The Web and our business

Although I don’t agree completely with the piece, the man brings up some good points. The whole color film thing seems a bit ridiculous considering I developed C-41 in my bathroom sink hundreds of times, but I see where he’s coming from. I believe, above all else, that the power of the still image will always have a place in society. And there are still many people willing to pay for it. An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that many starving photographers live in very large cities. I guess that’s where the action is. But as I sit in my middle-sized American midwestern city, I find there is a serious lack of talent in our area. We’ve hired it all up with our staff of eight. Or maybe it’s a serious lack of talented photographers willing to work for a 25,000 circulation newspaper for moderate pay. But there sits only minutes from our office, portrait studios that I are dragging in money. When I was in high school many of my friends paid over $1000 for senior portraits… in my opinion, bad senior portraits. Huh? Wonder where it all leads?

I seem to get the impression that things are worse here in the UK than other places.

Interesting piece. Not entirely accurate (the color bit), but I do agree that the glut of photographers (or rather, wanna-be photographers) have really affected those who shot stock. Especially with the glut of royalty-free images!

Neville Bulsara

http://www.nevillebulsara.com

India Photo Tours, Photography Workshops & Expeditions for the Discerning Photographer

i think there is becoming a clearer line between what people define as a professional photographer in a way.

in electronic music there is http://uk.tilllate.com/ where keen amateurs are given ‘free entrance’ to music events aznd sometimes even supplied a camera. the website gets a massive stock of photos and web hits that make for good ad revenue. with this specialist work, though, magazines and clients need a bit more for print editorial than a well exposed phot of a couple smiling at the camera – and that will always be where a professional is used.

with more commercial work i struggle due to graphic designers and marketing people moonlighting with the photo work passing over their desk, rather than passing it on. digital has shown many people how easy it can be to take a half decent picture and so people are less willing to pay for easier work. fair enough – in essence it is work many people are capable of doing and happily my specialization remains unaffected and steady, even if low paid.

it’s been said elsewhere in a different way – everyone, (apart from my mate phil), can cook a meal.
the food i cook is good stuff, but it also serves to illustrate how much better than me a professional chef is. tha analogy can be extended to say much of the work on flicker is warmed-up pizza and at least some of my clients would rather not serve that as it makes them look bad to advertisers.

i’m an amateur and do a lot of photo selections. the more i shoot and the more i see, the more i can tell the difference – you professionals will definitely always be needed, we don’t want warmed-up pizza every day!

Flickr (which will probably announce an e-commerce option soon) and other Web 2.0 sites will continue to devastate the incomes of professional photographers who expect a library of generic ho-hum stock to give them a viable long term income.

It’s even threatening the large image portals like Corbis and Getty Images, because after investing huge sums in acquiring small stock photography libraries, they now find similar and sometimes better work being offered for a dollar or less, by the microstocks.

So a lot of what they thought were high value pics are now worth not much at all. This is one of the reasons why Getty’s stock price has been wobbling.

It’s common knowledge that quite a few media organisations sniff around Flickr first looking for pics, because they know they can (with luck) get free stuff, or scam a cheap pic out of an amateur who has little knowledge of licensing or the market value of that image.

As Cameron Knight and David Bowne hint though, it is (and I suppose always has been) about supply and demand. If you’re shooting images which are pretty much the same as all the rest, or working in an area which has a glut of imagery, the overall price is going down, and staying down.

The only smart thing to do is shoot something else.

People talk about mobile phones killing us, but lets be brutally honest here – if I was an editor and had a choice between a cheap phone pic, and a more expensive pic shot by a pro, but which wasnt much better…which am I gonna go for?

So the question photographers should be asking themselves isn’t about whether the tsunami of cheapo-digi stuff floating around is gonna kill ‘em, but how come they aren’t producing pictures which are better than the digi-chaff.

We are supposed to be full-timers after all.

As the article says:

“the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones.”

The question is ‘usable ones of what?’ Usable images of flowers, fluffy kittens and red London buses aint gonna do it anymore, because everybody’s got those.

I feel this as painfully as anyone, but you can only beat your head against a wall for so long, so I’ve been taking steps to diversify a little – and funnily enough, its one of the divergent paths I’ve taken which has helped cover my ass financially while I’m laid up for 5 months with a busted leg, so its got me outta jail already.

