The changing world of stock photography
For many years my goal was to build up a substantial photo file, place it with a stock photo agency, and live off the residual income of my efforts. The world changed, however, and while the goal is still attainable, the path to reach that goal has changed completely. No business has been more dramatically affected by microchips than photography, especially stock photography.
In the “old days” — sometime prior to the early years of the 21st century — a photographer accumulated the best 35mm and 2.25 sildes he or she shot, usually one or two pictures per roll of film, catalogued and marked them for identification, and built a physical file of slide sheets. When he or she had several hundred that told stories about a particular subject or place then the photog would start sending them out to agencies. The application process was long and painful. The time from submission of a group of photos to the time they were being viewed by potential buyers was a year or more.
Now the process is much faster, but much more complicated. The digital workflow starts in-camera, with allowances for the unique aberrations of a digital camera, and in-camera editing. I shoot in RAW mode. I process my RAW files with Nikon’s awesomely powerful (yet kludgy) software, making adjustments formerly not possible - things like adjusting exposure, changing light sources, adjust fill lighting, etc - some of these things we used to do in the darkroom, others, if they were wrong, the picture was just thrown away. I then make a TIFF file, open it with Photoshop, fine-tune it, add a description and keywords, then store it in my library. When I’ve accumulated a few images I’ll submit them to a reseller - “agencies” don’t really exist any more. Each reseller has different size requirements, so the photo has to be re-opened, resized, and saved accordingly before uploading.
But the photo is then immediately available to a buyer. Instead of a year or more, a matter of a few days has passed since I clicked the shutter. And the competition is different, too; instead of a few dozen, there are hundreds, or thousands, of other photographers doing the exact same thing. Fortunately, the marketplace has also expanded exponentially; our resellers reach many, many more potential buyers. It’s so much easier to show a web page than it is to print a catalog and send it out to buyers.
My job is to make a photo that is unique enough to meet a buyer’s needs when others do not, and get it in front of the right eyes. In that sense stock photography hasn’t changed at all.
