Education/Inspiration
Selling Stock Photography in Today's Market
By Jan Isachsen
Jun 15, 2008

All images © Jan Isachsen

Recently I read about the stock trade and the use of words like “turbulence” and “uncertainty” to describe the situation. Over the past years I have jokingly called it “Wild West,” although the general state of this business has not always brought me laugher.

A few decades ago, stock photography was heavily based on transparency (slide) photos where a photo agency or picture library collected pictures from photographers, then filed and promoted them at the marketplace. Customers paid for each usage of a picture, and the picture fee was then split 50/50 between the library and the photographer.

Some photographers don’t like this 50/50 split because, in their eyes, it’s not fair that the library takes so much of the image fee. Well, I think it’s fair because I want to be a photographer, have the ability to travel, and to go out and look for great images. The responsibilities that also come with this job are hours of editing, captioning, and more. This can be very boring, but it’s also an important job. You can contribute the most beautiful pictures to a picture agency, but if they are not captioned correctly and given proper keywords, then customers may not find and license your images.

A picture agency takes its cut of the fee because they take the responsibility of selling your images. Some photographers think they can do it all, but then they have little time to do what they do best—taking pictures. Try to be your own secretary, lawyer, sales/promotion department, (and bill collector when fees are not paid in time). And these were just a few extra jobs that came to mind—the list can be endless. Some photographers want to do it all themselves, but most burn out pretty fast.

The stock business has become very turbulent over the past few years. Some agencies/libraries waited too long before embracing the new digital technology, ran into problems, and went out of business. Others had to close up shop because they invested too much money into the new computer-based technology and methods of doing business, and didn’t make enough money to stick around.  But it was not always the agencies/libraries’ fault, as downturns in the economy caused customers pay late or not at all, printing companies demanding only slides, because of what they were used to working with (machine set-up), etc. The problems were numerous.

The photographer is nearly always at the lowest rung on the ladder in this situation, and the last person to find out when things do not go well. If you don’t hear from the stock agency for a long time, then something could be seriously wrong. I have seen a few stock libraries roll over and sink over the past decades, and I know the routine.

For photographers interested in contributing photos to stock libraries/agencies, the best way to find the right venue is to buy the annually updated edition of Donna Poehner’s Photographer’s Market (2,000 places to sell your photographs). It is published by Poehner – Writer’s Digest Books (http://www.photographersmarket.com/) This book is like a “bible” for photographers, listing paper products, galleries, stock agencies, book publishers and both trade and consumer publications. In addition, there are organizations a photographer can belong to, ranging from ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers www.asmp.org) to NPPA (National Press Photographers Association  www.nppa.org). Photographer’s Market also has many pages dedicated to the “ABC of picture sales,” for example, copyright, model and property releases, plus interviews with photographers, editors and stock agency owners. You’ll also get an idea what photo buyers want, how much they’ll pay, and how to submit your work.

To contribute images, you should first find an agency that you like and then make an initial contact.  If they give you the okay, you can go ahead and submit some pictures for review. Do some research about what they specialize in, what their style is, and don’t overlook their contributors’ guidelines. Remember never to send anything they have stated that they DON’T need.

The digital age has also brought us something new and unique—the all-digital web library. This is where customers can browse and search for pictures and download them at a low-resolution size only, with medium- or large-sized photographs available for print. This new development may not occur as fast as the industry has predicted, but the future is moving toward an increased use of photos for web use only.

The web-based libraries also have a system by which the customer—for a small fee—can pay for the right to download a particular number of low-res images. The idea here is that low-resolution images (for web use) will make money from the volume of sales.

At some web libraries the contributing photographer can log onto a designated “photographers only” page and see how many hits there have been on each picture, which ones have been downloaded for sale, what is copyrighted to the photographer, and more.

Photos for web use can also have an advantage, whereby file size is not as important (for example, whether or not the photo was taken with a 6- or 20-megapixel camera). With other agencies, these rules are different. As I work only in the British market, generally the requirements are to accept only images for upload with file sizes between 48 and 60 MB, and saved at 300 dpi as a TIFF file. Some stock libraries require that you interpolate the picture with the use of Genuine Fractals Photoshop plug-in software only, while others consider Photoshop CS3 to be just fine. To illustrate the large file sizes discussed here, the former 16MP full frame Canon EOS 1Ds produced nearly 48 MB sized pictures straight from the camera.

The bottom line is that the stock market is very much alive, with an ever-increasing demand for images, but also with an increasing request for images that will only be web-based. There are many players and the competition is fierce.

We are also aware of the website trend in journalism, in which web-based bloggers have taken over some of what the newspaper, magazine and television news press should have covered or investigated, by being the society’s WATCHDOG. Serious scandals or abuse affecting all of us nowadays seem to be increasingly discovered and broadcasted by bloggers on the web.

See more of Jan's images at http://www.photoworkshop.com/photo_index/Isachsen


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