Long And Arduous And Worth It

This process of making the web work for your stock photography business can be a long and arduous one. I started my serious efforts eight months ago, and while I have seen results, they aren’t as impressive as I hoped for. But I am not discouraged, far from it. I am more convinced than ever that a strong presence on the Internet is going to be increasingly beneficial and important to all stock shooters.

My goal is to be getting 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a day to my site. Right now I am averaging a tad over 300 a day. That is up from one visitor a week eight months ago, but obviously I have a long, long way to go. But even with just 300 a day I am seeing a benefit. Today I was contacted by an Agency in New Zealand about licensing an image they found on my site. I asked them how they happened to find me. They told me they had searched Getty and Corbis and the “usual places” but couldn’t find the image they wanted. They then did a Google search and found my image.

Since virtually all of my images are handled by various agencies, most of those who find something they are looking for on my site are sent on to the respective agency handling that image, and I don’t know if they make a purchase or not. But I do see that every day numerous visitors do go to an image page and then on to Blend Images, Getty, Corbis, and Kimball Stock. I don’t know what percentage of these visitors’ license stock photos, but some do, and as my traffic increases so will those sales.

As I mentioned, success on the Internet, for me, is proving to be not just long, but arduous as well. The process of uploading my images, along with the metadata entry, is agonizing for me. In each of the arenas I am attempting to incorporate there is a ton of work to do. I am way behind in tagging and key wording the images I have on ImageKind. My CafePress site requires mountains of work before it will be ready for prime time. My efforts with Flickr at this point are pathetic and my own site is rife with mistakes, misspellings, inadequate key wording and lack of images…and what I really want to be doing is making images! But I firmly believe that in the long run getting my images seen is at least as important as making new ones.

Getty has instituted “stacks” in their search. The result is that while overall the bulk of my images will be seen more readily, some images will be buried much deeper. What can I do about that? I can get more eyeballs on my images through my Internet presence. I can do that by getting all of my images up online, making sure that they are key worded well, and that my site is filled with well-organized quality content. I am attempting to add quality content by writing articles, interviewing important people in our industry, and sharing my experiences in this blog.

Time to Be Shooting!

It seems that a lot of photographers have cut way back, or have stopped shooting stock altogether. I can understand that. Every time I turn around I hear bad news for the economy and threatening news on the stock photo front. Today I happened across a micro stock blogger who was pretty pumped up that after six months of dedicated work, he had just earned a new monthly high of over seven dollars. Is that depressing or what? BTW, no offense intended to all you micro stockers. I encourage micro stockers to learn as much as they can about the other areas of stock. The market embraces all the forms of stock and all of us need to know as much as we can.

In my opinion though, now is a great time to be shooting micro or macro. I can’t help but feel the weight of all the bad news and it makes me want to conserve my money. But I haven’t lost sight of the fact that almost every stock shoot I have attempted has turned a profit. Seriously. And in this economic environment there are deals to be had; it isn’t hard to find people willing to work at bargain rates.

Great images rise to the top

My approach is to put extra effort into coming up with shoots that either cost me little to nothing, or that I am super excited about both in terms of the shots themselves and in what yield I believe they will return. Of course, I pretty much believe that if I am really excited about creating a stock image it will naturally end up turning a nice profit. Great images rise to the top. I have a number of images that to this day I can’t figure out how people use, but I was excited about creating them, and I still love to look at them (one of my big vices is staring endlessly at images I have created). And many of these ideas have brought in thousands of dollars. A quick example of an image that cost nothing but has returned thousands: a close-up image (RM) of an airplane lavatory sign indicating, “occupied”. Now don’t go and copy it…it still sells!

Creativity is the answer, again

Creativity is the answer, as it usually seems to be. Creativity not just in creating the shot, but also in coming up with photographic ideas, and in coming up with ways to create images that don’t require a lot of money. I keep a list of hundreds of ideas. I am constantly adding to this list. I can now go through that list and filter out the ones that can be executed with little to no expense and bring those to the front. It is a creative challenge. I am actually having fun with it!

