Welcome to the world of business in the 21 century.... the world of outsourcing, globalization.

As someone who is just moving into stock I am thinking hard on planning my moves.
Do I shoot what I like ( and am good at) and hope that it sells, or do I change my style to get accepted at the agencies?

Glenn

i would shoot what you're good for and based on that i would pick up the right agency for such images, could be a generic macro o micro, o a specialist or even merchandising or fine-art, up to you and your style.

how could you bring any added value shoting stuff you hate when there's no shortage of photographers doing the same subjects with passion, quantity, and quality  ?

take Travel photography, anyone can go in holiday including photographers who dont do travel or lifestyle but they will be no match against those who covered the same niche since a long time and know the score.

i mean, you can get many lucky shots but that's all.
if you're seriously asking how to plan a solid foundation for your career the answer is to become specialized in one field that you like and that at least pays the bills.

if your favourite subject has absolutely no market value, sorry but for the moment it can only become an expensive hobby, in the future who knows, technology is changing quickly.

so true, versus seeing so many tout the 50mm as the "allrounder" but all it does it create horse face portraits IMHO.
what student can ever afford a 200-300mm lens? my teacher had a 400mm prime that he let me borrow once for a class shoot, I was waay back and had to keep asking everyone to move out of my shot. crazy heavy, would only use with a tripod.

technically, these are all things of the past if you can invest a lot of time in photoshop.

you can do wonders with a 36MP shot done with the cheapest second hand 300mm zoom and make it look like it was shot in F1.2 with a 5000$ prime.

it's really all up to you, how much time is in your hands, how good you are with PS, etc etc

buyers dont really give a sh-it about how made a shot, which gear you own.

modern lenses are a lot better than in the past, Sigmas in particular have not so much to envy from nikons now but they cost almost half, and the few aberrations and issues they produce can be easily fixed with PS if you're a perfectionist.

actually you could also do good stuff with Tamron lens but i just can't stand them, slow, ugly, plastic cr-ap.

Tokina are good and underestimated.

Zeiss nr.1 but overestimated and incredibly overpriced considering most of them arent even made in germany, they're built by japanese and chinese contractors !

try searching "business shutterstock" on google images, select "size : large" .. tons of results, many in full size, maybe 30-40% of the total.

but with more obscure subjects it ain't so easy, try searching for Bangkok all you get is a bunch of random Thailand images, only a few dozens actually about Bangkok and in full size and this is a maistream generic keyword search, "asian portrait shutterstock" only gives you a stream of garbage.

 

I'm guessing they could ....

Buy a subscription and use some fancy computer robots to download the full pacakge
or
Set up a bot to crawl the web searching for high res images posted on wordpress blogs
or
some other nefarious tactic beyond my imagination.

i've found a few tools doing "bulk image downloading", but they dont even waste too much time coding their own bots, most of them are addons for automated tools like ScrapeBox or UBot Studio.

here there's even a freeware on Download.com, no idea if it works, now i'm going to try it.

http://download.cnet.com/Google-Image-Downloader/3000-2381_4-75439931.html

but there's a sh-itload of similar tools even for Flickr and other image site, it's nothing new or difficult actually, technically they're called "bulk image scrapers".

HOWEVER, not many of the images scattered on blogs and sites are full size, most of them are 800px or 1024px and rightly so, there's no reason to use 12MP or 24MP images on a blog article and most of the blogging tools do auto-resize nowadays.

i think the few full size images you can find are because of newbie users who dont know how to resize properly or were in a rush.

the real culprits are pirate sites with full size wallpapers, image packs, etc.

there are many other stock packs, try searching "stock" in the section "Others/Pictures" :

http://thepiratebay.is/search/stock/0/7/603

i can say the chances to make money on micros are LOT higher than selling ebooks on Amazon or music on iTunes.

and last i've heard was a friend of mine earning around 50$ (100 downloads) from a sub-genre top-20 song on Beatport and he'll have to wait 6-9 months from his label to be paid.

what else ? merchandising on PoD sites ? good luck considering the top sellers are mostly vectors and crap.

fine-art ? that's an even harder nut to crack.

seriously, if you think we have it bad try music or journalism.

while useful advice, it's not as difficult or binary as that - when our drivers' in India find out we're interested in photography, they start actively looking for pictures for us; similarly with most local guides. I've never climbed a mountain or taken a hike with the sole purpose of getting a shot - but my companions know I may not be the first one back to the trailhead.  the one thing to avoid is organized tours, esp'ly those w buses.  exception is sound & light shows - I usually wander around and find good positions while waiting for m y 'lighting crew'

it depends on the location and it's up to you to ponder the pros and cons and therefore the costs involved in time and money.

some locations are hard to reach and while on paper they have some potential they can turn out to be wasted time.

in poor countries you can easily rent a taxi for a whole day for 10-15$ but if you're in a big city with 10-20 million people you still need one hour just to reach the suburbs.

while many locations outside the city may look inviting they're rarely worth the hassle, there's a good reason they're not considered "hot spots" and same for the so called "off the beaten tracks" which are certainly worth the trip if you're into trekking and want to relax but for photography they're hit or miss.

same for some markets that open early in the morning and close after a few hours, if they're famous OK go for it, but otherwise dont bother and stick with the famous ones where you're sure there are interesting subjects and lots of people.

