Microstock Photography

How to Make Money from Your Digital Images

Douglas Freer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136104138
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Be a part of one of the world's fastest growing imaging phenomenons: microstock photography. Microstock photography provides both professional and amateur photographers an opportunity to diversify their income and expand their artistic visibility by turning day trip photos or photography portfolios into viable business investments. Douglas Freer has written a comprehensive book that details the technical and commercial processes of the microstock industry. A must read for entrants into the microstock photography field, Microstock Photography shows you how to: .Choose the right microstock agency .Shoot work that will sell .Navigate the strict technical requirements .Understand the likely financial returns .Review licensing models .Understand copyright issues Over 60 illustrations and photographs help you improve your skills, learn new techniques specific to shooting stock photography and better understand what the microstock market demands. Anyone can shoot digital stock photography, but in order to make money and be successful, you need the practical advice that can only be found in this book.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the Microstock Revolution

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ABOUT STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

Don’t panic. This is not a lecture on the history of stock photography, but a few words of explanation may help set the scene for what happened in April 2000 when the first microstock image library was born, signaling the beginning of a revolution in the stock photography industry.

You don’t need to be told that we live in an image-intensive world. Just step in to any newdealer’s office and flick through a few magazines and books. Nearly every modern written publication is filled with images—and in the past few years, the Internet has added a whole new dimension to this insatiable demand for pictures of every kind (Figure 1.1). Most of the photos you see in books, magazines, and on the Internet were not shot specifically for a particular publication but were selected by picture editors or designers from available photographs that were in stock and ready for purchase. Of course, some images are shot to order. High-end advertising campaigns use photographers working under the direction of advertising agencies. Newspapers need newsworthy images to fill their pages.

But what if you need an image of a happy couple on a beach, and it happens to be midwinter? Well, the answer is simple! Just spend megabucks on flying the photographer, his or her kit, an assistant, the happy couple, and an art director and assistant to a tropical paradise. Will the community magazine that needs that beach shot be happy to pay the cost? I don’t think so!

Or perhaps you are Web designer and you want a picture of a group of businesspeople in a boardroom. I doubt that you will be filled with joy at the prospect of hiring the models and the photographer, renting a boardroom, and arranging for lighting. But even assuming you can stretch to the considerable expense of doing so, you still might not get the shot you have in mind.

FIGURE 1.1 We live in a world with an insatiable appetite for images, as this good microstock image helps to illustrate. © Jozsef Hunor Vilhelem/Fotolia.com

Of course, you do not have to go to the expense and trouble of arranging a photo shoot for most image requirements any more than you need to hire an author to write a novel specifically for you to read on vacation. For both of these examples, there are suitable images ready for purchase at the click of a button from stock photography agencies and, specifically, from the new microstock agencies.

Of course, this sounds simple on paper, but how easy is it really in practice? To prove the point, I set myself the task of finding, within 2 minutes each, suitable images for the happy couple on the beach and the business team in a boardroom examples that I mentioned above—and here they both are, as Figures 1.2 and 1.3, sourced from among many available images in microstock libraries that might fit the bill.

I might have had similar success looking for images in a more traditional library such as Corbis, Getty, or Alamy, but the price

FIGURE 1.2 “Happy Couple on a Beach.” This image was sourced in just 2 minutes from iStockphoto—no dry run or preparation. Generic lifestyle images like this are popular as they can be used to illustrate many different concepts. © barsik/iStockphoto

would have been much higher. The images in Figures 1.2 and 1.3 cost around two dollars each. I used iStockphoto for this search, but my research shows that I could have used other microstock libraries.

FIGURE 1.3 Businesspeople in a boardroom. As with Figure 1.2, this image was found in a few moments. Although not perfect for all uses, this image is a good stock image and has a number of useful qualities we’ll cover in more detail later in the book. How many can you see? © iStockphoto

SHOP UNTIL YOU DROP

The best analogy I can think of for purchasing stock photography is going to a shopping mall to buy a new item of clothing (Figure 1.4). Unless there is a special occasion, you expect to be able to look through items already manufactured and available for immediate sale. You just browse through a catalogue (where you will see more photos—I expect you are, quite literally, getting the picture) or rifle through the items on sale.

Exactly the same principles apply to stock photography as apply to the shopping mall example. You really can shop until you drop on the microstock sites without spending a fortune.

THE EARLY DAYS

The earliest stock photography libraries relied on unused images from commercial assignments. Stock photography evolved from the mid-twentieth century onward to become an industry in its own right, with photographers specializing in supplying stock photo libraries with new work. In the predigital age, this was done by the photographers

FIGURE 1.4 Shopping without dropping? Just relax with microstock! © mammamaart/iStockphoto

submitting film originals (normally transparencies) to the stock libraries. These originals were then indexed and stored. Transparencies were drum-scanned (an expensive high-quality scanning process), and selections of new images were included in catalogues made available in hard copy to image buyers.

