My flickr Experiment

I am amazed at how resistant I am to trying new things! Specifically I am talking about using social media and the Internet. I believe in the Internet, I rely tremendously on technology, was a very early adopter of Photoshop and digital capture, and yet I still resist a lot of the new and even not-so-new developments.
I am writing this because I have just dipped my toe in yet another pool of water…flickr. I am not thrilled about the prospect of spending time learning something else that may or may not work for me (when I would rather be spending the time making my images). But I guess as part of my ongoing growth, and my determination to keep my career in stock photography a healthy one, it is in my best interests to forge ahead and familiarize myself with another part of this stock-photo-Internet puzzle. After all, Getty is mining flickr, I have encountered a number of Art Directors who peruse flickr, and certainly gazillions of people log on to flickr just to look at photos!

So I just opened a Flicker account and uploaded five images. In the beginning I am just uploading my funny anthropomorphic animal pictures. Most of these images are not with any agency, and the ones that are with a stock agency are with Kimball Stock where they are available as non-exclusive rights managed images. If I choose to license the images myself I can still do so.

Now What? I decided to do a search to see how long it would take to find one of my images. I searched under “massage” and “cats” since one of the images I upload was one of my “Animal Antics” images of one cat giving another a massage. Well, it didn’t take long! My image was the second one that showed up! It was however uploaded by someone else. It was also the fourth one, and the seventh one, and…a lot more times as I looked deeper and deeper, but nowhere was my name ever mentioned, and I gave up searching before I found the one I uploaded. Not exactly the most encouraging start to my flickr experiment!

It seems pointless to try and police my copyright in these cases…it will just use up my time and there certainly isn’t any compensation to be gained. What I did do was to leave a comment on several of my pirated images that the image in question was mine and that they could see more of my work at my website (I included my URL). If nothing else, maybe I can use the misappropriation of my images to help direct traffic to my site. Time will tell! If any of you have any suggestions about how to use flickr to promote your photography business, or how to deal with infringement of this kind, I’d love to hear it!

Adjusting My Strategy For Selling My Stock Photos

Adjusting My Strategy For Selling Stock Photos

In a recent interview with Tom Grill (Tom Grill Interview), perhaps the most experienced stock shooter in history, he indicated that he is shooting for RF (Royalty Free) and not RM (Rights Managed). His strategy is to provide RM quality images for the RF market thereby having the best images available for those who are looking for RF stock photos. My own recent strategy has been to focus almost entirely on Rights Managed images. But after re-reading Tom’s interview, I am adjusting my course a bit.

I am continually debating with myself on whether I am making a mistake by focusing so much on RM. The problem, as I see it, is that by shooting only RM I am eliminating a big portion of the market, probably the biggest portion at this point. To hedge my bets, and having read Tom’s advice, I have decided to send more of my new work to RF. I have to admit it makes me a little crazy! I just have a very hard time with the idea of selling my highly manipulated concept work for RF prices. I also hate the idea of selling it based on file size.

“What about Micro?” some of you might ask. First, I consider Micro to be just a lower priced version of RF. Secondly, I do worry about missing out on what, by volume, certainly is the biggest market. But the research I have done so far indicates to me that “traditional” RF, despite declining RPIs, still offers me a bigger dollar yield per image and per shoot.

Some of my RF stock photos with Blend Images have made me some pretty impressive sums of money. I have a number of images that have brought in, so far, in excess of $5,000.00 over a two and three-year period of time. I have a couple of RF shoots that have brought in $20,000 to $30,000.00 over a similar time frame, shoots that only cost me two or three thousand dollars to execute. I continually have to fight my “old school” mentality about stock and work at embracing the new realities…like them or not. But it certainly helps to have the knowledge and guidance of photographers like Tom Grill to help point the way.

The RF that I have shot has been almost entirely for Blend Images. When Blend recently began to offer Rights Managed stock I went back to doing what I love doing most, those highly manipulated concept stock photos. Now I will be sending more of those images to the Royalty Free offerings, testing the water, and hoping that the sound I hear is a cash register ahead and not a waterfall!

Selling Photos To The Largest Internet Market

A Three-Step Process For Reaching The Largest Market On The Internet

The Internet opens up not just a gigantic market for your photography, but also opens up numerous sub markets. I am using my website to get my stock photos seen by more of the “traditional” licensees of stock, to get those same images seen by potential licensees who normally would go to Getty, Corbis, Blend and the like but still might not see my images, and to reach consumers who might want prints, printed merchandise, or might want to license images for non-commercial purposes. That consumer market is the largest market out there and I definitely want to tap into it. Following is my three-step process to tap into that market.

As most of my images are aimed at the traditional stock photography market, I would guess that they are not of that much interest to the layperson. Step one is to create images that will be of interest to the public in general.
My web master pointed out to me that there were a lot of searches being conducted on the Internet for “pictures of dragons”. My associate, Stephanie Roeser, volunteered to create some dragon images from some old photos I had shot of an iguana, hence the dragon image you see above. We also have fire-breathing versions, one with a castle and so forth.

Step two is to get those images (the dragons in this case) in front of that target audience, i.e. loading them onto my site, creating products in CafePress, and uploading the Images to ImageKind (in my case) for fine art prints. With CafePress we can offer the dragons on coffee mugs, apparel such as aprons, T shirts, and baseball caps, mouse pads, journals, pet bowls and numerous other imprinted products.