Believe me Tony, in photographic terms your images and approach has a better chance of making you a decent living in the long run, than mine has.

Sort of makes one think it not a bad idea to become proficient at promoting yourself on Flickr…
Of course, 99% of what is there is utter garbage, but they make it easy to find consistently good stuff, either by building up networks of people, using the algorithms they use to find “interesting”photos or by seeing what gets posted to specialized groups.

I’m pretty active in some of the groups on Flickr, more discussing photography than showing photos. (I’m not shooting at the moment, trying to overcome burnout.) There are good people on there who share the same love of photography. Most have never shown their work beyond the confines of Flickr, but yes, some are starting to be approached to sell their stuff. It might be a good thing to be around to tell them not to give it away or sell themselves short, when they mention they got an offer.

There’s a LightStalkers group over there—that might be a good place to start. If you haven’t done so recently, check out the revamped slide show. Impressive: http://flickr.com/groups/lightstalkersorg/pool/show/

I have been having a look at the microstock sites for a while and most having been bought by the likes of Getty and Jupiter.
If you look at what is being accepted for submission on these sites, there is a lot of dross. It just could be that Getty and the like are trying to introduce a distinction between low price crap and high quality hi price. That’s what I would do. So maybe all is not lost yet!!

To me, the Microstock sites are geared towards advertising. They offer images that a small graphic design team can afford. These are people who are not capable of paying big money for material.

I have spoken to a number of contributors who are full time photographers and they told me they are making money on Microstock but not on RM sites. I think there is a market for both.

The Guardian article reads: “A British photographers’ site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year.”

Could someone with good math skills calculate how many UNusable pictures a potential buyer will find at that site?? And then calculate the odds of that person eventually getting tired of looking at rubbish, subsequently deciding to use the services of a professional agency or photographer?

I think there is hope. I hope there is hope anyway…

“Could someone with good math skills calculate how many UNusable pictures a potential buyer will find at that site??”

What makes you think people are going to Flickr to BUY anything? They go there looking to get stuff for free.

That’s the problem, not Flickr offering pics to buy. If they did, it would probably improve things, or at least equal things out – I mean, how many image portals offering a mindboggling number of images do you need? If you can already get a pic from iStockphoto for less than a dollar, who cares about Flickr’s pics being sold?

Flickrs search engine is no better than the rest of ‘em, partially because it’s current users have no compelling reason to adequately keyword their images to be found efficiently.

It’s finding the images which is the crux here, not the number available. Smoothing out image search for potential clients and simplifying licensing is the Next Big Thing in internet image portals – and nobody has seemed to have cracked it yet.

Instead of pissing our pants about being buried by mobile phones, Flickr and the rest, we should be thinking about what WE do and what value WE add to our work.

Like I said before – how can you blame an editor for using a cheap mobile phone or amateur pic, if your stuff isn’t much better? If you’re being trumped by some bloke who works 8 hours a day in a bank and STILL manages to produce better stock images than you – who’s supposed to be doing this full-time – what does that say about you and what you’re doing?

I’m not having a go at anyone, but this is the brutal reality of the business now – particularly the stock photo business – and if you can’t work out what to do about that, you’re dead.

Simple.

The internet economy is no different to the capitalist economy that’s been the air we breathe (sadly) for the last 300 years.

Stop letting the bells and whistles and techno-bullshit that surrounds Web 2.0 bamboozle you and start thinking about what YOU’RE doing about YOUR thing.

Tony Olmos started this thread, so look at it this way. I know Tony and he’s a really talented portrait photographer as well as a gifted and senstive reportage shooter, mostly of features.

The point is though – in the vast majority of cases he’ll be the only photographer who has those images – because he doesn’t photograph generic stock stuff and doesn’t shoot events with hundreds of other snappers hanging round next to him.

In other words, his stuff has more uniqueness and more exclusivity than some numpty photographing (yawn) yet ANOTHER red London telephone box on sodding Flickr, right?

So his stuff is always more likely to command a higher fee – ‘cos thats the 300 year old law of supply and demand, OK?

If he keywords his stuff carefully and places it strategically, instead of in some bargain basement pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap internet portal, than he’s gonna make good money and his images will hold their value over time – which is why he makes more money than me, grrr….

