I loved photography, and I had a strong bent toward business. While I took classes and moved toward my eventual split major in photography and business, I researched the industry and began shooting photographs with the goal of being represented by a major photo agency. It was a long journey – it took eight years to become a good enough photographer to amass a library of images large enough to convince an agency to give me a contract. In the meantime, I shot black and white film, did my own processing and printing, and submitted my work to magazines and local publishers. And they started buying.
All the while, I was reading books to learn everything I could about the stock photography industry. I learned what I needed to know to get started shooting color for my own image library and for submission to an agency. I found that one had to shoot slide film, technically known as transparency film. The burn rate was high.
If one tenth of the frames you exposed came back technically perfect enough to submit to an agency, you were doing well. Slide film and processing were expensive: ten dollars per roll in combined costs for film and processing (and remember those were 1980s dollars). Many photo agencies accepted only 30 to 40 percent (and often less) of the images that were submitted. In terms of sales, those in the industry suggested that you could earn about one dollar per image on file, per year.
Are you doing the math? It cost ten dollars to produce four slides, only one or two of which the agency would accept, thereby netting one to two dollars per image per year. So purely on the basis of raw material costs you could expect to spend at least three years reaching a break-even point, taking in what you were spending. (In the meantime, you have written off thousands of dollars in expenditures as start-up costs.) In this scenario, it would take many years to see any sort of consistent profit, and that was if you were at least average! That’s all I was – just average. I was dedicated, but my photography skills were certainly not developed enough to vault me ahead of the pack.
I lay this out for you, dear reader, to illustrate how difficult it was to break into the business and gain any kind of foothold. As this book is being published in 2010, photography has gone through radical changes, and those changes have made it very easy for the amateur photographer to produce great-looking photographs. Photography today is as much about computers and software as it is about cameras and lenses. You no longer need to know a great deal about the physics of light or chemistry, and that bodes well for you, my friend. Technology has opened a door into the world of selling your photographs and making money passively – including while you sleep!
In the age of the Internet, anyone on the planet with a connection to the web can find your photographs and pay a fee to use them, and those transactions happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You literally make money in your sleep, in perpetuity. Now you can understand why this industry is so appealing!
Chapter 1
Visual Metaphors
Stock photography exists to serve the needs of people or businesses that need a photograph for some form of media, but they don’t want to hire a professional photographer to shoot it. A stock photography agency provides a commercial library of photographs available for rent or lease. Both amateur and professional photographers produce these photographs to sell, but they do not want to be directly involved in the selling process. Photographers shoot something they think might be wanted by some buyer, somewhere. They send it to the agency, the agency accepts it into their collection, and makes it available to the buying public. The potential photo buyers go to the agency’s website, search for the type of photo they need, choose the best one (yours, I hope!), and pay for it. The agency takes a commission on the sale and pays the photographer accordingly.
Chances are that you see yourself as the photographer in that equation. So, if you wish to participate in stock photography transactions, your interest is in shooting photographs that someone will want to buy, right? That leads us to the questions of what to shoot, and how to shoot it well.
There have been countless books and articles written about selling photography, and the vast majority center on the idea of “shooting what sells.” Most authors make the assumption that their audience is more concerned with making money than any other part of the process, including the creative part. Well, put on your turn signal and follow me, because this is where I take the road less traveled. I am going to assume that you, fellow photographer, give equal weight to the creative act of making photographs and making money from them.
If anything, you are probably like me in that you prefer to spend your time behind the camera and not at a desk doing sales, marketing, and office work. I’m going to assume that you are more “artist” than “business-person.” That’s why you bought this book! I’m willing to bet that you already have a camera, and your first interest is photography. If I’ve described you accurately thus far, then I want to respect that position, and not do anything to sour you on photography.
Let’s keep it fun and creative. In that vein, I’m going to teach you how to see the world around you through a different set of eyes. You are going to learn how to see everything as a visual metaphor. What do I mean by that? You’re going to learn to look all around you and decide if what you see is or could be a metaphor for something other than what it is.
Every day, companies, non-profits, schools, publishers, and all kinds of organizations have ideas that they need to communicate. Sometimes – oftentimes – it is to sell a product or service. Other times it’s simply to get an idea across or serve as an illustration for a written description (such as in a textbook). This communication is put into play with words, sounds, illustrations, moving images (video) and still images (photographs). That’s what we’re concerned with: photographs as visual metaphors.
Still photography has its origins, in part, in a process stumbled upon by the Frenchman Louis Daguerre. His process of exposing a copper plate to iodine gave him a metal surface on which an image could be recorded, though it had to be done within an hour of obtaining the exposure. The exposure itself took between ten and twenty minutes to obtain, so the photographer had a great deal of time and purposeful thought invested in every image he recorded.
Mechanically, it’s no leap at all from Daguerre’s era to the modern world of stock photography. The type of cameras used in the early 1800s – view cameras – are still used today to produce images sold as stock photos. Believe it or not, the view camera is alive and well in photography.
The photographers of yesteryear had to have a very clear idea of what they wanted to “say” in their photographs. As you might guess, using a view camera is a very slow process. It typically takes several minutes to compose a photograph, focus, and trip the shutter after inserting the film. (At least that’s how long it takes me!) Yes, you read that right, several minutes per image.
There’s not much point to investing that much thought and time if you’re not fairly sure the resultant image is going to be a good one. Let’s call that clarity of vision. Now let’s apply clarity of vision to visual metaphors to give ourselves a solid definition of what stock photography really entails: Using a still camera to produce a single image that illustrates or represents an idea, theme, object, or place, clearly enough that someone would pay to use it.
Time for our first example: the image of a hunter, below.
Whether you are an opponent or proponent of hunting, products related to hunting compose a multi-billion dollar industry. Take a look at this hunting shot and think of it in terms of how it might be used to represent concepts, ideas, or themes. What are some of the ideas that image
