Really?

These essays almost universally fail to acknowledge the (ironically, far more well-known) similar meltdowns in the music, television, and movie business. The truth is, every industry whose product can be transmitted over the Internet is experiencing overwhelming changes, not just photography. This is no coincidence; the digital revolution has reduced the barriers to entry and distribution of content. This results in lower prices for consumers of the content. Some of the best-selling books for Kindle are free. Microsoft can’t make money selling encyclopedias. Movie studios fret about piracy. Musicians make more money from touring and licensing than from CDs. Why should photography be any different?

Further, the writers always seem to forget that we live in a Capitalist society, which is run by supply and demand. If a client is comfortable using a nonexclusive image from a source with high supply (microstock) and low price, why shouldn’t they use it? Similarly, if they desire to use an image that has a low supply — say, a unique news photo that cannot be replicated by amateurs in their basement studios — then the photographer and client are free to negotiate a price that both parties feel is fair.

As to the argument that photographers are hurting themselves, well, that’s an individual choice. I know a local landscape photographer in my area, and he handles all his own stock sales, at high rates. His reputation is well-known, his photos are better than mine, and clients seek him out to commission his photos. Fair enough. But I don’t have people knocking down my door to buy photography. When I started looking into stock, I didn’t have an extensive enough portfolio to submit to a conventional agency. The barriers to entry were too high. Microstock was, and remains, the best route for me to enter the photography market.

In the end, what annoys me the most about these essays is the fact that they offer no solutions to this supposed problem. What, every person with a DSLR and delusions of selling images online should apply to a high-end stock agency? And, if they are not accepted, they should just stuff their images in a drawer, never to be seen again? In what way is that realistic?

The fact is, there are legions of people willing to not only sell their photos for a few dollars, but many people willing to give away their photos for free (Flickr, I’m looking at you). Just as old-school photographers fear the microstock movement, I’m terrified of the folks who are happy to give away their stuff for free (and yes, some of it is quite good). To me, the difference betwen $4000 and $125 is actually a lot smaller than the difference between $125 and free. The fact is, it is possible to make a living selling photos at $125/pop. Competing against free is a lot harder.

Other blog entries on Microstock.

Search iStock for subjects you’re interested in. One great feature of iStockphoto is that they tell you how many sales each image has. Try to figure out: why does one image sell well, but other, similar images fail? When does an image tell a story and when does it not? The answer may be keywords or longevity, but more often than not it’s about the content.

Too many people assume beautiful images automatically sell. It’s not true. Images that sell are images that are useful. Being useful and also beautiful doesn’t hurt, though.

Further, too many people assume stock photography just happens, and they can capture it by walking around. That can happen. But more often than not, good stock photography is conceived, planned, assembled and executed with care (and a helping of creativity and serendipity). A good way to begin is like this: think of a magazine article. It can be an article you saw somewhere, or an article which you made up. For example: How to put fussy babies to sleep. How to celebrate Christmas on a budget. Something plausible. Then, create an image to illustrate that magazine article.

Keep the image clean and uncluttered. The message of the article should be the message of the photo; there should be no distractions. The easiest way to do this is to shoot on a white background, but it’s not absolutely necessary or even the best approach (I do this a lot, but it can be a crutch). The background should either contribute to the story, or be neutral; the background should not distract from the story.

One further thought: since most photos are used to sell something, know that positive almost always sells better than negative (unless it’s a really specific message, say about teenage depression). Clean sells better than dirty. Happy sells better than sad. Winning sells better than losing. Even if your photo is about a negative thing, put a positive spin on it (often with humor). So a sink full of dirty dishes might work better with person humorously looking at the dishes.

I sell my photos via iStockphoto. iStockphoto was the first micropayment site, and it has spawned dozens of imitators, all with slight variations on this business model. For the purposes of this essay all of these will be lumped together as “microstock agencies.”

Pro photographers, understandably, tend to feel threatened by this development, and commonly ask me “how could you sell your photos for just a few dollars? Aren’t they worth more?” This question was first posed by my photographer friends, more recently by the photoblogs.

The answer is, simply enough, microstock agencies are better for me, and photographers like me, than the old model. After the jump is my explanation of the reasons why.

