John M. Lund asked:


Someday there will be an ‘e-bay” of photography where consumers and businesses, designers and art directors, agencies and photo buyers will all go to find and license image for their disparate needs.  A student will look for images to complete a homework assignment…and an Art Director for a major ad agency will find an image for a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal.  The student might pay twenty-five cents while the Art Director might pay $10,000.00.  The popularity of an image, in conjunction with the use, will determine the price that will be paid.  The best photographers will make more money than they ever have before…and photographers who are sound business people will find a way to make good money too.  Those of us who are less creative, less diligent and less motivated will fall further and further behind.  I guess that is one thing that won’t really change in the business of stock photography!  Those who “get it” will thrive…as they always have while those who remain stuck in the past will slowly (or quickly) fade away.

As professional photographers who sell their images to the advertising, design and editorial communities, many of us have lost sight, or perhaps have never seen the tremendous buying power of the “consumer”.  My eyes were opened to that when I began to sell my Animal Antics images…pictures of  funny animals in anthropomorphic poses and situations, as greeting cards.  Sure, I only make a few cents per card…but when the public is buying over a hundred thousand cards a month those pennies can really add up!

Even with sales like that most people who I talk to about my greeting cards have never seen the cards for sale!  So I conclude that sales of a hundred thousand cards-a-month represents only a small fraction of the total possible number of sales.  The potential income from selling images to the public, to the consumer, is staggering.  Especially if you consider that images, for the most part, are a universal language.

So how do we, the photographers, tap into that market?  Well, obviously greeting cards portraying funny animal pictures is one way to do that.  But that really isn’t a very efficient way to do it.  The internet is the way to do it…but perhaps not yet.  That above mentioned “e-bay” for photographs…or some similar mechanism to marry the elements of consumer, photographs and transactions, needs to come in to place.  The need is there…I bet the technology is too…the rest is simply a matter of time…and preparation. 

For me that means having a website that is reasonably functional in getting my images in front of the public…and having content that the public wants.  That content can be anything from pictures that consumers can download and print (and that they WANT to download and print), to images they can license for their small business or images they can use to spice up their social networking site.  I am attempting to offer such content to the consumer by linking up with Café Press for products such as coffee mugs, calendars, handbags, T-shirts and the like…to ImageKind for fine art prints, to the various stock photo agencies that license my photographs for more traditional advertising and promotional uses.  Currently I use Blend Images for ethnic lifestyle and conceptual imagery, Getty Images for most of my conceptual and business images, Corbis also for concept images, and Kimball Stock for the licensing of my anthropomorphic animal pictures.  I also continue to sell greeting cards through the Portal brand that is published and distributed by the Marian Heath greeting card company.

Any investment counselor will tell you that the first thing to do in investing is to diversify.  That is of particular importance in time of uncertainty…and I think these times qualify for that label. As photographers we need to follow that same advice.  How do we diversify? For me that means a multi-pronged approach.  I diversify in my content, in my target market, and in my distribution.

I create images for the traditional advertising, design, corporate and editorial markets.  Within those markets I create lifestyle images, business images, and conceptual images.  Here I am diversifying the content within the category of traditional stock photography.  Next, I create images for the consumer…that is images that in them selves are or can be product.  That means everything from photo imprinted coffee mugs to photos for checks, photos for screensavers…you get the picture.  I also, once a year, take a trip specifically to shoot travel images.  Again…further diversification of my content.

To diversify my distribution I utilize both those traditional “powerhouse” stock photo agencies like Getty and Corbis, and niche agencies like Blend Images (for ethnically diverse lifestyle and business imagery) and Kimball Stock (for funny animal pictures).  Further diversification of my distribution is achieved by selling greeting cards through Marian Heath greeting cards and hiring a licensing agent to sell and distribute other “consumer” images for such wide-ranging applications as vet reminder cards, gift books and even figurines and picture frames! 

