If there is something related to photography or illustration that you want to learn more about, chances are that Shutterstock’s Skillfeed (
www.skillfeed.com) has a video tutorial on the subject. Some of the tutorials are designed for beginners while others are aimed at people with more advanced experience. When searching a subject you can sort the tutorials by your skill level.
Google has just made it much easier for searchers to find images they can legally use for FREE – even for commercial uses. Bing introduced this feature last July. Go to Google. Use the images search feature and search for any subject. Click on “Search Tools” and under that click on “Usage Rights.” The default search is “not filtered by license,” but the searcher can change that to any one of the following:
n it’s
latest trend briefing, the Image Source blog, IMSO, delivers an analysis of popular stories covered during 2013 – from the Cult of Maersk on the rise of Industrial imagery to features on Richard Avedon’s work in Jeans Advertising – the research reveals five developing trends in photography: Mythography; Post-Cowboy Capitalism; Neo Geo Plus; Tonka Tech; and The Double Take.
I was recently asked to name the 5 biggest companies in the stock photo industry and the percentage of total industry turnover they represent. The surprising thing is how the names of the top 5 have changed in the last few years and the implications for the long term future of the industry.
Last summer Selling Stock published stories
here and
here about efforts in the UK to revise the copyright rules and devise a path for those who want to use “orphan works” to do so legally. Orphan works are any copyrighted material where the copyright holder cannot be identified or located. The process moves forward.
Recently Shutterstock published a Trend Report that showed the 12 most popular images downloaded by creatives in the last week. While this is a very small sample it may provide useful insights for photographers to consider. Only 4 of the 12 images in greatest demand were photos and two of the 4 were backgrounds. The other 8 images were Vector illustrations.
Recently, a photographer who has been regularly producing images for RM licensing for a lot of years asked, “Is there any future in stock photography?” He is with a leading agency, made very good money in the 1990s and sales were pretty good in the early 2000s. Then came 2008-2009 and sales dropped off the cliff. Now he is questioning whether it is worthwhile to continue to produce. He also said, “I have ever bought into the Royalty Free idea.”
A subscriber asked recently, “What is the best way to find out all the legal compliance issues associated with selling stock images of individuals and/or groups?” The issue is very simple. If the image is used for any type of commercial use you need a release. If it is being used for editorial use to illustrate a magazine or newspaper story of something that actually happened, and was taken in a public place, then a release is usually not required. However, it can get a little fuzzy if a picture of someone is used to “illustrate” an editorial story that has nothing to do with the subject of the photograph’s lifestyle.
For the past two years I have been tracking semi-annually the total downloads and images in the collection of 420 of iStock’s top earning contributors. As of the end of 2013 these contributors had a total of at least 50,777,000 total career downloads and 1,794,494 images in the iStock collection. Two-hundred-three of these contributors (48%) have uploaded
fewer than 100 new images to their collections in the last two years.
Based on the downloads of 420 of iStock’s most productive contributors who have a combined total of at least 50,777,000 downloads the number of downloads in 2013 were down about
12% compared to 2012. This group of contributors have approximately one-third* of all iStock downloads since the company’s founding,