Pickerell, Jim

Articles by Jim Pickerell

Hollingsworth Changes Course for "Toginars"

By Jim Pickerell | 295 Words | Posted 5/28/2009 | Comments (1)

Keeping up with Jack Hollingsworth is a challenge. In the middle of April, he announced the three-day Photographer Makeover conference, originally scheduled for June 1. This event has since been cancelled due to lack of interest, but never discouraged, Hollingsworth has launched a new series of interactive online conversations called toginars at the much more reasonable price point of $19.99 each.

The Long Tail And Stock Photography

By Jim Pickerell | 3057 Words | Posted 5/28/2009 | Comments

The Long Tail describes a new way of looking at, and approaching, markets in the Web 2.0 environment. The term was first coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine article in October 2004. It is illustrative of the business strategy of Internet companies like Amazon.com and Netflix which sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities, to a very large base of customers. This buying pattern creates what is called a "power law distribution curve" or long tail.

Strategies Traditional Sellers Should Adopt: Search, Info, Editing, Payment

By Jim Pickerell | 891 Words | Posted 5/27/2009 | Comments (1)

In addition to credits-based pricing, traditional sellers need to consider several technological adaptations. These include letting customers organize search results, helping photographers with research, providing a more varied offering and speeding up royalty payments.

Customers Move From Traditional RF To Microstock

By Jim Pickerell | 772 Words | Posted 5/26/2009 | Comments

The second insight came as I was reading the business section of the Washington Post and noticed that a photo used as part of the lead illustration was credited to iStockphoto. This got me thinking. In the past I’ve seen a lot of photos in the Post credited to Photodisc. Now we may be seeing the beginning of a move from the more pricey Photodisc images to those of iStockphoto.

Strategies Traditional Sellers Should Adopt: Credit-Based Pricing

By Jim Pickerell | 918 Words | Posted 5/26/2009 | Comments

Microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering, if not rushing to adopt. One of these is pricing based on credits, which transfers money to the seller before product delivery, makes it simpler to conduct small transactions, appears simple to the buyer and gives the seller more flexibility in adjusting prices.

Stock Photo Costs

By Jim Pickerell | 549 Words | Posted 5/26/2009 | Comments

Recently I was trying to explain the stock photo business to an investment analyst and making the point that there comes a time when a photographer can no longer afford to produce stock images because his costs are greater than his income. The analyst was under the impression that a “stock photo” was one that had been produced, and paid for, while the photographer was on assignment for someone else. Thus the image was “expense free” to the creator. And, in theory, the only “additional costs” the photographer might have to make the image available for secondary licensing would be the cost of packing it up for shipping it to his stock agency.

Strategies Traditional Sellers Should Adopt

By Jim Pickerell | 1911 Words | Posted 5/26/2009 | Comments

As the stock industry changes, traditional stock agencies and distributors are losing ground because they have failed to adopt new technological efficiencies. Granted, constantly keeping up with the latest technological changes can be expensive, and most agencies have already invested huge amounts to get where they are today. But, microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering – if not rushing to adopt.

Microstock: No Longer $1

By Jim Pickerell | 449 Words | Posted 5/22/2009 | Comments (3)

Many experienced professional photographers have been watching image prices fall but just cannot bring themselves to license their images for $1. Yet the truth is that at today's microstock prices, it does not take all that many sales to match what a photographer would earn from a single rights-managed sale, and there are a currently a lot more microstock sales than rights-managed ones.

Copyright Office in Logjam

By Jim Pickerell | 380 Words | Posted 5/20/2009 | Comments

The Washington Post reports that it is taking an average of 18 months for hard-copy copyright-registration applications to be cleared since the U.S. Copyright Office implemented its new electronic application system last July. It takes six months to process an electronic application, despite the fact that the system was supposed to be able to do it in one month.

Why 70% Of Images Licensed Are Microstock

By Jim Pickerell | 790 Words | Posted 5/18/2009 | Comments (6)

Many traditional sellers want to believe that all microstock is doing is stealing traditional customers. However, there is a lot of evidence that disproves that theory.

About Jim Pickerell

Jim began his career in 1963 as a freelance photojournalist in the Far East. His first major sale, a Life Magazine cover, was a stock photo of the overthrow of the Ngo Dinh Diem government in Saigon, Vietnam.

He spent the next ten to fifteen years focusing on assignment work, first as an editorial photographer, and later in the corporate area. He regularly filed his outtakes with several stock agencies around the world.

As the stock side of his income grew, Jim studied the needs of the stock photo market, and began to devote more of his shooting time producing stock images. At about this time the 1976 change in the copyright law went into effect, and the industry began to see rapidly growing demand by commercial and advertising users for stock images.

In the early 80's he helped establish the Mid-Atlantic chapter of American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and served as Vice President, President and Program Chairman over a period of six years. He served on the national board of ASMP for two years, was on the committee that produced the ASMP Stock Handbook in 1983, and was active in the fight to reverse the IRS rules that required capitalization of all expenses of stock photo production.

In 1989 he published the first edition of Negotiating Stock Photo Prices, a guide to pricing hundreds of stock photo uses. The fifth edition was published in 2001. In 1990, he began publishing Selling-Stock, a bi-monthly newsletter dealing with issues of interest to stock photographers and stock photo sellers, with particular focus on issues related to marketing stock images. Selling-Stock is recognized worldwide as the leading source of in-depth analysis of the stock photo industry. As a result of his many years in the industry and his work with Selling-Stock, Jim has an expert understanding of the stock photo industry, its standard practices and developing trends. He frequently provides consulting services on stock industry issues to photographers, stock agents and individuals in the investment community.

In 1993, his daughter, Cheryl, joined him in the business. Together they established Stock Connection, an agency designed to provide photographers with greater control over the promotion and marketing of their work than most other stock agencies were offering. The company currently represents selected images from more than 400 photographers.

At age 76, Jim continues to follow stock photo industry developments on a day to day basis and expects to continue to do so far into the future.