Exceptional work all round

[David Kilpatrick]

I have been looking at the threads here and the pix. Some of you really have some exceptional work, and it is made more interesting by the contexts and stories attached. I hope that 'visitors' drop in and view this forum regularly because it has become a showcase for some excellent Alpha images.

Thanks, everyone.

David

[Dusty]

It might be good for the shooters if you were to point out which ones you thought exceptional, and also if you think there is any commercial value to them. Maybe you can point a few guys to the proper resources to sell a few pics.

Maybe a thread on "How to market your photos in today's digital world" could give us all pointers.

Just a thought.

Dusty

[Hawk]

I agree with Dusty. I doubt any of my photos is exceptional as I still think about myself "slowly learning Alpha amateur", yet I'd welcome any comments why my photos are good/bad/whatever as well as information of what kind of photos sells best, how and why

[David Kilpatrick]

I wish I could tell you. 10 or 20 years ago I could have told you exactly how to make photographs to sell. Now, I have no idea. I put almost all my images up for stock sale through Alamy and the ones which sell have made me reconsider my approach. We live in an information era, and pictures which show information outsell those which don't. Pretty pictures - attractive scenes, great photos - don't sell as well.

In the last year, it took me 70 image sales to gross $6400 with Alamy - roughly $4000 net. That;s about 1/3rd of what 70 image sales (averaged) would have made in the pre-digital stock library era. Of the 70 sales, about 10 were duplicates or repeats - the same image selling several times for related uses. This week, a single 1986 35mm Minolta Fujichrome scan shot from the floating market Damnoen Saduak (photographed by thousands of tourists every week) secured three related sales for a total o $500. That's about the best sale for some time.

Nine of the 70 images sold from the last year were direct images of text, signs, labels or information including close-ups of computer screen text, mandatory safety signs, windfarm protest placard, parking charges signboard, airport internet facility chairback. This tallies with experience; anything up to 20% of stock sales for editorial have a legible message or words included in the picture.

Needless to say, these images are NEVER great photography. They are often just the name of a place, a hotel, or something like that.

David

[roysmith]

I wish I could tell you. 10 or 20 years ago I could have told you exactly how to make photographs to sell. Now, I have no idea. I put almost all my images up for stock sale through Alamy and the ones which sell have made me reconsider my approach. We live in an information era, and pictures which show information outsell those which don't. Pretty pictures - attractive scenes, great photos - don't sell as well.
[...]
Needless to say, these images are NEVER great photography. They are often just the name of a place, a hotel, or something like that.
David

Yes I noted something like that, too. Most people doesn't seem interested in what I consider a great photo, they prefer pics with signs, words or things which doesn't make any sense or they don't understand (like weird perspectives or tricks with lights and shadows). Simpler pics, like landscapes or wildlife, are often overlooked regardless of the quality (composition, colours, tones, texture). Same thing seems to be happening with music and other arts I'm afraid.

[Dusty]

Okay, maybe no-one is going to make post-cards of my great vacation shots of the Grand Canyon. But what is today's process for stock photography?

Back in the day I was doing weddings and shooting for a few small publications, I knew where my market was. I looked at taking some of my excellent shots and putting them in a stock agency, but the books I bought on the subject set the bar pretty high, I thought.

Is there a primer somewhere on the web about how to do it today? Is there a minimum number you need to submit, size/type requirements, release requirements, cost to submit or other "entrance" requirements? What will the average sale bring? What are the "best" (subjective, I know) sites to put your photos on? Can I submit the same photo to multiple sites?

Maybe if some of these questions were answered more of us would delve into trying to sell our pics. I know that any money I make on photography just goes back into more gear, and I need to rebuild from scratch, having gone from MD to Alpha mount.

Dusty

[Hawk]

I just registered on Alamy and I'm about to send first four test photos. I hope they'll pass quality checks and then I'll upload more and wait to see if at least one will sell in next few months As far as I read and understood the contract I don't have to pay anything for that.

[David Kilpatrick]

The most consistent money per image can be made from Alamy and iStockphoto, though the former will sell mainly for $30-$300 per image and the latter for a tenth of that, but ten times as many downloads. Alamy QC is not very strict compared to iStockphoto, which likes to see zero noise (absolutely no noise at all, not even slight blue sky noise) but it's still fairly rigid now. For example, this section of an Alpha 350 shot (which has been sized up to 48MB) got an entire batch a rejection for 'Soft and Lacking Definition':

stormont14ak-sectionsoftdef.jpg (99.07 KiB) Viewed 5861 times

From the whole shot:

stormont14ak-small.jpg (127.61 KiB) Viewed 5861 times

This is one of my daughter's shots with the 16-105mm. I questioned this as slightly less detailed images have passed QC before, and they said this was marginal, but still got rejected. Images have to be perfectly sharp in a 'clean' sense, no lens aberration of hint of degraded pixel level detail even when scaled up the size requirement.

Very few of these service are exclusive, but you can opt to send exclusive pix to iStockphoto, and if you are lucky Getty Imaging, who own iStockphoto, may select your work as exceptional and offer a Getty contract. It is almost impossible to get a Getty contract without shooting commercial stock (staged shoots, paid models, releases) otherwise. They are not really interested in travel and editorial, it is a flooded market and so much is pirated from internet pages now.

David

[bakubo]

David, thanks for all the info. Several months ago, maybe it was even last year, I for awhile thought about signing up with one of the online stock sales websites. I ended up not doing anything though. I don't know if any of my photos would sell or not, maybe a few would from time to time, but I didn't think I would get enough to make it worth all the work in preparing them, submitting them, having some rejected, some accepted, keeping track of things, etc. As you say, things have changed a lot in recent years so that the types of photos that often sell are different than in years past. I take the kinds of photos I like even if they have no commercial value.

