This is the first in what I’m planning will be a regular theme of posts under the category of ‘exposure’. Each post will look at one image, the idea being to obviously give the photo and its creator some www exposure while at the same time providing some insight into the ideas behind the image, the process of creating it and its success, or otherwise since. I say creator because while the bulk of the featured images will inevitably be mine I’m open to receiving contributions from other photographers, indeed this might be considered the second exposure post after Maurice’s excellent Maori.

The images disected under exposure won’t be exclusively stock images either as I, and hence this blog, am moving increasingly into other areas of photography for profit.

So, without further ado, the first (or second) image.

This is a fairly obvious conceptual shot illustrating success, skill, achievement etc. It’s a very simple image which I think is often the approach that works best for stock photos that need to communicate the intended message at a quick superficial glance. It is a shot you’ll find multiple variations of at virtually any general stock agency being easy to produce and perenially popular. I can’t claim mine is amongst the best necessarily but it has sold consistently since creation and continues to do so. I put this success down, in part to its graphic simplicity and also the fact it was a relatively early submission into the microstock marketplace. There is no doubt it is harder to get started and achieve a good return in microstock now than it was five or so years ago. When I submitted this image it faced a lot less competition and was able to build a good sales record which still helps it gain exposure and sales to date on most of the sites it is available on.

It was shot in 2005 with my first digital camera, an Olympus c5060. At the time this humble 5.1 megapixel tool was one of the better prosumer compacts on the market. Having been paid off by this image alone mine is still in occasional use as a carry around and family camera. I’m a big believer in less is often more in megapixel terms and think the output from this camera is often better than from newer models which try to push out more pixels from similarly small sensors. I used the c5060′s combination of a wide zoom, decent close focusing and vari-angle screen to shoot the toy dart board. It was simply lit with diffused natural light from a large window and some paper reflectors bouncing some light back to keep things evenly balanced.

At the time I shot this I was just embarking on something of a fresh start in stock photography with digital capture. Previously I’d only really shot travel material with my trusty OM SLRs and a bargain basement Lubitel TLR. I submitted to one agency, Travel Ink, who have recently had a big clear out of the old transparencies and rebranded as Latitude Stock. The remnants of my film travel stock days can be seen here. So this image is representative, for me, of several simultaneous shifts in that I started shooting other stuff, with different gear and submitted to multiple different agencies in a new sector of the market. Had I not embraced all those changes I suspect I wouldn’t still be producing fresh stock images now.

While the lifestyle of travelling to new and exotic locations to shoot images for stock is obviously appealing it isn’t viable for many. This image demonstrates it is possible to create saleable stock photos without even leaving your home and with minimal gear. It may not be as glamorous but it is certainly a lot easier to make a profit when expenses are kept to a minimum.

Free images, on the face of it, appear to be a great deal for photo buyers users and a kick in the teeth for working stock photographers. Or is there a way free could actually work for photographers seeking to make money from their images?

Making a reasonable return from stock photography in the current open and competitive market requires creativity not only in producing images but also in their marketing. Photographers, increasingly under pricing and demand pressures, need to be prepared to approach new ideas with an open mind and do a little out of the box thinking.

Now the business of free isn’t new. This 2008 Wired magazine pieceis well worth a read if you’ve not come across it before. Of course the microstock agencies are well known for having free offerings in some form. Some do offer small cash incentives to contributors to offer images for free but the primary selling point is the idea your individual portfolio will gain extra exposure and hopefully increased sales. Just as the agencies offer free images to attract buyers to their sites individual photographers can tap into the traffic directly by making a few images available for free. Or so the theory goes.

I haven’t personally tested this out having only ever made one microstock image available for free. On a whim I allowed this photo of a bunch of a grapes to migrate to Dreamstime’s free section when presented with the option. At the time I thought why not give it a go with this relatively mundane but useful image. Needless to say I’ve seen no discernable benefit but that is due to my poor approach to the potential opportunity. If you’re interested in experimenting with a few free images on microstock here are the basic errors I made so you can avoid them!

