Stock Photography

For a year, my stock photography was online at the website, Digital Railroad. For $550/ year, they hosted about 3-4000 of my images. Over the year, I sold only two pictures- the first sale didn't even cover my annual fee, the second was my biggest stock sale ever. Soon after paying my annual fee in September, DRR went bankrupt, taking my money with them...

For now, I'm looking for a new website to host my pictures and take care of sales. I have some images on Alamy, but am looking for something a little different.

Recently, I was contacted by a sports store owner from NY asking if he could use some images I had taken in Acadia National Park for his new store. After some discussion, he mentioned "On many stock photo sites I have come across it looks like I can purchase an image at differnt sizes for a price and then it is mine to use as I like. Is this not the case with your photos? I was hoping to buy the rights to a specific image based on the size of the file. If this is not the case I may have to buy a stock photo elsewhere. It would be too bad as I really love your work."

Here was my response to him:

"I know the stock photo sites you're referring to; I just can't compete with their prices. Their prices are for 'royalty free' images. Basically, you pay a fee and you can do whatever you want with the pictures. I only sell my images as 'rights managed', meaning you can use them for a certain amount of time for rights that are agreed upon at the time of the sale. The big agencies and online sites all offer royalty free (as well as right managed), but the contributing photographers make little to anything on sales. I have a lot of costs to cover for my Acadia pictures (airfare, car rental, hotel, food, as well as my time spent there and ~$15,000 of equipment I bring with me to take the pictures), so I have to charge enough to begin to recoup my costs. I hope you can understand my position."

Here're a couple links that explain it better than I can.
http://www.stockphotography.com/faq/CompareGuide/
http://www.asmp.org/commerce/royaltyfree.php

That was on Monday; I haven't heard back from him, so I'm assuming he's using one of the low cost stock photo sites, and that's OK. I put so much time, energy and expense into my pictures, that I can't justify selling them for a few dollars. I'd rather lose sales than give away exclusive rights for almost nothing.

That brings up another point– the cost of photography. I'll write that in another posting. Stay tuned...

Industrial Annual Report Photography

Wow- it's been a LONG time since I updated this page. It only means one thing... I've been busy, and in this economy, that's a good thing. Since my last posting, I've been to Maine for a week of foliage photography, spent three days in Colorado shooting log cabins for a luxury home builder, shot all the images for a new luxury hotel during a three day shoot, and countless other commercial and sports photo jobs.

One of the best parts of my job is that every day the work is a different. Some days I'm shooting sports, other days I'm at a hospital, and another day might find me at a college. Yesterday I visited a site I'd never been to before. I was working for a design firm in Baltimore, shooting some images to go in an annual report for an international chemical company. The shoot took place at a power plant in northern Indiana. Understandably, security is tight at a place like this, and once inside, it was a cross between being at an industrial wasteland and Homer Simpson's nuclear power plant. It was good to be home later and smell the fresh air and see grass again! I'm still not exactly sure what they do at the plant- water treatment or electricity generation. I felt too dumb to ask! But the photography was good, despite the wind chill being about 10 degrees. After some initial hitches (the tanker truck we were supposed to shoot wasn't even due to come that day, and the control room we were going to shoot in was off limits– we shot in a dingy corner, with one ten inch screen in the dirty wall instead), we got some good shots.