Following Andy’s comments here, I decided to write a bit about my humble experience with the business side of photography. Andy had several questions, so I think I’ll spread the answers out over several posts here, do a bit of writing now and then when I have the time.

This first installment will be about stock photography: Do you intentionally shoot for stock? Can you recommend any specific agencies?

Yes, sometimes I have shot photos purely intended for stock sales. I am personally selling my stock photos through Alamy, an agency based in London and soon New York. I started in late 2007 by uploading some general shots I had of this and that, but focusing more on ‘travel photography’ than ‘documentary stuff’. I now have about 700 images online with Alamy. It has been a good learning experience, but not really a big financial success. In stock photography, earnings are best measured in terms of RPI, meaning return-per-image (per year). My RPI so far is…

…about 1 dollar, meaning that for each photo I’ve uploaded, I’m getting an average of 1 dollar return per year. Not impressive, but I consider it an OK start.

Notice : I am not saying here that I’m selling any images for 1$. I’d definitely not recommend doing that! It’s more like I’m selling 7 images for around $100-150 each, my cut being 60%.

From these numbers alone, you can see you need to have a lot of sellable images to earn a decent living this way! And that’s the first truism here: Stock photography ain’t quick and easy money! Be prepared to work for years before you get substantial sales!

After my initial experiments, I’ve now changed my approach to doing stock photo work. It’s just not worth the time and effort, for me, to be ‘shooting in the dark’, submitting general ‘this and that’ anymore. The trick, of course, is to have an idea about what sells and what doesn’t sell. I’m still learning this, I know anything can sell, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth the effort. This is where your workflow efficiency comes into the picture. It’s really an important thing to consider when you consider photography as your livelihood in stead of your hobby. So I did a simple piece of math that might be useful for you and others to consider:

I’m guessing currently I need at least 2 hours to produce an image for stock. That includes research, travel, shooting, editing, post-processing, keywording and uploading. I can work for 10 hours per day and I currently have an RPI-per-year of around 1 dollar. That gives me a daily salary of just 5 dollars! But wait, I’m guessing the same image can remain sellable for 5 years, which makes my day-salary a whopping $25 (sic!).

Well, for me, 5 or 25 dollars per day, just doesn’t make sense. It should be at least $100 and preferably more like $250 if I’m going to spend my time on it. Remember, you still need to pay travel expenses, camera gear, computer, software, internet bill, perhaps insurance and don’t forget tax, of this amount! That’s the cost of doing business. If I can’t reasonably cover these costs, I feel rather silly taking on the workload!

So before I will shoot stock photos now, I’ve learned to consider if it’s worth the time. It might be, if, (1) I can expect a super-easy workflow, cutting the time spent per image down to 20 minutes or so (a factor 6 improvement), or, (2) I can expect to produce some very sellable photos giving me a RPI of 5-10 dollars or more. In those cases I still do stock photos!

One of the reasons I’m buying a new camera (they keep saying it’ll come ‘next week’) is that I expect to be able to cut a lot of the post-processing time, thereby increase my workflow efficiency. But that’s not enough. The other important step to take is, producing very sellable stock photos. Well, I think I’m getting a better idea about this as time goes by, but it’s not easy to define what sells. Some of the usual and rather un-specific advice floating around is :

(1) Be original – don’t waste your time on the same things as the happy weekend-snapper crowd
(2) Be iconic – perhaps contradictory with (1), but it has something to do with shooting general, multi-useful images. One thing I’ve realized is that what I’ve been shooting is very much ‘Nepal images’ – natural, since this is where I’m based. But it’s too specific, there isn’t exactly thousands of image buyers looking for ‘Nepal images’, so I now know that I need to be ‘broader’.
(3) Get model releases – important if you want to sell images for the advertising market, where the image prices are generally higher. Takes some getting used to, and sometimes when I’ve asked people to sign a model release they become really suspicious and walk away! So I usually only ask for MR’s when it’s some of my friends now.

Good Subjects
My own experience tells me that ‘general travel photography’, slightly surprising, isn’t worth the time and effort – unless it’s really good and original. Good, sellable qualities are :

(1) ‘clean and simple’ images which are easy to ‘decode’,
(2) strong colours and a narrow tonal range,
(3) photos with people showing strong emotions (‘happy’ seems popular)

and perhaps

(4) ‘average to slightly stylish’ people actively doing something in some fairly stylish settings.

I’ve also heard that more sellable subjects should be such things as

(5) ‘active senior citizens’
(6) ‘happy families’
(7) ‘business people shaking hands etc.’
(8) ‘mixed ethnic friendship situations’.

But honestly, I’m not that interested in spending whole days staging these kind of situations and rearranging little things in the photo, although that’s probably the key to success in stock photography…

This was some of my thoughts and experiences selling stock photos on Alamy. You can see all my stock photos on Alamy here. There are of course other stock agencies to consider, most notably Getty and Corbis, but I will not begin to spend time on those before I have improved my workflow and RPI level. I have heard a lot of things, mostly bad, about working for Getty, but one thing is for sure: They know how to sell images! So they might be worth considering as well at some point in time. I’m determined to earn some money this way, but I’ve still got a lot of ground to cover ahead of me… There’s other ways of selling photos than through stock agencies, I’ll write about them at a later time. This was probably the best advice I can give. Not much, but it’s difficult to describe in general terms. And I’d love to hear comments if someone thinks I’ve gotten it right or wrong here! To learn more about photo business, I highly recommend reading these two books, they’ve pretty much become classic must-have’s. You can even have a free sneak preview inside the books by clicking on them: