When did publishers become more interested in the bottom line than in finding the best image for the job?
What happened to the value of finding the perfect shot for a project?
Recently, negotiation has become a game of “How cheap can I get it?” What once was gratitude to sources for providing images that perfectly fit the concept has been reduced to nonchalance. And a shark-infested feeding frenzy with all the photo sources competing for business has made it possible. There are so many new photo agencies trying to sell their latest pricing models that picture editors and photo researchers seem to feel the competition can drive the prices down.
Are they wrong? Look what’s happened in the industry. One agency offered package deals (x number of images per year for x dollars) back in the mid-1990s, and other agencies had to make similar offers in order to compete. On the royalty free front, agencies began buying collections of images outright so they could have complete control over how they were sold. Subscription stock was born and, more recently, microstock. I think it is kind of funny that some people don’t even know what microstock is, but want to try it because they know it can be purchased for as little as $1. The trouble is, although microstock may have a place, the overall quality isn’t there and someone has to search tens of thousands or even millions of images created by nonprofessionals to find the gems that might work on their projects.
Four years ago at the ASPP Education Conference in Chicago, many senior photo editors and researchers stood up and pleaded for agencies to put up fresh and new content for their publishing projects—textbooks in particular. Many complained that books from the various publishers all contained the same images because there were so few available.
I beseeched everyone in the room to look to the smaller niche agencies that continue to scan and put up significant content for educational publishing projects. Danita Delimont Stock Photography is one of those agencies, so I know how time-consuming, difficult and expensive the costs are in doing this. Few of the specialty agencies are supported by venture capital, trust funds or billion-dollar backers.
Still, it is those of us who have been in the business for several decades who actually know and understand the value of the images we select. We’ve seen the specs come up over the years for one project after another. We support educational publishing projects with unique imagery, because we know how hard it can be to find some of the content. We also do it because some of the specs are timeless, and we know the content will hold its own for some time. Few of the big agencies, aside from Corbis, have given educational editorial content much notice.
Most of the new content being produced is oriented to commercial or personal-use licensing and not educational, unless the subject is generic. In other words, there may be more content, but little of it is appropriate for textbook use.
I received an email recently from a textbook photo buyer who had a “take it or leave it” kind of attitude. She (unthinkingly?) copied the agencies (royalty-free and non-editorial agencies as I recall) that she was sending the email to. She sent a list of the agencies she currently works with and the deals they have worked out, so we would know how to bid for her company’s work. Her email stated that her design group would have an in-house meeting to determine which sources they should use, and their decisions would be based on the lowest rates they could get. The photo buyer suggested that $100 for a quarter-page would keep them coming back to our site for content.
I politely told this photo buyer that there is more than the fee that they should consider, such as the level of expertise niche agencies offer that can help publishers avoid using inappropriate images in their textbooks. I also suggested that the depth and breadth of subject matter that they require is jeopardized when publishers lower rates in an already volatile marketplace.
After all, when you combine lower fees with the photographers’ increased costs of doing business in a digital world, the end result may be photographers going out of business or switching to subject matter that is more lucrative or, possibly, changing careers altogether.
I encouraged this photo buyer to come back to our site when she couldn’t find what she was looking for anywhere else.
Nancy Carrizales, a friend and colleague who runs Animals Animals, which services the editorial market primarily, said she’s been receiving these agreements for a few years. “Along with lower fees, the rights requested are greater than what we are willing and often allowed to grant due to our agreements with our contributors. The negotiation process has become an education for both the client and the agency. We are both going through major changes due to new technology and consolidation. We try to be understanding and flexible to meet the client's needs, however we also need to maintain a clear understanding of the value of our collection and the services we offer. It is this understanding and confidence that allows us the option to say no when we cannot come to terms with a client.”
Could part of the problem be that few mentors are teaching new photo researchers, editors, art directors, and other photo buyers the value of content? Many come into a new job or an internship fresh out of college and without proper guidance and training. Many—possibly most—photo researchers and picture editors evolved into their positions. There are few college courses that can prepare a picture buyer for the job.
I wonder why no one is teaching these new researchers and editors the value of an image, in particular the harder-to-find content?” Has an entire segment of the industry resigned itself to mediocrity? If a researcher can’t find “the shot” to illustrate a concept the book is covering, is it ok to go with a less suitable generic image he/she can find that fits the budget? We need to take the time to teach these young professionals what we know, and in particular, share with them why some images are worth more than the lowest bid.
