Cameras

We?d like to think that at Photopreneur we have influence in the photography world. We?d like to believe that we?re among the movers and shakers, the people who set the agenda, the picture-taking elite who are changing the face of photography forever.

But we?re far too modest for that.

And besides, the people who are really changing the photography business are you: the enthusiasts, semi-professionals and professionals who are grabbing the opportunities that the digital age has thrown up and seeing where it can take you.

You have had some help though. Over the last few years, a number of websites have launched that have had a huge effect on the photography business. In no particular order, here are the most influential.

iStockPhoto

The idea was simple, horrible, successful and completely revolutionary. To inject some competition into a stock photography market now dominated by one big company was no bad thing. But to do it by making the images royalty-free and to charge a price that many photographers saw as insultingly low was, in their eyes, outrageous. It wouldn?t last they said. No one would want to contribute.

They were wrong. Bruce Livingstone, the site?s founder, had spotted that the relatively low cost of digital photography meant that good quality cameras were now in the  hands of talented amateurs who would be happy to shoot for small payments, especially if they were getting those payments multiple times.

iStockPhoto Started as a Free Stock Site

In fact, initially, Livingstone assumed that those amateurs would be willing to supply their images for nothing more than the thrill of publication. At its launch in May 2000, iStockPhoto was a free stock site supported by Livingstone?s Web development company Evolvs Media. By 2001, the site was charging for images and generating a profit. It has remained profitable ever since, boosted by a community of more than 3 million registered members and a portfolio of nearly 4 million photos.

The threat to traditional stock photography, long an elite club in which top photographers contributed their best images to large companies which then sold usage rights to other large firms on their behalf, quickly became clear. In February 2006, Getty Images, the industry leader, realized that it couldn?t beat them and would be better off if the company joined them. It bought iStockPhoto for $50 million.

The price may have been a bargain. In 2007, the site generated almost $72 million in revenue, sharing almost $21 million with its contributors.

iStockPhoto is no longer the only microstock site on the Web. Plenty of others have followed in its wake ? some successfully, others less so. But iStockPhoto was the first and it changed the way photographers sell their images, the way users buy them ? and the amount they expect to pay for them too.

Flickr

Image: notsogood

Not everyone who owns a digital camera wants to sell with it though. Most people just want to show what they photographed. When Flickr gave camera-owners a place to store their images, show them to friends and family, and even join groups where they could chat about picture-taking, photographers had a home on the Web.

They could improve their skills, make friends, pick up new ideas and, we?ve found, even generate sales and build careers.

Like iStockPhoto, Flickr began with modest intentions. Developed by Canadian firm Ludicorp, Flickr was initially part of the company?s attempt to create a massive multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. Its first incarnation was based around a chat room called FlickrLive which allowed users to exchange photographs. Gradually, the site began to emphasize uploading and filing, and the chat aspect disappeared to be replaced eventually by forums and groups as influential as David Hobby?s Strobist and Darren Rowse?s Digital Photography School. Game Neverending ended as a photo site where photography enthusiasts could endlessly play and learn.

You Can?t Ignore Flickr?s 3 Billion Images

If all Flickr had done was to become the main center on the Web for image-sharing, that alone would already have made a huge difference to the way photographers used the Web and improved their skills. Certainly the 3 billion images it now hosts could hardly be ignored.

But it did much more than that.

Tagging images in the same way that stock companies keyword their photos gave contributors a sense that their images were waiting to be discovered and introduced them to the world of professional display. Enabling the addition of geo-tagging, including the ability to drag-and-drop photos onto a map, gave location scouts a whole new way of preparing for shoots and checking out sites, while the challenges set in groups and the attraction of winning a spot on the Explore page ? an award made according to a Google-like algorithm based on views, faves and comments ? motivated already-motivated photographers to shoot better pictures and to network like unemployed bankers at a job fair.

And then there was Creative Commons. By allowing photographers to apply a range of different Creative Commons licenses to their images, Flickr has managed to build a giant bank of almost 90 million free photographs. These have granted countless photographers enormous exposure and provided a fantastic no-cost resource for image users. Flickr photographs now turn up on outlets from small websites to The Economist?s blogs and even, controversially, on advertising billboards.

As if that wasn?t enough, The Commons also makes some of the world?s most iconic ? and copyright-free ? images available on the site too.

Unlike iStockPhoto though, the company has yet to come up with a solid business model. Annual membership plans which allow for limitless uploads, better organization and stats are unlikely to make a large dent in the firm?s running expenses. Nor are the sponsored groups, run by firms looking for free advertising images and we-get-social-media branding. None of that though stopped Yahoo! from buying the site in 2005, replacing its own Yahoo! Photos with the then smaller but faster-growing service.

If microstock offers cents as the reward for getting images seen, Flickr, soon likely to become part of Microsoft?s stable, has built a site in which views alone is the most important currency.

Google

What would a list of influential websites be without Google? Sure, it?s not a photography site, but Google?s versatility and efficiency have made it a valuable tool for both photographers and the people who use their images.