One great benefit from these times is that I am fine-tuning my process; becoming more efficient and less wasteful. These processes not only serve me well now, but also will serve me well in the future. Already I have benefited from relying less on employees. When an assistant recently moved on I resisted replacing her. Not only does that save me some overhead, but also as a result of it I have learned to use programs myself that I used to relegate to others. Ultimately I not only save money, but I am also in more control of my business. It’s all good!¬

Stock Photo of a Wrecking Ball produced with quality images and Adobe Photoshop tools.

Perception Is More Important Than Reality

Out with old, in with the new! That is the concept behind my concept stock photo "Wrecking Ball". But perhaps more importantly, the image is a good illustration of the fact that the "imagined" image can be more powerful than the literal one. In stock photography I certainly believe it is true that “perception” is more important than “reality”! I believe the viewer is more comfortable and more accepting of an image that fits their mental picture…and let’s face it…so many times reality just does not live up to what we picture in our heads. Also, when a viewer sees an image and it matches their perception of something they can quickly, in their thinking, move onto the message…rather than using their subconscious process to fit the reality into their pre-conceived notions. At any rate, in my experience, catering to preconceptions seems to work well in conceptual stock photography.

Difference between Perception and Reality

When I first decided to do this image I went to a demolition site in San Francisco and shot a few images. It was, however, immediately apparent that the reality didn't match my mental picture. What I had pictured in my mind as a wrecking ball was a steel ball on the end of a chain…smashing through brick and concrete as it swing laterally from the end of a crane. In reality, it is a tear-shaped concrete device on the end of a cable usually being "dropped" onto a building…at least that is what I was witnessing as I set about shooting that demolition scene. My “imagined image” was far more graphic and powerful than the real one. I decided to go with the perception rather than the reality.

Finding the Parts

As I was walking back to my studio pondering how to create my image it occurred to me that a manhole cover might do as a wrecking ball. Since I had my cameras with me I photographed one about a block from my studio. I also photographed the sidewalk including a portion that was cracked. Once back at the studio I set up an old rusty chain that had been gathering dust for some time in my prop room and shot that. I scrounged up a brick and shot several angles of that too. In my stock photo files I found some pictures of a simulated computer explosion I had photographed years before for a magazine cover. Shots I had taken of a freeway demolition (after the 1989 quake) provided the background. In short time I had all the parts I would need to create my new photographic reality.

Creating the Image

To create the image I started with the wrecking ball. I used the "spherize" filter in Photoshop on the manhole cover, a cover that had been worn smooth by years of traffic. The filter, at 100% turned the flat manhole cover into a steel globe. I added a specular highlight by creating a new adjustment layer (Brightness and Contrast) and maxing out the brightness…then using the accompanying layer mask to isolate the layer effect to just one small hotspot. I repeated the process, this time darkening the adjustment layer and painting it around the bottom edges to provide an even greater illusion of roundness. I used the pen-tool to create a clipping path around the outside of the ball…turned the path into a selection (with a one-pixel feather) and then inverting the selection before deleting… leaving only my new very “dimensional” “wrecking” ball.

I created another clipping path to separate the chain from its background. After copying and pasting the chain into the image with the ball, I used Free Transform to size and position it…then used the warp filter for adding some curve to the chain…and the motion blur filter to add just a touch of movement.
The pen tool and clipping path again did the job for selecting the sidewalk, which, after pasting in, I turned into a crumbling wall by the use of layer masks “painting” the sidewalk in and out as needed . The layer masks also worked well to “paint in” the exploding computer shots to look like dust and flying debris. Finally, the same technique was used to add the bricks. To integrate the whole image I used an adjustment Hue and Saturation control in an adjustment layer to give the image a sepia-toned look. That is how a manhole cover and a sidewalk become a much more powerful graphic than the real thing....

Success!

Though done many years ago, the image is a timeless one. By creating images that match our “perceptions” rather than “reality” we can create stock images that have both more impact (OK…pun intended), and provide a longer revenue stream. The best of both worlds!

