty, have also been used by publishing companies.

It does help though that Olive is also known as a destination wedding and art photographer. While a book cover is a form of photography with its own demands, art directors will be looking at a photographer’s other work as a guide to his or her capabilities and especially their ability to portray personality.

“If you want to shoot covers it comes down to a strong portrait portfolio,” says Cordner. “Publishers are looking for photographers that have solid skills in lighting and posing. Also being able to put up with celebrity egos is always a big plus.”

Work in other fields will also make sure that there’s income between shooting book covers, a consideration that’s becoming increasingly important as the publishing world feels the pressure from ebooks and pirated downloads. In addition to working with publishers, Zach Cordner also shoots regularly for magazines and for companies.

Shooting book covers then requires connections and experience with portraiture. It helps to know the right people as well as the right way to put across the message and feel of the book. But it helps most of all to shoot the cover of a successful book — even if that means looking like a mammoth to do it.

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iPhone Photos That Sell

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February 15, 2012

It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer that makes the picture. That’s what photographers are always told — and what the successful ones always say — and it’s particularly true for anyone trying to take pictures on an iPhone. Although the latest model, with its new optics and 8 megapixel lens is a big improvement on older versions, it’s still far from a professional tool capable of shooting the sorts of images that buyers need. And yet, iPhone photos are selling. While there are no figures that reveal the number of iPhone images that have been bought and sold, some iPhone-wielding photography enthusiasts have earned several thousand dollars from their pictures and the total value is now likely to have exceeded seven figures. Here are five ways that iPhone pictures have sold for real money:

News Images

The iPhone camera’s biggest advantage for photographer is its mobility. When something happens, you’re more likely be carrying your mobile phone than your Nikon DSLR. It’s no surprise then that one of the hottest-selling types of iPhone images are news shots.

Finnish company Scoopshot specializes in images taken on mobile phones and even has an app that lets photographers send their shots directly from their iPhones to the Scoopshot marketplace. The site says that it has made almost €135,000 selling images to 42 different publications.

The shots aren’t as dramatic as the snaps taken recently (on a Blackberry) of the bombing near the Israeli embassy in Delhi and sold worldwide through the Associated Press. Images that Scoopshot has sold include shots of someone driving the wrong way up a street and a traffic jam caused by broken traffic lights. More exciting was the series of images that appeared recently in the Danish press that showed a fire engulfing a building in Denmark.

If you’re near the news, the event can compensate for the quality of the camera.

Assignment Photography

It’s one thing to whip out your iPhone when a fire breaks out on your street. It’s another thing altogether when a professional photographer is hired to complete a shoot for a magazine and finds that one of the images the publication buys is a quick shot taken on his mobile device. That’s what happened when photographer Craig Mitchelldyer was sent by Oregon Business magazine to shoot a story about a snowy summer camp. After carrying his equipment onto the ski lift and up the slopes, one of the images that appeared in the publication showed the teenagers preparing to snowboard down the mountain with the clouds below them.

That shot, says Mitchdyer, was taken on his iPhone as soon he got off the lift.

“It’s my favorite image from the shoot,” he wrote on his site. “Also the first time I’ve had an iPhone photo published.”

Interior Design

It might not be Mitchelldyer’s last iPhone photo he sells though. Photographer Dave Kozlowski has been selling iPhone photos for two years. This year, he says he sold more images taken on his mobile phone than photos shot with his Nikon, including a series of seventeen images that went for $6,000 and were used during the renovation of a Dallas hotel.

“My clients love this stuff (Hipstamatic)!” he told the readers of photographer and technologist Aaron Hockley’s blog. “I think I’m probably the first photographer to shoot a project for a major national brand using only my iPhone.”

It’s notable though that while Kozlowski is willing to sell his iPhone images to happy clients, he’s not willing to tell them he shot them on an iPhone. And if the camera really doesn’t matter, he shouldn’t have to.

Prints

The hardest market for any photographer to break is the print market. The competition is so intense, there’s such a huge choice of beautiful images and so little demand for items to decorate wall space that it’s no wonder prices can be so low and sites can be so saturated. And yet, even in this market, it’s still possible to make the odd sale. Aaron Hockley was writing about iPhones because he’d sold a print of a shot he’d taken of a forest fire on his iPhone to a friend. He didn’t mention the price, although you’d have to hope that his friend at least received a discount.

While that was the only time that Hockley had sold an iPhone image, it wasn’t the first time that he’d used his iPhone professionally. Instagram on his mobile phone is go-to app for posting quick images, he reports, and he often uses his telephone to take pictures when scouting shots. That’s a more familiar professional use of the iPhone. The idea that he could actually print those pictures and sell them shows that the kind of opportunistic images that are more likely to find their way into publications can also find their way onto walls — if they’re taken beautifully enough.

Art

And it turns out the most beautiful iPhone images have a market all of their own. In December 2009, artist Knox Bronson suggested that Rae Douglass of the Giorgi Gallery in Berkeley hold the first ever gallery exhibit of iPhone photography. The exhibition was a huge success and has since grown into Pixels, a collection of “iPhonographic art.” All submissions have to be shot and edited entirely on an iOS device, including iPads, iPhone models and iPod Touches. The range of the work is phenomenal with delicate shots of leaves appearing alongside old-style country images and Hockney-style (no Apple slouch himself) poolside photos.

Although the images are shown on the site for free (and, oddly, are even printed in the site’s book without a royalty), that Magcloud book sells for $40 and any prints sold through the gallery generate 50 percent of the sales price for the artist.

