Photographers need to be prepared for and anticipate career change. Consider the career of Ron Rovtar, a successful stock photographer in the 90s, now happily selling real estate and using his photographic skills to photograph architecture.
"We have reset and won't rebound and re-grow," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the continued decline of print as an advertising medium during the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
The American Society of Media has launched a redesigned Web site with expanded resources available to all photographers and members of the photographic community---not just ASMP members.
Photographers and agencies are concerned about unauthorized image uses and the best ways to protect their copyright. The focus is often on catching the criminal---finding the individual who has made an unauthorized use---but there are two aspects to copyright protection that need to be considered. Much more attention should be paid to making it easy for individuals who find an image they want to use---whether on the Internet or in a printed publication---to locate the image owner and determine if a fee must be paid for the rights to use that image.
Joe Sohm started out as a teacher of American history but became a full-time photographer, and for more than 30 years, has produced images of people and lifestyles in every state in the union in his personal quest to illustrate the depth and breath of all that American democracy represents. His Visions of America collection contains 28,000 tightly edited images. Sohm has had a very successful career licensing rights to these stock images---one image at a time, around the world, through multiple distributors. As the stock photo business changes, Sohm, always a man with a grand vision, has moved on to new things.
Want to be part owner of Blend Images, LLC, one of the leading stock-photo production operations in the world? Jack Hollingsworth, one of the two concept originators of Blend, is asking $250,000 for his shares in the company.
Market value for most products depends on how they are used---the value the customer receives. The distinguishing factor is often between
renting and
buying a product: from DVDs to photo equipment, renting based on value received is a very common practice, which has been all but eroded in the photo industry with the proliferation of microstock.
Many stock photographers are looking for new directions and ways to reinvent their businesses. Jonathan Ross is putting some effort into shooting video with the Red One camera.
The following is a list of general categories of imagery that are often used by educational publishers. This list is used by the Universal Images Groups and by Encyclopaedia Britannica in categorizing images for their purposes. In one sense the list might be viewed as covering all types of imagery, but if you think of each category in terms of images that might have an educational application you see that many images that might broadly fit into the category will have little or no education value.
If the figures in "Getty Images: Why Are Photographer Revenues Dropping?" are reasonably representative, there are at least two major and closely related issues to be considered: the downward trend of royalty-free pricing and oversupply.