My latest GettyImages royalty report came yesterday, and it made me reflect on trends I see. I am hardly a representative stock photographer and it has not been the primary focus of my business for some years now, so I'm out of touch with what's really happening. But here is my experience.
What is selling is not the usual stock subject suspects. I am not selling lifestyle, business, family, portraits, couples, cute kids, or pets, though I have all of those subjects in my collection. It's static things that don't change or go out of style—trees, columns, landscapes, candles, my garden, weird directional signs, lighthouses, cactuses, travel destinations--that is earning me some sometimes decent money. All that stuff you're not supposed to be able to sell as stock, because it's so commonplace. My Mexico and Israel trips have been paid back now from stock sales. My biggest sale last year—a five figure amount—was of a mountain landscape that I shot back about 1981.
My stock career took off in the early 90's when I joined Photonica, a cutting edge agency in its era. They took pains to not tell their photographers how to shoot. They wanted quirky, they wanted a highly individual take on the world, and they knew to leave us alone.
That was the file that moved over to GettyImages when they bought Photonica a few years back, and I'm still milking that cow. I also participate in Photographers' Choice (where I pay $50 a pop to place images), and where I see that it is fruitless for me to chase anything like a stock trend. I am too out of touch to know what the style of the current nanosecond is, which is what lifestyle shooters and the Royalty Free people have to know. I'm also unusual in that I am primarily in the Rights Managed sector, which was supposed to have died and shriveled up a decade ago.
So I just keeping taking pictures of what captivates me, and it still sells as stock, though only for a fraction from back in the heyday. It's so Old School it's probably going to come back into style soon.
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