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Stock photography

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Stock photography consists of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, filmmakers, web designers, graphic artists, interior decor firms, corporate creative groups, and other entities utilize stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments. By using stock photography instead of hiring a photographer to perform on location shooting, customers can save valuable time and stay on budget. With a wealth of images, stock photography databases that may be searched online save photo researchers valuable time when they are looking for just the right image. With today's digital delivery methods, images may be purchased online and delivered via email or downloaded right away.

Stock photography is sometimes called a photo archive, or just stock photos. The term photo archive often refers to the website or physical location where the photographs are stored. Photo archives are also sometimes called image banks. As modern stock photography distributors often carry stills, video, and illustrations, none of the existing terminology provides a perfect match for the state of the industry.

Contents

Industry structure

Images are filed at an agency that negotiates licensing fees on the photographer's behalf in exchange for a percentage, or in some cases owns the images outright. This is increasingly done online, especially with the newer micro-stock models.

Pricing is determined by size of audience or readership, how long the image is to be used, country or region where the images will be used and whether royalties are due to the image creator or owner. Often, an image can be licensed for less than $200, or in the case of the microstock photography websites as little as $1. The client may, however, request "exclusive" rights, preventing other customers from using the same image for a specified length of time or in the same industry. Such sales can command many thousands of dollars, both because they tend to be high-exposure and because the agency is gambling that the image would not have made more money had it remained in circulation.

With rights managed stock photography an individual licensing agreement is negotiated for each use. Royalty free stock photography offers a photo buyer the ability to use an image in an unlimited number of ways for a single license fee. However with royalty free licensing there is no option for getting exclusive usage rights.

Some stock photography sites offer low-resolution photography free for the purpose of preparing advertising comps to demonstrate a design. If the advertiser decides to use the image, the rights to use the high-resolution image then can be negotiated.

Professional stock photographers place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, with a defined commission basis and for a specified contract term. Some photographers fund their own photo shoots, or develop imagery in cooperation with an agency, while others submit photographs originally produced as part of editorial (magazine) or commercial assignments.

Royalty-free

  1. Pay a one-time fee.
  2. Use the images multiple times for multiple purposes.
  3. No one can have exclusive rights of a Royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he wants).
Rights-managed (sometimes called "licensed images")

  1. Pay each time you use the image.
  2. You must choose a Rights-managed license if you want exclusive use of an image (the photographer would not be allowed to sell the image to anyone else).
  3. Fee is based on such things as exclusivity, distribution, length of time used, geographic location of use.
  4. Editorial is a form of rights-managed license when there are no releases for the subjects. Since there are no releases the images cannot be used for advertising, only for news or educational purposes.

History

One of the first major stock photography agencies was the one founded in 1920 by H. Armstrong Roberts, which continues today under the name [RobertStock].

For many years, stock photography consisted largely of outtakes ("seconds") from commercial magazine assignments. By the 1980s, it had become a specialty in its own right, with photographers creating new material for the express purpose of submitting it to a stock house. Agencies attempted to become more sophisticated about following and anticipating the needs of advertisers and communicating these needs to photographers. Photographs were composed with more of an eye for how they might look when combined with other elements; for example, a photo might be shot vertically with space at the top and down the left side, with the conscious intention that it might be licensed for use as a magazine cover. Leading agencies during this time included The Image Bank, SuperStock, Comstock Images, FPG, Index Stock Imagery, and Masterfile.

In the 1990s, a period of consolidation followed, with Getty Images and Corbis becoming the two largest companies as a result of acquisitions. Today, stock photography companies have largely moved online. In the early 2000s, JupiterMedia Corporation has started buying some of the smaller players in the market, aggregating them under the banner of their JupiterImages division, and became the third largest player in the market. The availability of the internet provided a means for other, smaller companies to get foothold in the industry. One such company is Alamy who has since become a significant competitor in the market with over 4 million pictures in its gallery.

In the 2000s the microstock photography industry, led by iStockPhoto and later ShutterStock and Dreamstime, emerged as a rapidly growing market. Using the Internet as their sole distribution method, and recruiting mainly amateur and hobbyist photographers from around the globe, these companies are able to offer stock libraries of good quality for very low prices.

There are also a number of completely free stock photography sites, where no payment is required whatsoever, for example [FreeDigitalPhotos.net] and [FreeFoto.com].

See also

External links

Industry News
Stock Agency Associations
Stock Photographer's Associations
Licensing systems
Forums (open)
(for Microstock forums see: Microstock photography)

Forums (restricted membership)

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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