Firstly, avoid the natural tendancy to pick your less good work to offer for free. As I freely admitted my grapes photo is nothing special; it is not going to attract a lot of attention which is after all the whole point of taking the step of offering a freebie. Duh! Marketing 101 failed. I’m not alone though; if you browse the Dreamstime Free Imagessection you’ll see a lot of mundane, and some quite poor, work. It is only natural photographers want $$$ signs attached to their good stuff. However this is missing the point of offering a free image. You want it to be good or better to attract attention and drive that traffic to the rest of your portfolio. The fact that much of the free imagery offered by the microstocks is poor is an opportunity for good work to stand out from the crowd.

Secondly make sure you have plenty of similar and related work of an equally good or better standard in your portfolio. The idea here is that some of the traffic attracted to your free image may well be tempted to part with cash for some of your other photos so make sure they see images they’re likely to be interested in and tempted by. If you click on the grapes you’ll see the Dreamstime download page for the image (help yourself, it’s free!) with two smaller images to the right. These shots automatically pulled from my portfolio on Dreamstime as related images. So you can see Dreamstime make a generous space available to showcase more of your work, I just haven’t chosen the right shot to utilise it! Offer a freebie from a series or subject area you have strong coverage on and this page would show another twenty of your images available to buy. I can see how this could work with a more thoughtful approach.

While the microstocks all take a slightly different approach to offering free images, from Crestock’s daily feed to Dreamstime’s large collection, they all follow the same model of a small number of images as free high resolution downloads to attract traffic and hopefully buyers to the much larger collections for sale. There is an alternative method; offer everything for free but at a limited size. The reasoning here is fairly obvious; give away versions of limited use to attract the all important traffic and rely on enough of that traffic being willing to stump up a small payment to upgrade to a larger version of images. Given the increasing market for small images for use in digital media in all its guises I personally see a potential flaw in this plan in that many users will now be perfectly content with very small images. The market for photos for online use on websites and blogs, mobile applications, epublishing etc etc is fast growing. Many of these users will only ever need a small image. The question then becomes is there still a large enough volume of users that will want to take up a paid upgrade option?

Freedigitalphotos.net is a site that is essentially a microstock agency with this twist of the freebie offering. Every image on the site is available as a free download but limited to 400px on the longest side. Even given that tiny size it will inevitably deter many potential contributors and the site is undoubtedly tiny compared to regular microstocks. There is an ‘upside’ in that contributors can set their own price for full resolution downloads, though given the value nature of the site there isn’t going to be much logic in pricing anything beyond the upper end of microstock pricing. So does it work for contributors? I’ve no experience myself as a contributor but there is an interesting case study on the site of contributing photographer Simon Howden. Again I think this model has potential with a planned approach; the images offered need to appeal to potential larger uses while minimising uploads that lend themselves mainly to online and digital usage.

It is, of course, possible to do something along these lines independently. I’ve used a combination of Clustershot and Freeimageslive to experiment with offering limited size freebies in the hope of generating sales for larger versions of the images. Now my experimental sample isn’t significant enough to draw any strong conclusions and Clustershot have been going through some upheavals too, so the potential is really unproven. However it is interesting that my one and only sale through Clustershot to date is this image which is one of four I’ve made available here on Freeimageslive. It could of course be coincidence but once again if you’re prepared to embrace ‘free’ in some form I think there is potential to generate a return creatively. It is also worth noting the amount of backlinks the Freeimageslive page allows me to have on the image download page. Not only do I link to the image on my Clustershot page but also to some of my microstock portfolios, my Alamy collection and even this blog. Those links on a relevant and reasonably well optomised page are difficult to value but may well be worth the give away in themselves.

So there you have it, some food for thought if you’re willing to bend your head around the idea of giving (to a limited degree) some of your work away. If you’ve had a go or think I’m mad let me know in the comments. Stay tuned for a quick part 2 on more ways to make money from free photos!

A passive income is a beautiful thing. Money that flows to you without any or minimal effort on your part. It is something of a holy grail amongst many Internet entrepreneurs. I suspect there is often too little appreciation of the work that goes into creating such a happy situation; a passive income is usually the result of an asset in some form that took a lot of effort to build. In other words, while it may be passive when received it isn’t often achieved without a significant initial investment of effort, talent and/or money. Photographers producing stock images are effectively working to build a passive income, a photographer’s pension in a sense.

