Stock Photography

silver163 · May 18, 2007

can anyone recommend a good stock photography company, one that pays a fairly good amount and/or lets you bargain the price for "special" photos? thanks in advance.

wesd · May 22, 2007

ya I would be interested in this thread.
Wes

skieur · May 22, 2007

I have always found there is a profit in buying stock photography, not selling it. I currently have bought 1,000,000 royalty free/rights free photos.

I have used such photos to speed up the process of producing multimedia presentations. It is much easier and faster for example for me to come up with a rights free photo of an antique telephone than finding one to shoot. I use my own photos as well and some animation but time is money and combining stock photos into collages with titles etc. can produce a great presentation without sending the cost factor into the stratosphere. Of course the bottom line is that the customer is happy with a great presentation at a very competitive price.

skieur

DigitalDiva · May 23, 2007

I'm also interested in where to sell some work as stock photography. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

wesd · May 23, 2007

One stock photography place that I know of is the www.stockphotospot.com , it was an advertisement on this site. They dont really give you that much for an image but you do keep the rights for the shot. So if you have a lot of shots that you dont really want then I guess its worth it, but shop around and keep us posted.
Wes

CBRfanatic · May 23, 2007

www.shutterstock.com is a good one.

niccig · May 23, 2007

www.photographersdirect.com

They take a fairly small percentage, photos are priced at a lot more (like $50 up to the $1000's, I think) and you keep the rights. They have a whole thing on their website about "fair trade photography". I have some stuff on there, but have yet to sell anything.

BoblyBill · May 24, 2007

I have a Istock account but have only made about $7 on my shots. Granted I have only 5 pictures on there, but it's hard to have them approved. I always run into artifacts. Most of my pictures are of storms and they don't take sunset and cloud pictures very often because of the high volume that they already have. I do of some that have the nac for finding that one picture that qualifies for a great stock photo. I know of some that have made a VERY good living at stock photography but they upload tons of pictures a day.

darich · May 24, 2007

As far as I'm concerned any place that only gives me $0.20c (equivalent of 10p) is as good as stealing it from me. If it's good enough to use in the public domain then the price should reflect that.

www.stockphotospot.com, www.shutterstock.com, www.istockphoto.com are all taking advantage of the digital revolution in cameras nad that people who never sold an image now can.
In every site, bar none, you retain the rights so making a big deal out of that is a bit sneaky and could lead you to think that other sites take those rights away.
I use www.photographersdirect.com and there are 2 main differences there:

first off i decide the price and the use of the image is agreed and included in the binding agreement, unlike the royalty free sites who could sell my image who uses it to promote something i'm against.
i can use the images again and again because i know where they've been used. With Royalty Free you can run into legal problems with different printers/publishers in a competing market

And apart from that, I got more a of a kick selling my one image for over £85 ($170) than i ever would from selling loads for a next to nothing.

fmw · May 24, 2007

Darich, sorry for going off topic but I saw a well made television show the other night about the life and activities of William Wallace. Needless to say, your home town came up several times. It is a place of much history.

darich · May 25, 2007

fmw said:
Darich, sorry for going off topic but I saw a well made television show the other night about the life and activities of William Wallace. Needless to say, your home town came up several times. It is a place of much history.

Fred
My home town is actually Glasgow, i moved here around a year ago. I live about 6 miles from Lanark. It's a very old town and as you probably saw, is steeped in history.

But i still think it's robbery to sell an image for a few pence like the sites i mentioned!!

BoblyBill · May 25, 2007

darich said:
Fred
My home town is actually Glasgow, i moved here around a year ago. I live about 6 miles from Lanark. It's a very old town and as you probably saw, is steeped in history.

But i still think it's robbery to sell an image for a few pence like the sites i mentioned!!

If you wouldn't mind, I have some questions about this site. Do/Have you sell/sold a lot of pictures on this site: www.photographersdirect.com? Do you have to have some one look over the picture for quality before you upload it? I'm assuming there is a minimum size. Do you have to pay to be a member? I'm sorry but I didn't see any of that info when I checked that site out.

niccig · May 25, 2007

On Photographer's Direct, you can either get a "subscription" membership where you pay a fee, but no commission, or you can be "commission-based" where they take a percentage of each sale, but no up front fees. All photos are reviewed for quality before they're accepted, and there is a minimum size - the longest side has to be at least 3000 pixels.

One other thing - if you have any images at all on "micro stock" sites like shutterstock, istockphoto, etc, they won't accept you. I think they're with me in the idea that the micro stock business model is totally unfair to professional photographers in that it makes it basically impossible for anyone to make a significant income from it, and it's really insulting to say to someone "Your work is only worth $2". The evils of micro stock are a whole other thing though, and there are already a few threads on it.

darich · May 25, 2007

niccig described photographers direct pretty well - the site does have a "frequently ignored question" section where the technical and financial details are.

I've been a member for over a year - slowly building up the number of images i have. Currently around 140. I've sold one to a calendar in Germany for over £85 and had 2 other enquiries but they didn't lead to sales.

As for micro sites and not being accepted by PD - i think it's a legal issue too.

And who'd want to buy an image for £100 when it or an almost identical one could be had for 20p? It doesn't reflect well on the site or the photographer.