Quote from: Xanox on July 19, 2013, 08:26

and what about accomodation and meals ? if you work for yourself you can travel on a tight budget and eat junk food but who would work for a company that let you sleep in a 1-star hotel and eat at mcdonalds ?

Arrgghh __ I hate to see such excess and wastage. Before you eat a cheap meal ... you must first shoot it for stock. Then you get to eat it cold, sitting at your PC, whilst processing and uploading the images.

Quote from: sharpshot on July 19, 2013, 16:30

That's why I do so little food photography.  Empty plates don't sell that well and for some reason, the food seems to vanish before I can photograph it.  I have less discipline around food than Homer Simpson

Similar story here, except it's my family I have to worry about.  When I cook a nice meal, they don't want to wait for an hour while I photograph it and then serve it to them cold

What I have noticed at iStock is new work doesn't sell, page after page of new uploads with zero downloads - over supply is becoming a real problem - I experienced it back in September but I don't think I've ever seen it like this.

Fixing declining sales with new work looks like a near impossible task now - established contributors appear to be slowing their uploads too - waiting for evidence of returns on production costs and sitting it out I guess.

Quote from: drial7m1 on July 18, 2013, 16:38

While I can appreciate your opinion, I still see that the photo-factories will be able to turn out more photos at a lower cost than a single operator, they will put them out faster and at a lower cost and in some cases the photos will be better as you will have SME's (subject matter experts) to handle each small part of the process.  I understand that the commodities are not the same, food vs photos, but I still see that in time, there will be very few photographers on their own out there unless they have a very specialized set of photos or themes.  Look at iStock, now a part of Getty, which is part of the Carlyle Group.  I see it as just a matter of time, maybe not today, tomorrow or in the next year, but in time.

But even with your analogy of the situation, the photo factories will flood the market, dilute the pool and make it so the single photographer can't make a living off it or won't want to put in the time to get the Pennies on the dollar that they were making.  Even if there is a scale back on the new content from the factories, the photos that are there will make it a sea of photos which are mostly from the factories, thus the chance of some of us making a sale is limited at best. 

Again, this is my opinion and I actually hope that your view of this is what happens.

Look ... photography generally ... just does not scale. It never has and it never will. That's why if you need portraits done, some wedding photos or a commercial shoot there are no big corporate giants to turn to. It all happens, mainly on a local level, via self-employed individuals or the owners of tiny businesses with very few employees.

Stock photography is no different. If stock photography did scale ... then why don't the agencies do it all themselves, produce their own content (or at least the majority of it) and keep all the sales revenue for themselves? The answer is because they know that they couldn't possibly produce the content as cheaply, as efficiently and as risk-free (to themselves) as we can. 

The 'photo factory', as a business model, is inherently flawed and is unlikely to survive for too much longer __ 5-10 years at the outside. In the meantime they have done much damage to everyone else and they have simply accelerated the demise of their own operations and the ability of individual stock photographers to earn a living.

The fact that there are only 5-6 acknowledged 'photo factories', out of supposedly 30K-odd contributors, should tell you much about how unfeasible the long-term prospects of such businesses are. Most of us have considered the idea of scaling up our businesses and have quickly dismissed it as unworkable. When talents such as Sean, Lise and Lisa (and many other Black Diamond level contributors) turn down such an 'opportunity' to grow their businesses and their incomes it should be obvious that there isn't much of an opportunity there.

She hasn't exactly made herself available to contributors the riff-raff. If we're lucky, she'll throw us some cake.

I've just been sitting around quietly the past two years or so, being annoyed with all the things that doesn't work properly at iStock, so I thought it's time to actually do something. Share my thoughts on how to improve the site with the people in charge. But how the heck do you get in contact with Ellen Desmarais? I'm not a paying member at LinkedIn so that doesn't work. Does anyone know her e-mail?