Advantages of microstock over traditional stock, for photographers like me:

Lowered barriers to entry: Under the old model of stock photography, and true for many (not all) major stock sites today, you needed to submit a large library of images simply to apply. Back in the pre-digital days, this could mean making dupes of 100 slides or more. At $7-$10 per slide dupe, this could mean shelling out $700 or more just to apply to a stock agency. Even today, some high-end stock sites require a CD of 100 images. That’s a barrier that keeps out a lot of folks, including (initially) me. Micropayment agencies typically require only a few images to evaluate applicants; opens the door to contributors who had been shut out of the previous model. For folks like me, the question “how could you sell at a micropayment agency” could be answered with the simple rebuttal, “because the big houses would not accept me.” That’s the easiest answer, and I don’t think you can blame this on the microstock agencies.

Access to new markets: The low prices at micropayment agencies provide entry for clients who cannot afford the prices of regular stock. I’d say well over half micropayment agency clients are nonprofits, churches, and inividuals who previously did not have access to stock photography. In this sense, I think micropayment agencies are not much of a threat to traditional stock, because their client base is largely different.

So-called “Micropayment Theory:” Lower prices mean increased sales mean greater overall income. Micropayment theory goes like this: Given low enough costs of reproduction and distribution, if a product is priced lower, it will sell disproportionately more. ie, cut your price in half, and your sales will MORE THAN double. I’m not sure I completely buy this, but makes a degree of sense. Since distribution costs are essentially nil, there is no increased cost from churning out extra copies of an image. And since supply-and-demand law dictates that a lower price will sell more, the potential (at least) exists to make MORE money from a $1 image than from a $100 image. I’ve read that some experiences by music download companies give some evidence for this, but I’m unable to find the source. At the very least, it’s clear that lower prices lead to increased demand, and we can make up a lot of the price differential in volume.

Faster selling helps me learn the market faster: If I can sell 100 copies per year of an image at $1 each, that’s much better for me than selling it once per year at $100. Faster selling means I catch sales trends faster. I uploaded a few photos of ballroom dancers, and within a month, I saw that these were hot sellers, so I uploaded more. My toothpaste tube shots sold well enough in the first week that I staged a reshoot.

Inevitablility: micropayment sites are the logical next step in an industry trend going back decades. First, royalty-free stock sites undercut prices of the rights-managed agencies. Then, Photodisc surprised everybody by selling CD’s with dozens of images, for the same price as a single RF image. Now microstock agencies can connect new clients with new suppliers using the newest technology. Call this the “if you can’t beat em, join em” argument.

The World is Flat The Internet creates new business conditions (lower costs of market entry, lower costs of distribution) that did not exist before. This affects not just photography but many industries across the board. Industries which sell a product which can be reduced to computer bits (music, movies, photos) are especially affected. This change is inevitable and cannot be stopped no matter how much you whine about it. Therefore, realize your choice is to either change your business model to accommodate this evolution or die. See Thomas L. Friedman, “The World Is Flat“.

Downsides to microstock

You can’t just port your old way of doing things to the microstock model, though.

Low prices requre mass sales: If you have a good sense of the mass market, you can sell hundreds of copies of an image in a year (mirostock boosters like to talk about sales in the thousands, but experience tells me that these kinds of numbers are as rare as pearls in oysters). But if your tastes run to the offbeat, the weird or unique, then microstock looks much less lucrative. You really need to have a sense for images with broad appeal.

Understand the market: For the most part, major advertisers and design firms are not the bread-and-butter for microstock agencies. That’s not to say that they don’t use them; I know for a fact that a major international soft drink company used one of my microstock images in an ad campaign (and, tellingly, they were skittish enough about it that they wanted me to sign an additional contract, and pay me addtional money). However, the (potential) new markets opened up by micropayment are much larger. We’re talking about every church newsletter, every nonprofit organization, every dude with a blog. Many of these clients never bought stock photography in their career. These clients are not as concerned with making a strong visual statement, they’re not necessarily worried that a certain image was used by a competitor. They are just happy to make their communications look more professional within their extremely tight budget.

The pressure of free: Another interesting phenomenon is the rise of free photo sharing. Pros think $1/photo is a threat to their livelihood? Well, say hello to the folks who give their stuff away for free. There are plenty of folks willing to give away photos in exchange for the thrill of seeing their images in use. Sites like stockxng.com will allow you to do just this, and yotophoto.com will meta-search these sites for client convenience. I’ve found that these sites are a great source for snapshots of frequently-photographed subjects; as a client, I’ve used a free photo of the Pyramids of Egypt for a university Egyptology department. The photographer was thrilled.

