Kzenon Überforward

In the first part of this article we looked a bit at “what you see” in the microstock industry today. But what does all this mean? There are, depending on your function and position in the market, different answers. Let us have a look at the contributor side first. For them there are numerous implications.

1. In order to “survive” Contributors will have to produce better content. “Better” here is used in a broad sense: it does not only mean the visual quality of the picture – contributors love to focus on that. It also means that the picture has to transport a concept and the description / keywords have to verbalize this in a way understood both by the search engines and ranking algorithms of the agencies and the customers looking for pictures. Contributors will have to understand not only photography but also an agency (and their IT-systems) that treats them like air, a customer they do not know and a topic (in the picture) that is not theirs. In short: they will have to become much better in solving equations with lots of unknown variables.
2. Contributors will have to produce more content and be able to process such content down the chain. They will very carefully have to decide whether they do everything themselves or whether or not it is wise to have other people process some given task, due to quality or for economic reasons. In order to decide this they will have to become aware of the processes they use, streamline them and make them outsourceable. They will, in fact, have to become a business.
3. As with every business, the ability to act quickly and put the resources needed into every action will become more important. Microstock is a game where the contributor puts the money on the table first without knowing whether they will profit from that investment. The more one produces the more resources are needed to put in action. This is a financial as well as a logistical issue. For most new contributors with an emphasis on the first issue, for most established ones on the second.
4. Contributors will have to have a much closer look on the market. Today many contributors still operate without any market research or content development based on the premise “produce and then see what happens”.

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If you are a microstock contributor, a fellow photographer or simply following the discussions in the respective web forums you might have noticed the complaints about falling RPI’s (Return per Image), growing competition, and generally the industry going downhill. The consensus seems to be that things were much better in the past.

Is there something to that? To a certain extend: yes. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily.

You should know that indeed there was a gilded age for microstock. That was when the industry was young enough to be sniffed at by the professional photographers but mature enough to already have a strong customer base on the demand side. There was land to be claimed and relatively little competition. Even mediocre or outright trivial pictures could be sold simply because they were cheap. Conceptually good pictures, well executed, could make you a fortune.

Well, this is over. There are no sales anymore for the USB-stick with shallow depth of field or the not so incredibly well lit tomato isolated on white. The stocks of the agencies are filled with them and most of the existing pix have accumulated such an amount of ranking-juice that for the foreseeable future they will stick on the top. If somebody looks for a trivial (read: exchangeable) picture they will have an impulse to buy something from page one. That’s it for that.

On the other side there is no such thing as an end to stock photography just because there is already a lot of stuff, such as there is no end of science just because we already know a lot. There will always niches, there will be changes in the way we take pictures, in the taste of buyers, and the way models do their hair will be different in 2013. Promised. (more…)

When shooting standard situation you typically do standard things. More craft than art. Skills and equipment are there so you simply use them in the fashion you are comfortable with and you know that works. Therefore, to not get too boring, it is a splendid idea to do not so standard things in photography from time to time.

Two days ago I had the opportunity to shoot in a disco club with ten models, two make-up-artists, my full set of equipment, some time, and no force that kept me from experimenting. Now, if you ever worked in disco club with a party going on you know that due to the people moving, the light show, the dry ice fog etc. there is nothing you really can prepare for or count on. You more or less have to let go and simply try your best in every situation. Which simply means: having fun.

This is how I found out for example, that you can actually picture laser beams flashing through a group of people dancing. Never thought this could be done yet it can. I’ll have more of that later I think.

there are situations that are unique. There are shootings that were difficult and expensive to set up. In such situations it is rather disturbing if your gear lets you down. Last weekend we staged a wedding (nobody was harmed). Logistics for such an undertaking is complicated, the mood is delicate and the whole thing wastes two handful of models and lots and lots of money. And my Canon 1 Ds Mk III – a camera the size of a mountain and the price of a well equipped city car – ceased to focus properly. Even with moderate apertures and under ideal conditions (much light, hi contrast, sedated models) the scrap rate was around 80%. It is known that Canon is the one camera maker who managed to somehow incorporate an epidemic failure in the AF-system not of the cheap cameras in its setup but exactly in the two most professional and expensive models. But my camera was fixed two years ago but now the error seems to return. It is surely not the lenses but the camera – all lenses work fine on the backup 5D Mk II. Which is probably what I want to say here: have a backup cam ready. It may seem as a waste of money so many times, but there will be a situation where it saves your life. Or at least your mental stability. Priceless.