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What's Next For Stock? Depends Whom You Ask
by Daryl Lang
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April 10, 2006
Excerpted from article published in PHOTO DISTRICT NEWS ONLINE
CHICAGO - Here’s how to succeed as a stock photographer: Find a niche,
partner with a big agency, shoot briefcases and people shaking hands in a
way that has never been done before, hang on to your rights, sell out, aim
for the high end, aim for the budget market, and finally get out of the
picture business entirely.
That’s the sort of contradictory advice offered by various stock agency
representatives at the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) annual
meeting Friday and Saturday.
Even with the disagreements, the PACA members seemed to agree on a few
points:
• Micropayment sites have tapped a new market for imagery. These
dollar-an-image or low-cost subscription sites work with amateur and
semi-professional photographers and cater to budget-minded designers. Any
doubt about their importance was erased earlier this year when Getty
acquired the top microstock company iStockPhoto.com.
• There are serious problems in enforcing copyright that have to be solved
for the picture business to thrive. PACA and other photo groups are
actively fighting a proposal before Congress that would make “orphan
works” — including photos of unknown copyright status —
essentially free for the taking. Companies like PicScout, IdČe and
Digimarc are using technology to ferret out copyright infringers. One
organization, the Picture License Universal System (PLUS) is developing
new technical standards for specifying an image’s licensing and copyright
status.
• There is a robust supply of images as agencies produce more of their own
work and more photographers contribute more stock images.
. . . On Saturday, the PACA audience heard reports from representatives
of the three biggest imagery companies: Lewis Blackwell of Getty Images,
Gary Shenk of Corbis, and Mark Berns of JupiterImages.
All three companies are aggressively pursuing wholly owned content,
meaning they own the rights to the pictures they sell. The primary reason,
they say, is to be flexible with pricing and new services in the future.
[However, Jim] Pickerell predicted a bleak future where there is an
oversupply of available photos, the return per image declines, and
photographers will be forced to shoot on a work-for-hire basis or the
agencies will hire someone else who will.
Full article may be read here:
http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002314545
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