Despite the ease of consumer shopping these days, finding essential items is not so easy. Take the case of the lowly shoelace. You can't do without them. And you need white ones for your sneakers, not black, not plaid, nor leather. You don't feel like walking half a mile through a Wal-Mart. On-line shopping on the Internet would cost you three times the actual price when you add in the shipping. And gas prices make a special trip to the Dollar Store prohibitive.
I can't suggest an easy way out of this dilemma, and it's interesting that the same parallel holds true for the photo researchers looking for an essential picture for their publishing project.
But on this latter issue I can offer a solution. Like on a shoe, 'any ol' shoelace won't do. For the researcher, that "just right" picture can turn a B-minus layout into an A-plus.
The savior in this case is the search facilities on the Internet. Like the improvements in cell phones over the last two years, 'search' on the Internet has improved also. Using a text search, rather than a picture search is the simplest answer for the weary photo researcher.
"But are researchers using text to find pictures?" you might ask.
Not all of them, because not all of them are aware of this fairly recent search method. But the successful researchers are finding out about the benefits of this method, and growing numbers are climbing on board. realize this method.
The top search engines these days seem to be Google, Yahoo and MSN. On your website, if you enter several words, even sentences or phrases, that these search engines can pick up in their frequent 'web crawls' of the Internet, your pictures and essential details will be indexed. In other words, you'll be 'cataloged' like a reference book, just like in your local library. You and your picture description will be identified. And you'll be found.
Though each search engine will invite you to apply for a search (it's free), you don't have to. Like the census taker, they trace you down -in this case, about every three to six months, depending on their workload.
If you don't have a website, or you want double protection, place your descriptions on the PhotoSourceBANK at Photosource International. The web crawlers will index your personal website but also the PSI website, giving you double protection. More importantly, the photo researchers tend to opt for easy shopping by adding the word -photosource-to their search description, which directs their search to the major image database, the PhotoSourceBANK.
As for shoelaces, however, I don't have an easy answer for you. -RE
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find information about social photography, photo research, buying pictures, finding photos, keywords, and selling pictures.
Our weekly newsletter that features carefully researched
coverage of trends, methods, and the latest information
that can help photo researchers in their quest to find
that "just right" photo for their publishing
project.
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- Fay Torresyap, Photo Researcher, New York NY
It is morning and as you finish your breakfast, in October of the year 2011, you click on your "daily revenue" feature on your keypad.
"My! That's a nice surprise," you exclaim. "But of course garden publishers are preparing for their year 2012 brochures, magazine articles, calendars and catalogs."
You are a gardening enthusiast and specialize in vegetables. Before you go off to your job as a biologist at a nearby college, you are examining your stock photo sales made last night while you were sleeping. Fourteen sales for a total of $307.16. That beats yesterday's sales of $215 for seven sales.
"I wonder if that company in Buenos Aires is still interested in the three dozen seedling shots I emailed them last week," you wonder to yourself just as the fax line rings. You watch as the machine curls out an order totaling $1,700 US. Not bad for 24 hours' "work."
You have been engaged in this kind of stock photo marketing for the past five years. You have developed a database of photos in an area (gardening) that you have special interest in and abundant knowledge about. You are not only a serious amateur gardener, but you also teach horticulture.
About five years ago, you began building a massive file, 10,000 photos now, capturing all aspects of vegetable gardening, from seed to mature plant. You researched the biological and common name of each plant you photographed. Because you live in the southwest desert area of the U.S., many of your images are unique to that part of the country. You have recorded the stages of various plants' growth, various insects that plague different plants, the resulting harm, and in some cases the effects of diseased plants on animals or people who eat them.
Your photobuyers, a select group of 42 photobuyers and researchers on your master list, call you by first name and you call them collect whenever you wish. You have become an important resource to them. You also deal with outside buyers. Every now and then you get an occasional one-time sale from a buyer who has used the Internet to locate you and your email address. A children's book publisher bought one of your beanstalk images, an advertising agency bought a tomato plant growth sequence for a pharmaceutical ad, and a close-up of a ladybug was used on a drug company's advertisement for a salve for freckles. But for the most part, your checks come from within your 42 mainstays who are prompt with their photo requests, and who know you do good work and provide accurate captioning.
WHEN IT ALL STARTED
And how did this system of acquiring that "just right" photo at an inexpensive fee all start? It was born of the revolution in e-commerce marketing at the turn of the century; inspired by the Napster music outburst back in 2001. Internet entrepreneurs realized that if you injected some democracy into music buying, more people could enjoy music at a lower cost to the consumer. And if you applied evolving Internet search methods, photo researchers and photobuyers, using the same basic technology, could use more illustrations because they were easier to find. A final advantage was micro-payments, a system of tracking multiple volume sales and controlling the bookkeeping through subscription services that provide royalty tracking and payments schemes, ensuring that the photos purchased didn't leak out onto the wider Web landscape.
In the first decade of the 2000's, the world of stock photography distribution changed. No longer did massive stock agencies, based on previous century technology, control the commerce. Photobuyers armed with Web search know-how, aimed their high-speed computers and bandwidth directly at individual photographers who were able to supply the highly specific images they were looking for. Everyone from school children to major book publishers, from TV documentary production companies to major advertising agencies, were customers.
What made the difference? There were several factors. Digital cameras that could produce high-resolution images became affordable. Speedy phone lines could transmit images for preview with immediacy. Web search engines became more sophisticated. Photographers began building deep selections of specific subject matter that they were expert in and enjoyed photographing. Business software for stock photographers emerged that made bookkeeping and accounting chores more bearable. Disk storage became cheap and dependable. Digital-only printing plants became the norm rather than the exception. Picture security systems became useable. Copyright protection laws were revised and brought into the new millennium. Magazines and book publishers focussed more on theme publishing, rather than producing "across the board" subject material. Photobuyers and researchers became more versatile in Web technology and more expert in the select special interest area of their readers.
BLOWING IN THE WIND
What caused the demise of the large stock photo agency as we know it today? All of the above, of course, but the main factor was that, being a centralized organization, the massive stock agency was too monolithic to be able to act swiftly when a buyer needed a picture. In the past, the massive stock agency was convenient because all the images were housed in a central supermarket-style location. But the emergence of the Web destroyed this advantage. Photobuyers could now go directly to the supplier-the photographer - rather than through a bureaucratic middleman system.
In addition, if the buyer needed a recent photo of school children in France, or a skyline of a particular city in California, the image from the stock agency might be 4 to 5 years old. A query to a California photographer living in the exact city or to a Parisian schoolteacher-amateur photographer, could produce current results in less than 24-hours.
We emerged into an era where film-produced images became artifacts and were seen in 'antique' exhibits, and film photographers came to be revered as artists who mastered archaic darkroom techniques to provide museum-quality prints. Digital photography became the norm. Not only did the automatic controls on digital cameras allow persons with a sensitive eye for imagery to produce fine quality images, but photo editing software allowed them to enhance the pictures for additional creative treatment.
When we look back on the turn of the century, our grandchildren will admire those early photographers who spent lonely hours in darkness to produce memorable film images of the world around us. The turn of the century will also be known in photography circles as the era when photography lost the shackles of cumbersome roll film and odorous darkroom chemicals. It will be known as the revolution that gave pictures back to the people and eliminated greedy photo pricing and limited distribution of those images.
Thanks to the photography of yesteryear, we were able to perceive a limited view of our planet. The new era of photography will be boundless in its energy to provide us with a more comprehensive knowledge of our world.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, Osceola, WI 54020 USA Email: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394
Web site: www.photosource.com
(PhotoSourceBank: http://www.photosource.com/psb; Phone: (800) 624 0266 x21; PhotoSourceFolio: http://www.photosource.com/psf; Fax: (818) 831-0916. Email: info@psf.ntnation.com (auto response))
Ed. Note: Drop us a line about your successes in marketing your photos through the PhotoSourceBank or PhotoSourceFolio. We'd like to hear your story.
Business
Notepad
STOCK PHOTO AGENCIES
can be an outlet for some of your pictures. Do agencies object to you marketing your own pictures when they also represent you? No, not the established ones. They encourage you to also market on your own. They want to share the sales with you, and also to share the setbacks. They know that a photographer who markets pictures on his/her own will understands the pitfalls (and glories) of selling ... Full
Story
The cost of travel overseas is always
prohibitive for the stock photographer just starting out.
One way to skirt around this problem is to become a home based
travel agent. Make money from home as an independent travel
agent and see the world at a discount! Get details from this
informative eBook.
Does this symbol need to be displayed on all your photos for you to be protected? In other words, if someone uses a photo without the permission of the photographer, but the photo does not contain a copyright notice, is that person still guilty of infringing?
The answer is yes. Someone who uses a photo they see in a publication, without getting the photographer's permission (let alone paying him or her), is violating copyright, whether or not there's a copyright notice on the photo. Under current law, photos are protected by copyright whether or not the photographer puts a copyright notice on them. However, the fact that a photo does not have a copyright notice on it may result in a lower damages award, under copyright law's "innocent infringer" defense.
The Power of a Researcher's Personal Visit to an Agency
All the best picture researchers I know like to ferret around in stock agency filing cabinets. Just to find out what's there. Some assignments are simply not quantifiable by computer search. An example - I was working for a magazine and I had two stories to fill: one was a roundup of motor sport and the other was a dry business piece about "Taking on Your Competitors," one of those abstract concepts that are notoriously difficult to illustrate.
I went to Allsport in London and had an enjoyable afternoon finding the racing pictures. I happened to see a tranny on the lightbox: the classic image of a truly gigantic sumo wrestler facing down a smaller man (the "little" guy actually won the bout). Presto! I knew I had the business image I also needed. (Allsport, picture by Chris Cole).
I keep hearing that a 20% group of a photo agency's pictures account for 80% of the sales profits. The implication is that the other 80% of the stock images is essentially worthless. I don't share that view. In a way, the little-seen pictures have more cultural value than the endless numbers of "samey" ones. In an age voracious for new images, I think it's bean-counting to throw away the 80% because they don't sell often. Most of the 80% are not digitised. Non-digitised costs aren't an issue: what other business could store assets worth $100,000 in a filing-cabinet and not put efforts to market them?
A REMEDY
These pictures are unlikely to be digitised, but I don't recommend throwing them all away. It's hard to tell what will be of value to future researchers. For example, could the industry have predicted that 70's fashions would presently have a revival? (I nearly had an embolism when I recently saw platform shoes again…!)
In my time I've got quite a lot of the more "conceptual" material by looking in the back of drawers and asking library staff what oddball stuff they've got. (These are the ones that are not readily available because they are not digitised.) It's all part of the mysterious process of being a researcher: visual culture will be diminished if these stores of "other" pictures cease to be an option in the rush to digitisation.
Julian Jackson is an Internet consultant, web designer and Picture Researcher living in the UK. His eBook, "Picture Research in a Digital Age" is available from http://www.julianjackson.co.uk for $9.99.
Jackson's latest eBook will give you insider knowledge about marketing your images in the new media. Internet Marketing for Photographers is 67 pages important information about promoting your stock photos. $18.99.
http://www.julianjackson.co.uk /marphoto.htm
Of
Interest
HOME OFFICE PERKS . . .
KNOWING THE ROPES
TO PUT MONEY IN YOUR POCKET
Advance Notes: If you’re self-employed, you’re eligible for specific tax deductions that can, in effect, “give yourself a raise.” There are many tax deductions you can claim that relate right to the place you probably do much of your work, your home. Here are some tips from the book, “422 Tax Deductions,” by Bernard Kamoroff, C.P.A.
The IRS accepts that a “home” office can be in a house, apartment, loft, condominium, trailer, mobile home, or boat. The term also includes any separate structure that is part of your residence, such as a garage or barn. You can deduct the expenses directly related to your home office, such as utilities, insurance, property taxes, etc. You must, however, meet certain requirements for your home work space to qualify as a “home office,” and be eligible for these deductions. (See below).
The home-office rules apply to sole proprietors, partners, and owners of an S corporation. The ... Full
Story
BETTER VIDEOS COMING Canon, Nikon video-shooting SLR cameras ready for action
Two new SLRs can now shoot high-definition video, taking advantage of
the superior lenses (much better than video cameras,
way better than point-and-shoots) available for SLRs.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-10-01-slr-video_N.htm?csp=34
HOW DO THEY DO IT? Yuri Arcurs - Microstock Entrepreneur - Not content with an
annual microstock income of US$1.3 million and being the top selling microstock photographer, Yuri Arcurs is creating a microstock empire. Here's a summary of his new entrepreneurial activities.
http://www.microstockdiaries.com/meet-the-new-yuri-arcurs-microstock-entrepreneur.html
WHO SAID PHOTOGRAPHERS CAN’T WRITE? History in the Buffer - David Burnett, photojournalist, wrote this piece about his experience "in the buffer" covering the election night in Chicago. A remarkable diary of his election night experience.
http://werejustsayin.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-in-buffer.html
TAKEAWAY: When TIME Magazine made “the computer” the Man of the Year, they sent David Burnett to Pine Lake Farm to photograph me and my new Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. You can see the picture TIME used at:
http://www.photosource.com/rohntime