The Most Influential Photographer of My Career (Not)

The Most Influential Photographer of My Career (Not)
I recently got an e-mail from a young photographer wanting to know who was the most influential photographer was for my career. It got me thinking. The most influential person in my career hasn’t been a photographer at all. Rather, it was a motivational speaker named Brian Tracy. I have an audio book on tape, and now CD, by Brian called “How To Get Everything You Ever Wanted Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible”.

I have listened to Brian Tracy more times than I can remember and every single time I get something out of it. There are always nuggets that motivate me and fire me up for just a day and there are a number of principles that I believe, if followed, can’t help but make me succeed.

For example, one of Tracy’s tenets is that one should take a realistic assessment of where one is. A person needs to be realistic if he or she is going to make good decisions. This is an important thing I try to remember whenever I am making decisions, but looking back one particular instance comes to mind when that “reality check” made a huge difference in my career.

The year was 1990 and while I was coming off of my best year yet, the economy was tanking. It was like someone had turned off the faucet, I just wasn’t getting any work. I took a good hard look at my entire situation and in particular my portfolio. I asked myself who was going to hire me instead of my competition…and why. The answer was no one. I wasn’t doing anything unique, anything to set myself off from other photographers.

I had been dabbling with in camera multiple exposures. That experimental work was the only really interesting work I had. I committed to building my entire book around that technique. I spent the next two months going through my files finding images that worked together, and creating multiple exposure in-camera montages. Then I went out and started showing the work. Two things happened. First, it worked. I began to get assignments for that kind of approach. Secondly, it was one thing to find images in my book that worked well together, but an entirely different thing to get an assignment and have to create a montage from images that don’t work well together! Arrgh!

It was precisely at that time that a friend suggested to me that I look at this new thing called Photoshop. I did. As they say, the rest is history. Now at that time I was truly broke, but I knew I had to start using this program if my career was going to succeed.

I used the money I was saving for taxes to buy a used Macintosh computer. I called Adobe and asked if I could trade photography for a copy of the program. They agreed and even offered to give me some training. To make a long story short, I immediately began to train myself by making stock shots for my portfolio and soon began to use Photoshop in my assignment work.

Another Brian Tracy principle that I embrace is this: Ask yourself what is the one thing that you need to do better; more than anything else, to move your career forward. What is your weak spot? Find out that weak spot and then master it. Once you have mastered it, ask yourself, what is the one thing that you need to do better more than anything else to move your career forward…and so on.

Heck, how could anyone follow this principle and not succeed? BTW, right now, in answer to that question, I am learning Final Cut Pro. I believe motion is already an important part of the stock photo mix and the thing that right now is the most important skill to acquire to advance my career in stock.

To take one more page from Tracy, I have a plan and I write it down. There is something magical about writing goals down. There are some who believe there is something mystical about this process, and maybe there is, but what I ascribe to it is firmly planting the goal in your mind and giving you a much higher chance of actually taking the steps one needs to take to reach that goal.

The process is simple. Write down your goals and the dates by which you want to achieve them (push yourself but be realistic). Then write down the steps you need to reach those goals and assign deadlines for each step. If you miss a deadline, simply give it another deadline using your best educated guess. This plan is not set in concrete, and as you review it changes will come. Your goals will shift; the steps will come and go. But you will be making progress and success will breed success. I have followed this process and every once-in-a-while I pick up an old plan and…wow…I have reached so many of my goals!
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how easily it is for me to lose sight of those important steps I need to take while I attend to all the piddling little things that vie for my attention. Reviewing my plan, the more often the better, helps keep me on track to actually do those important things. To that end, writing out my goals each morning is a truly powerful way to stay on track and reach those goals faster than I ever thought possible!

The Future of Stock Photography - Again!

