By: gd (Gunther Deichmann)

gd (Gunther Deichmann) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:09:50 +0000

Tks. to my old friend Klaus Plaumann interesting article: What if Stock Photography dies in 2010? http://www.fastmediamagazine.com/?p=3052

By: Bruno

Bruno — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:46:02 +0000

What if the whole earth exploses tomorrow ?
What if … With WHAT IFs we can put Paris in a bottle.
There will be a future for Getty, Corbis and some microstock players but not anymore
for the agencies in between.

By: Steve Lake

Steve Lake — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:55:35 +0000

I agree with a lot of what Resnyc says but still feel there’s a place for smaller, specialist picture libraries selling exclusive, high quality work. For all the changes in the industry, one of the underlying factors as to why picture libraries came about in the first place – that the best photographers want to be out taking pictures, not immersing themselves in credit control and keywording – remains as relevant today as it always was. Libraries who have not gone down the image-factory road can still provide a very valuable service to photographers. You just have to make sure you choose wisely.

By: Fenneke

Fenneke — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:26:13 +0000

I’m glad to read your positive comments, John! It gives me all the more confidence for our specialist agency PictureNature which is based on a similar model like yours.

By: Resnyc

Resnyc — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:03:26 +0000

Stock photography, as run by the big agency (agencies?), is now only about volume and crowdsourcing. Quality imagery happens in that space, but it’s almost by accident, and mostly that’s not an issue because the customers in that market do not care about quality – at least at the level that differentiates between professional-produced imagery and amateur/hobbyist/user-generated content. Within a couple years, the only truly innovative, highly-produced photography at big stock agencies will have passed its expiration date, because, starting about 18 months ago, no photographer creating with a primary focus on quality over quantity can get a return on their investment in stock. The trick, now, is to decide which kind of photography you want to produce: money-making stock (massive quantity of disposable images) sold through agencies, or super high-end, signature-unique work that will get you assignments and, if it’s stock, that you can sell for a price that you set yourself (if you can afford to turn down low bids), on your own e-commerce enabled web-site. As with any artistic craft, only photographers offering something that is both totally unique and also beautiful and profoundly communicative will achieve commercial success, or even be able to make a living, in this part of the market. The days of making a good living from decent-quality but fairly indistinguishable stock photography, without resorting to shoveling out literally hundreds of scenarios a day, are over, forever. Good-enough photography is no longer a specialized craft – it is a mass phenomenon. To rise above that you have to be superstar-great and have deep pockets money found elsewhere, not just be really good. This is not a motivational message; we do not need to respond to this by saying, well, by gosh I’m a great photographer so I will make it if I try hard enough! It is a reality-check. What percentage of people graduating with fine arts degrees from art schools actually end up becoming successful artists? Who knows, but I’d bet it’s less than 1 percent. That’s about to become the same percentage in the photography world. We’ve just lived through an extraordinary and rare period in which there was huge demand for photography but it was still a challenging, expensive craft to execute even passably well, so a big percentage of people who tried their hand at it made a decent living. No longer. There will still be demand for assignment (but at lower budgets, and only for esoteric subjects that can’t be shot good-enough by the clients themselves), and demand for commodity-stock produced by image-factories, and super-high-quality stock sold directly on photographers’ own sites, but only by photographers who are making enough from assignment so they can afford to say “no” to low-balling customers.

Comments on: What if Stock Photography dies in 2010?

By: gd (Gunther Deichmann)

By: Bruno

By: Steve Lake

By: Fenneke

By: Resnyc