Accepting Responsibility, The Cornerstone Of Success In Photography

Taking total responsibility for yourself, is a cornerstone for success as a photographer.

Responsibility For Success or Failure
A good friend of mine called me today and let me know he had just been laid off. He was in a high-paying management job, and his boss came in today and out-of-the-blue fired him. That has to be devastating. When I think of all the down sides of working for someone else it reminds me of how fortunate I am to be self-employed. If I put in the work, I get the reward. There are no office politics to deal with, no personality conflicts, and no one I have to count on to pull me out of a jam. I am totally responsible for my own success or failure. No one can fire me.

Blaming Robs You of Your Power
While it is true that no one can fire me, my career does seem under threat. Photographers, particularly long-time stock shooters, are having a difficult time. My own income is down almost thirty-perecent…which isn’t too bad by a lot of accounts. But if you truly accept full responsibility for your self, there is no blaming. I don’t blame the micro stock shooters and I don’t blame Getty or any of the other agencies. Blaming others just robs you of your power. That doesn’t mean I like the downward price pressure from micro stock competition, or the fact that Corbis just lowered my royalty percentage, or the fact that Getty is now sending me royalties of less than a dollar per license. It is just that complaining about it not only doesn’t do any good, but it actually directs my energy away from dealing effectively with the new realities.

Responsibility Means Learning
Accepting total responsibility for your success or failure is perhaps the key step for successfully competing in photography today…at least if you want to make a decent living at it. To succeed in the face of the kind of overwhelming competition that is emerging in this flickr, iStock, and Internet era requires total commitment. It means a whole lot more than making great photos. It means learning about distribution, learning about the market, and learning your craft. Sometimes it means learning something difficult to learn that you may not end up using at all. I am learning SEO. I have been learning Final Cut Pro and have no idea if I will eventually end up needing it or not. I haven’t yet tried shooting video with a DSLR, but I am going to because I think I would be remiss if I didn’t explore that possibility. I am taking full responsibility for my future as a professional photographer.

Industry Assessment, Opportunities, and Strategic Thinking
Being responsible for your future means realistically assessing the photography industry and where you fit in, where the new opportunities are, and which ones you are both suited for and interested in pursuing. I believe that strategic thinking is going to get more and more important. It used to be, with stock, you just had to make great images, or heck, even not-so-great images, and send them in. I my mind there is no doubt that this business is just going to get harder and require more and more strategic thinking. If you are not ready to take total responsibility for your photography future then your future might be in serious doubt.

Of Elephants, Associates And Ego

A Journey Towards Success
The image above, of a huge elephant lumbering down a long road on a journey requiring perseverance and determination, is a great example of a slightly unusual way of adding to your productivity, your income and your success in stock photography. How is that? To begin with, while I photographed the elephant in Thailand, and the road in Arizona, I did not create the composite picture. This elephant stock photo was created by my associate, Stephanie Roeser. She is not an employee, and she doesn’t work for me. She is one of several individuals whom I have opened up my files to as raw material for stock picture creations.

New Ideas And Royalty Splits
Opening up your files in this way works on several levels. First, it can bring in all the new and fresh ways of seeing things, and of new ideas, that another individual brings to the table. While I had the images for this new composite, Stephanie came up with the idea and sorted through my files to find the pieces to make it work. In short, she came up with the idea, she put the time in to sort through my files, and she did the Photoshop work. We then divide the royalties on a case-by-case basis. The split can by eighty percent to her or as much as eighty percent to me. It depends on the particulars of any given project. Stephanie consults with me on possible ideas. I give some guidance and suggestions, but what she does is her show; she works at her own pace and on her own schedule.

Credit Lines, Copyright Issues And Other Problems
While I have found this arrangement to work very well for me, it is not a step to take lightly. It is essential to work out all those difficult details such as royalty splits, credit lines, copyright issues and so forth. It is also important to make sure that problems do not arise around similars since the person you decide to work with may not be familiar with the images you have already submitted to various stock agencies.  There is also the ongoing royalty split to contend with. I have a File Maker program that I put all my sales into and that automatically breaks out the royalties that I owe the photographers who work with me.  Keep in mind; ideally the images that are made will bring in income indefinitely, which means you will have to pay royalties indefinitely. This is a lot of responsibility, so you have to be sure you really want to undertake it.

Assistants, Retouchers, And Fellow Photographers
A great candidate for someone who can enhance the value of your files might be an assistant who is good with Photoshop, or perhaps a retoucher you respect, maybe even a fellow photographer who likes digital manipulation as much as, or even more, than he or she likes shooting.  If you have files that can be used to create new images, or can be enhanced to create outstanding stock images, then your partnership can be extremely rewarding for both of you.


Images, Ego And Royalty Checks
I have a number of such relationships. For me the most difficult part actually surrounds my ego. I want credit for the images I do, and I prefer not to have my name on images I didn’t do. But sometimes it just isn’t possible to keep things so separate. In the case of this elephant image, submitted to Getty, it goes under my contract and needs to be my copyright. Sometimes, as with the image Stephanie has created here, it is particularly hard because I wish I had created it!  Oh well, the royalty checks will help.

Value Added Stock Photos And The Way Forward

Value Added Stock Photography
After a couple of unexpected and rather invasive abdominal surgeries in the last year-and-a-half, four months ago I had a plastic surgeon perform an abdominoplasty (tummy tuck) on me, to clean-up the scars and give me a new navel. Fun stuff! Anyway, the surgeon asked me to shoot a picture of one of his new laser tools in action. I did the shoot this afternoon.


A Beautiful Woman And Credibility
As I was packing up the old ProFoto 7bs, he mentioned to me that he needed to redo the picture on the cover of his brochure. The shot was of a beautiful woman in a nature setting. He said it cost him a fortune, but now another surgeon was also using it, so he needed a new one. I was a bit confused. I asked him where he got the picture from and he told me iStock. “But you said it cost you a fortune”, I said. “No,” he replied, “Not the picture, the printing for the brochures, the flyers and the advertising”. Ah ha! In a lot of cases, maybe in most cases, it doesn’t really matter if someone else is using the same picture…but if you are a plastic surgeon you sure don’t want the same picture being used by anyone else. That damages the credibility of your whole operation!

Stock Photography And Trust
As someone who has actually gone through the process of finding a plastic surgeon, I can attest that if more than one surgeon in the same geographical region is using the same stock photo, your going to see it. As you peruse the before and after pictures you can’t help but wonder if they are real. If you see the same face on more than one site…well, how are you going to trust anything else about the surgeon? In this case Rights Managed stock photography is definitely a value added proposition!


Power Point Presentations And Getty Images
Also of interest in regards to Rights Managed stock imagery, a couple of days ago I was contacted by a doctor who found one of my images through Google Image search and wanted to use it in a power point presentation to a group of his peers. The image in question is a Getty picture and I had neglected to link Getty from the photo on my web site. I sent the doctor the link and told him he needed to license the image from Getty. I wasn’t going to hold my breath. I figured that the process would be too daunting and the price too high. Oh well….


Licensing Stock Isn’t Brain Surgery
Surprise! He emailed me, said he licensed it, and thanked me for making the image available. I emailed him back asking how the process was and if he had ever licensed stock before. He told me that no, he had never licensed stock before and that it was no harder than ordering anything else on line. It wasn’t exactly brain surgery (turns out he is a vascular surgeon). He also told me it only cost him $15.00. Take that micro stock! Rights Managed is value added and economical as well!


Stock Photos And The Way Forward

As iStock and other micro agencies add higher priced collections, and mid-stock evolves, it becomes ever more apparent that micro is really simply an ultra low-priced RF product. There is a place for all price ranges of RF (micro included), and yes there is a place for RM, and yes, the road to success in the future, the way forward for stock shooters, will be paved with creative, dynamic, market-relevant photography no matter what the category.

A Stock Photo Strategy For Photographers

A Stock Photo Strategy

A former photo assistant and friend of mine, now on her own, just asked me to help her devise a strategy for her to incorporate stock photography in to her new and growing business. I know she is quite adept at the technical end of photography, has good ideas, thinks conceptually, and knows how to use Photoshop.

My advice to her is to shoot for her book (in the world of professional photography your “book” is your portfolio). When I first started out around thirty years ago my mentor at that time told me “always keep shooting for your book”. That advice is as sound today as it was then. You can push your own work further than you can when you are constrained by the limits of an assignment (OK, that may not be true on some rare assignments…but for the most part it is true). You can shoot the kind of work you want to get, the kind of work that speaks to your passion. The work you shoot for your self can be a much more accurate expression of who you are as an artist, and where you want to go.

As I said, my advice to her is to shoot for her book, and make each shot a masterpiece for stock as well. Particularly when shooting for RM nothing is out of bounds. I remember long ago shooting an image for my own book, back when I actually did assignment work. I photographed a man with a shaved head, turned him blue and had flames coming from his head. I sat on that image for quite some time before sending it to a stock agency. “Who the heck could use that for what?” was my reasoning. But eventually I did send the image to Getty, who promptly rejected it. So I sent it, dubiously, to an agency then known as The Stock Market (later bought by Corbis). They ran the image as the cover of their primary catalog. The first sale that image made was for $17,000.00, and it has sold many times since then. That was a lesson for me, and can be one for you too. Shoot for your book, and make the image available as stock, whether through an agency or through your own site. I can think of no down side to making great images available for stock.

When you are shooting for yourself you are quite likely to come up with a much stronger image than when you start trying to create something that will sell. If you succeed in making a truly arresting photograph, then the creativity of the art directors, art buyers, or editors that see the image will allow them to find ways to use that photo in the service of their client’s products and services. You will get more exposure and possibly a nice chunk of change too.

