Once you start your own
business you soon realise that you are going to need photographs, whether for use on your
web site or in publicity, such as flyers, brochures and print
advertising. Now, many businesses do not have huge advertising budgets and let's face it, hiring a
photographer to shoot some pictures every time you want to use some photographs in your publicity is going to be expensive. So, what does the average company do (and not so average, as we shall see)? They turn to
stock photography.
Now, a decade or so ago, stock photography was expensive but not as expensive as hiring a photographer (along with assistant, make-up artist etc) to do the shoot. That's why stock photography became a multi-million pound business and it still is. However, along came micro-stock. Now what exactly is micro-stock? Basically, with the advent of very clever cameras that almost guarantee a 'perfect
picture' there has been a veritable explosion in the quantity and quality of images available.
This has led to non-professional photographers entering the market, previously the preserve of photographers who have spent years refining their art and using expensive camera equipment (usually costing in the thousands of pounds, particularly medium and
large format - think Hasselblads). Now, with the technological improvements brought about by
digital photography its much cheaper to to obtain hi-res images and this has led to thousands of people thinking they can be a stock photographer or make some money from the thousands of digital files now sitting on their computer hard drives.
Now, as a photographer who has been taking images for several decades and who has dabbled in the field of stock photography, I well remember having to cart around my portfolio to stock libraries as the internet was very slow and scanned slides were huge, too huge to send via the net. This put off most folk from even trying to become a stock photographer, that and the fact you often had to submit a minimum of hundreds of high quality images to even be considered by the stock library.
Today though you can upload images over your
high speed broadband connection without leaving the comfort of your own home quite easily. Also, the submission process is relatively anonymous, no waiting in reception for your appointment with an art editor! In addition, you can submit just one image or several, no need to have hundreds. As well as this, digital photography and the internet go together perfectly - no more hours spent scanning slides, cleaning them up in Photoshop and sharpening them etc.
Granted, micro-stock pays little per image (often mere pennies) but the average person uploading to a micro-stock site is very happy to earn anything. They are not usually a professional photographer and there livelihood doesn't depend on them earning thousands from their images. So, micro-stock sites have flourished and they market themselves on the low price of the images they have available. Now this brings us to a very important point, namely that most micro-stock sites offer royalty free images without what are called 'rights management'.
What does this mean? Simply put, it means that anyone can download the same image and use it for whatever purpose they wish (except re-selling the actual image) and as often as they wish. So for example, several companies can pay a small fee (usually less than £1 an image) and use the same image all over the place, be it the web or in print. Does this really matter you might ask? Well, possibly not if you a low profile company and the image(s) are going to be used in a flyer that only a few hundred or few thousand customers are going to ever see. However, remember that with the web (you did after all download the image from a micro-stock web site) its quite possible to see the same image used on lots of sites, some not very reputable ones at that.
Does this actually happen you might ask? Well yes. In one example, the
Hilton Hotels chain used a micro-stock image on its main site of a woman with a headset (think receptionist) on its 'About Us' page. Nothing unusual about that you might say. Until you realise that the very same image has been used elsewhere, in particular by on site selling Viagra over the internet! Now do you see the problem?
So, the moral of the story is that if you are happy to use images that anyone else can and is likely to use, be prepared for some unfortunate associations to be made between your business and other less salubrious ones!
If you would like to read more about this subject, check out this excellent
article on
Photographers Direct (not a micro-stock site!)
Image via CrunchBase