Someday there will be an ‘e-bay” of photography where consumers and businesses, designers and art directors, agencies and photo buyers will all go to find and license image for their disparate needs. A student will look for images to complete a homework assignment…and an Art Director for a major ad agency will find an image for a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal. The student might pay twenty-five cents while the Art Director might pay $10,000.00. The popularity of an image, in conjunction with the use, will determine the price that will be paid. The best photographers will make more money than they ever have before…and photographers who are sound business people will find a way to make good money too. Those of us who are less creative, less diligent and less motivated will fall further and further behind. I guess that is one thing that won’t really change in the business of stock photography! Those who “get it” will thrive…as they always have while those who remain stuck in the past will slowly (or quickly) fade away.
As professional photographers who sell their images to the advertising, design and editorial communities, many of us have lost sight, or perhaps have never seen the tremendous buying power of the “consumer”. My eyes were opened to that when I began to sell my Animal Antics images…pictures of funny animals in anthropomorphic poses and situations, as greeting cards. Sure, I only make a few cents per card…but when the public is buying over a hundred thousand cards a month those pennies can really add up!
Even with sales like that most people who I talk to about my greeting cards have never seen the cards for sale! So I conclude that sales of a hundred thousand cards-a-month represents only a small fraction of the total possible number of sales. The potential income from selling images to the public, to the consumer, is staggering. Especially if you consider that images, for the most part, are a universal language.
So how do we, the photographers, tap into that market? Well, obviously greeting cards portraying funny animal pictures is one way to do that. But that really isn’t a very efficient way to do it. The internet is the way to do it…but perhaps not yet. That above mentioned “e-bay” for photographs…or some similar mechanism to marry the elements of consumer, photographs and transactions, needs to come in to place. The need is there…I bet the technology is too…the rest is simply a matter of time…and preparation.
For me that means having a website that is reasonably functional in getting my images in front of the public…and having content that the public wants. That content can be anything from pictures that consumers can download and print (and that they WANT to download and print), to images they can license for their small business or images they can use to spice up their social networking site. I am attempting to offer such content to the consumer by linking up with Café Press for products such as coffee mugs, calendars, handbags, T-shirts and the like…to ImageKind for fine art prints, to the various stock photo agencies that license my photographs for more traditional advertising and promotional uses. Currently I use Blend Images for ethnic lifestyle and conceptual imagery, Getty Images for most of my conceptual and business images, Corbis also for concept images, and Kimball Stock for the licensing of my anthropomorphic animal pictures. I also continue to sell greeting cards through the Portal brand that is published and distributed by the Marian Heath greeting card company.
Any investment counselor will tell you that the first thing to do in investing is to diversify. That is of particular importance in time of uncertainty…and I think these times qualify for that label. As photographers we need to follow that same advice. How do we diversify? For me that means a multi-pronged approach. I diversify in my content, in my target market, and in my distribution.
I create images for the traditional advertising, design, corporate and editorial markets. Within those markets I create lifestyle images, business images, and conceptual images. Here I am diversifying the content within the category of traditional stock photography. Next, I create images for the consumer…that is images that in them selves are or can be product. That means everything from photo imprinted coffee mugs to photos for checks, photos for screensavers…you get the picture. I also, once a year, take a trip specifically to shoot travel images. Again…further diversification of my content.
To diversify my distribution I utilize both those traditional “powerhouse” stock photo agencies like Getty and Corbis, and niche agencies like Blend Images (for ethnically diverse lifestyle and business imagery) and Kimball Stock (for funny animal pictures). Further diversification of my distribution is achieved by selling greeting cards through Marian Heath greeting cards and hiring a licensing agent to sell and distribute other “consumer” images for such wide-ranging applications as vet reminder cards, gift books and even figurines and picture frames!
And finally, I have my website which I am fine-tuning as a vehicle to make my photographs available to anyone who might be interested in them, and in guiding them to the appropriate distributor for their needs. I believe that those of us who establish such websites now and learn from that process, will have a huge head-start when that new paradigm lands on us…as it surely will! When that wave hits I want to be experiencing the thrill of riding it rather than the pain of being crushed beneath it.

A Strategy For Success In Stock

Before we get down to the state of stock photography, check out my latest image...It's Ganesh the Hindu God , the Remover of All Obstacles.