FOMO!

Elephant on his way!

A case of FOMO


What is more important, your career or your life? I ask this question because a lot of us get lost in chasing things; Chasing success, chasing money, chasing twitter, chasing Facebook. This morning I sought some solace from a good friend and fellow photographer, Shalom Ormsby (www.shalomormsby.com). I explained that to him that I was starting to feel a little frantic about not keeping up with all the tweets from twitter, and all the writing on the wall (Facebook). “You got FOMO!” he exclaimed, “You have Fear of Missing Out.” And it is true. My obsession with Social Media is starting to adversely affect the quality of my life! And that is what got me thinking about how important it is to put your life in front of your career. I already knew that, but a reminder now and then is necessary.

Don’t get me wrong, I have certainly enjoyed whatever success I have had, and not having to worry about paying my bills rates right up there at the top. But life does fly by all too quickly and it is important to enjoy every minute that you can. Whey young people come to me for advice on their photography careers, among other things, I advise them not to forget to plan their life as well as their career. Where do you want to live?
How do you want to live? What do you want your LIFE to look like five years from now, ten years from now? Build your career on those determinations, not the other way around. There is room for both a rich life and a satisfying career, but life needs to be nurtured as well as your career.

I am a huge proponent of visualizing what you want and then writing it down. There is some magic to that. Making your vision of what you want as real as you can, as detailed as you can make it, will propel you in that direction. I do not know if there is a metaphysical component, or if it is just because the more you want something the more likely you are to take the necessary steps to get it…but the process does work. A lot of experts have written on this subject and my favorite is Brian Tracy. I highly recommend anything Brian has written; give him a Google!

So while you visualize your life, I have to get back to my twitter account. I might be missing something!

The most valuable thing for my stock career right now

The most valuable thing, right now, for my business success

I often ask myself “what is the most valuable thing I can do right now for my business success?” As a stock photographer my immediate answer is: “Create more images!” But I don’t think that is really the correct answer. In my particular situation, and possibly yours too, the answer is to get my work in front of more potential buyers.

To buy it, they have to see it

My reasoning is as follows: If enough people see mediocre or even poor work it will sell. If I create the best work in the world and nobody sees it, it won’t sell. I do have a body of work, and I do think it is, at least, better than average. If I want to increase my income would it be better to create more work that is increasingly hard to find in the over-supplied market of today, or would it be smarter for me to increase the visibility of my work, an effort that would also boost any new work that I create in the future?

If they don’t see it, it doesn’t exist

I have many images that I think would sell if an art director became familiar with them. It is kind of like that old saying “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make noise?” For example, I recently shot a series of Sumo wrestler images that combine drama and humor. In one pose the Sumo wrestler is squared off with a businessman. This is a great image to illustrate any product or service that allows small businesses to effectively compete with large ones. But how many art directors, designers or photo editors know that this image exists? How many would even think to search under “Sumo” if they were looking for an image to solve this visual problem with? If they don’t see it, it doesn’t exist!

It quickly becomes very clear to me that the problem of visibility is the primary problem facing me in my stock career. Should I rely on Getty, Corbis and others to solve that problem? That would be a resounding no. My problem is not their problem. As with so many things, being proactive is the way to get the best results in this case.

What to do?

Long term I think it is important, as a stock photographer, to build your brand. It is important to create awareness in the potential users of stock photography that your work deserves special attention. In the short term, I think it is important to get your work in front of them. In both cases, the vehicle by which you can do that effectively and with relatively little cost is through your web presence.

The answer

In my case, I have decided that the most important steps I need to take right now to insure my continued success in stock is to keep improving my web site in terms of both search engine optimization and in getting more and more of my work up on the site. It is an inherently slow process. Uploading and key wording my stock pictures is a laborious process. Tonight I will be watching Survivor on TV while I use my laptop to enter Meta data for those stock photos.

Four months ago I started this process of making my web site truly work for my stock career. At that time I was getting about one person a week to my site. Now I am up to close to 200 a day. My goal is to get over 10,000 people a day, heck, maybe 20,000 a day (Dan Heller is getting over 20,000 a day). The progress is agonizingly slow, but it is also very real. In the last four months I have sold several prints, made enough off of Google Ads to pay for my hosting, and am aware of at least 2 stock sales through the agencies that were referred from my site. There may well have been many more, but I cannot track that. I have also handle a couple of transactions myself for images that are on my site but are not handled by other stock agencies. Like I said, slow, but encouraging!

To sum it up

I am certainly not quitting making new stock images. Far from it. I have actually increased my efficiency at creating images and create new stock photos on at least a weekly basis. But I realize that right now the best thing I can do to bolster my career is to continue to optimize my site in order to establish my “brand” and get my work in front of more buyers (licensees).