It is pretty obvious that the traditional process involved in producing, indexing, and promoting stock photographs was and is expensive—unavoidably so. The photographer incurs film purchasing and processing costs. The image library has to hand catalogue the images received from the photographers and to take great care of them; the library incurs further costs in periodically producing catalogues of a selection of images for review by potential buyers. I can recall visiting image libraries in the 1980s to make personal selections from their images for use by my then employers. I must have wasted a couple of hours per visit peering at transparencies on a light box before finding the right one for a project. It was no fun!

It should be no big surprise, then, that the major stock libraries could command substantial fees to license the use of images to buyers. High prices were justified by high production, cataloguing, scanning, distribution, management, and storage costs.

In the 1980s, a handful of major players grew to dominate the stock photography market, led by Getty Images and Corbis. The sales pitch remained much the same—high-quality pictures at relatively high prices. Images were not “sold” but “licensed.” The license would allow the buyer to use the image for the specific purpose or purposes agreed on with the stock library in advance. The price would be determined by a number of factors, such as image placement (front page, inside page, etc.), size, circulation of the publication, duration of the license, industry segment, and geographical spread.

The traditional licensing of images remains the backbone of the stock photography market. Many libraries offering licensed images also offer the option (at additional cost) of exclusivity so that a buyer knows the images he or she has purchased will not be used by a competitor. That can be important. However, the licensed model of image use can prove restrictive, and in the 1980s, royalty-free stock photography emerged as an alternative.

The title “royalty free” is misleading. The buyer does not have to pay royalties for each use of an image, but he or she still has to pay a fee for the image at the outset; however, once the image has been paid for, the buyer can use the image indefinitely and for multiple purposes. There are usually some restrictions, which might include limits on reselling or print runs, but the buyer has much more freedom to repeat the use of an image. The downside for the buyer is the risk that someone else might use the same image in a competing publication. There is generally no protection against this with the standard royalty-free sales model.

At the outset of royalty-free stock photography, prices were comparable to those for licensed images. The justification for this was the same as for licensed photography as the cost issues were broadly the same.

EXTINCTION OF THE DINOSAURS

Some scientists now believe that three (or more) factors led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and, thus, ultimately to the ascendancy of mammals—long-term climate change, a major meteor strike at Chicxu-lub, and volcanic activity. It is all very controversial and uncertain. I bring this up because there are similarities between this event and the emergence of microstock.

A confluence of three events has led not to the extinction of traditional stock image libraries (which, to be fair, cannot be described as “dinosaurs” at all and are in fact still thriving) but to the sudden evolutionary development of microstocks—and I think that in this example, the case is more easily established than for dino extinction. These events involve the following:

1. The Internet(or, more accurately, the World Wide Web). The need for expensive catalogues of new images has almost vanished. Any buyer can search for what he or she wants online, which is where you’ll now find all the major image libraries have a presence. Many libraries have their entire image collection searchable online; others have a selection only.
2. Fast and cheap (sometimes free) broadband Internet access. Anyone with a computer can access stock libraries in seconds from the comfort of the office or home. Download or order online what you want with no or little cost penalty for broadband usage. Of course, what can be downloaded can also be uploaded, and the micro-stocks have helped to pioneer the uploading of images directly to the image library database. From there, they can be checked online before being made available for sale (Figure 1.5).
3. Digital cameras.With digital cameras, there are no film or processing costs to worry about. Digital cameras offer instant feedback and the opportunity to experiment and perfect technique. The cameras themselves are relatively expensive but no longer much more so than their film cousins. The quality of digital cameras is now also very high.

In short, most of the costs that justified high stock photo prices have been stripped out of the equation. The photographer no longer has expensive film and development costs. Original transparencies do not need to be hand catalogued and stored. The drum scanner and its operator are no longer required. Glossy sample catalogues do not need to be produced and distributed to clients. Photography is cheap to produce, store, catalogue (using digital databases), manage, and distribute.

Also, mirroring the development of the Internet, broadband Internet access, and digital cameras, all of which have transformed the supply chain, has been a simultaneous explosion in demand for quality images from Web designers (pro and home), home desktop publishing outfits, community magazines, and the like. The combination of a transformed supply chain, new channels to market through Web-based technology, and the evolution of new markets has inevitably shaken up the slightly stuffy world of the stock library, the more traditional of which, in my view, took too long to react to the new market dynamics. Step forward the microstocks.

FIGURE 1.5 The Int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding the Microstock Revolution
• 2 How to Make Dollars from Cents
• 3 What Sells and What Does Not
• 4 How to Make Sure Your Pictures Win
• 5 Technical Issues: Killing the Gremlins Before they Kill Your Pictures
• 6 Equipment
• 7 Setting Up a Home Studio
• 8 Twenty Tips and Tricks to Winning on Microstocks
• 9 Mixing It with Rights-managed Stock
• 10 Case Studies
• 11 Copyright, Trademarks, and Model Releases
• 12 The Future of Microstock Photography
• Appendix 1 Microstock Library Links
• Appendix 2 Model and Property Releases
• Appendix 3 Useful Links
• Index