Web, Photography & Digital Art
My photo of another interesting graffiti on a Venice street wall
‘La patria sarà quando tutti saremo stranieri‘
literally:
‘There’ll be a homeland only when we’re all foreigners.‘
A paradox that overturns the traditional idea of homeland: not an identity that excludes, but a condition that includes.
Only when no one is “at home” can we all feel at home.
Is it utopia, or simply a definition still ahead of its time?
preamble: a professional photographer asked me some hints to sell stock images. I answered her privately. Then I thought that a slightly fleshed-up version of it might also deserve a little corner on my blog.
For decades now I’ve been looking for some magic formula to sell good pictures on the web, and if I had run into an effective one I wouldn’t hesitate to pass it to you. But, alas, that seems fated to stay a dream.
Then let’s put aside the dreams and face today’s reality, so that we can realistically adjust our targets and methods to it, thus sparing us the worst disappointments:
1 – nowadays (and for quite some time) just everyone is a photographer – or believes firmly that she or he is one, even if all they do is tap the screen and upload the picture. What they lack in skills is amply offset by the hi-tech electronics inside the chatter can.
2 – most of the audience – the buying audience – don’t appear very interested in the quality of the images they purchase. I sold at a comparatively high price and/or in impressive quantities pictures that, if not totally dull, were nothing exceptional, whereas a number of really beautiful ones are still there awaiting their first buyer.
An example?
This image is one of my bestsellers at Adobe with 280 sales until now (from .38 to 26.40 USD each) and keep selling. I am the first to admit that it is nothing special, even if the composition and the content is good.
3 – There seems to be no rationale for the criteria they use to choose which images to purchase – or if there’s one I failed to see it in the last 16 years.
4 – Whoever buys the images prefers the big agencies over the small individual seller, no matter the price, the quality or the professionalism of the agency, as long as it has a name big enough. Possibly (just a wild guess of mine) for they pay out of their client’s pocket, not of their own.
And still, despite such a bleak scenario, I keep making decent money by selling images on the web. How?
In the first place I put in the freezer my ambition to make money by selling art: for my most beautiful pictures I have a couple of private websites that produce a few sales and a lot of satisfaction.
Then I discarded the smallest agencies. Why? Let me explain: I think that Dreamstime is a quite fair agency, but it takes me 2 years to make the same amount I achieve in less than a week by Adobe. Moreover, I would be competing against myself.
Actually I’m selling pretty well at Alamy (the best for me), Adobe and Istock. I obviously discarded Shutterstock, leaving there (in my still open account) only a toilet paper still life.
As for the small agencies, I deleted most of my images there but left my account open: should the situation change I might reconsider coming back again. Except for the ones I really dislike: by them I deleted everything and disappeared in a puff of smoke (a name? Wirestock).
With this tactical approach I saw my income soar… well not enormously but significantly.
And I began listening to the old saying “when you go fishing put a worm on the hook: it’s the fish that must like it, not you” and uploading to the agencies mostly nice but quite ordinary pictures, the kind ordinary people would like and buy.
I hope this helps you rather than discourage you…
It was quite cool to recreate with Midjourney a Krampus night 🙂
It’s a big hairy creature, a blend of beast and human, with horns, a long pointed tongue, fangs, and a very convincing devilish look. The roots of the tradition date to an unspecified pre-christian era, from the European alpine regions.
Several centuries back the heathen Krampus folklore was engulfed into the Christmas tradition as a dark counterpart to St. Nicholas, to remind (mostly the children, but not only) of the possible effects of being naughty rather than nice.
Dozens of such ominous half-goat, half-demon creatures roam the streets during the Christmas season (5th-6th December) rattling chains and bells to warn or punish those who haven’t behaved properly (actually all the bystanders, not a bad assumption 😉 ).
The Krampus parade annual event is really a spine-chilling and oddly fascinating show: it takes more than a while to realize that inside those sinister figures there are playful men that every now and then stop and take off their demonic horned heads to drink a beer or play with absolutely delighted children.
Have a look at my AI & I collection and enjoy the gothic artistic side of the Krampus depicted by flogging MidJourney long enough.
13 beautifully suggestive images – occasionally with a hint of humor,
If you want to have a look at the real side of the ‘Krampusses’ – to balance the macabre with the fun – just look at my editorial images of the “backstage” of the annual Krampus Run in Munich These are 100% real, live, no AI involved.
The participants take their Krampus get-ups very seriously and spend a lot of money throughout the year to bring the evilness of their creation to perfection: elaborated barbaric fur outfits, heavy artistically carved wooden masks, monstrous horns, long lolling tongues – and more, much more. It’s a great experience to watch those big friendly guys happy even if exhausted by the fatigue of wearing those incredibly heavy costumes, graciously posing for a selfie and accepting kindly the curiosity of the viewers.
As in so many other occurrences, here too the AI complements admirably a professionally used camera, the one siding with fiction, the other with reality. The conflict is so often in the eye of the beholder…
This is me in an ectoplasm version, having plenty of ghostly fun with my new camera.
My husband and I gave ourselves a Christmas gift in advance: the new DJI Pocket 2: a tiny pound of pocket-size camera with a great sharp sensor and a gimbal head allowing absolutely smooth 4K video clips at a very affordable price.
But I’m not going to describe the characteristics of this great new gadget here, you can find much more on YouTube and on specialized reviews. As I am not particularly fond of movies (I like still pics much more) I wondered if this pocket-size camera could replace in some way my good old one.
No sooner said than done, I began taking shoots outdoors and indoors with both and then comparing the outcomes.
My first images were accepted at Adobe, Alamy and Arcangel without arching a brow.
Voilà some of them:
Not bad at all 🙂
I always hear the same refrain: yes, they are fair indeed, pity though that they don’t sell much…
Actually so far my experience at Picfair had been… fair: for a few years I’ve been putting every now and then some images there, having three or four sales promptly paid in the meantime.
But times seem to be changing, and I decided that I need a personal photo website. I would know pretty well how to set up one myself, but for a small yearly fee Picfair offers me the possibility to have it under my own name, and as a very nice bonus also to sell my pictures as prints/posters/framed. So why not to give it a try?
So be it: luisafumi-photography.com
The presentation of the images is very good, and I can (beside having an URL of my own by them):
– sell prints,
– make albums and feature one on the first page,
– have a local search engine,
– create a splash page with a picture I love
– add external links to the menu (to my blog here, to my other website vintage-nostalgia.com, etc.)
– have a personal watermark. I retained the Pifair standard one, very well thought and designed, also because I am happy to be there in excellent company, as I find the overall Picfair image quality astonishingly high.
Time will tell if such a decision will be fruitful – now it is to early to make a reliable forecast about the destiny of the photo market at all.
Just few days after my new Picfair installation I was rewarded with a pleasant surprise: my first print sale, my splash image! A good omen and a nice startup.
I fear that Shutterstock has given the final blow to the microstock photos market with their unilateral action, by reducing drastically the contributors royalties to 10 cents/picture – promising more for big amounts of uploads and sales, but resetting the contributor at the beginning of each year – that is, forcing her/him to start from scratch @10 cents/sale, and thus humiliating legions of outraged submitters.
And I also fear that this deliberate act is actually a farsighted move: the SS people must have realized that the time was ripe to grab as much as possible before going out of business.
Just look around: the websites offering high res images for free are rapidly growing and some of their pictures are really beautiful, also considering that today’s smartphones are growing better endowed than most photographers.
What to do now?
I’m thinking of two possibilities:
1. Business is business: to upload all of one’s images on all agencies that sell (if just a little) in exchange for a decent (if just a little) royalty, and to hope for the best.
Alas, there is a heavy drawback about it, tough: a couple of years ago I withdrew almost all my images belonging to a particular well-selling niche from the less profitable agencies. As it happens, it proved to be a blatantly fortunate manoeuver: my sales at Alamy and Adobe more than doubled immediately. And they keep growing.
This way I understood that I was my own cheap competitor. When 123RF contacted me on behalf of a customer about a deleted image of mine, I told them that I was really sorry and explained candidly my problem. Quite surprisingly they accepted my point of view and respected it.
2. To accept the change without moaning and make plans. To leave and to upload your images on the trustworthiest agencies, but to keep aside the best ones and find other more profitable ways to sell them.
Still I think that the idea of a personal stock agency is worth a thought or three anyway – no matter if self-hosted or not: there are several alternatives on the market and at least two of them are very affordable (I’ll tell about them in a next post).
It could turn into a precious show-window for the images you like too much to give them away cheap.
At this point it wouldn’t surprised me to witness a revival of many curated niches over the mass cauldron.
Since many years I’m not only a contributor, but on behalf of my web customers also a microstock buyer, and as such I’m perfectly aware that my behaviour doesn’t deviate much from the vast majority of buyers, who statistically give up after the second page the local search engines produce.
And what with the tenths of millions of images stored by the agencies? Dead, almost completely dead.
Nowadays selling microstock is like winning a prize at a cheap lottery called “search engines”: partially random, partially influenced by hidden rules and only marginally based on the actual, hard-labored keywording.
What’s the point of such zillions of dead images, when just a few thousands of high-quality pictures, if well presented and properly selected, could make a really huge difference?
For nearly a month (since the infamous 1st of June) a couple of disquieting questions have been bouncing back and forth within my skull:
– what are we to do if/when the other agencies follow Shutterstock’s despicable example and start treating their contributors like beggars?