[David Kilpatrick]

Time changes what sells. I have pictures of certain views in Venice, or the Algarve, or the Amalfi coast, which can not be repeated today. Key features in the shots have been defaced, destroyed by nature, or obscured by development. I was fortunate enough to have switched to Fujichrome (modern colour palette, unlike Kodachrome or Ektachrome which look 'dated') in the early 1980s so my carefully scanned work still sells.

Some of your ethnic people-shots round the world may not be possible today. That could mean they have value.

David

[Elisha]

what method do you use to upsize them to 48mb?

[harvey]

I have been thinking about submitting to Alamy for a couple of years but never took the plunge. I have a suspicion that I don't have enough good images to make it worthwhile but the real problem is that I'm not sure of the technical requirements.

I have a lot of transparencies, mostly Kodachrome 64 but some Velvia. The KR64 is very grainy at 5400 dpi.
With digital I have a couple of good photos from an OptioWP (5MP) which will be too low in resolution,
some from Canon G9 (should just be OK upsized) and the rest from A900 (ok).
I need to understand the sharpness requirements for digital (for unsharpened images if that makes sense).

And there was a requirement that black and white points had to be within 5% of 0,255 which made no sense to me whatsoever and would have destroyed a lot of images. I just checked their website and they seem to have relaxed this now.

One of the UK photo dealers ran a seminar a couple of times on submitting to stock agencies with the offer of a quality check on some images but it was nowhere near my location.

Harvey

[David Kilpatrick]

I use Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, C1 Pro or DxO Optics Pro to do the resizing - my output is set to 17 megapixels, 5120 pixels wide, or whatever other setting ensures 48MB. For the A900 I do not resize of course, but sometimes when I am not happy with the noise or sharpness or when I reckon the subject is stupid to be a 70MB file (shot of a signboard or something like that) I go for the downsizing directly in ACR.

I think that Alan Capel of Alamy is lying - or just not facing the truth - when he told me that QC standards have not changed and 6 megapixel images upscaled can still regularly pass QC. In the rejected example below there is a level of detail you simply don't get from an 8 or 6 megapixel image scaled up. It can be fairly difficult to get that sort of detail from 10 megapixels but the A100 manages it (the A200 and presumably the A230 have more anti-aliasing and don't render such detailed images as the A100). By 12 megapixel, this level of detail is possible and a very good lens/technical result can look better than the 14.2 megapixel from Ailsa's hand-held, SSS enabled, wide open 16-105mm zoom shot.

It's reasonable to assume that the experience of viewing images is the same for Alamy QC assessors as it is for me. What I once thought acceptable - D7D and D5D images taken up to 48MB - now looks soft even in the best cases, after you have been editing or viewing A380 or A900 pix. I am sure there is a natural process by which standard are raised, as more 'better' images arrive from today's higher resolution cameras. Alamy deny this. But they also have a very unbending policy of supporting the decisions of their QC staff, even when these are ridiculous (example, a shot of a flock or birds fillng the sky rejected due to dust or a LensBaby creative effect rejected due to Soft and Lacking Definition).

Cameras all vary. The Nikon D5000 12 megapixels is way better than a Sony A700 12 megapixel. In fact, an upscaled D5000 shot can look almost as good as a downscaled A900 shot both at 48MB file size. Nikon D3/700 12 megapixels is even better. Olympus 12 megapixels in contrast is always very poor for upscaling.

Having said all this I've managed to file, and sell, pictures with extreme grain; pictures scanned from 30-year-old b/w prints; LensBaby and other extreme out of focus FX; pictures carefully resized from 3 megapixel consumer cams.

Alamy has more benefits for me than the sales, which by 2006 standards should now be grossing $3000-4000 a month (they were making $2000 in 2006 when we had 5000 pix filed). In fact the collapse of fees, and sales, in the entire stock photo market which is also flooded with new material means than our 10,000 images now get little more than $500 a month. However, Alamy forces me to edit my work rigorously and to process with care. Everything must be named, captioned, copyright embedded and keyworded (I use iView Media Pro for this). The resulting files form a catalogue on a large hard disk (backed up to another HD) with both overall iView indexing, and individual iView catalogues saved. I can now search over 8,500 images by keyword, subject etc and find our pix very quickly. The missing 1,500 are early stuff from pre-iView processing.

At some point, I will write a 250GB portable drive and send it to another agency like Photoshot or Rex - an editorial agency not demanding exclusivity - and all the work put in for the keywording and captioning will mean the entire collection can go on sale with other libraries.

On topic, there are many images seen in this forum which would sell, just as long as the 100% view at the 48MB size (needed by all the major libraries, not just Alamy) is clean.

David

[bossel]

The Nikon D5000 12 megapixels is way better than a Sony A700 12 megapixel.

I suppose you're not talking high ISO here? For years now everybody dreams about the A700, it's colour rendering, dynamic range, whatever. Is it about sharpness? Is the A700 that bad? Should I jump ship?

[bossel]

I am just back form my "neighbour village" Cannes. Had a chance to handle Nikon D5000 and A350 next to each other. Really no big difference. Viewfinder more or less same, similar to my KM5D, give or take a few percent. After all the horror stories I heard about the A350 (looking through a long dark tunnel) I have to say it's not that bad as often presented.

The A230,330,380 where on display but you couldn't handle them. A500/550/850 still absent. A700 and A900 gone, the same shop used to have them on display. Also some lenses, including 70-200/2.8 and Z24-070 but my purse was empty

Then took the Nikon D90 and Pentax K20. Certainly a different class. Not only the viewfinder is much larger - reminded me of my A700 - but also bodies are bigger and more sturdy. Still, based on my scientific 76 seconds long test I would select the A700 as a clear winner, body wise.