I’m assuming that most readers of this blog are familiar with the basics of how stock agencies work. You take photos, you send them to the agency, they sell them, and you split the sales proceeds. That’s the basic model. That said, that said, the stock photography world is a universe unto itself. Various articles in this series will deal with some of the bigger differences you should be aware of, as well as more detailed thoughts on how to pick and work with any given agency.

For now, let’s say you’ve decided to sell through a stock agency…how do you decide which one to sell through? I’d say the answer depends on where you are in your photographic journey.

Part One: If you are just starting out

If you are completely new to stock photography and / or if you do not have at least 500+ high quality images in a singe niche area, then I would recommend that you take two steps.

First, choose your niche and start shooting to develop a deeper library in a particular issue area. Second, in the meantime, get your feet wet in the world of stock photograph, and possibly sell some images, by applying to Alamy or a similarly flexible agency.

Alamy is the largest online stock photography agency, with nearly 14 million images at time of writing. They require that photos meet certain minimum standards of size, resolution, and quality, but otherwise, their view is that if you have images, you should have a place to market them. Thus, they more open to new photographers than other agencies.

Working with Alamy will get you accustomed to the laborious process of preparing your digital files for submission. It will also give you a outlet for possible sales (don’t expect a lot). Finally, it will give you some credibility. When you apply to other agencies later, you can tell them you have 1000 photos on file with Alamy. Also, Alamy will give you your own searchable homepage.

Part Two: If you have experience and/or a larger portfolio of images

If you have a large portfolio of high quality images and you know enough about stock photography to prepare and submit images, then you have more choices. The big question is whether to try to get into a larger, generalist agency or a smaller, specialist agency.

For the most part, unless you are a recognized name in the industry, you’ll do better with smaller, more specialized agencies. Most important, you’ll be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. The agency will be more interested in your work because it matches the agency’s niche field. Because it’s smaller, you have a better chance of developing a strong relationship with the editors.

Because you’ll have a closer relationship and because your photos match the agencies niche area, they will be more likely to promote your photos in catalogs, online, and with buyers. You will do much, much better with an agency if the agency promotes your images and puts them in high profile locations.

Beyond these benefits, there’s also the fact that smaller agencies are less competitive and easier to get into. If you are just starting out, that’s probably important. Indeed, the biggest and most competitive agencies—Getty, Corbis, Jupiter and the like—can be very difficult to get into unless you are already an established photographer.

At some level this decision is made for you. If you are the kind of photographer who has a chance for getting into Getty or Corbis, then you already know it, and you probably don’t need to be reading this. If not, you’ll probably be looking at smaller agencies.

So the remaining question is: which small agency do you choose?  Simple. Remember this refrain: match content, style, and quality. You should find an agency that matches your content, style, and quality. The same advice applies if you are sending magazine submissions: send your photos to magazines whose images have the same content, style, and quality as yours.

If you follow that simple advice when sending submissions—whether to magazines or stock agencies—you have won have the battle.

If you find more than one agency that matches your work in content, style, and quality, then you can look at other criteria. Other things equal, you should choose the agency that:

a) has the more established reputation
b) pays the highest percentage to the photographer
b) matches your content, style, and quality the best
c) will do the most to promote your images
d) has the smallest number of photographers
d) offers the most attractive terms regarding exclusivity (ie, gives you the most leeway to continue to market your images yourself)
e) offers the most attractive terms for removing your images (ie, doesn’t require you leave your images on file for two years).

So ideally, you’d find an agency that sells just the kind of photos you take, has a great reputation, works with few photographers, pays a high percentage of sales, lets you market images yourself, and lets you pull your image when you decide to. If you find that agency, you’ve got a great match.

Indeed, once you find that agency, you’ll probably continue to work with them for the rest of your photographic career, even if you establish relationships with other agencies for other types of photos.

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Stock versus Assignments (Selling Photos versus Services)

The first and most common division is between those who sell images (“stock” shooters) and those who sell their services (assignment photographers). Stock photographers take photos on their own time and resources, accumulate large libraries of images, and sell the rights to use those images. Assignment photographers, by contrast, are paid to take the specific images that clients need. After the assignment, they may or may not retain rights to those images.

While that’s the basic difference, there remains great diversity within each category of work. For example, stock shooters may sell their images directly to photo buyers at magazines or publishers. They might sell photos through stock agencies. Or they might specialize in selling fine art prints.

Assignment photographers, on the other hand, include those who do fashion or commercial assignment, but also those who shoot weddings and special events. In each of these cases, a client is paying for the services of the photographer, for the process of having photos taken.