– How come a fair agency like Picfair appears to sell nearly nothing even though they offer such awfully great pictures?
I do know all too well what it’s like to set up a photostock agency – I did it. Once you solve the technical problems (quite a hard cliff themselves) and get it to run fine, you find out to your dismay that keeping it up and running – server fees, updating, de-hacking, automation, you name it – is way more expensive (at least in time) than you optimistically thought when you started.
No, I don’t really think that setting up a new agency – with so many small ones out there struggling to survive – would be a solution. What we need is a new concept, something that would entice anyone who needs one or more images having specific requirements. The cue came from Alex Rotenberg as he told us how a customer, unable to find his images on Shutterstock any longer, got directly in touch with him.
So why not to put in contact clients and contributors, thus bypassing the agencies?
All it would take would be a surprisingly cheap and simple no-profit site, a sort of artists’ cooperative dedicated to illustrations, photos and video clips, where potential clients may freely ask for images having some specific features. Their requests appear on a board and get immediately sent per E-mail to all photographers who subscribed (for free).
A mother knows her baby, a photographer knows his/her images: the one who has an image that may satisfy the client (say, a kid playing in a puddle) replies uploading ASAP one or more watermarked images onto a page that only the client may access.
That would be really big news: a thoughtful human response, no AI at all, no 300 pictures of the same lonely puddle in the park taken from 300 different angles. And no time wasted on keywords ( do we all loathe them!)
As far as prices are concerned, that’s all to be seen: fixed price, normal and premium, private negotiation… a matter of taste. However the cooperative rules must be simple and clear, and accepted by all subscribers; that’s important, the one who doesn’t play fair gets kicked out without ceremony.
The site would be extremely simple – though attractive – and wouldn’t require any special server performances, or large amounts of memory, or special skills to run it. The only costs would be:
No commission on sales – we’re talking of a no-profit initiative and this way it shall stay, lest greed creeps in and shatters(tocks) it to crumbles 🙂
The expenditures above would be covered by all subscribers after their first sale; if some 1000 – 1500 artists gather and join, it would be a matter of a few $ each yearly – transparent management, all expenditures publicly documented, no hidden costs.
Of course there should be a page telling the cooperative’s history and its goals, with a nice name (how about “Shutterstock’s castaways”?) and some well-groomed galleries of monographic pictures about current topics, something like the Photocase’s ones.
Maximum publicity to all successful sales on the site.
No a-priori exclusive, though it may be individually agreed with the client case by case.
All the above should obviously be discussed in detail once (if) this initiative takes shape and color. Mine is just a stone I’m throwing in the pond, let’s see now if it makes any waves…
Inauguration of the ESO (European Southern Observatory) Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre near the Eso headquarters in Garching near Munich, Germany
A new great attraction in Munich!
Supernova provides an immersive experience in astronomy and technology and – I would remark – lot of fun with interactive gadgets and virtual reality.
Learn the stars, the new projects and the history of universe on colorful boards written with dedication and full of amazing images.
Spring in Bavaria is the best time to visit flea markets.
The season begins with the biggest of all, the Riesenflomarkt in Munich at the same location of the Oktoberfest in autumn.
A big flea festival reserved only to private sellers, about 2000 stands just for one day of bargains.
Fancy a cowbell? Great choice here!
… or a trophy for your drawing room?
I always find something to buy: ancient books, coffee cups and absolute useless trinkets that I cannot leave there, because they are telling me a story.
After this shopping ordeal, you can have a beer and a merry-go-round at the nearby spring Festival!
The calendar read spring but the weather in Munich seemed to differ, thus I feared that a lot of people would desert the march and look for something cozier to do. But I was wrong: Karlplatz was full of merry people, who turned this meeting in a sort of civil festival.
All signs were clever, funny and appropriate:
the best, typical Bavarian: NO SCIENCE, NO BEER !
the participants spoke in a calm and cool matter-of-factly tone to an utterly attentive audience. Then the march: first time in my life I see such a march stop on red traffic lights – apparently science and civilization walk hand-in-hand!
The gloomy side:
is it really worth the while to demonstrate against “alternative sciences” (alas, nowadays calling them “superstitions” wouldn’t be politically correct), or against “alternative facts” ( calling them “blatant lies” would be risky)?
Yes, I definitely believe it’s worth the while.
If we don’t, tomorrow we might have to demonstrate against “alternative honesty” or “alternative democracy”, and end up in a jail if we call them with their true names.
I’m persuaded that we must remember constantly that the independence of science from politics, superstition and bigotry is an essential factor to the welfare of society and humankind, and that the survival of a millennial culture depends entirely on it.
