Advance Notes: Have you recently bought a digital camera, and are you wondering if the same markets that always accepted your color transparencies will accept your digital images? What has changed? The Digital Age has flattened the stock photo world to a stage that an individual editorial stock photographer now has more leverage than ever.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Now that we have Google et al on our side, it's very easy for a photobuyer to flex their researching muscles and come up with a picture that just a decade ago would have been nearly impossible to find -- let alone license -- in an appropriate amount of time.
If you review publications from the last century, you'll notice photobuyers leaned toward making-do with easy-to-locate pictures (generic) that they slapped in the layout, and then moved on to the next project. Today's sophisticated reader expects more. The search engines today, based on search of text descriptions of images, provide avenues for rearchers to find more specific pictures; "best" pictures instead of second best.
The result: happy researchers and happy photobuyers.
Check out www.photosource.com/bank and you'll see how photographers are getting aboard this new 'text-centric' way of providing images to stock buyers.
As for the question of whether you can work with the same markets now with digital images, the answer is yes. With the new technology, "editorial stock photography" needs haven't changed. What has changed for the editorial stock photographer, is the delivery of pictures (speedy!), the absence of worries about losing a transparency, and a new work flow.
The Digital Age has flattened the stock photo world to a stage that an individual editorial stock photographer now has more leverage than ever.
Most editorial buyers are now looking for highly specific pictures. Such images make their productions, periodicals, magazine articles, textbooks, more unique, and more appealing to their readers. If a photo researcher can find an image that is not generic (i.e. everyone is using it) but rather, specifically matches the writing content of their production, they are successful at their job.
Any photographer these days who has a deep selection of images in a specific category, is a very important resource to a target group of photobuyers out there whose "publishing themes" focus on that category. These buyers' monthly budgets for photography can range from $20,000 per month to $90,000 per month.
No, not much has changed. You'll continue to find a home in today's editorial stock photography field if you continue to photograph subject areas that please you and match the subject focus of specific publishing houses and magazines.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA. Telephone: 1 800 624 0266 Fax: 1 715 248 7394. Web site: www.photosource.com/products
Welcome
to EditorialStox.com. Here's where you'll
find information about photo marketing, selling pictures, social photography, business how-to, and working with photobuyers.
The Largest Stock Photo Agency in the World
Who is the Biggest?
Advance Notes: Ever wondered which is the largest stock photo agency in the world? The answer might surprise you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Did you know you are a member of the largest stock photo agency in the world? Photobuyers have quickly learned to check this "agency" out first before turning to any other stock photo agency.
When buyers seek a specific-content, hard-to-find image, they know not to turn to Getty, Corbis, Jupiter, et al. These agencies do a great job serving up generic and standard pictures, but for real-life specific action and location images, buyers know to go to this other "agency."
While the familiar large stock agencies have been laboring to keyword their images for access to Internet searches, they're woefully behind the precision and extensive nature of the keywording being done by many independent photographers.
Getty, Corbis, Jupiter, et al have not been keeping up. And none of them is the largest stock agency in the world. They represent only a small fraction of the number of stock photos that reside in the files of the Internet's worldwide database of photographers.
The largest stock agency is the Internet + Search Engines + You. Increasing numbers of photobuyers are finding out they can easily locate the source of the exact photo they need by simply using a search engine such as Google, and typing in several specific words describing the photo they need. *
THE GOOGLE EXPERIENCE
You've no doubt experienced it: "the Google Experience." You needed to know the name of the village where Michaelangelo was born, or the name of his father. You typed your question into the Google search bar and your answer was available to you in seconds.
A text search on the Internet for photos is no different. If you were a photobuyer researching the making of violins in Italy, you would have found that Cremona is famous for its violins. But you need an aerial view. Your search request on Google or Yahoo would read like this: Cremona Italy violin aerial. Presto, the name of a photographer (or photographers) who has this photo comes up. Try it.
How large is this Internet directory of photographs? You be the judge. Estimate how many individual photographers now have digitized and labeled their collections and presently make them available to photobuyers via the Internet. If your calculations are similar to mine, you'll figure there are presently at least 450 million images search-available on the Internet. By the year 2010 there will be three times that number. Getty, Corbis, and Jupiter can never catch up.
*Do photobuyers use Google Images as a source for images? No, they don't. The Google Images system directs them only to sub par images, that also often present complicated copyright issues. More and more buyers know instead to use the "text" option of the Google search bar, and type in their photo-need description, to locate quality stock photos that offer ease of transaction.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and best-selling author of "Sell & ReSell Your Photos" and "sellphotos.com" has helped scores of photographers launch their careers. For access to great information on making money from pictures you like to take, and to receive this free report: "8 Steps to Becoming a Published Photographer," visit http://www.sellphotos.com
Business
Notepad
MEETING PLACE
-- Interactive Flickr Now for everyone. Yahoo has finished a redesign of its Flickr home page that emphasizes the photo-sharing site's social aspects. The new home page shows off more of a user's own photos and more from the user's contacts, and it surfaces social activity such as comments on the user's photos, replies to comments the user made on others' photos, and new photos posted to the user's ... Full
Story
Program maintains it's easy to earn extra
funds by establishing a photo business out of your home and
photographing local businesses, corporations, churches, schools,
sports teams, and families in your community.
