Times they are a changing
The November/December issue of the NUJ Journalist carries several stories of interest to independent freelance photographers.
Ajax has reported in a previous post (6.9.06) on the trend by news gathering agencies and newspaper publishers to shift day to day operations from traditional still image production for newsprint to video footage for their multi-media operations, which include, print, internet, and podcasts. The English national, The Daily Telegraph, is one of the heavy-weight papers at the forefront of the move to video content gathering which it says will be well advanced by 2007. The Press Association has been operating a voluntary video footage gathering operation for some time, but it cannot be long before this becomes part of the job description for all photographers. And in the USA, these programmes are already pretty well advanced.
For newsprint, what makes the shift away from traditional stills photography possible is the sophistication of currently available screen grab image manipulation software; although it's still possible to tell when a smudge on the page has been made from video footage, reproduction quality of these images is at a far higher quality level today than agency wire pictures in use a couple of decades back. The new technology has sufficiently blurred the margin between what is acceptable quality and what isn't to the point where it's really no longer a debatable issue.
The bigger question for those hoping to persue work as stills photographers is, for whom, where and how often? The NUJ rag is full of despair stories from both writers and photographers decrying the demands made on them to write advertorial crap instead of real reporting, and snappers with no where to sell their hard won images, citing (in particular) the British Press as a disinterested end user of hardcore social issues.
I find it a little bizarre that some people in this business think this is anything new. It's always been difficult, more specifically, to sell photojournalism in the UK. The best days are long gone and they were long gone before I managed to get started in the mid 1960s. It's just that at the time, no one was saying outloud (lack of instant communication) that this was indeed the case, so those of us that came on board at the tail end were none-the-wiser avid enthusiasts of the calling and full of optimism for the future.
Well, I don't know about most of the others, but my enthusiasm for stills photography, reportage and photojournalism or whatever you want to call it, hasn't waned. If anything, I suspect it is on a higher plane than ever and part of the reason for that may have to do with a notion that if I join the crowd who are willing to let it die, it will. One way or another, I intend to keep plugging away, finding new outlets and cajoling old ones to cough up for what I do. After all, someone has to pay.
Some of the advice given by writers published in the NUJ issue mentioned above, all well meant to help colleagues find new markets in a world of diminshing returns, is a little misleading. But rather than go down the road of persecution, I'd simply say that if you think it's possible to make a decent living selling stock through an agency portal, you need to do some homework. Yes, some, by all accounts, do seem to make a reasonable return on contributions, but essentially, the numbers which underwrote the math of it 40 years ago are almost the same today. If you work on the principle that every potentially sellable image you own the rights to is worth a £ or a $, you will not be far off the mark, except when you are selling that image through a microstock agency, when the return made on each sale will be considerably less.
There are a lot of stock picture agencies out there, specialists, generalists and the reportagists; some, indeed many, you will have never heard of, with anything from a few hundred to several thousand images in their archives. One of the problems for photographers seeking to earn revenue from these smaller content sources is the indisputable fact that they are competing against the major players - who are so well known I do not need to name them.
But it is not just the (almost incomprehensible) quantity of stock made available by the big guns which is a barrier to the little person, it is another fact that many end users such as newspapers, are obligated by management and accountants to use the larger resources because they are 'preferred vendors'. Subscription models, by month or year, enable picture buyers to find almost everything and more than they want exactly matching key word search parameters by way of the simple and hassle free logistic of screens 'always viewing the preferred vendor'. You can see the lone player's problem; how to get the end user off the preferred vendor's site and on to yours. Considerable tactical and political persuasion is required and at the end, you will have incurred expense with little guarantee of any sales having been made.
For the enthusiast aiming to recoup a little expense money for his/her hobby, there are several 'open' portals through which images may be offered and hopefully sold; but you will need to upload hundreds, if not thousands, of images to compete with the thousands of other enthusiasts work already on-line. New business models for these portals are being devised constantly; the chances of any-old-rubbish selling in the same way it did a few months back, will probably have changed by the time you have read this far down the page, and, in the future, quality, content and photographer ranking models will change again. Keeping up is already a nightmare.
And there is more dilution to come.
Citizen journalism has rapidly become a serious content resource for many end users and this model, with a few tweaks, will become more popular further down the line, blurring both aesthetic quality and content values to the extent that even some of the big commercial players will find themselves being hit where it hurts at the low end of their revenue earning capacity.
Just recently, in its 5-2006 issue, the news magazine of the picture industry Visuell (www.piage.de) reports on the demise or takeover of at least four stock picture agencies in recent weeks with plenty of other news about partnerships and mergers. This is just more 'thinning the woods'; it has been going on more or less continuously for the past decade and still has a long way to run.
None of this paints a happy scenario for the independent freelance photographer hoping to continue making a living from his/her output. What it means in essence is much more effort for those determined to make it work, to upload stuff to many different portals, not just one; to work on building unique and functional web sites, a lot of time and effort spent advertising their existence in the right quarters and looking for trustworthy partners to keep the revenue engine rolling.
Visitors, users and viewers of the foregoing content may copy and re-use it in other internet content sites on condition the source of all material so used is acknowledged with the attachment of the following.
Copyright; Jonathan Eastland
www.ajaxnetphoto.blogspot.com 2006.
www.ajaxnetphoto.com 2006.
This original content may be used in any print media made available for commercial resale.
The products and companies named in this website content are trademarks , registered trademarks or servicemarks of their respective owners or licensed users.