A friend of mine, and former assistant, called me yesterday to pick my brain bout the state of stock photography and what kind of strategies I would suggest for stock success in the coming years. That is a popular topic among all of us photographers who derive most of our income from stock.

In the coming paragraphs I will attempt to work out my own reasoning and strategy for dealing with the challenges we are seeing in this arena.

To begin with…just what is the state of the industry? If I put aside as much speculation as I can and just stick to what I really know is true I come up with these following points:

1. My stock photo income is far more volatile than it ever used to be.
2. I have many more images in stock and yet my income from those images is relatively flat.
3. The stock agencies seem to be taking almost everything I submit to them.
4. I still have large sales…but now have many more minuscule sales.
5. There are wonderful, high quality images everywhere…in Rights Managed, Rights Ready, Royalty Free, and in Micro Stock.
6. There are new agencies still popping up all the time.
7. Crowd sourcing agencies are still being created.
8. Consolidation is still happening.
9. I have images selling great in both Royalty Free and in Rights Managed…the image seems to play a bigger role than the business model.
10. Virtually all the stock photographers I know are cutting back on production.


Those are the facts as best as I can determine them. So what do I make of this?

I think in the short-term things are going to be very difficult for those of us who depend on
stock photography for our income. All of us stock shooters are experiencing declining
revenue, or at least declining RPI (return per image). At first it seemed that everyone’s
reaction was to increase production… which of course has put more downward pressure on
stock image prices.

Now I am seeing photographers left and right pull back on their productions, cut back on
staff and overhead, experiment with Micro, and focus more on Rights Managed. I believe
that with the economy the way it is, and with the already massive glut of images in the
market place, in the short term this stock photo career is going to be a little painful!

My short-term strategy is…surprise…to produce more images. I have stopped doing large
shoots of lifestyle imagery and am focusing on highly conceptual high-end images that
generally require a lot of post to produce. In short, I am trying to make more images that
are competing with fewer images and that are clearly needed in the market place. I still
suspect that in the very short term my income will go down. Oh well….

I am, however, very excited about the middle to long term future of stock…but it will be a
different kind of stock world. I see my market as including the current clients I have for
stock…but also including the massively larger market of non-professional image buyers.
What do I mean by non-professional image buyers? I mean the woman who needs an
image for her business card as a part time massage therapist…or the executive who needs
photos to spice up his Power Point presentation…or even the occasional person looking for
a print for their living room. All the people who need photos…who now can find and
purchase, or pirate them, on the Internet. The people who have never heard of stock
photography agencies. . but need and/or want photos. These people comprise an awesomely huge market that the vast majority of us professional photographers are not tapping into.

I believe there is also another possible market developing…one that has been around for a while, but is going to increasingly develop. That market is the traditional stock client who has decided to look beyond stock agencies for images. As more and more photographers put their images up online…as more and more amateurs put THEIR images on line…the possibility of finding “cool” images increases…and thus more and more designers and art directors will turn to Google to fill their needs or find that special image. Someday there will be an efficient vehicle to match photos with prospective buyers but in the meantime they aren’t waiting. This morning I had an Italian magazine contact me via my website to use an image of mine for their cover. They found me by Googling…and the image they asked for is with Corbis…which I directed them to.

Which brings me to my strategy. My strategy is a very simple one. Get my images in front of prospective buyers…all of them. I am in the process of optimizing my site and putting all of my images up on line. I don’t want to deal with clients and billing and all that…but I am putting images up with clear guidelines about where to license them for stock, where to buy products with my images imprinted on them…and where to buy prints. I have also begun to create more images that are aimed at those non-traditional markets. For example, I just completed Ganesha…the Hindu deity of Prosperity. While I know the image well do well as stock…I suspect it might do far better outside of a stock agency. Either I will submit “Ganesha” to an agency and reserve “Paper product rights”…the rights to market it as a product…or I will simply not give it to an agency. I believe that the income from the image as a product could far exceed the revenue from licensing it for advertising and corporate uses.

Tune in six months to a year from now and I will let you know how this process is going!