Images & Thoughts

When I began exploring the world of stock photography, I realised that it was a world filled with frequently-asked questions and conflicting opinions. In this article, I will attempt to compile my own thoughts to help you decide whether or not stock photography is for you.

What is stock photography?

Stock photography is the sale of images, often via a library that were taken without a particular customer or use defined. Generally (there are exceptions) people add their work to a collection / library so that potential customers can browse the images and buy one if it suits their needs. Potential customers search the library for keywords that match their needs. If you look around, you will see stock images everywhere, from magazines, newspapers, book covers, posters, calendars and postcards and much, much more.

Who can do stock photography?

This is often an eye opener which has many old school photographers reeling. ANYONE! Stock photography is faceless, the picture does the talking.

OK, now I’m interested what photo’s should I take?

My best advice is look around at magazines, books, leaflets, posters, advertising, and websites etc. Don’t just think locally either as stock libraries sell worldwide. There are books, websites and magazines for almost every subject. Maybe you have a hobby you could specialise in or you travel a lot, the world literally is your oyster.

The nitty gritty bits

One major thing to consider is that you can not sell photographs that have identifiable people or products or trademarks in them without written permission. For people this is called a model release and for logos/property etc, it is called a property release.

The other big consideration is how you wish to sell your images. Which leads us to two subjects that crop up a lot.

1, Should you sell via microstock or macrostock agencies?

Well, this is up to you. I’ll explain the difference.

Macrostock

as it is called includes agencies such as Alamy, Getty, and Corbis. This is the traditional method of selling stock photo’s and you can sell an image varying in price from $30 to$3000 (sometimes more) depending on the way your images are sold ( see point 2 ). Sales can be month’s apart though unless you have a good collection of images. Macrostock agencies tend to have minimum requirements on camera model or image size much higher than that of microstock agencies.

Microstock

Microstock is controversial to say the least, mainly because it upsets a great deal of professional photographers who feel they are being priced out of the market. Some microstock agencies are Istockphoto, Dreamstine, Fotolia and Shutterstock. The business model of microstock is to sell your images for just a few dollars of which you may see 20 cents - 1 dollar per download. BUT because the price is so cheap downloads are vastly more frequent than that of macrostock and if you have a good amount of worthy material you can make a reasonable return. A great number of amateur photographers are happy to make money this way to pay for their camera equipment. Microstock agencies often sell subscriptions where a client will pay a monthly fee and get an amount of downloads per month, which means they are very likely to download several images that may fit their needs. This all sounds perfect but there is, as always a catch. Most sales via microstock sites sales are royalty free ( see point 2 ).

2, There are several type of ways to sell your images. Licenced, Rights managed and Royalty free.

Licenced

Licenced sales are the traditional method at macrostock libraries and recently so, microstock are starting to use this method but still much cheaper than macrostock agencies. A licenced sale is price is determined by what the photo is going to be used for and for how long, with licenced sales you also get told basic information about what the image is going to be used for but generally you don’t get told the details of the customer. An example of the info received for a licenced sale is:

Country: United Kingdom
Usage: Editorial
Media: Consumer Magazine
Industry: Media Industry
Sub-Industry: Publishing
Print run: up to 500,000
Placement: Inside
Image Size: 1/8 page
Start: 04 September 2007
End: 11 September 2007

As you can see there is a reasonable amount of information there but not the customer ID. I’ll be honest I don’t know the exact reason, myself I’d say its because the agency is worried that they will look amateurish if customers buy something then get hassled for a tear sheet by the photographer. I have also seen in forums people speculate that the agencies are afraid of being cut out of the loop on future sales, which in today’s world is sadly quite believable.

Rights Managed

Rights Managed sales are pretty much the same as licenced except they can have restrictions such as the countries the image can be sold to or the usage of the image such as not for advertising. The price model as far as I’m aware is the same as licenced sales.

Royalty Free

Royalty free are the most common sales on microstock agencies and have become hugely popular on macrostock agencies also. The price on royalty free sales (also referred to as RF) is based on the image size. Royalty free has almost as many debates about it as microstock. The downside of royalty free is once you sell the image the buyer can do whatever they want with the image and you don’t get told who the customer is or what the image is going to be used for.

So which sales model should I use?

My logic on this is that images that are easy to reproduce I tend to sell as royalty free and less easily to reproduce ones I sell as licenced. This seems to be a more common practice for macrostock shooters. Other people who shoot microstock and macrostock often put their royalty free images on the microstock sites and their licenced images on the macrostock agencies. It is perceived as bad etiquette to sell the same royalty free images on both macrostock and microstock libraries as a customer would be quite annoyed to find he as paid $240 for an image he could of bought for $5 elsewhere.

Keywords

Whichever library you choose you are going to have to keyword your images. This is listing words that associate to your image so that a potential customer can find it. Bad practice is to add irrelevant keywords or copy other peoples keywords from similar images. Keyword abuse can result in the library forcing your images to the bottom of the pile making it much harder to get a sale.

What sells?

The most common asked but least answered question. Some photographers refuse to say because while others don’t know they are making the money. I don’t truly know myself but I believe good selling categories (if your pictures are good of course) are lifestyle conceptual and travel. A lot of images used for advertising etc have people in them doing lifestyle activities, it is much harder to get great images of people doing things and that are model released or conceptual ideas so this is where there is a good deal of money to be made, easier subjects are far more saturated so your image has to be all the better to stand out of the crowd, and images tend to fetch less of a bounty.

Other requirements and considerations

Most if not all agencies require images submitted saved in the Adobe RGB colour space as a tiff file or jpg, and sharpening is not allowed. (this is so the client can sharpen to their own requirements)

If your image is aimed at a magazine or book cover, remember to try and allow space around the subject of the image for the overlay of a title or other text.

Links & More information

Microstock group forum
Stock photography section at DPchallenge forums
Alamy forum
Stock photography at Wikipedia
A book worth reading is “photos that sell” by Lee Frost. ( it wouldn’t be prudent to link to any particular seller )

Disclaimer: None of the websites on this guide are an endorsement I have tried to be subjective and not represent anyone.