It’s unlikely that Pixel’s “iphonographers” have made a great deal of income with their iOS-only art shots but they are making some. The question they’re asking isn’t whether it’s the camera that makes the picture but whether it’s photographer or their Hipstamatic app.

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Become a Photographer Without Giving up the Day Job

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February 8, 2012



Photography: Renata Ramsini

Renata Ramsini’s website describes her in four different ways. She’s an “efficiency-lover,” a “photographer,” a “policy wonk” and a “law student.” That’s not the order in which her life has played out however. Like many photography enthusiasts, when it came time to pick a profession it never occurred to Ramsini to pick up her camera and push for a career in picture-taking. Although she says she’s always loved photography, she didn’t think it was something that could give her a living. For that she turned to a night class at law school and a full-time job in the Ohio Governor’s office. Today, with the administration over but still at school and still active in politics, Ramsini receives a regular stream of commissions from people keen to make use of her photographic talent — and provides an example of the difficulty of maintaining a passion for photography while also building a career outside the world of creative arts.

Photography became a serious hobby for Ramsini about seven years ago, and a “very serious passion” about two years ago. She specializes in street photography and says that she’s always looking to capture intimate moments on the street when no one is looking. Her portfolio shows a broad collection of travel shots and portraits, children and maternity pictures.



Photography: Renata Ramsini

For some time though, there was no photography at all, a situation Ramsini now regrets. Once she had made her decision to take a day job in politics and to study for her career in law at night, Ramsini found that she had no time to indulge in photography. While she was in the Governor’s office, she barely took a picture.

“Working full time and going to law school in the evenings resulted in my not picking up my camera for about two years,” she says. “Once I left the administration, I rediscovered my passion and won’t let that happen again. It brings me too much joy. Once you find something like that, you have to make time for it in your life, just like anything else.”

Politics and Photography Do Mix

If not creating time to shoot was a mistake, it was, at least, an understandable one. Many enthusiasts struggle to find the time to hone their photography skills even without the extra pressure of weekends spent poring over law school textbooks and cramming for exams. While professionals are able to practice, improve and sharpen their skills by shooting every day, enthusiasts have to make do with stolen moments, special trips and occasional shots of the kids doing interesting things.

The solution though, other than to add a few more hours to the day, is to look for places where profession and passion overlap. Automobile engineer Andreas Reinhold was able to do that by taking artistic pictures of cars at the shows he attended. After a magazine editor he’d met at one auto show saw some of his photos, he began receiving commissions to take shots for the publication. His engineering background even made him a useful representative for the magazine at car-related events where he didn’t just photograph the models but could also chat knowledgeably with the manufacturers.

Renata Ramsini didn’t shoot the work she was doing at the heart of her state’s politics, but she does believe that she might have missed a trick. Looking back, she now feels that her joint passions for photography and politics weren’t as incompatible as she once thought.

“At the beginning of the Obama Administration, I read an article in the Washington Post about a new staffer who was documenting her time in the White House by taking photographs of everything (and everyone) around her. I was super jealous!” she says.

“Photographs can tell powerful stories. They can share things with the public that no political speech or slogan ever could.  There isn’t any American who can’t think of a powerful photograph of a political figure (or a situation surrounding one) that evokes some sort of emotion within them,”

Clearly, not every work space is as photogenic as the White House or a Governor’s office and not all professions offer the same opportunities to mix with magazine editors (or shoot pretty objects) as the car industry. But even if you miss your workplace photography opportunities, there are still plenty of chances to combine a passion for photography with a career in a completely different field.

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Tips to Mix Work with Pleasure

  1. Shoot Workplace Images

You might not work at the White House, but you can still take pictures of office scenes, shoppers in the mall, and the factory floor. Think of the scenes you see every day as stories and you’ll have something to document. You might need to ask permission but many companies will appreciate the PR.

  1. Carry Your Camera

To take pictures all the time, you’ll need to have your camera with you all the time. That’s easier now than it used to be. British photographer David Bailey famously told the world that he used to carry an instamatic with him wherever he went. Today, even the camera on an iPhone takes good enough shots.

  1. Tell the World

If you want to be asked to shoot more images, tell the world about the stories you’re documenting at work. Build a website, and promote it through social media and photo

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Winning Commissions

Renata Ramsini’s more recent development as a photographer has happened through channels that anyone can use — provided they’re willing to put in the time to build them. Over the last year, Ramsini has had a steady stream of clients seek her out to capture special moments in their lives or to take pictures of loved ones. They see her images on 500px then click through to her website.

They might not be buying her prints — a format that’s always a hard sale online — but by showing what she can do in a field for which there’s a demand, she’s able to get paid to continue to do photography even as she prepares for a career in the law and in politics.

Mixing work with an enthusiasm for photography isn’t straightforward. Time is tight but if you can find something photogenic to document at your workplace — and promote yourself as a photographer — you’ll be able to shoot without giving up the day job.

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Microstock Turns to Quality, Not Quantity

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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.

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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.

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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.

Correction: Serban Enache’s description of 50 percent growth referred to image price growth and contributor expectations. Since its inception in 2004, Dreamstime’s collection of images has grown more than 400 times.

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The Secret to Shooting for $1,000 an Hour

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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

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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

Filed Under: Stock Photography by Dean — Leave a comment
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”, 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 she’s a professional photographer. She’s been shooting full-time for a year and specializes in families, babies and particularly newborns.

Jen 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 Jen 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, he is also offering to answer any photography-related question for five dollars. That job has been up for two months and like, Jen’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.

Update: One of the Fiverr members mentioned in this post has asked for her name to be redacted. We’ve done so.

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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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