Some of the influence has come from its hosted service. Like Flickr, Google also allows users to browse historic images. Life magazine?s photo archive is now searchable by keyword and includes millions of images that have never been published. As a way of viewing inspiring pictures and understanding the development of photography it certainly beats an hour browsing the art books at Barnes and Noble.

Learning about Copyright

Most of Google?s influence on photography though has come through Google Images. While Yahoo! Photos fizzled and died, giving up its life in favor of Flickr, Google Images has stuck around, returning millions of pictures based on size, file type, color and even content. And unlike stock sites and Flickr, those pictures appear in context, showing how and where they were used. The recent addition of Google Image Labeler may make the searching quicker and images easier to find while removing a time-consuming headache from overworked photographers hoping to turn up in search results.

The biggest impact though has probably fallen on copyright. Too many users feel that if an image turns up in a Google search result then it?s free for anyone to copy. Using Google Alerts to receive notification of a credit ? even when the user hasn?t asked permission ? hardly helps.

As a result, artists who might never have worried about their works being used without authorization are creating watermarks, concerning themselves with image sizes and keeping track of how their photos are being used and where. Thanks to Google, we?re all copyright experts now.

Cafepress

Back in the old days, there were only a handful of ways that photographers could sell their images. They could talk to gallery owners and develop a taste for rejection. They could contact stock companies and get used to hearing ?no, thank you.? And they could cold visit retail stores and usually hear the owner tell them that they didn?t want to sell their postcards, posters or photos on a t-shirt. If they were very lucky though, they might win an agreement based on sale or return which meant dishing out a fortune on prints in the hope that one day they?d see a profit.

Cafepress changed the dynamics of at least the last option. Founded way back in 1999 by Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, the site allowed artists to offer user-customized products on demand. Photographers then could sell mugs, bags, t-shirts, clocks and calendars decorated with their images and do so without any risk of losing their production costs. They didn?t even need to worry about the hassle of packing, shipping and storing inventory. Cafepress handled all the logistics for them, allowing contributors to focus on production.

Cafepress Sets a New Trend

The quality of items on the site has always varied ? a problem faced by any commercial outlet with no entry restrictions ?  but the service has nonetheless done well. It now offers over 150 million products created by more than 6.5 million contributors. In July 2008, Cafepress bought the photo printing business Imagekind giving it a chunk of the photography art-on-demand business too.

Perhaps the only area it hasn?t dominated is print-on-demand photography books, a  niche dominated by Lulu and especially Blurb.

Cafepress?s biggest effect though may be that it set a new trend. The service might have been revolutionary when it appeared but these days it has to share a space with competitors such as Zazzle, Etsy and Red Bubble. Each of those sites allows photographers to use their images to decorate household objects and to sell them with little or no risk (Etsy charges a subscription fee which keeps out the truly amateur but benefits from the appearance of more professional items.)

But Cafepress ratcheted up one more result that?s also reflected in the me-too sites that followed after it. None of the services does a great deal to market itself to buyers; contributors  are forced to do that for themselves. They might not have had to worry about filling boxes but if they were to make sales, photographers had to learn about sales points, market sources and joint ventures. Cafepress showed photographers that in the digital age, creating isn?t enough. If they want to make money, photographers have to be creative marketers now too.

eBay and Craigslist

eBay is another site that isn?t geared towards photography but which has had a huge, if largely unseen, effect on the photography industry.  Launched in 1995 by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, the site removed commercial mediators, allowing the market to set the true price for an item based on exactly what buyers were willing to pay. Right from the beginning, that?s thrown up some surprises. The very first item sold on eBay was a laser pointer (although laser pointers are now banned) which went for $14.83 even though it was listed as ?broken.?

More importantly from the point of view of photographers is that eBay also allows artists to put their works in front of potential customers without the challenge of dealing with gallery owners ? or paying them half the sales price. Currently more than 3,200 printed photographs are on offer on the site with asking prices as high as $7,500.

Galleries might have a cachet and eBay is a long way from Sotheby?s but the ability to reach the art-buying public directly has created a whole new opportunity for photographic artists.

The No-Cost Way to Market Photography Prints and Services

And Craigslist has done something similar for photography services. Founded by software engineer Craig Newmark in the same year as eBay, the site was intended to do little more than function as a kind of noticeboard, helping the local community become aware of social events in San Francisco. Soon the service grew, with companies in particular using it to recruit staff. Today, the offers placed on the site range from erotic encounters to second-hand refrigerators, it covers 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide and serves 12 billion page views a month. It?s also part-owned by eBay.

Little of that translates into cash though. Craigslist refuses to accept banner advertising, preferring only to demand small payments for some job and real estate listings.

It?s the company?s broad reach and low cost which, although they?ve been devastating to the classified sections of print newspapers, have given photographers a valuable gift.

Small photography businesses with tiny marketing budgets are now putting ads on the site, updating them regularly and winning orders with little effort and no cost. One photographer told us that she picks up a wedding job for every ten to fifteen free ads she runs on the site.

