Under the branch

Just 8 months after its official kickoff, PSC - the PhotoShelter Collection - is closing its doors as a stock agency.  The innovative marketing concepts they’d implemented simply didn’t work.

I’m of two minds about it.  First, and mostly, I’m sorry; PSC seemed like a great new outlet, an ambitious sales team who could have put the industry on a whole new plane.  Second, I’m relieved.  While they accepted a decent percentage of my photos, very few of them were “star-quality” - I had very few editor’s choices.   Plus, I had a photo that that had s0ld on Alamy turned down for inclusion on PSC.  I simply couldn’t shoot the ‘cutting edge’ style they were looking for; but, unfortunately for them, as it turns out, that style wasn’t what the marketplace wanted.

So. like so many others, I have to re-adjust my marketing and make some changes, and I’ll miss the energy PSC brought to the business.   But I salute them for giving it one heck of a good try.

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Limited Use - the Alamy method for selling low-priced images for blog, educational, or social-networking use - has rolled out internationally.  At first, it was only available in Britain.  Now that I’ve had a chance to check it out, frankly, I’m beginning to wonder just what my problem is with it.

The terms of the sale are clearly spelled out - this is noncommercial, nonadvertising, strictly for personal or educational use - and as long as those terms are honored, they will benefit buyers and sellers immensely.  The photographers who participate now have a whole new market, one that is just now emerging.  After all, blogs and social networking sites didn’t even exist a few short years ago.

My major discomfort is that I can’t choose which of my pictures go in to Limited Use.  It is either all or none.  I would very much like to leave selected photos out of Limited Use - but right now we can’t do that.  Alamy is considering ways to give us that option.

When they do, I’ll sign up and try it out.

Check it out at www.alamy.com.

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Here’s a petition to sign, against the Orphan Works legislation:

http://www.petitiononline.com/Stop2913/

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Alamy revealed its first ‘Novel Use’ initiative: A method by which bloggers, social network users, educators, and students can use photos from Alamy at minimal cost (between 60p and 1.60 pounds, or something over $3 US). The use must be private, noncommercial, non-advertising, and non-business.

There’s been a strong backlash to this announcement, with concerns expressed that Alamy was becoming a micro site. This is an over-reaction, in my opinion; the uses are clearly limited and won’t interfere with business use. Their normal pricing structure remains the same. This new model just allows them to tap in to a previously ignored market. Micros are a reality; this is one way to deal with them.

I actually like the idea, with one big exception. I’m not convinced these people will buy photos at all. If they do, I hope they will be told all about copyright, and be trained to understand that they can’t give the pictures away or use them in any way except as licensed. I’d much rather give them the picture to use, with the user understanding and agreeing to limitations.

My concern is photos sold this way would be copied and moved around, posted on other blogs etc, and eventually become orphan works, in which case the photographer could lose his/her rights.

Like many Alamy shooters, I really don’t know whether I will go with this or not. Yet Alamy has done me well so far; perhaps a little more blind trust is in order. I’m not comfortable with it, however.

Added 6/13/08:

I opted out.  Distilling it down to the basics, the plan smacks of microstock.  I want no part of that.

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Orphan works are creative content of any kind, that is subject to copyright, whose copyright owner can’t be found. Someone may want to use the content, but can’t find the person or company that would be able to give them permission. Legislation is under consideration that would create a way to make that use legal.

Obviously, this is something photographers in particular need to pay attention to - image theft is so easy, especially on the internet, that one of your photos could become an orphan without your knowledge. Someone lifts your image from a web page and uses it without permission.  Now your image is floating in a whole new universe with no connection back to you, the legitimate owner of the copyright. Years down the road, someone else finds the image, decides to use it to illustrate an ad campaign or an article in a magazine; they decide it is an orphan work and your image is used without you receiving payment or copyright protection.

The same problem applies to any intellectual property - software code, a written report, a painting - as well as photographs.While we, as the creatives, may rail against this as theft of intellectual rights - we must look at the other side. Should a particularly fine piece of writing, or software code, or a historically important photograph, be kept in the dark just because its creator can’t be found? To me, the answer would be no. But the user must make a sincere effort to find the copyright owner, and a mechanism must be created to properly reward the creative if he/she is found some time later, after the use.

Obviously, this is a complex issue. For more information, start with this site: www.orphanworks.net written by Joe Keeley, a lawyer who was involved with the 2006 attempt at legislating orphan works, and is involved with the 2008 attempt. And don’t stay silent; the rights you protect by speaking out are your own. Let your legislator know how you feel about orphan works legislation and the need to protect creative content.

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I’ve been in a bit of a sales slump - one of those periods when doubts crawl the outer edges of your marketing plan, as nothing is going according to that plan.  My history says I’ll have a nice sale soon, as with Rights-Managed you sell less often but you sell for more. 

Our Australian friend Rob Walls just proved it.  He sold a very nice picture of his lovely daughter for a major ad campaign, with several use rights purchased, for a grand total over $9,000.  Specifically, the sale was 7 licences of the same picture, varying from $243.50 for ¼ page web use, to $3610 for 2500 billboards over 24 feet for a grand total of  $9233.43. Other uses included point-of-sale, editorial in trade magazines and multimedia audio-visual.

