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Archive for October, 2008

Alexander Nevsky in Snow

The Alexander Nevsky Memorial Cathedral Church in Sofia has been a good seller for me.

It’s one of the most famous buildings in the Balkans and it’s best to try to get a slightly different image.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found that snow scenes have done well.

I’m in the happy position that I live within easy walking distance of this fine building and so I can photograph it in all seasons by day and by night, in outline and in detail.

As Stock Photography is partly a numbers game it means I can easily build up a large set of different images of this great church.

The general economic climate and the various changes in the stock photo industry mean that I’m going to write a slightly different blog than I meant to, but I still think that I’m on theme.

It’s for you to judge.

Just as I was planning more chat about the business of stock photography, and how to have a web presence, it turns out that for many individuals and companies it’s actually the end of the business of stock photography and the end of their web presence.

Those of you who have followed my blog for some time will have seen that the link I used to have to Photoshelter has gone because Photoshelter, at least as a stock photo agency, is no more.

I received the news the other day from Alamy, as an Alamy contributor, that Alamy are reducing the photographer’s percentage.

The reason they give is to generate more money to break into the United States market.

And if we look at the USA market, what is happening?

Corbis is still there. Luckily, it seems to have great financial backing but as far as I know, is not exactly a money spinner.

Getty, the big player – its business model so much criticized by Photoshelter, has taken over Jupiter images for a mere $96 m dollars.

Now $96 m. dollars may not be small change to you and me but it seems that somewhere there’s money to be made in the stock photo business.

And only yesterday Digital Railroad posted on their site:

“October 28, 2008

To our valued Members and Partners:

We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.

On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.

Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.

Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.”

So what’s to be done?

Well I have some ideas and just for the moment I’m going to continue with how to build a web presence which might be even more important in these troubled times.

Interestingly enough I recently revisited Dan Heller’s site and found some interesting comments there which reinforce the point I made about photographers and web designers:

“If you get beyond your own technical skills or interests, then you might want to outsource the job to a web designer. But buyer beware: this path comes with some risks”

I suggest you read his comments here

Now I’m not going to suggest to everyone that you do what Dan did and learn everything yourself  but I do still want to emphasize that however much you want to work with an expert professional like a web-designer, it’s still a good idea to have some idea of how to do things, if only to ask the right questions.

You’ll see that this Blog is hosted on WordPress.

It’s taken me a long time and lot of thinking to make this decision, and things are changing all the time.

I’ll comment on my reasons for choosing a blogging platform and some other online matters in my next post.

By the way, so far my images have been straightforward stock photos but I do try to explore other outlets for sales and so for the next few blogs I’m going to showcase some of my photos available for sale on ImageKind

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Daisy – Collectable Bisque Head Doll

Stock photos are often all too depressingly “samey” – you know, cardboard cutouts of business people and happy families.

So I’m always pleased when I get success with something a bit different.

This photo of “Daisy” has been successful both as an editorial and stock photo.

Exactly why I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s because the image is intrinsically attractive.

Perhaps because the object is quite valuable.

Perhaps because the picture is exclusive.

One peculiar aspect of this and others that come from the family collection is that I have to, in principle, make up a property release for myself.

And so back to the current theme of creating your own web presence.

I’ve found myself a bit too busy to blog lately.

After all, we live in very stirring times and I decided like many other people and many photographers of course to take stock of some of the ways that I live my life and look after business.

Partly that has been forced on me like it has many other people because there really isn’t much business around.

Now photographers suffer from what is called the credit crunch, just like everybody else so I was very interested to read a report via the EPUK news letter from Black Star Rising Contributer, photographer Sean Casey, which gives some tips for photographers to deal with the downturn in business.

I think this does relate to my topic because I have been looking at how to have a web presence.

I suppose anybody reading the blog can say, “Ah. well there’s a very easy way of doing this and that is to pay an expert.”

However as you can see from Sean’s post there is a case, however peculiar and desperate it might be for what you might call “in sourcing” that is doing it yourself.

Now, I have long had a suspicion about websites which are built for photographers who know nothing about web design by web designers.

This is in my opinion, what often happens:

A very ignorant person, in this case a photographer asks an expert – here a web designer – for help.

Because the photographer is ignorant he or she can’t really specify what they want and don’t know exactly how to ask for what they want.

So, they leave it to the web designer.

Web designers often like to show how good they are at web design.

In my opinion, the results are often dreadful – very complicated long, flash based intros, slow down loading times and a need for extremely fast connections.

So I really do think that there is a case, even if you do not intend to build your own website or have your own web presence designed by yourself in some way, to at least look at some of the basics.

So here I think we go to how you can get some presence on the web for free but where some degree of skill is needed.

For this in my opinion one of the traditional ways now is to look for a free website host provider.

There are lots of around, almost all of them have some advertising.

The only place for advertising on your own site is advertising things that you want to advertise and talk about.

Clearly nothing could be worse for you than to have a site with your photographs and adverts for fake watches or some other product that had nothing to do with photography.

I think that one of the reasons for having a website on a free Host is that you can use it to experiment.

It means that you can learn to use a bit of HTML.

You can work out how things would look and at the very least would then be able to brief your web designer better.

There’s one other thing, I think I should say at this juncture, and that is that there are a host of new products appearing which are free and are very interesting.

I haven’t tried them and the reason for this is that I have finally made up my mind to create a blog based site.

This has good and bad points.

And it means you’re not likely to have one of those flashy sites but more of that later.

In my next post I’ll briefly discuss two free resources that I have found helpful.

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