Believe me, the difference between $1 and $0 is much larger than the difference between $300 and $1. When you earn $1 per image, the potential exists for a lucrative hobby, even a career. If you earn $0, you’re really exploring the meaning of the word “amateur” (ie, one who does something strictly for love). These free sites are just as inevitable as the micropayment sites, and no doubt they will grow ever larger and more sophisticated. We must all learn to live with them. The only solace I can offer is that, by definition, the free sites will inevitably feature lower production values and less experienced contributors. But the bar is raised higher for all of us.

The new reality:

I think what’s clear is that the new realities force all of us to operate at our very highest level. Basically, the stock world is stratified into (at least) three different spheres:

Free images: low end images of everyday objects, famous places around the world, vacation-type snaps

Microstock: good, solid model (people) photography, good images of common objects, classy photos of locations around the world, any kind of cliche concept

Full-price stock: high-end stock with a true style; locations not open to the general public (military or industrial settings); the uncommon, expensive, unique; high-end concepts executed with true style and without cliche

What the microstock model means is that photographers can no longer get away with taking ordinary shots of ordinary subjects and selling them as stock for hundreds of dollars. If your concept is something that reasonable photographer could take, they probably already have, and are undercutting you in price.

What’s easy to overlook in all the fuss is that there will always be a demand for higher-end professional work. Firstly, stock photography is but one aspect of the photographic industry; I don’t really see much of an impact from these trends on assignment work, for example. And within stock, there is a place for everybody within the three tiers I outlined. But each of us needs to leverage our assets to the greatest extent possible, to exploit whatever “edge” we have as much as possible.

A bit about me

Some background on my history: In college I spent most of my Junior and Senior years as the head photographer for our yearbook. We were amateurs, but we shot with pro equipment and took a professional approach to our work. My first post-college job (1988-1990) was as a photo researcher/conservator at the (pre-Corbis) Bettmann Archive in NYC, where I got a perspective on the stock photo industry from the inside. I left Bettmann to get a graphic design degree in 1993, followed by a series of staff and freelance print graphic design jobs in New York during the 90′s, where I was a stock photography client. I managed to make the transition to higher-education Web design/production/management around 2000, where I have been since. I’ve been an advanced amateur photographer since 1984, and a contributing photographer to iStockphoto since 2002, where (as “kickstand”) I am currently ranked #24 in overall sales.

So, I feel that I have a pretty good perspective on micropayment stock photography, having worked inside the old-style stock industry, as a stock photo client (clients both corporate and nonprofit), and as a successful micropayment stock contributor.

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Edit: 12-14-06 fixed math mistake, 7×100=700, not 7000

Well, here’s my oft-repeated advice for these people: forget about selling photos when you start out. Instead, work on improving your skills. You need to figure out how to control the image first; worry about figuring out the market later. Good stock usually starts out as a concept first; very few good stock shots come about by randomly walking around looking for “found” photos.

So there are two skills you need to acquire: 1. coming up with concepts and 2. controlling your tools so you can realize the concepts.

To come up with concepts, it helps to be familiar with how images are used in design projects. Look at the media around you: advertisements, brochures, even magazine articles. You’ll start to identify stock photography. Think: why was this used? What is the message behind the photo? What specific aspects of the photo (composition, model choice, pose, lighting) reinforce the design?

To learn the art of photography, there are many pathways. You could take a course. You could join a local camera club. You could buy a book. You could learn by careful observation of existing photographs. You could do all these and more.

One helpful book is the Photo Idea Index by Jim Krause. It is loaded with ideas and self-assignments. This book is helpful for beginners and advanced shooters alike.

Here’s a typical self-assignment: pick a subject (a person or an object, whatever) and shoot it from all different angles and perspectives until you fill up your compact flash card. Then erase the card (without saving the images) and keep shooting until you fill up the card again. Try not to shoot the same exact image twice; try to make sure each image is unique and different from all the others. Use different focal lengths, shoot from different distances. Try different lighting. By the time you fill up the card for a third time, you will start to see the subject in new ways and hopefully really improve your composition.