Why I do I charge what I do for commercial image use? I explain at Compound Eye: This Photo Is Not Free, But How Much Should It Cost?
Posts Tagged ‘Photography business’
Myrmecos at Visuals Unlimited
As a business experiment I’ve submitted an assortment of photos to the high-end science/medical stock agency Visuals Unlimited. Photo users now have the option to license my images instantly through a third party instead of waiting for me to answer my email. I had resisted joining an agency for years, as in the age of [...]
The death of career photography?
The New York Times on the changing face of the photography business: Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting [...]
Online Copyright Registration
A couple years back I posted a short bit on how to register photo copyright with the U.S. government. That turned out to be the last time I filled out a registration with pen and paper. For all subsequent submissions I’ve used the new ECO system at http://www.copyright.gov/eco. Let me disabuse you of any preconception [...]
Career Advice
Malcom Gladwell to aspiring journalists: The issue is not writing. It’s what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he’s one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance [...]
Health Care Reform and Photography
Every year my part-time photography business does a little better than the year before. A few new clients, a few new venues, a few more visitors to my web sites. It’s not a meteoric rise by any measure, but considering the current economic situation I am counting my blessings. Naturally, of course, when business is [...]
PLoS and Creative Commons
This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology. I hate doing that. Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research. The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) [...]
Photoshelter Collection Closes
My favorite upstart stock photography business, the Photoshelter Collection, has decided that their experiment was not successful enough to continue. This is a shame. The quality of imagery at Photoshelter is competitive with the industry giants, yet they treated photographers more fairly than the traditional agencies and used a more democratic, more merit-based criteria to [...]
Interviewed!
While I was away the Photoshelter blog posted a recent interview I did with Allen Murabayashi, the company’s CEO. You can read it here, and I’ve also pasted it below the fold. I don’t market my photos through an agency- my own sites work pretty well- but if I did, Photoshelter is one of the [...]
Is iStockphoto ruining the insect photo business?
The rise of microstock photography has many established photographers wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over how microstock companies are destroying the business. What is microstock? It is a relatively new internet-based business model that licenses existing images for scandalously low prices. Traditionally, images are licensed through highly selective stock agencies for amounts in [...]
A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