Ajax has reported in a previous post (6.9.06) on the trend by news gathering agencies and newspaper publishers to shift day to day operations from traditional still image production for newsprint to video footage for their multi-media operations, which include, print, internet, and podcasts. The English national, The Daily Telegraph, is one of the heavy-weight papers at the forefront of the move to video content gathering which it says will be well advanced by 2007. The Press Association has been operating a voluntary video footage gathering operation for some time, but it cannot be long before this becomes part of the job description for all photographers. And in the USA, these programmes are already pretty well advanced.
For newsprint, what makes the shift away from traditional stills photography possible is the sophistication of currently available screen grab image manipulation software; although it's still possible to tell when a smudge on the page has been made from video footage, reproduction quality of these images is at a far higher quality level today than agency wire pictures in use a couple of decades back. The new technology has sufficiently blurred the margin between what is acceptable quality and what isn't to the point where it's really no longer a debatable issue.
The bigger question for those hoping to persue work as stills photographers is, for whom, where and how often? The NUJ rag is full of despair stories from both writers and photographers decrying the demands made on them to write advertorial crap instead of real reporting, and snappers with no where to sell their hard won images, citing (in particular) the British Press as a disinterested end user of hardcore social issues.
I find it a little bizarre that some people in this business think this is anything new. It's always been difficult, more specifically, to sell photojournalism in the UK. The best days are long gone and they were long gone before I managed to get started in the mid 1960s. It's just that at the time, no one was saying outloud (lack of instant communication) that this was indeed the case, so those of us that came on board at the tail end were none-the-wiser avid enthusiasts of the calling and full of optimism for the future.
Well, I don't know about most of the others, but my enthusiasm for stills photography, reportage and photojournalism or whatever you want to call it, hasn't waned. If anything, I suspect it is on a higher plane than ever and part of the reason for that may have to do with a notion that if I join the crowd who are willing to let it die, it will. One way or another, I intend to keep plugging away, finding new outlets and cajoling old ones to cough up for what I do. After all, someone has to pay.
Some of the advice given by writers published in the NUJ issue mentioned above, all well meant to help colleagues find new markets in a world of diminshing returns, is a little misleading. But rather than go down the road of persecution, I'd simply say that if you think it's possible to make a decent living selling stock through an agency portal, you need to do some homework. Yes, some, by all accounts, do seem to make a reasonable return on contributions, but essentially, the numbers which underwrote the math of it 40 years ago are almost the same today. If you work on the principle that every potentially sellable image you own the rights to is worth a £ or a $, you will not be far off the mark, except when you are selling that image through a microstock agency, when the return made on each sale will be considerably less.
There are a lot of stock picture agencies out there, specialists, generalists and the reportagists; some, indeed many, you will have never heard of, with anything from a few hundred to several thousand images in their archives. One of the problems for photographers seeking to earn revenue from these smaller content sources is the indisputable fact that they are competing against the major players - who are so well known I do not need to name them.
But it is not just the (almost incomprehensible) quantity of stock made available by the big guns which is a barrier to the little person, it is another fact that many end users such as newspapers, are obligated by management and accountants to use the larger resources because they are 'preferred vendors'. Subscription models, by month or year, enable picture buyers to find almost everything and more than they want exactly matching key word search parameters by way of the simple and hassle free logistic of screens 'always viewing the preferred vendor'. You can see the lone player's problem; how to get the end user off the preferred vendor's site and on to yours. Considerable tactical and political persuasion is required and at the end, you will have incurred expense with little guarantee of any sales having been made.
For the enthusiast aiming to recoup a little expense money for his/her hobby, there are several 'open' portals through which images may be offered and hopefully sold; but you will need to upload hundreds, if not thousands, of images to compete with the thousands of other enthusiasts work already on-line. New business models for these portals are being devised constantly; the chances of any-old-rubbish selling in the same way it did a few months back, will probably have changed by the time you have read this far down the page, and, in the future, quality, content and photographer ranking models will change again. Keeping up is already a nightmare.
And there is more dilution to come.
Citizen journalism has rapidly become a serious content resource for many end users and this model, with a few tweaks, will become more popular further down the line, blurring both aesthetic quality and content values to the extent that even some of the big commercial players will find themselves being hit where it hurts at the low end of their revenue earning capacity.
Just recently, in its 5-2006 issue, the news magazine of the picture industry Visuell (www.piage.de) reports on the demise or takeover of at least four stock picture agencies in recent weeks with plenty of other news about partnerships and mergers. This is just more 'thinning the woods'; it has been going on more or less continuously for the past decade and still has a long way to run.
None of this paints a happy scenario for the independent freelance photographer hoping to continue making a living from his/her output. What it means in essence is much more effort for those determined to make it work, to upload stuff to many different portals, not just one; to work on building unique and functional web sites, a lot of time and effort spent advertising their existence in the right quarters and looking for trustworthy partners to keep the revenue engine rolling.
Visitors, users and viewers of the foregoing content may copy and re-use it in other internet content sites on condition the source of all material so used is acknowledged with the attachment of the following.
Copyright; Jonathan Eastland
www.ajaxnetphoto.blogspot.com 2006.
www.ajaxnetphoto.com 2006.
This original content may be used in any print media made available for commercial resale.
The products and companies named in this website content are trademarks , registered trademarks or servicemarks of their respective owners or licensed users.
Labels: Photography
posted by Ajax at 11.11.06
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