And finally, I have my website which I am fine-tuning as a vehicle to make my photographs available to anyone who might be interested in them, and in guiding them to the appropriate distributor for their needs.  I believe that those of us who establish such websites now and learn from that process, will have a huge head-start when that new paradigm lands on us…as it surely will!  When that wave hits I want to be experiencing the thrill of riding it rather than the pain of being crushed beneath it.

William Lund asked:


I remember back in the early 90s when my brother John called me up on the phone one day and explained that he had found a niche in digitally manipulated photography.  He said he was poised to make a good deal of money with it, but he couldn’t find any good help.  He knew that I had been into computers and thought maybe he could get me to work for him helping him digitally manipulate his photography.

John was a professional photographer doing mainly stock photography, and had discovered some new software called Adobe Photoshop.  John found that he could use Photoshop to fix problems with photos taken at an expensive photo shoot that would have had to been re-shot.  He also found that he could use the software to create photographs that just could not be shot in real life.  This was a great thing for his stock photography business.

At the time I had just had a business fail, and I was supporting my family as an injection molding press operator, earning near minimum wage working the graveyard shift.  John lived in San Francisco at the time and his studio was located where AT&T stadium is now. I was living in Stockton California, a good hour and a half commute each way.

Well John offered me $50.00 an hour to come work for him in his studio in S.F., and I asked him what time he wanted me to report for work in the morning!

For the next 5 years I worked for my brother doing digital manipulation for stock photography, digital retouching, and lots of digital art and photography for advertising agencies.  I remember one of my first projects was to put an egret’s wings onto a pig for a stock photo of flying pigs. 

Another time I brought my pet three-foot-long iguana to the studio and we photographed him. In those days we used film, and after developing the film we would use a drum scanner to digitize the photo, and then use either Photoshop or Live Picture to manipulate the photos.  We turned the iguana into a fire-breathing dragon.

One job we did for Mother Jones magazine involved replacing Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s head with Hillary Clinton’s head in a photo of Madame Chiang Kai-shek chatting with Eleanor Roosevelt in the rose garden at the White House.  We were later told that Hillary had it framed and put on her desk.  We also heard that she was at first confused because she did not recognize the outfit she was wearing in the photo.  Go figure.

We specialized in “conceptual” stock photography, producing images such as money trees, time flies – (a watch with wings),  an image of the earth in space but made of currency, dollar bills flying out the window, and that kind of thing.  We also did photo-shoots for fortune 500 companies and used digital techniques to produce advertising images.  John acquired an incredible reputation for producing the best stock photography of its kind, and all of the ad agencies knew him well. He was a huge success. He created a line of images he called “Animal Antics” using images of animals doing odd things like skateboarding and riding bikes.  The images were the basis for a highly successful line of greeting cards.

I finally grew tired of the commute and of sitting in front of a computer all day with an art-director telling me what to do. I went back to being an inventor, and John capitalized very well on his pioneering venture into digital stock photography, digital manipulation and funny pictures of animals.

Back then John was the first and for some-time the only stock photographer using digital manipulation to produce stock photos. There was no internet, and stock photography was pretty much limited to ad agencies with big budgets.

In those days he sold stock photography through Tony Stone Images, and The Stock Market.  Now Tony Stone is gone as is The Stock Market and Getty Images and number of other large stock agencies have replaced them.  Royalty free photography, widespread use of digital manipulation, and the internet are changing the face of the industry. Times have changed and John recently told me that the future of stock photography was online.

Mom and Pop business’s are going on the internet to find stock photos for their newsletters, advertising both online and hard copy, brochures, trade show booths, etc.  He feels the future of stock photography is online catering to the masses with low cost stock photography. There is a huge market for all types of photos for everything from photos for websites to pictures for brochures, to pictures for printed merchandise like cups and baseball caps.  Most people now searching for stock photos don’t even know what a stock photo is. They search for “pictures of pigs” or “shark pictures”.

To take advantage of this burgeoning new market for stock photos, today’s upcoming photographers (and the old ones too) need to get their work online where it can be found and purchased.

Once again John is on the leading edge of his field.  John has now launched a new website to address the blossoming online small business stock photo market.  Somewhere on his website there are photos of fire-breathing dragons in a world where pigs do indeed fly.