Why not increase rather than decrease the budget? The price of textbooks is increasing due to many costs, so why not increase the price a bit more to compensate the photographers properly as well? Isn’t it the role of photo buyers to inform those that set the budget to the reality of what it costs to get outstanding content? After all, the buyers are the ones in the trenches, working with photo sources and negotiating the rights and licenses. They need to speak up on behalf of the photographers if they want to be assured of appropriate content in the years to come.
Some say the lower budgets are all about supply and demand, which is normal for business. There is truly a glut of imagery today, to be sure. Still, if you look deeply into most agency files, you’ll see a lot of content, but not a lot that is oriented toward illustrating the textbooks that are supposed to be teaching the next generation!
“We, the small quality agencies around the world, are between a rock and a hard place,” said Jose Azel of niche agency Aurora Photos. “Maintaining high quality at premium prices can and must be maintained. The problem comes with the subjectivism inherent in photography coupled with the number of high quality clients willing to pay what we consider fair fees.”
Azel continued, “We have several ways to combat this phenomenon. One may be to consolidate as a group by providing large volume at fair prices, if our material is not being provided by others. In the past this has not been easy since, like photographers, many small agents value their independence. Another might be to add value to the work beyond what others are doing. We have experienced this with some of our journalistic material, as our captions and information can be infinitely better than the average ‘stock’ caption. Finally, prove to publishers that better images, even at higher fees, sell more of their product. In the end we [picture agencies] need to make the best choice for the photographers we represent while servicing the market.”
So where does this leave us? The choice is yours, if you’re a photo buyer, speak up for the photographers who work so hard to shoot the material you need or you can go with the status quo, making no waves, secure in your position, and settling for images you might not have even considered five or ten years ago. Alternately, you could educate the bosses and bean counters about the value of editorial content and the scarcity of appropriate work. Use your powers of persuasion to get them to offer prices that will keep photographers in business.
We’re all in this together.
This article first appeared in Issue 4, 2007 of ASPP's The Picture Professional Magazine.
Value & the Bottom Line
Jane Kinne: Trailblazer, Mentor, Friend
I first met Jane Kinne at a President’s reception at one of the many NANPA Summits. I introduced myself to this small woman of great stature and she said, “…I know who you are and I’m delighted to finally meet you!”
That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship we shared for the past ten years, during the course of which I served on several boards with her at ASPP and NANPA. I would also call her from time to time with a business dilemma when I needed her sage advice.
What always struck me about Jane is that she was even tempered and never got too worked up over some issue or problem. She always encouraged and advised me to take a fair-minded attitude in order to solve a problem, which I continue to use to this day.
Jane and her husband Russ were avid “boaters” and “birders” as are my husband Dave and are. We always looked forward to the many conferences we attended, knowing that we’d spend some more quality time with them. They stayed with us in Seattle one time and I’ll never forget how they came to our breakfast table with binoculars around their necks, sighting birds out our picture window over the canopy of our NW landscape.
A few years ago during a summer board meeting in Denver, Jane and I discovered that one of her dearest classmates from college at William and Mary and then later in NYC, was my husband’s long time friend and mentor from the UW Business School! This connection was uncanny and Jane often commented how Charlie was looking down at us and had indeed put us together because we didn’t know Jane until right after Charlie’s passing!
Jane had stamina unparalleled to others her age—I asked her how she could stay up partying with us and still get up for the 8:00 meetings. She said she had an arsenal of vitamins and supplements that made all the difference. I know that she influenced me in many ways and her legacy will continue in the on-going efforts I take for our photo industry, exercising caution and fairness along the way.
To those of us that were touched by her, she will always remain in our hearts.