Stock photography earnings rarely come in the form of a payday; the return on your investment of time, money and creativity is usually some way off in the future and over a period of, hopefully, years. Putting your resources into producing stock images is really more akin to making an investment for future returns than working for next months bills. Microstock may be a slight exception to this where good images will often enjoy an instant honeymoon period of downloads due to the sectors general bias towards fresh material. However with micro numbers the payday will be small for anyone other than the seriously committed contributor.

Given the time lag usually involved between doing stock work and earning a return from your efforts it is important for photographers producing stock to consider what they realistically may assume the return on any investment in creating and marketing new images will be. Are you wasting your time or building an asset that will return a healthy passive income for years to come?

For a variety of reasons including migration, hoboing and general laziness, I haven’t added any significant new material to my stock photo portfolios for the last six months. It isn’t the productivity I had hoped or planned for, but it is what I’ve done! That isn’t to say I haven’t been work a day shooting and carrying a camera around, so there will of course be images I can add in due course. However for that period I haven’t really worked on my stock and yet my income from stock photography didn’t stop. Inadvertently I’ve conducted a short experiment to test the financial sturdiness of my current stock photography collection. So how well did it hold up?

Well, I’m pleased to say I have been able to enjoy a reliable and, so far, sustained level of income from my various portfolios. Obviously six months is a relatively short period of time to judge any collection’s longevity in terms of providing a sustained passive income. It is quite possible that if I continued in this dormant mode my income would gradually fall as my images dated and their relative presence in the market declined. While I’m interested in how stock photography may contribute to a photographer’s pension pot I can’t continue this little experiment for much longer without damaging my own pot’s potential!

Obviously every photographer’s collection is different. Currently my own stock collection is around 2500 images; so relatively modest. The fact it has stood up to this period of inactivity I take as a positive sign that it is worth me continuing to build it for the future. I’m spread across RM, RF, traditional and microstock which, arguments re the pros and cons aside, I think probably helps in terms of sustainability of income by evening out peaks and troughs across different sectors.

As I’ve mentioned previously I’m not a big stats man; this post is as close as I’ve previously come to number crunching and a minutiae of stock photography income analysis. However I am going to do some basic analysis of my microstock portfolios over the last six months to a year to see how these have held up. I’m particularly interested to look at my micro portfolios in this regard given the common perception that it is necessary to continually “feed the beast” in order to maintain returns from microstock. To date my micro images have provided a reliable and reasonable return without too much effort in recent years. For me the attractiveness of continuing to contribute to microstock depends on the sustainability of the returns. Stay tuned if you’re also interested to know if microstock has passive income potential.

Crestock has been struggling for some time with backlogged submissions and poor response times to both contributors and image buyers, so for all concerned this should be good news. The scale of the microstock sector is making it difficult for small operations to continue to offer the levels of service required for continued success. It is a natural progression for such relatively small start us to be aquired and further developed by established industry players.

The fact Masterfile have taken over Crestock should be seen both as an endorsement of the quality of what Crestock’s founders and conributors have built and also of the importance and viabilty of the microstock sector going into the future. Masterfile come from the old school of stock photography but obviously see the need to be involved in microstock and in Crestock they’ve the opportunity to fast track their entry into the sector.

I’ve written about DepositPhotos previously so here’s a quick update to report that I have started to see sales from the modest  one hundred and thirty odd images I currently have on sale.

DepositPhotos made an impressive late entry into the microstock market with their contributor incentives so I’d hope their pursuit of buyers will be equally proactive and this early result would seem to be a positive indication.

Bandwagons keep on rolling long after there is really any room left to jump aboard.

I’m really quite surprised to find there are still new microstock agencies popping up. Sure it is relatively cheap and easy to throw a site up. However, it takes a lot more effort to build a worthwhile collection of images that might start enticing buyers. Microstock is not new anymore, so any new agency has to somehow differentiate itself to potential buyers who are already familiar with and buying from one or more of the top six microstock sites.

This is where most of the newer sites playing catch up are struggling; their offerings are largely duplications of what is already on offer from the established players built up by non-exclusive contributors seeing each new site as another potential outlet for their images. Potential that unfortunately is often not realised as the buyers don’t come in enough volume (microstock is all about volume). Think about it. Why would they, if there is essentially nothing new on offer?