It’s bloody obvious, and has been the paradigm of the whole sodding economy of the Western World for the last three centuries!

So fuck the internet alright? Start using your gray matter! It’s the ONLY thing that’s gonna help you!

Have you keyworded your pics? Well, HAVE YA?

Well stop pissing about on this forum and get it done!

Have you keyworded your pics? Well, HAVE YA?

Love it! In all the excitment I lost track,, how may keywords was it 5 or 6 ( yada yada ) lol

“What makes you think people are going to Flickr to BUY anything? They go there looking to get stuff for free.” Sion, my point was this: wehter someone wants to buy a picture or get it for free, they are looking to get a picture. And with a zillion pictures in a portal and only a fraction (according to the thesis set forth earlier) actually being very useful/usable, I think/hope find it uneconomical to spend their days sorting through endless rubbish to find what they are looking for. And thus see the value of actually paying to get good quality pictures in a speedy manner, through a professional agency or photographer.

And being professional is, in part, as John points out: keywording. Not only that, as this article points out, but also providing proper captions:
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news_story.html?id=1769

As someone who not only shoots, but also sells the work of other photographers, I am sad to report a disturbing lack of comprehensive captions from many photographers. Yet they cannot seem to understand why their images don’t sell.

The ‘pile it high sell it cheap’ businesses largely responsible for the huge consolidation of imagery under single portals are already being consumed by the very mindset they engendered.

Large image portals offering up cheap pics simply cannot compete with a large image portal which makes its money by other means and has free images as a by-product. This is what Flickr is. It’s not an image portal in the accepted sense – even Flickr would say its just a hosting site.

(Flickr is now owned by Yahoo by the way)

The problem is the beancounting mindset has so infected print media that nobody can resist a free pic. It’s totally irrelevant for the most part if the pic is shit or not. It’s free. End of story.

If you look at many mass print publications you’ll have noticed an incremental deterioration in the visual material thats being offered. All the papers look the same, and think giving away free DVD’s is the answer to falling circulation.

The people working there know people arent buying the paper because its no longer distinctive and compelling, but sadly they’re not in charge, the accountants are.

It’s already common knowledge that some picture desks have instructions to begin searching for free images on Google or Flickr first, then the microstocks, then and ONLY then must they consider buying rights managed images.

The main barrier now as you say, is the search. To be honest, unless you plan on being a fulltime micro-stock snapper, I see little point in optimising your images to be found within a portal, if when they are found, they sell for fuck-all.

If you’re in the volume microstock business, it makes sense because you’re aiming for volume sales – 1000 sales for a dollar a piece instead of 4 sales at 250 dollars each.

But if you’re aiming for higher rates, then putting your stuff on a more conventional portal like say, Alamy, is making life hard for yourself.

You can’t regulate your rate and will be ‘competing’ with millions of other images in searches. To top it off, so many photographers on Alamy keyord their images so badly, that you’ll be lucky to be found at all even if you keyword your stuff properly. You’ll be lost amidst the chaff.

It’s the Achilles Heel of a lot of large portals who are discovering that having billions of images is valueless if they can’t be found, and may actually be a hinderance to future growth.

To be honest, microstock is a perfectly acceptable business model for the internet, which is composed of billions of pages. Those pages need pics and who the hell can afford to pay the rates for a million changing pages a day?

You don’t particularly need stunning, thought provoking photography either. Mostly it just needs to be nice, simple clean and usable as a 72dpi thumbnail…which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Enter the micros – it’s volume sold at a rate which makes it easier to get a pic from there than to steal one. It’s iTunes for images. Spend a day finding a free song via Google? Or get one straight away for 99 cents on iTunes?

iTunes has found a business model which competes with piracy and makes billions. The microstock model is virtually identical and entirely appropraite for the Web.

The only problem (and its a BIG problem) I have with the microstocks is they don’t split the volume sales equally with the photographer.

Microstock percentages are crap for the most part, but if you wanna churn it out…you’ll make money.

In the internet economy there really seem to be only two options, the mass sale/low price option, or the niche sale/higher price option (which has been coined ‘The Long Tail’).

Both require different approaches because both kinds of imagery need to be targetted and found – VIA A SEARCH ENGINE – by different clients.

So this is a question of – what added value (if any) can you build around your imagery and what’s your target audience?