If Rob had made this an RF image it would have gotten one price, probably $300 or so, for all those uses.  If it had been microstock it probably wouldn’t have been purchased for this use, as the buyer was willing to pay for exclusivity.  The sale was made on Alamy. 

Congrats, Rob!  And thanks for sharing the info - it is keeping me motivated during a slow time for me.

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As Rob Walls reported, Alamy followed through on their promise to speed up QC.  Rob probably set a record - 18 hours from the click of the shutter to a keyworded image ready to go live.  I finally almost caught up to Rob, with my last 3 submissions passing in 2 days or less.  The drought is over!  No more losing a month’s worth of uploads because one of the images had an interpolation artifact.

Now it’s back to work… got lots of photos to process and upload.

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When Rob Haggart talks, stock photographers listen - as do a lot of others.  He’s the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside, and the blogger who created A Photo Editor, a widely read blog on photography.  He’s created a very lengthy list of stock photo agencies, and it’s something every stock shooter should study before making a submission to a site.

Not unexpectedly, Getty and Corbis are at the top of his list, but interestingly, Alamy and Photoshelter are hard on their heels.  He also lists boutique and specialty agencies, but the most interesting list is his “crap” list - comprised of microstock sites. 

Here’s his list: http://aphotoeditor.com/2008/02/27/stock-photo-agencies/

Not only a great list of places to submit, but a list of places to avoid.  There’s enough good agencies listed to keep a stock photographer busy a long time.

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PhotoShelter has done a few things that irritate many of its pro and semi-pro photographers, including me, but I continue to believe that this new kid on the block is going to be an industry leader.  They are innovative and bring fresh new ideas to the stock photo portal business - as their new widget demonstrates.

The widget is a piece of code that contributors can place on their websites to show their images on PhotoShelter.  It works great, except on Wordpress - I can’t get it to work here.  But I do have it working just fine on my stock page on my site at:

http://www.dallypress.com/len/stockphotos/index.html

And I’m hopeful they’ll fix whatever is keeping it from working on Wordpress.   The widget isn’t perfect - it sometimes mangles vertical images - but otherwise is very nifty.

It’s a brilliant move for a lot of reasons.  First, it quickly gets their site hundreds or thousands of relevant links, which will tremendously boost their ratings on google and other search engines.  Second, it involves their contributors in marketing.  Personally, I’ve avoided doing my own marketing of stock photos as I’m a poor negotiator.   I’ve done much better with my stock images by letting someone else set the price and deal with the buyer.   But this tool allows me to easily promote my own images.

Good job, PhotoShelter!

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Alamy is a great place to sell editorial RM photos - my particular specialty - but it has become a terrible place to submit.  While they do not edit for subject matter - what the photo is of doesn’t matter much to them - they do care deeply about the quality of the file.  Their Quality Control (QC) method has become a monster.

This is supposed to change; but that change seems to be happening at Alamyspeed - which is to say, slow.  It’s like in the old days of Microsoft when the buzzword was RSN - we’ll do that Real Soon Now, a phrase that consigned an idea to purgatory.

At present, the system is this:  the photog shoots photos, works ‘em over, makes sure they are at least 48 MB when full size, saves as a level 10 Jpeg, then uploads them to Alamy over the internet.  We then wait, most of us for 30 to 40 days.  During that time we can upload more pictures.  However, when the QC folks finally take a look, they select photos at random and scrutinize every pixel, looking for noise, soft focus, or any reason they can fail the picture.  Upon failing the picture, Alamy now fails the entire upload, and any files uploaded in the interim.

So an entire month’s worth of uploading is gone in a flash and the photographer is back at square one.  It hurts.  You’re looking at a month’s worth of work down the tubes, a stack of photos to reprocess and try to figure out why they failed, and fix them.  There have been two outcomes: one, we all look much harder at files we are going to upload; two, we look for other agencies with less draconian Quality Control.  But Alamy outsells all of my other outlets by a huge margin; I need my work there, not elsewhere.  Sigh…

Help is supposedly on the way, but as I said, it’s moving at Alamyspeed. 

The word is, they are not changing how they QC - they still want absolutely perfect files with no noise, sharp focus, etc - but QC times will change, with submissions reviewed in days, not weeks or months.  So a QC failure, while it will still cause all uploads in the pipeline to fail, will only affect a few days’ worth, not 30-40 days’s worth of photos.  This change may well be under way - some Alamy photogs are reporting much faster QC times since the first of the year, a matter of 2 or 3 days.  Alas, I’m not one of them - I have 3 uploads awaiting QC since December 23.

In the meantime, I am uploading only perfect files - no noise (so they are all shot at low ASA, which limits my subject matter), absolutely no sharpening (ever), sharp focus (no selective focus either, as the QC person may not “get it”); and each image is carefully scrutinized before I submit.  Okay, they are better files.  Not necessarily better pictures, but they are getting up on Alamy where they have a chance to sell.  And I will grudgingly admit that Alamy QC has made me a little better at what I do. 

But, I anxiously await Alamyspeed to move past Real Soon Now to It’s Here! so I can again upload my more interesting and creative images (which might fail - but won’t cost me a month’s work if they do). 

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