Microstock contributors are becoming increasingly wary of investing time and energy uploading to new startups and so new agencies are resorting to using pay to upload enticements. The now departed Albumo tried this with some success in building a decent collection. It didn’t help them sell enough to survive though. Now along comes DepositPhotos, a site offering the potential to make $100 simply by uploading your images. Their Photographer Promotion Program is paying 20c per image uploaded and approved, up to 500 images. Crucially their payout minimum is $50, so there is potential to make a little bit of cash here simply by uploading your existing non-exclusive microstock images. Whether that return is worth the time and effort involved is up to individual contributors. I would suggest it is only worth the effort if the submission process is fairly painless and automatic as I suspect they may struggle to generate decent sales.

The problem with this approach is it will again create a collection that struggles to stand out from the established players. DepositPhotos pricing model is on the low side but with microstock prices there really isn’t any room to win market share with aggressive pricing, especially as the current trend is for higher prices and more ‘premium’ imagery like istockphotos vetta collection.

So can a new startup microstock agency succeed now? I don’t think it is going to be easy; we’re going to see consolidation in the next few years in my opinion and there will be fewer viable agencies. There are, however, still some areas of potential though where a new agency could grab enough of the market to be worthwhile both to its owners and contributors. What is needed is some sort of unique selling point that will attract buyers, it could be a niche focus, or a superior level of service of some kind. Vivozoom had the right idea with their image warranties which offered buyers something of real value that would have stopped some using other microstock sites. However it didn’t take long for the big boys to swipe the competition away with istock and shutterstock now also guaranteeing their images. Vivozoom now has to brand itself as the ‘first’ microstock site to guarantee its images as legally safe, which doesn’t quite have the marketing clout they enjoyed when they were the ‘only’ microstock site offering this. You can bet the same thing will happen as soon as another upstart comes up with a good usp!

Starting up a new microstock agency is still relatively easy. Building it into a viable business is going to become increasingly hard. To my mind the opportunity is only really now in building a relatively small specialised collection with content that isn’t available everywhere and that is tightly focused on a specific segment of buyers. That doesn’t sound like microstock at all does it? Welcome to the resurgence of traditional stock photography agencies!

Following on from my previous post on the current opportunities to make money selling photos through microstock agencies here are a couple of observations that I think are worth both new and exisitng contributors pondering.

A few years ago early adopters of the microstock model could pretty much throw their shovel in the air, dig where it landed and make some money. You could shoot anything and everything, upload and see some downloads. That approach will not work now with photography, the market is saturated with enough general imagery that anything new that isn’t different and/or exceptional in some way will have, at best, only modest success. A more targeted approach is required, to use an internet business buzz word, you need a niche.

A niche may be subject matter, a particular style of photography, a unique take you have on your subject, or a combination of these things. For many photographers this is not necessarily an easy thing to find or develop; I know I haven’t developed one and I probably need to if I’m going to improve my microstock returns. The first step I have at least taken; realisation that it would be a good idea to think about this and work a bit smarter! If you’re thinking along these lines too take a look at picniche and see if any areas you might be able to shoot jump out!

Of course there are always exceptions and new opportunities. Many of the microstock agencies now accept video footage in addition to photos and vectors. Where any given subject or category will have many many thousands of images there will be far fewer footage clips currently available. Video could well be the new frontier and there is still time to get in early! With the release of the D90 Nikon opened up the possibility of creating high quality footage without needing too much extra gear so many microstockers already have the tools to shoot video. There is no doubt extra work, time, bandwith etc etc when working with video but to balance this licence fees are significantly higher and the competition is currently much less formidable!

Let me start by making it clear it has never been easy to make any significant money in microstock photography. The contributors making good money have worked hard to build successful collections over time that bring them the rewards for their efforts. However, a few years ago it was realistic for many “Mom and Pop” point and shoot snappers to upload their photos and earn some cash on the side. Some of these discovered they had real talent, saw the potential and went on with work and perseverance to become the people who now make significant income.

The question now is whether it is still possible for a new contributor to start from zero and build a portfolio in the microstock industry that will make them a reasonable return, at least, for their efforts. My short answer is a qualified yes; it can still be done but it is a lot harder with the level of competition now in terms of both quantity and quality of images continually being added. A talented contributor prepared to put in sustained effort could still build an asset – a portfolio – of images that will earn them residual income and possibly develop a career shooting for stock if desired. However the days of submitting snapshots from compact cameras and making a little second income, I think, are pretty much over. Any new contributor needs to being going into this with a high level of skill, good gear and the stamina for the long haul.

