Stock photography?

jl-lb.ms

jl-lb.ms

John A. Lever
Local time
12:40 PM
Joined
Mar 5, 2006
Messages
244
Location
Kemah, TX
View My Gallery
Hi all,

Anybody here shoot stock photography? Within the last two weeks, I've been rejected from two different sites. Now, I think my photographs are pretty good, and I've won a few awards, but this is just brutal! I can't tell whether they're looking for something else or my photos just suck!

So, does anybody understand how the "stock market" works?

thanks,

John
 
I have shots on alamy. It takes a long time to process each image (mostly getting rid of the dust spots), and then keywording your images and so on. I recon its a waste of time since unless you have thousands of shots online on these types of sites you'll never make any real money.
 
Forget it. The market has changed. There's just too many pictures out there. People over eager to get published sell way too cheap. Unless you have something nobody else has you won't make any sales. Even then, you probably won't make any money to speak of.
 
Last edited:
I think stock photography has become something of a joke with the online world. You need volume, and a hell of a lot of it to make any kind of return, and then the amount of time and price of equipment....you never can make a return! Those stock photography sites have hugely harsh requirements, I was looking at one (whos name I cant seem to remember now) and they wanted minimum 20 megapixle images and any film shots had to at least 6x7 format and be drum scanned with a certain machine, etc etc etc then they offered you 25% of the sale which for a large sized image meant you were making maybe 2-3 dollars a pop. Ridiculous!

The others with easier requirement...maybe you can make a dollar per shot, most often not though. A friend of mine and I were thinking about getting into stock photography a couple years ago and after doing a lot of research we decided it was not worth the price of the camera to get into it, there was simply no way to make a real return.
 
On occasion a picture researcher will run across my images on my blog, which is very "Google friendly", and contact me, wanting to know what else I might have of a person, place or event. In that situation it's easy to sell specific limited rights and get several hundred dollars per picture per use.

Remember that most photographers, and even newspapers, purge their files from time to time, or just plain can't find the pictures. Thirty or more other photographers might have covered an event, like The Miami Pops Festival back in the late sixties. It seems that I might be the only existing source of photos. The festival was a week or two before Woodstock, same promoter and same line-up of rock groups.
 
One of my good friends is making a *very* good living off one of the stock sites, he's about #50 in volume out of about 50,000. He keeps this a secret so all his other photo friends won't call him a sellout. 😉
 
I shoot it...

Other than selling out to what will eventually kill stock photography for all but the top of the chart in terms of talent, microstock, you would do well to find a great niche that not a lot of people can do and then take advantage of technology and market your self.

Take for example travel photography, who does not love to shoot it, right? Not the niche to choose unless you can outshoot & out produce guys like Jim Erickson.
 
Avotius said:
Those stock photography sites have hugely harsh requirements, I was looking at one (whos name I cant seem to remember now) and they wanted minimum 20 megapixle images and any film shots had to at least 6x7 format and be drum scanned with a certain machine, etc etc etc .
Click to expand...

Are you talking about Getty Images? because they got the same kind of requirements.
 
I have representation by a few agencies including Getty and Corbis. Getting involved with shooting stock these days is extremely difficult due to the economy and the abundance of shooters out there. As X-Ray pointed out, you do need to be different. Very different. Having a personal vision that can translate into shooting stock and fulfilling the needs of of what is selling is very important. The current world-wide economic situation has affected stock sales a great deal. Very few, including myself, are making the kinds of money that they were making a year ago. Microstock agencies, royalty-free, has also affected the once dominant domain of rights-managed image sales. Where images are sold exclusively in an industry for a determinate period of time for a high price. No other client can purchase that particular image for the same use within that licensed period. With royalty free imagery, there is so much imagery, and images are sold generally without license. Anyone else can purchase that particular image for the same use anytime, anywhere. Hence the lower fees.

Avotius - stock is nothing of a joke. One does not need volume, while it does help. One needs very direct subject matter that will sell. It takes a lot of research and thinking to come up with different creative visuals to the same old subjects. That's why it is important to have a personal vision and develop it before taking on stock. It is much more competitive then ever.
 
Last edited:
Pretty much spot on Keith. The fact that millions more people use cameras has not diminished the long standing fact that it takes talent, unique vision and a strong drive to succeed.
 
With so much Royalty Free imagery out there the market for stock images has shrunk dramatically, and become much more specialized. I've seen such a huge drop in sales over the years, so much so that I gave it up entirely about three years ago as not being worth the time and gas. Ten years ago I was having great success with two different agencies, but it simply dried up. A good friend who was with one of the same agencies as me saw the same thing, at the same time. The editors one works with make a real difference in success, perhaps we were just not fitting the editors who came in then- and there was lots of turnover with editors.

It also seems too many 'designers' seem not to care about pictures the way they once did. My wife is a nurse and in many of the nursing magazines you see the same exact royalty free image used in three or four ads from different vendors- sometimes even twice on the same page, and the same three dozen images are in all the time.

Even when stock was paying better the ones who made the most money were the ones who shot lots and were able to come up with new faces or ways to render the same old ideas as stated above. That certainly can be a challenge creatively, but it can also be a real drain.
 