INFLATION SCENE
Runaway costs for publishers are in the stock photographer's favor. A publisher who needs to economize won't send photographers out on assignment; he'll deal with the stock photographer who can offer him a selection of ready-made photos. Many publishers check in with our PhotoSourceBANK >www.photosource.com/bank < for photo category information -- also to line up photographers in specific geographical regions. When they need photos from a particular area, photobuyers like to contact a local photographer rather than foot the expense of sending someone out from their own city. If you haven't listed in our PhotoSourceBANK, click on the URL above for more information or Fax us at 1 800 PHOTOFAX.
The automatic controls on cameras today make the technical side of photography much easier than a generation ago. As a result, the person with a sensitive eye finds that she or he is amassing a healthy collection of "quite good" images.
"How can I get my pictures published?" is usually the next question. And rightly so, because you've seen pictures published that were not even as good as yours.
Award-winning pictures in exhibitions and contests may earn you blue ribbons, but if you're interested in seeing your credit line in national circulation and receiving checks in the mail, here are some tips on how to shift your emphasis.
For the purposes of marketing, the real judges of what makes a good photo are the editors at magazine or book publishing houses, who buy photos not because they like them, but because they need them.
I've been in many an editor's office where stunning calendar-type pictures are on the wall, but the editor is signing a check for a work-a-day nuts-and-bolts picture he or she needs for their current project.
If you're interested in making money from your photographic talent, you will want to follow a basic business concept: positioning. If your collection of photos is strong in, say, education, position yourself so that you become a valuable resource to editors who are in continual need of education photos. I know photographers who have positioned themselves so well in their specialty area that they can call editors collect.
THEME PUBLISHERS
When you position yourself, you lock yourself into publishing houses that produce visual materials relating to one theme. This may be auto racing, gardening, hang-gliding, medicine, and so on. When you submit your first selection of photos to such a publishing house, spark the photobuyer to say, "This photographer speaks my language."
Once you sell your first photo to a theme publisher, you will find it much easier to make subsequent sales. I have found that once a photographer establishes him/herself with a theme publisher, (s)he can expect to stay with that publisher for an average of ten years, minimum. The individual editors at such a publishing house may come and go, but the theme of the publishing house remains the same. This translates to $20,000 to $50,000 in sales over the ten-year period. And of course the business relationship may go on even longer.
And that is the beauty of marketing your own photos. You can choose to stay with only one or two theme publishers, or go big time and deal with dozens of them, if you position yourself. -RE
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of the weekly PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, 1910 35th Road, Osceola, WI 54020 USA Email: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394
Web site: www.photosource.com
Of
Interest
Re-publication Permits Privacy Suit to Proceed
Although the language of each state statute may vary, the use of a
person’s name, portrait or picture in a photograph cannot be used for
advertising, commercial or trade purposes, without the person’s written
consent.
This is called the Right to Privacy. The time to bring a lawsuit for
invasion of the Right to Privacy is one year from the first publication
in New York and most other states, but is subject to what is called the
single publication rule. Under this rule, the statute of limitations
begins to run on the date the material at issue is first published or
used. Accordingly, subsequent distributions or uses of the images does
not constitute a separate publication or continuing wrong which would
extend to the date the initial claim accrued.
The purpose of this rule is to avoid an endless tolling of the
limitations statute. For example, a distribution of a work to a library
would be the initial date for statute of limitations purposes, and that
initial date would not be extended each time the ... Full
Story
HOW DO THEY DO IT? Yuri Arcurs - Microstock Entrepreneur - Not content with an
annual microstock income of US$1.3 million and being the top selling microstock photographer, Yuri Arcurs is creating a microstock empire. Here's a summary of his new entrepreneurial activities.
http://www.microstockdiaries.com/meet-the-new-yuri-arcurs-microstock-entrepreneur.html
WHO SAID PHOTOGRAPHERS CAN’T WRITE? History in the Buffer - David Burnett, photojournalist, wrote this piece about his experience "in the buffer" covering the election night in Chicago. A remarkable diary of his election night experience.
http://werejustsayin.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-in-buffer.html
TAKEAWAY: When TIME Magazine made “the computer” the Man of the Year, they sent David Burnett to Pine Lake Farm to photograph me and my new Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. You can see the picture TIME used at:
http://www.photosource.com/rohntime