Kind of ironic in a way. The barriers to entry into the microstock business have started to rise! There is an interesting discussion on this going on over at the shutterstock forums which is worth a read for anyone considering their next move in microstock. A lot of valuable insight from experienced contributors is being shared in addition to some inspiring examples of what can be achieved.

Is the blogosphere the next big battleground in stock photography?

Newspapers and print media are like walking wounded staggering from the cruel sucker punch the global financial crisis has dealt them. Old media companies that survive will look a lot different in whatever guise they manage to make work and there will be far fewer printing presses rolling out fresh pages. The action is online now, and this has implications for photographers who are finding traditional markets are using fewer images and/or paying less and less for the rights to publish.

Increasingly the demand for images is online and every agency from Getty on down is doing something to promote their content for web use. Where it gets particularly interesting is in the potentially massive but hard to sell to micropublishing world that the Internet has facilitated. The blogosphere is the biggest and most obvious part of this. There are a lot of blogs, I’ve no idea how many, lets say 3 twillion for the sake of argument, which is academic anyway as the number will have grown exponentially by some dizzying factor by the time I finish this riduculously longwinded sentence. Where were we?

Yes, how to get bloggers to buy images? Pretty tricky given the presumption of “free” amongst many web users and the availabilty of creative commons content on flickr. Alamy, to their credit, are thinking about this, but their novel use scheme wasn’t too well received amongst contributors. I have a feeling they and the rest of the ‘traditional’ agencies better get some sort of working plan together quickly as the microstock agencies are looking to tap into this market and have the ready advantage that their pricing is already very affordable.

The microstockplugin for wordpress bloggers uses images from fotolia, which have to be purchased for use. Its a clever development which in theory may offer users a win win situation by allowing potential affiliate links back to earn them what they spend on photos for their blog. It also opens up the fotolia stock photography collection to a potentially huge new market.

Crestock has taken a different approach with freebieimages.com by attempting to tap into the potential for free advertising the blogosphere could offer. Freebieimages is also a wordpress plugin, the difference being users get to blog images from the crestock collection for free but they will be watermarked.

Both approaches seem to have potential to me, indeed I fully expect one, both or another will soon be available that offers bloggers the choice of a free watermarked image or a blog ready unbranded one for a few dollars more. Any bets which agency gets there first?

Despite the number of easy money and get rich quick type articles on microstock photography floating around the web I can tell you it isn’t an easy gig. Yes you can make money selling your photos on microstock sites but it does take a fair amount effort, in addition to photography skills, creativity and some business awareness. It is work!

Photographers spend only a small amount of their time with a camera in their hands. To be successful at stock photography you’ll quickly discover you need to invest time planning your shoots, editing and post production, keywording your selected images and eventually submitting to agencies. It can be a lot of effort and for measly returns as you start along the road of building a stock photography business. Understandably his is why many photographers quickly tire and never build a worthwhile portfolio that could bring them residual income in the future.

So how do the microstock superstars do it? With the micro agencies only a relatively recent phenomenon how have the contributors earning serious incomes built such successful businesses so quickly? Well there are inevitably some variations between each case and it goes without saying these guys have worked hard making the most of their talent for producing high quality images that the market needs.

On top of talent and effort I think there is an extra element that the most sucessful microstock photographers have incorporated into their workflow that the vast majority of stock photographers haven’t. Help. Pretty simple hey? To grow a business you usually need to get help one way or another and stock photography is no different. Take a look at Yuri Arcurs incredible studio set up and insane second photographer productivity to see the extreme example of what we should all be doing!

The trouble is, I think many photographers are inherently one-man-band type operators; it is the personality disorder that predisposes you to photography! So the new improved services from Lookstat could be of real interest to many microstockers ticking over and making some decent income but struggling to break into the next level. Outsourcing keywording and submission tasks would free up a lot of time to do more shooting. It’ll obviously depend on costings and how productive in shooting more images a photographer can be with the time saved but it does seem a service that could help a lot of photographers contributing to microstock.