Editorial versus Commercial

Another important distinction is between editorial and commercial or creative photography. Editorial images are those used in newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and similar publishers. Commercial or creative images are most often those used for advertising—including, for example, fashion, product, and conceptual photography.

The divide between these categories is clear on most major stock agencies. Go to the sites for Getty Images or Corbis, for example, and they will ask you to select whether you want to search their editorial or creative collections.

Editorial and commercial images are very different in terms of style. Editorial images are often photojournalistic in style, taken to illustrate important news stories or contemporary issues. Conceptual images are generally taken in studios or in other locations with highly controlled lighting.

Most editorial images are published in educational, informational, or news-type publications, and as a result they require much more detailed captions: who did what, where, and when. Commercial images, by contrast, are designed to invoke a mood or idea or give an appealing appearance to a particular product. Neither the location nor the timing nor the identities of people involved are of great importance, so captions can be brief.

One of most important difference between these two types of images lies in the need for model releases. The vast majority of editorial uses do NOT require model releases, while the vast majority of commercial images do. For more on this issue read Model Releases.

Putting these categories together and adding a few others, we can distinguish 7 types of photographers.

7 Types of Photographers

Using the two distinctions above, we can immediate distinguish four categories of photographers.

1. First, there are editorial stock photographers who take their own images and concentrate on selling those images in book, magazine, and similar markets. Two good, well-known examples are John Shaw and Ron Engh.

2. Second, there are editorial assignment photographers. These people are sent on assignment by major magazines and publishers. The classic example is a National Geographhic assignment photographer. As a general trend, such editorial assignments are increasingly rare, limited to the largest (and best funded) magazines and publishers. Most editorial outlets increasingly rely on editorial stock photographers for their images.

3. Third, commercial stock photographers are stock shooters who specialize in creative imagery for advertising. They come up with creative themes and concepts to illustrate with their photography, and often take their images at home or in studios with controlled lighting. They also hire models to shoot “lifestyle” images that capture situations and emotions and relationships in ways that are likely to be useful for advertisers. Most commercial stock photographers work with major stock agencies. A good example here is Lee Frost.

4. Fourth, commercial assignment photographers are those generally hired directly by companies to take specific images for advertising purposes. These assignments may include fashion shoots to advertise beauty products, product shots for catalogues, or architectural shots for corporate brochures. An important sub-category here are those who make a living through their own portrait studios, often working directly with end consumer rather than with corporate buyers.

In addition to these four categories, it might be useful to distinguish four sub-categories of photographers who technically fall into one of the fall categories above, but who represent such a large or unique group that they could be considered separate.

5. There are event photographers, those who shoot weddings and other special events. Event photographers are essentially commercial assignment photographers, but who work with end consumers rather than corporate entities and who constitute such an important industry to be a category in their own right.

6. There are print sellers, who make a living selling prints either online or at art exhibitions or fairs. They are essentially an editorial stock photographers, but rather than selling to magazines and publishers, they sell retail fine art prints to end consumers. An interesting example here is Dan Heller, who has built a successful business with a blend of commercial assignments and online print sales.

7. There are staff photographers who are directly employed as full time photographers for major national magazines and newspapers. Unlike the freelance photographer, they have regular employment with benefits and insurance, and a much more rigid schedule.

8. Finally there are the artists. Artists are less focused on photography as a business. They have often attended photography schools, and either enjoy photography for its own sake or strive to compete for places in the best-known galleries. Here, the approval of art critics is more important than making money, although the two may ultimately go well together. The world of high art photography operates according to its own rules. You should consider studying photography formally, and should try to establish links to art directors and photographers doing the type of work you like.

Combining Models

The distinctions between the business models above are important. But unless you are already a well-established photographer (in which case you wouldn’t be reading this), you will almost certainly need to blend several of the models above. Indeed, even most established professionals do a blend of stock and assignment shooting, and perhaps even a blend of editorial and commercial work. Combining models is crucial because in the competitive world of photography today, you probably can’t make enough revenue to survive from just one type of activity.

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Am I missing any? Let me know in the comments if so.

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Try to resist the cheap thrill of being paid (very little) for a photo. The true expense of that action is that you ultimately deprive someone who has devoted their life to shooting professionally much of a chance of financial survival. If you are good enough to work for pay, you are good enough to work harder and raise the standards of the profession, not devalue them.

On the one hand I can totally get your point David, I really do. And you know, I do feel a little guilt for giving my photograph away (thanks for ruining a great moment in my photography career! heh).

Having pondered on it for a little while though here are my thoughts

• If I say “no” someone else will say “yes”.
• The only person I would be depriving is me and sorry but depriving me hurts a lot more than depriving you from where I am standing.
• How the heck am I supposed to build a portfolio if I have to charge what you consider fair rates to people who consider those rates anything but.
• The people who want cheap or free will not pay more than that.
• What makes the photography industry any different?

My last point needs some clarification. Consider web sites. A company comes to me and says “I want a web site to sell my widgets”. I say “That will be $£xx,xxx.99″. They say “Whoah, my neighbour’s nephew’s friend’s sister can do it for $£x”. I say “Go get them to do it then and come back to me when they make a hash of it”.

If an industry gets commoditised it is because that industry is doing a poor job of selling itself. What is the difference between me building a website and the 12 year old kid with a copy of Dreamweaver? Oh, probably more than a million pounds in profit on the clients bottom line, and I can prove it, but I am not going to do it at the kids rates. You have to decide what the difference is between your photograph and some kids $1 stock photo. If there is no difference who’s fault is that? Not the kid and not the customer, that’s for sure.

Technorati Tags: strobist, stock, photography, news

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Making Money For The Flickr Flock?

He called subscriptions one of the “core ways” Flickr will make money in the future.

He also said that there were other opportunities, such as brand advertising, contextual ads, search ads and, well, then he stopped short.

“We don’t talk about upcoming initiatives,” he said. “But I will say that even today, a lot of people buy photos from Flickr users. But people have to know the person, and send them a Flickr mail and they have to negotiate a price.

“It’s a very high-friction process. Taking the friction out of that would be one of things Flickr could do to monetize,” he said. “But we haven’t made any announcements.”

But he went into details.

First off, Butterfield said, Flickr photos wouldn’t be the same product that photo buyers find on a stock photo site like Jupiterimages or even iStockphoto, which is a kind of Flickr for professionals known for its “crowd-sourcing.”

Butterfield said those sites typically trade in typical business brochure-friendly photos. For instance, he added, they would sell an image of a group of ethnically diverse 40- and 30-somethings using computers or maybe of two men shaking hands.

Flickr photos would find a different niche on the marketplace, but still a viable one, he added. And then it begins to make sense. Flickr photos are typically more, personal, more artistic.

When I gave Butterfield my card, he saw that I worked for JupiterWeb, which shares a parent company with Jupiterimages.

“Ah,” he said, “Jupiter, No. 3 in the business.”

Before the interview ended, I pointed out that iStockphoto already has a good 23,000 contributing photographers.

That’s when Butterfield reminded me of Flickr’s 4 million.

Not everyone is happy about it, there are several pro and anti conversations taking place on Flickr groups right now. I for one welcome the move if it keeps Flickr running, they can’t survive on subscriptions alone can they?

Technorati Tags: flickr, stock, photography, news

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Here is a titbit from Thomas Hawk’s blog

One of the things we want to do at Zooomr is to help the pro/am photographer monetize their photostream within the photosharing space

Out of everything else going for Zooomr that could be one reason to switch. Zooomr doesn’t offer me anything to set my world alight so I would much prefer Flickr to offer this but if they don’t then Zooomr might be worth a try.

flickr, zooomr, stock, photography, news

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Carl Purcell is a travel photographer whose art has graced publications ranging from National Geographic and U.S. News and World Report to travel sections in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Still, an online archive at corbis.com is home to 12,800 of his more than 300,000 photos and is a primary source of income for him. One popular photo alone — of palms blowing in a typhoon in the South Pacific — has netted more than $25,000, Purcell says. But this 77-year-old retiree’s most famous image — a billowing American flag merged with the Statue of Liberty — appears on a 39-cent stamp. [..] Unfortunately for Purcell, the 8-year-old image credited to him and his former wife, Ann, was one of a handful of royalty-free photos available from an Internet archive. “The only payment I got for it was a check for $150,” he says ruefully.

So his art has found success, he has even made a bunch of cash ($25k is not to be sniffed at unless you just happen to be the hobby digital photographer called Bill Gates), and his picture even graced a stamp for goodness sake, success! Wouldn’t you feel you had been kicked in the nuts every time you received some mail stamped with your now bargain-basement image?

Thing is they probably wouldn’t have seen let alone used his image had it not been in there and how many people can claim to have had their photographs seen by as many people?

royalty, free, stock, photography, news

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