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...