take a look at any travel article about Bangkok for instance, despite Bangkok having 10 million people there's not a single "landmark" for which bangkok is famous and so the most used images are about the "bangkok floating market" which in reality is far away from the city, then you have the Royal Palace and the main temples but for one reason or another photo editors keep using these * floating market images that have absolutely nothing to do with the real daily life in Bangkok.

same for Phuket and Samui, the most popular beaches dont look very good, and photo editors pick up images of the most remote beaches trying to make it look like paradise on heart.
problem is, they're hard to reach (eventually only by private boat and it doesnt come cheap) and the tourists will never see them as they also look good only in high season and at the right time and with good weather.

so what you're gonna do ? hire private boats, private taxis, spend a whole day to shoot what maybe 10-20 landscape images and a few other pics with random fishermen ?

i can tell you, if you're into this your production costs will skyrocket and you've no guarantee of making good shots too because the weather can turn bad very quickly, and that's why this sort of images (landscapes) are better suited for magazines with big pockets like National Geographic rather than stockers and microstockers traveling on a shoestring.

if Landscape is all you can do and all you like to do maybe you better stick with your own city and your province, doing so you will save a lot of money but it still takes a lot of time and it's a lot of work.

with the same time it takes to shoot a few good Landscapes you could shoot a 100 or more interesting images in markets and in downtowns, mostly about people and monuments and architecture.

however, considering how cheap some poor countries are, you dont really need a strict pre-planning like you would do in expensive places in europe.

why these stereotypes about travel photographes are still so popular ?

if you make travel stock you're working hard every day, it's NOT fun, it's work !
you have often to move from place to place, find a place to sleep, shower, take your camera and make a list of locations to visit, go there on foot or with other means, shoot temples, monuments, people, markets, whatever suits your style, stop for lunche and stop for dinner, and then relax by night for a beer or for a well deserved nap.

can't see how this is so funny especially in tropical countries where you sweat like crazy with two kilos of gear on your neck.

consider also that the weather could turn bad and rain for the whole day, leaving you very few stock opportunities to get interesting shots if you're stuck under a torrential rain for hours inside a bar or in the middle of nowhere.

some of the people you shoot can also turn nasty or becoming a royal pain in the a-ss, many are happy but many have a chip on the shoulder with tourists and photographers, cops and guards can also be equally hard to deal with especially in museums and government/royal/whatever buildings.

i mean, your typical day is walking for hours and shooting, stopping for a quick lunch, moving to the next place, and walking again and shooting.

if you think it's all done on a taxi with aircon you're totally wrong, either you walk or you lose most of the best shots in my experience, i mix mototaxi, taxi, and tuktuks, but there's no way to just avoid the walks and the heat unless you only target the most famous hot spots but in that case why bother ? these places have been already covered to death in any agency.

for anything else, if you like to travel, to see new things every day, to deal with crazy people every day, and you've a sense of adventure then it's a great job and you'll feel rewarded once you're back home editing your new collection as each photo will remind you of a place with the smells and the noise and the music and anything attached.

true, you see millons of tourists with thei nikon and canons bursting shots at every step but none of them is going to join a stock agency and the fools who try will soon give up when they see how difficult is to make steady sales nowadays.

as for the fun side, there's of course time to get fun but then it's up to you and your scheduling.
you cannot get drunk every night and then sleep the next day, you cannot take it easy and go home with just 10-20 saleable images per day, you cannot do crazy things and risk your gear or your neck, it's too easy when in a new country to fell pray of scammers or ending up in the bad place at the bad time for whatever reason especially considering your camera will always attract unwanted attention.

if you hear photographers telling you doing Travel is a lot of fun maybe he's a newbie or he's telling BS or he's just having fun and shooting 1-2 hrs a day, in that case his collection will not be enough to even repay the production costs but that's a whole different story anywayas nowadays very few places can give you the option to recoup the costs with stock alone, let alone making a profit.

out of curiosity i looked at the Pictures top 100 section of Pirate Bay and guess what ... nr.1 and nr. 2 in the list there's a couple packs of stolen shutterstock images, each pack is 60-70GB !

besides, there are other 4-5 packs in the list, 30-40GB each.

http://thepiratebay.se/top/603


in the first pack (http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7757399/Shutterstock_-_stock_photography_collection_1) one guy even complains about the "copyright na-zis" :

"Sorry, I can't share this content any longer (problems with the copyright na-zis). Please get it from rutracker. Use google translate for an English instead of a Russian interface."

RuTracker.ru is a russian warez forum with links to torrents and bitlockers, maybe that's exactly where all these stolen pictures are coming from ?

this new move from IS clearly shows management finally had come to terms with reality.
they're no more the king of the hill, they're just in the top-4.

besides, sales will suffer for the exclusives as IS will soon be flooded by new uploads.
it's gonna be a numbers game, more than before.

by the way, there's an Alamy Uploader addon for Lightroom, it should support all the fields, not sure about the keyword limit.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1946522



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hi, i wonder what are the advantages getting a medium format camera?

the high resolution may meet some special commercial requirement which need to print it extra large size?

does it share common lense? it seems bulky so does it mean it is usually restricted to use in studio?

some buyers with big pockets are willing to pay to achieve the "maximum possible quality".

and why not considering some AD campaigns cost hundreds of thousands of dollars ?

a friend of mine works in a creative agency, he told me most of the photographers use Hasselblads and they ask 10-20K $ to shoot some t-shirts of famous brands on white background that are later heavily photoshopped.

for these guys the cost of a medium format is nothing.