Step three is to write about those images, maybe put them in a blog (wink, wink), write an article (I always knew that English degree would come in handy) Dragon Article, and, of course, make sure the images are well key worded. The article is first published on my site, then after being indexed by Google and other search engines, it is published on various e-zine sites.

It really is simple. Created images that appeal to the public, make them available over the Internet, and then make sure that the images will appear in searches. Stay tuned, I will eventually know if this works!

¬

On Getting Seen

I met a designer at a party this weekend. He says he buys a lot of stock photography…and always at iStockphoto. This brings up for me a continuing concern. By not being in the Microstock world, there are a ton of buyers who are not seeing my images. I have also spoken to a lot of designers and art directors who use RF but not RM because of their perception that RM is too expensive. I create most of my work for RM and am concerned that so many potential licensors won’t even see my work if they are limiting their searches to Micro and RF. The good news; the designer I met at the party said he also uses Google to look for images.

It is a relief then when I hear that designers and art directors do use Google to search for stock photos. That gives me the ability to get my images in front of them and at least have the possibility that they may license those images. I have been working hard to bring my site up in the search engines. I started that process about six months ago. I am happy to be able to say that I have gone from about one visitor a week to about 300 per day. But that is a mere drop in the bucket, as my web master is fond of pointing out to me. We really want over 10,000 a day!

I have not moved up significantly in the search results yet. I am getting more people finding me through long tailed keywords, and I have experienced some sales through that. I am selling one or two products through CaféPress each week, I have made a spattering of print sales through Imagekind, and have licensed a few images through my site. I am also sending about 20 people a day on to Blend Images, Corbis, Getty and Kimball stock. What percentage of those people, if any, go on to actually license an image I have no idea. But surely some of them must license an image! If so, I am ahead of the game.

As I mentioned, I fully expect to have thousands of visitors to my site each day. It might be months from now, or years. I don’t know. But I do know it is important to get my images in front of people, and that I am making progress with my site. I think it is important for any stock shooter to get their site up, optimized and functioning well. As the stock photo world gets more and more cluttered with photos, getting seen will become ever more important. As photographers, insuring that our web sites are art director friendly, and search engine optimized, is something concrete that we have control over and that we can do to increase our revenue. I believe as time goes on this will be just as important for Micro shooters as for those of us in the traditional stock photo model. As hard as it is to fathom, getting our web site functioning well for us may well be more important than creating new images.

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.

Opportunities Are All Around Us

Hey, that's me they are operating on!

Just over a year ago I had emergency surgery in which a couple of feet of my small intestines were removed. Ouch! Six months later I had an “incisional” hernia when the incision site from the first operation gave way. The repair involved inserting a plastic mesh underneath my abdominal muscles. In a true case of “If you don’t ask for it you won’t get it” I got permission from both my surgeon and from the hospital
to have my friend and fellow stock photographer, Shalom Ormsby, photograph and video tape the operation. The stock photos and clips are available through Getty Images.

This morning Shalom dropped by and handed me my share of the first royalties we have received from this material. This little event demonstrates several points that I think are important. Firstly, it behooves us all to have strategic alliances with others in this industry, whether it is other shooters, stock agencies, modeling agencies…the more strategic alliances the better. Secondly, it takes a lot of time for the wheels of stock to turn. It is not at all uncommon in my experience to wait six months to a year before your efforts begin to pay off (keep in mind the vast majority of my experience is with Rights Managed stock, and I have zero experience with Micro Stock). And thirdly, the opportunities to create income generating assets (stock photos) are all around us, all of the time, if we just pay attention.

So go buddy-up to another stock shooter, have an operation, and be patient!

On Demand Printing: Selling Mugs, T-Shirts and Mouse Pads!

For most of my career I was so focused on advertising, corporate and editorial markets that it never occurred to me that there was money to be made in what is called the paper products industry. Paper products include greeting cards, calendars, coffee mugs, puzzles and so forth; when your photo is part of the product.

It wasn’t until I established a line of greeting cards that I realized that this whole vast other category existed. Shortly after getting the John Lund’s Animal Antics® line of cards established we began to license the images for coffee mugs, jigsaw puzzles, figurines, checks, even Christmas ornaments! The problem with this market his how incredibly difficult it is to penetrate. But that has changed now. For little or no money you can open a storefront with CafePress or one its numerous competitors. I mention CafePress specifically because that is where I have started my little enterprise, but there are numerous online businesses now that offer on demand imprinting of a huge variety of merchandise.

It takes a little work. You have to choose which of your images to feature, size them, go through the process of uploading them and so forth. The hard part is driving traffic to your store. But again, that is simply a matter of SEO and elbow grease. All of us who are passionate about our photography have first hand experience that there are people out there who are willing, eager even, to purchase our work. Think of search engine optimization as helping them find what they want.

Of course, it helps to have the kind of images that people want to buy as refrigerator magnets, mouse pads, and aprons. It is also important to make sure your images are available for such licensing. My funny animal and pet pictures are for the most part not handled by stock agencies such as Getty and Corbis. Many of the images are licensed through Kimball Stock whom I chose for their niche of animal pictures and also because they license for non-exclusive use. That way I can still offer these images on the products and merchandise that I want to.

Well, I guess I will wrap this up because I have a lot more uploading to do for CafePress!