It?s just another way in which entry requirements for photographers have been lowered, allowing novices and part-timers to start earning.

Photography: Sadik Demiroz/Shutterstock

It took Shutterstock two years to gather its first million images. It took the company just over three months to increase its library from five million to six million photos. That growth represents an acceptance rate of around 70,000 new photos every week ? and yet, Shutterstock says, it continues to reject more than 60 percent of the submissions it receives.

Shutterstock?s landmark was reached at the end of February 2009 but more interesting even than the fact that photographers are submitting to the company at a rate of 112,000 photos a week was the photographer who created that six millionth photo. The image depicting flowers on the British coast was taken by Turkish photographer, Sadik Demiroz.

Unlike many of Shutterstock?s 144,000 contributors, Sadik is not a part-time shooter hoping to earn a little extra cash from his  hobby. He has an MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and teaches in the Fine Arts Faculty of Maltepe University, Istanbul. In the fifteen years that he has been shooting professionally, Sadik has had seven solo exhibitions and his images have picked up more than 200 awards, including Best of Show at the Hasselblad Austrian Super Circuit and the Gaudi Medal at the 39th Gaudi Photographic Exhibition in Spain. He has been selling his images through traditional stock companies since 1997 and shoots every day, sometimes placing his images on stock companies, sometimes on microstock and often working directly with clients as a commercial photographer.

If You Can?t Beat Microstock, Join It

While many professional photographers remain appalled at microstock?s low prices, others, it seems, have decided that the best response is to join in.

?Microstock represents the direction in which the industry is moving,? explains Sadik. ?I chose microstock as a sales channel because I believe it represents the future of stock photography and I want to be a part of it.?

At the moment, microstock represents only a small part of Sadik?s photography earnings. Forty percent of his sales still comes from traditional stock and just 15 percent from microstock. But Sadik has only been submitting microstock images for five months during which time he?s managed to create a 1,100-strong portfolio at Shutterstock while also contributing to Dreamstime, Fotolia, iStock, PantherMedia, BigStock and 123rf. Numbers, he argues, are important. The more images in your online portfolio, the greater your chances of making money. In the future, Sadik sees himself shooting only low-cost, royalty-free images.

That?s a career plan that?s likely to horrify professional photographers who see the value of their portfolios decline as buyers too turn to microstock for their image sources. No high-quality photograph, they would argue, should be sold for a dollar, and photographers who offer good images for those prices are undervaluing their work and harming other professionals. Nor do they understand why anyone would choose to sell their photos for a buck when they could sell it for far more elsewhere.

Simple Images Sell Best on Microstock

The answer, Sadik argues, is income that?s both regular and reliable. Even though the individual payments are small, the frequency and reliability with which they arrive outweigh the occasional nature of regular stock sales and the difficulty of achieving them.

?What some people might not realize is that microstock images continually produce income,? he says. ?A good image posted on a microstock site is like an investment because it constantly returns profits for years down the line?. As many professional photographers can attest, it is not always easy to secure a fair payment for rights-managed images.?

The shift away from traditional stock is not entirely straightforward, however. Although Sadik expects most rights-managed photos to become microstock eventually, his editor currently helps him to choose which images he sells on a rights-managed basis and which he offers royalty-free. Good artistic photos, and even good traditional stock photos, do not necessarily sell well in a microstock environment Sadik has discovered.

?I have found personally that images that get one clear message across are the best: a hand reaching for a heart, or two businessmen shaking hands, for example.?

Sadik?s top-selling images include close-ups of food, as well as rural landscapes.

Of course, Sadik isn?t the only professional photographer to be attracted by frequent, if low-priced, sales. Yuri Arcurs famously rejected an offer from a traditional stock company to remain with microstock and stock photographer Ron Chapple has created his own microstock portfolio, iofoto, licensing his images through a dozen different microstock sites.

Ron though continues to shoot traditional stock, selling through Corbis, JupiterImages and Getty. The diversity, he argues, makes good business sense. Standing in both camps gives his company stability even as the market environment continues to change. Rights-management also allows him to negotiate appropriate usage for images that lack model or property releases.

While Sadik seems to be preparing for a world without Getty ? or rather, a world in which Getty sells its licenses through iStock ? that combination of traditional and microstock sales is perhaps a more likely future. Getty itself has just launched its Flickr collection, offering the high quality images it?s found on the photo-sharing site on both a royalty-free and rights-managed basis. Instead of simply placing the photos on its microstock outlet, Getty is demanding prices that range from around $50 for a royalty-free photo to several thousand for a rights-managed image depending on usage.

It?s unlikely then that traditional stock photography is going disappear altogether. Buyers still see a difference between the simple, single-idea shots that sell well on microstock and the more complex and varied photos available on stock sites. We just might find that more professionals like Sadik are tempted by microstock?s frequent sales ? and that Shutterstock?s seventh million photo won?t be too far away.