I was recently approved for Getty's "Contributer" program through Flickr. It's not microstock, but only pays a 20-30% commission to the photographer. I was originally holding out for putting together a 600 image portfolio for Lonely Planet Images, but I may just go with Getty as none of those pictures are earning me anything right now. From what I've seen, the quality on Alamy is pretty spotty, even with the higher commission rate I think my volume would be a lot lower as it's not as popular.
 
jl-lb.ms said:
Hi all,

Anybody here shoot stock photography? Within the last two weeks, I've been rejected from two different sites. Now, I think my photographs are pretty good, and I've won a few awards, but this is just brutal! I can't tell whether they're looking for something else or my photos just suck!

So, does anybody understand how the "stock market" works?

thanks,

John
Click to expand...

Hi John.

Sorry for the late contribution. I'm new to this forum and slowly making my way around it.

Speaking as a pro photographer (sports, events & portraiture) I agree with some of the other posts. There are people out their that want to make some quick money out of their hobby so sell their photos (too) cheap. It's a real problem for the profession. For a few years now, professional photographers have been missing out on work because "real business people" (pro photographers) can't compete with a hobby photographer with a DSLR and some spare time.

Thankfully the market is realising that a professional photographer will provide consistent high quality results. Whereas an amateur photographer might get a few good shots but the consistency just isn’t there, because they just don’t have the experience – they can’t given that a pro shooter is just going to be out there more often, camera in hand.

So, stock image libraries are fast becoming an outlet for amateur photographers. You don’t need the same level of consistency that a “normal” client demands. One or two great shots a month is enough to get published by a stock photographer. The down side of that relatively low barrier to entry is that almost anyone with a DSLR and an eye for composition can take part. Just look at flickr to see how many hobby photographers can make some really good photographs. Most (generalising here, bare with me) are unlikely to be able to produce the volume of consistently good photographs required to be a professional photographer. So stock image libraries are the perfect outlet for someone that isn’t running a photography business to make some extra money on the side.

Of course, to really succeed financially as a stock image photographer you need to make lots of photos. The only way to really do that is to do it full time. If you’re going to start photographing full time you’ll soon realise that stock photography isn’t going to earn you enough money to sustain a business. So you’ll develop a client base and build your photography business on that. And stock photography, if you decide to pursue it along side your photography business, will be a sideline income.

So, stock photography seems like an ok way to make a little extra money from your photographs. I don’t know anyone that is making any serious money out of it though.
 
I sell stuff off my website as stock and am selling enough to make a big impact on my income. I looked into the stock sites, including ones like Alamy that pay more than the crappy microstock rates. Problem is none of them pay that much and as Avotius said, they generally reject film images as 'too noisy' even if shot on fine-grained films. Silly. None of my buyers have complained about quality.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
I sell stuff off my website as stock and am selling enough to make a big impact on my income. I looked into the stock sites, including ones like Alamy that pay more than the crappy microstock rates. Problem is none of them pay that much and as Avotius said, they generally reject film images as 'too noisy' even if shot on fine-grained films. Silly. None of my buyers have complained about quality.
Click to expand...

What you describe is a race to the bottom. Like Al says/said (above) 'forget it.'
 
charjohncarter said:
What you describe is a race to the bottom. Like Al says/said (above) 'forget it.'
Click to expand...

Strangely enough people are buying and paying good prices for my stuff, though sales this year have declined from last year, which is probably the economy, since the last several years I've had increased each year.

I don't shoot anything specifically for stock the way some people did in the old pre-microstock days. Its not worth the time I'd have to put into it. I shoot stuff that interests me for my ongoing artistic projects and if someone is willing to pay me a couple hundred dollars or whatever to use one, why not?
 
I sell some of my pictures at photocase.com which is a small "independent" microstock agency. They have only two criteria for accepting pictures a) that it shouldn't look like a typical microstock picture and b) whether they like it or not. The also won't accept endless series of the same motive, so while at other agencies you wouldn't think about starting with less then 500 pictures, at photocase a portfolio of more than 100 pictures is already quite big and it would probably take you some months to build. On the plus side, you don't need as many pictures as on the big microstock agencies to get noticed.
They don't care about resolution and they do accept for example pictures with heavy grain if they feel that it adds to the atmosphere of the picture and aren't picky about dust if you failed to remove it completely. They even accepted a pinhole picture I made. The customers know that and they are coming there especially for that "alternative" look, since you can also find lomos, holga pictures with light-leaks, cross-processed, and alike.
However, their acceptance criteria are a bit of a mystery, it's very subjective and the rejection rate is very low. For me (and as I understand for most photographers), they accept between 5 and 20% of my submissions. It can very well happen that you have a perfectly good picture and they just reject it because they feel that it doesn't fit their style or that they have already too many similar pictures. That can be quite frustrating, on the other hand if they accept a couple of your pics it feels like winning the lottery 😉
What's good though, is that you only have to add keywords after they've accepted your photo so it's not too much work to try out.

It's by no means a way to earn your living. I see it more as a nice way to get back some of the expenses of my hobby, it's also an extension of my hobby since I enjoy the pics posted there and they have a friendly community (mostly German though, but they try to become more international). Those pics would otherwise rot in my archive or I would put them up on flickr (if i had an account), where people might just steal them.
I won't upload my best shots there and I usually scale down my images to the lowest resolution they accept (something around 3MP) so that customers can use the shots for websites or leaflets but not for posters or something similar, thus I don't have to have a bad conscience about destroying the market for pro photographers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom