Stock Photography & Keeping up with Modern Technology
After laboring through my latest stock submission of 1,100 images, I have been coming to a conclusion over the past week that I need a more efficient workflow. I submit to a number of stock photo portals but hadn't been taking full advantage of all the options available to me. One of which is Lightboxes! Up til now I've just been creating galleries on my website and emailing them to prospective buyers, emailing low-res jpegs, or the old school way of mailing discs with print outs. I mean there's benefits to that too, namely lots of search engine traffic for my site, but that is not really the most efficient use of time.
So I've spent the past two days looking through the stock sites that I contribute to and learned how to set up lightboxes by emailing them to myself. They look good and gives the buyer flexibility in adding or removing images, something that is not an option on my main website currently. In the future I do plan on adding the MySQL-database, Lightbox Photo gallery software on my site to make it a fully searchable stock website with thousands of images. I'm working on figuring out the logistics of such an ambitious project as that would force me to learn more about website production than I ever planned to.
In the meantime, there are a lot of new companies out there to aid photographers with automated production, archiving and distribution tasks such as Digital Railroad, Photoshelter, etc... The drawback is that they are not cheap. Unless you plan on utilizing all of their features by integrating them onto your own site, or use them as your main website business, those sites would probably be a waste of your money. I do plan on following the status of Digital Railroad's new Marketplace feature though as that is essentially a massive stock photo website. That alone could make DRR a profitable venture for a photographer if you even get a sale or two per year through that service. However, my first priority is with continuing to grow my own website, then Alamy, then the other stock sites. So incorporating lightboxes into my submissions is going to be of high priority for me.
One service that I am with is Rohn Engh's Photo Source International. I've had portfolio listings with them for the past two months but now I'm really liking their lightbox feature that comes with it. I think the lightbox feature alone makes it a great deal for a do-it-yourself type of photography business. I'm glad to have discovered it tonight!
I just put together a Photo Source lightbox from Saturday's Central Coast images and I think it looks great. I plan to use it more than Alamy's lightbox since I want to deal directly with buyers, but there's more contact info on those lightboxes than I want to post on my blog here. I would be more inclined to use Alamy's though if they would let us photographers know who our images are being sold to. It makes it harder to market your photos and know what buyers are looking for when you haven't a clue who is buying your photos. That's Marketing 101. I have a bachelors degree in marketing management and a masters degree in advertising so I don't think that I am wrong about this. If anything, it would be beneficial to Alamy to provide us with that information. More sales for their photographers = more sales for Alamy. Obviously the more prosperous we are, the more photos we can provide to them. I don't think a homeless guy is capable of providing thousands of images to stock agencies.
Despite what I just wrote in the above paragraph, here is an Alamy lightbox I put together with some of my Eastern Sierra pictures. A few days ago, one of the scenic landscapes here sold as a double-page spread to run for three years in a U.S. textbook.
http://www.alamy.com/lbx.asp?318607
P.S.: don't get me wrong. I love Alamy. They give me a link to search my own image collection that I have on my main website, are non-exclusive, require no commitments, and are reliable when it comes to paying on time. They fit into what I want to accomplish so that is why I have been with them for two years now.
So I've spent the past two days looking through the stock sites that I contribute to and learned how to set up lightboxes by emailing them to myself. They look good and gives the buyer flexibility in adding or removing images, something that is not an option on my main website currently. In the future I do plan on adding the MySQL-database, Lightbox Photo gallery software on my site to make it a fully searchable stock website with thousands of images. I'm working on figuring out the logistics of such an ambitious project as that would force me to learn more about website production than I ever planned to.
In the meantime, there are a lot of new companies out there to aid photographers with automated production, archiving and distribution tasks such as Digital Railroad, Photoshelter, etc... The drawback is that they are not cheap. Unless you plan on utilizing all of their features by integrating them onto your own site, or use them as your main website business, those sites would probably be a waste of your money. I do plan on following the status of Digital Railroad's new Marketplace feature though as that is essentially a massive stock photo website. That alone could make DRR a profitable venture for a photographer if you even get a sale or two per year through that service. However, my first priority is with continuing to grow my own website, then Alamy, then the other stock sites. So incorporating lightboxes into my submissions is going to be of high priority for me.
One service that I am with is Rohn Engh's Photo Source International. I've had portfolio listings with them for the past two months but now I'm really liking their lightbox feature that comes with it. I think the lightbox feature alone makes it a great deal for a do-it-yourself type of photography business. I'm glad to have discovered it tonight!
I just put together a Photo Source lightbox from Saturday's Central Coast images and I think it looks great. I plan to use it more than Alamy's lightbox since I want to deal directly with buyers, but there's more contact info on those lightboxes than I want to post on my blog here. I would be more inclined to use Alamy's though if they would let us photographers know who our images are being sold to. It makes it harder to market your photos and know what buyers are looking for when you haven't a clue who is buying your photos. That's Marketing 101. I have a bachelors degree in marketing management and a masters degree in advertising so I don't think that I am wrong about this. If anything, it would be beneficial to Alamy to provide us with that information. More sales for their photographers = more sales for Alamy. Obviously the more prosperous we are, the more photos we can provide to them. I don't think a homeless guy is capable of providing thousands of images to stock agencies.
Despite what I just wrote in the above paragraph, here is an Alamy lightbox I put together with some of my Eastern Sierra pictures. A few days ago, one of the scenic landscapes here sold as a double-page spread to run for three years in a U.S. textbook.
http://www.alamy.com/lbx.asp?318607
P.S.: don't get me wrong. I love Alamy. They give me a link to search my own image collection that I have on my main website, are non-exclusive, require no commitments, and are reliable when it comes to paying on time. They fit into what I want to accomplish so that is why I have been with them for two years now.
Labels: California, stock photography
posted by Richard @ 11:21 PM
6 comments
Richard Wong Photography: Image Boutique
6 Comments:
I didn't realize you had a masters degree - from where?
As much as I would like to say the Wharton School of Business, I went to the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. :-o
Maybe it will be the next Wharton! I picked up my MBA at UC Irvine - it is a nice thing to have.
Thanks for the optimism. yeah I did a lot from the experience so I guess I sort of achieved the purpose for going to school. lol, now I have to capitalize on it...
congrats on your UCI degree. when I came out of school originally I looked into Northwestern and some other big name schools but I was told that you should have several years of real experience first. so that's part of how I ended up going where I did, plus after 9/11 there really wasn't much in terms of employment opportunities so I knew that I was probably going back to school the next fall to learn something practical.
That is interesting as that is how I ended up at UCI. At the time they preferred, but did not require full-time work experience which I didn’t have. The economy in Alaska was terrible at the time so I went back to school.
smart choice. that period of time I had between graduating and going back to school is when I learned how to do serious photography. so in a way that was an education as well.
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