Crowd Sourcing Crowd Enforcing?

Crowd Sourcing Might Become Crowd Enforcing

A few days ago I had a very interesting conversation with Randy Taylor of The Copyright Registry. The Copyright Registry is a service to help photographers deal with the ramifications of passage of the Orphan Works Bill (should it pass). But the interesting thing to me, at least at this point, is a possible side benefit of their service, finding, and establishing a record of unauthorized use of images. Figures on copyright infringement on the Internet indicate the problem is truly staggering with upwards of 80% of photography usage being without permission.

The Copyright Registry makes it possible for anyone to find the copyright owner of any content, as long as the content has been entered into the registry. The Copyright Registry sends out spiders that use image recognition software to match photography on the Internet with the works identified in their registry. This process creates a record of where and for what time periods those works have been used. This information then becomes available to the owners of the work and can be used to ferret out unauthorized uses and help establish abuses for use in legal proceedings.

As you can imagine, The Copyright Registry isn’t the only registry out there, but they do have some unique approaches, and at $25.00 per year, they seem like a bargain. The efforts of The Copyright Registry and other such services just might turn the tide against the massive copyright infringement that we see on the web today. If it becomes simple and affordable for every photographer to protect their work, then crowd sourcing might not just be the origin of so much artwork, but also the ultimate safeguard of that artwork.

Some salient points about The Copyright Registry that Randy shared with me:

-Users can find the owners from copies of their
images, including the uncredited, altered,
unattributed, stolen ones. It's all about
enabling users to find image owners.

- No pictures are uploaded or stored. It's all
done with text, which can be a simple database
export with hundreds of thousands of records at a
time. Very easy and efficient.

- Though we created this to counter the effects
of Orphan Works legislation that is progressing
worldwide, it has real-world benefits right now,
today, while statutory damages still apply.

- The cost is $25/year to register unlimited
images - a price set to attract semi-pro
photographers. Photo agencies get a huge benefit
from that ultra-low price point.

- Though it seems too good to be true, there is
no risk, no downside. Rights granted are less
than those granted in click wrap agreements with
major search engines. No images are exposed
beyond their current web exposure. Rights holders
are merely enabling people to find them from
copies of their images.

Check them out for your self: C-Registry.com

Pianos, Passion and Stock Photography

I just finished shooting a piano. I found a small music shop that let me shoot a piano in their showroom…for $25.00. Now I am all excited. That was an awesome price, but it isn’t why I am excited. I am dying to get into my studio and start putting an image together. I shot a model, a businessman, standing and looking at his watch, a few weeks ago. Last week I photographed a tall building in downtown San Francisco as well as shooting a piece of rope with a frayed end in my studio. I have all the parts I need to create an image of a businessman, standing unaware, as a piano, trailing a broken rope, plunges down towards him. This is going to be great. The idea is little bit corny, a lot cliché, but is certainly one that will grab a viewer’s attention with humor and a clear message. The message is about risk and the need to be alert and aware. And I am fired up to complete it.

What is important about my excitement is that it is this excitement that makes me successful. It is my passion for creating my images that propels me to do all the things that are necessary to keep my business going. It is this excitement for creating not just photographs, but the kind of photos I love to do; conceptual digitally manipulated stock photos, that drives me to continually think up ideas, and that has me happily putting in fifty or more hours a week.

I don’t think that you can succeed in stock right now without that excitement. Stock photography seems easy to me because I love doing it so much. I have encouraged a lot of people to enter the business. I have seen a lot of these people struggle. A few have gone on to succeed, and many more have drifted away from stock. I am far less likely to encourage others to jump into stock these days. The business has changed dramatically. Micro stock has made is easier than ever to get started in the business. Over supply of images and downward price pressures have made it harder than ever to make real money, but it can be done. To succeed in this stock photo environment you can’t be that businessman standing unaware. In a sense we are all that man standing under the falling piano. You have to be on top of everything, and it is just too much if you aren’t really into it. To succeed in today’s stock photography business requires dedication, creativity, awareness, a ton of elbow grease, and above all else, passion.

Above I have included the parts for my upcoming image. To see the final stay tuned! Now I am off to indulge myself in my passion, creating that stock photo.

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.

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!

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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.