The Office: Preparing the Images (Part 2)
In the Winter issue of Currents, you got my take on what kind of equipment and technology you need to start your photography business. Now I’d like to talk about preparing images for sale and distribution. Many of you have libraries of analog images from years past that are still saleable. Few editors take slides anymore, so if you don’t yet own a scanner, consider buying one. You don’t have to spend $10,000 for an Imacon. A Nikon 5000 works well at a fraction of the price. When looking for a scanner, be sure to get a model with “Digital Ice” as that helps alleviate any of the dust spots from old slides. Before scanning, use canned air on both sides of each slide to remove any surface dust/dirt adhering to the transparency. Like I said before, take the time to do it right the first time and you can keep moving forward. Scan the high-res image from the beginning and do a batch action in Photoshop to resize and save to jpeg after the initial hi-res Tiff is scanned. Save the Tiff files separately, as you would the Raw files in digital capture, so you can always return to the “original” to make future changes, if necessary. Scan each photo at 16 bit, 4000 dpi, and then save the jpeg to 8 bit for website delivery. You’ll usually get a 50-60 MB file from a 35mm slide. There is nothing more maddening for photo editors than returning to a photo they saved to a working folder only to realize that they don’t know whose it is or where it came from because the information has not been embedded. At my agency, we not only back up daily on a Raid Array within the office, but we also store external hard drives of our entire photo library (which we rotate out every week) offsite at the bank. Then there’s our website server in Connecticut, which has all the files as well. My husband, Dave, used to manage a digital storage facility and we’re lucky to have his expertise for our agency.
Few photo buyers have more than a couple days to find their shots. The quicker you can deliver digital files, complete with metadata, the better your chances of making the sale. I’ve found that even when there’s considerable lead time before a due date (say a week), the early bird often gets the worm. But you have to have the right stuff. When hundreds of images are making their way to a photo editor’s desk, the quicker her eyes land on “the shot,” the sooner she can stop looking.
Bottom line: make photo requests your top priority!
You can’t fill a photo request unless you can find the right shot or the right version of the shot in your files. You need an organized file naming scheme and a method for keywording and tracking your files. The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh is a good resource for figuring out what to do after you take the picture through final output and permanent storage.
Your file and folder names need to be short and meaningful, possibly including ISO (International Organization for Standardization) country codes or shoot numbers for your reference. Programs like Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge can help you keyword files quickly. Other programs, like Portfolio and Expression Media, add cataloging features. Still others, Lightroom and Aperture to name two, handle much of the workflow. Try out a couple programs to see what will work best for you.
Present accurate caption information with the image as well as embedded in the file using File Info in the Photoshop drop-down menu. File Info is also where you put your copyright info, credit line and keywords. As painful as it is, enter the keywords at the same time so you don’t have to revisit the IPTC File Info scenario again. Do it once and do it right the first time.
A few tips on composing captions and keywords:
Find a stack loader too. Make the feed adjustments necessary and start scanning 50 at a time. We use our son’s old baby monitor—it’s 18 years old now—and set it up next to the scanner while walking around the office carrying the monitor with us. When we scanned thousands of images before the launch of our website in 2003, the scanner was running day and night. We could hear if it had stopped or had a problem because of the monitor.
After you’ve scanned the images, you can work on them in Photoshop—spot cleaning, color correcting and so on. I have one contributor to my site who learned Photoshop early on, and it’s paying off for him. He told me he spends about 15 minutes on each slide, color correcting and making the colors and light pop. His images are downloaded more than any of my other 250 photographers.
With digital capture, many photographers make lo-res jpegs for agency submission review and then convert the Raw files after images have been selected. That way, they can take the time to caption, keyword and color correct in Photoshop in order to deliver the high-res digital files. Others do everything all at once. Even if you’re submitting and selling images on your own without the help of an agency or portal, you still need lo-res files with caption and credit info embedded.
Offer photo buyers lo-res files that are big enough to enable them to see the content but small enough to load quickly. 500-1000 pixels wide and medium Jpeg quality will usually do the trick.
Once you have your images prepared, be sure to back them up somewhere, including offsite in case something happens to your home. A photographer recently told me how his entire house burned to the ground during the California fires. He was out of the country at the time, and there was nothing he could do.
Now that you have your images prepared, you can get the lo-res files on your own website and/or start submitting to agency and portal sites.
Take these steps and keep the work flow going and before too long you’ll have a collection of images that not only solve picture researchers’ problems, but that can be found from anywhere in the world based on keyword searches. It’s pretty amazing!
That’s it for this round. Next time I’ll talk about finding clients appropriate to your coverage and, more importantly, how to get them to come to you for images. Happy shooting!