How they find your images and how quickly they can do that is largely up to the photographer. As you say Fredrik, good metadata is one of the keys, but not many photographers spend enough time thinking about it.

If your pics arent intelligently keyorded and targetted, they won’t be found. If they won’t be found they won’t be used. if they’re not used, you starve.

What part of that equation don’t photographers seem to undertsand?

bump. i found it a useful thread to refresh the mind with autumn starting :))

A really interesting book/blog project that I’ve found really useful for thinking about metadata, image filtration and how the heck we’re going to deal with the (apprximate) 2-3 million images that go up on Flickr each day, not to mention the thousands going up onto the wire services from both pros and the odd amateur who happens to catch a news event. If you want to understand data organisation, filtration and metadata then read this book and/or the blog:

http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Miscellaneous-Power-Digital-Disorder/dp/0805080430

I think the mistake a lot of people are making with sites like flickr is not figuring out how to use them to their advantage. It has been well speculated flickr will be instituting some kind of ecommerce licensing model. However they have a major hurdle once they’ve done this. They have to figure out a way for image buyers to find the images they are looking for. The ability for buyers to find the needles in their giant haystack is going to be a major challenge for them should they come to rely on the ecommerce feature for revenue. Professional photographers have a major advantage in this arena because we are consiously aware that image buyers are looking for images and amtuers don’t.

This means that those photographers who choose to be proactive and figure out how the flickr system works, how to get their images to show up at the top of search results will have a major advantage. In addition established photographers already know how to deal with clients, what their needs are and can therefore offer more in the way of services than the average flickr user.

Search for just about any subject on google and you’ll find lots of blogs showing up in the search results. Many if not most of the blogs have little or no original and/or useful content yet they are at the top of googles searches because these people figured out how google works and can get their pages to the top in order to get revenue from ads. So they provide very little in the way of value yet they are getting revenue because their pages show up first in google searches. Somebody is going to get good at getting their images to show up at the top of flickr image searches. Those people will be the ones who figured out how flickr’s system works and how to take advantage of it, it’s not necessarily going to be the people with the best pictures.

If you establish yourself on flickr making it clear to image buyers that you have the knowledge and experience to meet their needs as well as having the images the want, you can be ahead of the curve rather than lagging behind it.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hY4qGm1zcwVgM74krLbd4eMB3Shg

Virgin Mobile is getting sued for using a photo they pulled from flickr. They thought they were getting a free picture to use in their ad campaign but their legal fees alone will be more than they would have paid to license an image from a photographer or stock agency. I think corporations will see this and other lawsuits that are sure to come and back away from the free for all that flickr has been. This is a great opportunity for established photographers because you can establish a presence on flickr and on your flickr profile make it clear that you have been in the photography business for X years, make sure there’s a link to your website and make it clear that you are an image source that can be trusted. The question that many companies that have used flickr images haven’t asked themselves is “how do I know that this person who has posted this image in their profile under the creative commons license actually owns the copyright?” There’s the rub, that’s where established photographers have the advantage because you can direct potential buyers to your website and provide a measure of confidence that the average amateur using flickr can’t.

Take the Virgin Mobile example a step further. Suppose Virgin obtained the image from the flickr source in this case but YOU actually owned the copyright. Virgin would not only be facing a lawsuit from the family mentioned in the AP article but they would be getting a lawsuit filed by you as well. Also you could seek prosecution of the flickr offender under the DMCA which carries some hefty penalties.

I think the time is now to use flickr as a free marketing tool. Now is the time to get in their early and figure out how their search system works and how one can get their images to show up at the top of search results as well as contributing images to specific flickr groups in order to establish a presence there. Of course I would watermark my images so that it’s more difficult for somebody else to take my images and pass them off as their own. Removing an watermark from an image establishes “intent” and helps significantly in prosecuting (and the awarding of damages) under the DMCA as well as copyright violations. Of course we need to make sure we’re registering our images with the copyright office too. We should be using our experience to take advantage of tools like flickr rather than shunning them. I think the ‘age of the amateur’ will be coming tapering off over the next couple of years. The novelty is wearing thin.

“good metadata is one of the keys, but not many photographers spend enough time thinking about it” ... I think Sion has hit the nail on the head! When I worked at a London photo agency we spent far more time on captions/keywording than on retouching.