Dave Stevenson
Uploading your images to a microstock library is a great way to show off your work; just don’t expect to make any money from it.
When I was 16, I worked as a clay pigeon trapper. This meant rising abruptly at an unsociable hour on a Sunday morning and spending the day perched on a metal, spring-loaded contraption, designed to fling orange discs into the air, so that moneyed, tweed-wearing types with shotguns could dispatch them with a well-timed blast.
If the spring-loaded device (‘trap’, for technical types) broke, which it often did, it would fling a face full of razor-edged shards of clay at the operator. Assuming you survived, you’d heave yourself up and wander, flag in hand, into the line of fire of Giles and his armed cohorts, hoping they didn’t respond instinctively and take a potshot at the fluorescent-jacketed teenager ambling over the hill. For this eight hours of lonely, dull, frequently wet and arguably dangerous work, I was paid the princely sum of £20 and a clammy hotdog at lunchtime. ‘Still,’ remarked the head of the shoot: ‘At least it’s tax free!’
Eventually I left, deciding that with any luck my future didn’t lie working for upper-class yahoos. I promised myself I would never again work for such little money.
Then I started writing about photography, and realised that not only was £20 an entirely acceptable daily wage for some, but being paid in sterling at all was a distinct bonus.
The problem is that a ‘professional photographer’ is roughly on a par with a ‘stock car racer’ or ‘luxury resort tester’ in terms of desirability. That means an awful lot of people want to do it, and are prepared to do almost anything to get there. Some compromise their creative instincts and do catalogue work and product photography in order to pinch decent gear for weekend projects. Others work long hours as assistants, lugging strobes and tripods at weddings up and down the country. Others invest heavily in kit and time, and work for very little money in anticipation of becoming successful and well paid later.
It will not come as news that the Internet has given photographers an entirely new set of ways to both make and lose money, and one of the most tantalising of these is the emergence of microstock empires. These run along simple lines: take a huge library of images (Shutterstock has more than 11 million, while Fotolia has 9.5 million) and charge very little for them. For instance, a four-megapixel image might set you back around $10 (about £6.50). A small percentage is passed to the photographer, who can take comfort from the fact that if enough people download their image, they will be able to buy a small packet of cereal.
That’s an exaggeration, of course: if you take an image that appeals to enough picture editors, selling it over and over again will eventually make you money. Stock photography tends to be rather dry, though. The most successful images are of bright white corporate meeting rooms staffed by pearly-toothed executives; the ratio of skin tones carefully judged by scientists to appeal to as many people as possible.
The other problem with microstock – and stock photography in general – is that per-photo payments can often leave you with a pitiful amount of money in return for a successful piece of work. That’s not just in terms of kit investment and travel. Take the unfortunate case of Richard Carey, an underwater photographer based in Egypt. He took a superb image of a turtle (see right-hand picture) in October 2009, which he submitted to a stock agency. It was downloaded 14 times, netting him the depressing amount of $3.82 (about £2.50), and one of those downloads ended up on the cover of a book. Roughly 18p for an image worthy of a book cover is an excellent deal for increasingly cash-strapped picture editors, but it’s not so good for professional photographers. Stories like this abound. One critic of Flickr’s recent tie-up with Getty says he was paid $45 (about £29.40) for an image that ended up being used by advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather.
I had a crack at microstock photography once. I uploaded a series of images to one of the larger stock sites, and while I had little trouble getting shots accepted, selling them was a different matter. There is as much demand for images of the natural world in stock photography as there is a demand for Marmite-flavoured toothpaste; I sold precisely one image, which netted me considerably less than a pound. Considering the image in question involved travelling to California, the microstock route, for me at least, made no business sense. Partly, I missed the name of the game: stock photography is all about knowing your market. That means nice green and red images at Christmas, and still life photos of the beach just as the summer comes around. There’s a good reason clean, bright pictures of babies and happy executives sell well – people want them.
Stock photography doesn’t just pose dilemmas for photographers. The explosion of ultra-cheap stock photography means that consumers are increasingly seeing the same images used in different places. The same few faces appear in various print adverts, with the result that people get confused over brands, and companies’ reputations get cheapened.
I don’t, however, think that microstock will be the end of professional photography. It will be the end of professional photographers if all they do is submit work to microstock libraries – while a few notable examples might make a living out of it, most won’t. In particular, it seems unlikely that amateurs will get their big break selling images for a few quid. Microstock will continue to have its place, but then so will top-end photography. Annie Leibovitz doesn’t continually get work from Vanity Fair because she charges $5 per image: a career’s worth of experience, contacts and talent mean people pay her top-dollar. She, and top professional photographers like her, offer something an image bank can’t match.
If nothing else, aspiring professionals should continue to take images that make them happy. At the very least, should you find yourself in the middle of a damp, cold field on a Sunday morning on the hunt for otters or owls, there’ll be fewer shotguns.
