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October 31, 2005
Botanica: Photographs by Robert Cattan
Posted by Jason at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Finding Your Way Through the Stock Lexicon
Stock Photography Definitions
By Pat Hunt
Whether you are a seasoned Stock pro, or just getting started, it’s often helpful to review the lexicons that describe the stock industry. Business models change and grow, allowing confusion and misunderstanding from season to season. However, a few basic terms are contemporary and widely used, offering a basic underpinning to the business structure you are building. Keep these in your Stock dictionary.
Stock Photography is imagery already produced and offered for licensing with prices based on image usage. Stock images can be photography, illustration, maps, web symbols, fine art, historic documents, graphics, 3D and video. Typical clients are book publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, web designers, graphic artists and corporate creatives.
Editorial Imagery is licensed to illustrate a text article in a magazine or textbook and not for advertising in order to sell a product.
Advertising Imagery promotes a company or named product in order to sell its services. Requires model and property releases.
Corporate Imagery refers to companies licensing imagery directly for the creation of in-house marketing, web or intranet use, annual reports and sales brochures. Sometimes advertising design is done in-house.
Stock Agents will generally market imagery for a percentage of the licensing revenues. The artist retains copyright to the images. (Some images are wholly owned by agents.) Most agents will guide production, edit, scan, keyword and upload to their commercial e-commerce site for the artist.
Portals are similar to an agent, but in most cases all production processes, through the upload of imagery, is handled by the artist/collection for a higher percentage of revenue.
License refers to how stock images are sold. It is a reproduction fee that is granted upon payment, and the image copyright remains with the creator/owner.
Rights Managed (Rights Protected) Imagery is licensed via a pricing model that tracks the client usage in order to retain the right to charge higher prices for restricting that usage to a particular industry. Pricing is determined by negotiating various parameters such as print run, image (file) size, distribution, placement, and image sophistication. For example: “One time, non exclusive, North American, two languages, text book, ¼ page, inside, OR Advertising brochure, ½ page, inside, two million print run, one year, non exclusive, world wide.
Royalty Free Imagery does not restrict rights of usage and can be published in perpetuity by the licensing client. RF is usually offered in three or four resolutions, which limits its usability and determines its price. Average examples: Low resolution price range for 2 MB file - $59 to $129; medium resolution for 10MB to 18MB file - $179 to $289; high resolution for 30MB to 50MB file - $249 to $359; and a super hi res at 70MB+ for $359+. Range of price for a disc of up to 100 images - $399 to $599.
Subscription Stock is usually Royalty Free stock offered in bundles for restricted periods of time at one price rate, allowing numerous downloads. Business models vary with competing companies. A client may chose from a collection of several thousand images for one month, or six months or one year, for $99 to $2400. File resolutions vary depending on the business model. The system works for designers with strict budgets that can work with broad subject images only.
Assignment Stock offers the advertising client a way to secure a custom image on a restricted budget. That budget may be too low for assignment and high enough for stock, however, that stock may not be available on the market. An assignment stock company will arrange to produce that image at their expense and license it for a stock price (minimum $1000), then retain the rights to remarket the image in selected stock outlets (agencies).
SoHo is an acronym standing for Small Office, Home Office. It usually refers to low-resolution image files offered to small businesses at a lower rate. They can be RF or RM.
Consumer Sales is a client term that usually refers to the sale of images for use in post cards, posters, cell phone wallpaper, and products meant for the non-commercial public.
Foreign Sales describes many US agents who have foreign agent affiliates or wholly owned offices that market and license imagery for a specified revenue percentage in their territory.
Third Party is a term that usually refers to sales/licenses handled by a domestic subagent or foreign agent affiliate, resulting in further apportioning of revenue percentages.
Bulk Rate offers a negotiated discount price for images sold in volume, or package deals of multi-use licenses for one price.
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. The term is usually used in connection with piggybacking a product onto another company’s product to make a packaged deal more inviting. Example: Adding a package of imagery onto a software product or adding imagery to mass mailers for direct marketing to consumers.
Exclusivity Arrangements allow for a limitation on the representation of an image for licensing or on the purchase of a license for a specific industry.
Commission Statements represent artist’s revenue. Some agents/portals send monthly, quarterly or six month statements and some are available in live time on the web site. They usually offer image identification, gross amount of sales, the artist’s percentage of revenue, type of publication or usage and industry to which it is licensed.
E-commerce refers to how most stock imagery is now sold/licensed on a fully enabled website, offering such advantages as lightboxes, varied resolutions, keywording, shopping cart pricing, high resolution download and invoice tracking.
Copyright is a legal concept representing the original expression of a creative process, and restricts rights of reproduction and distribution to the original artist.
Model/property releases are signed documents giving consent to use a likeness of that person or property for a commercial purpose, usually representing an entity or product to be sold.
Trademark refers to a legal registration with a governmental agency to assure exclusivity. Some properties and products are trademarked and cannot be published photographically without permission.
Dimensions are the height and width in inches or centimeters that govern output size for a digital stock photograph.
DPI stands for dots per inch. It measures the resolution or number of pixels in a digital stock photo by the inch, horizontally and vertically.
Resolution is a measure of output capability expressed in dpi and is used in connection with file size for print usage.
Submission guidelines offer strict parameters for sending images to the agent/portal for review, editing and upload/storage. Each company will offer guidelines for film or digital production, including size, resolution, captioning, keywording, copyright, submission volume and delivery media.
The most common broad image categories:
Animals
Architecture
Backgrounds
Fine Art
History
News
Business
Concepts
Food
Health & Beauty
Industry
Lifestyle
Nature
Objects
Sports
High Tech
Travel
Helpful sites:
www.editorialphoto.com
www.alamy.com/help/stock-photo.asp
www.indexstock.com/content/help/stockphotography.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_photography
www.worldofstock.com/popular_searches.php
www.photosource.com
www.stockindustry.org
Posted by Jason at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2005
Panel Party
By Pat Hunt
Friday October 21st
Mid October brought about a busy week for Stock Photography professionals. Representatives jumped from the PACA meeting to Picture House and Photo Plus. But, nothing topped the elegant party hosted by Jackie Lissy Brustein Photo Director of the Bill SMITH STUDIO, a major design force in the world of children’s books. Jackie graciously sponsored the get together of over eighty-five guests in honor of an eight-person panel and moderator, all in town for a seminar the next morning at the yearly New York Photo Plus, in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The Panel reads like “Who’s Who in Stock Photography:
James Alexander - Director of Adobe Images
James West - CEO of Alamy
Paul Banwell - Director of Photographer and Filmmaker Relations of Getty Images
Patrick Donehue – Vice President, Photographer Relations of Corbis
Alexis Scott - CEO of Workbook Stock
Brad Kuhns – Co-founder of IPNstock.com
Christina Vaughan – CEO of Image Source
John Lund - Stock Photographer, Author and Lecturer
Moderator - Pat Hunt, V.P. of Corporate Relations at Index Stock Imagery,
Author and Lecturer.
Organized and moderated by Pat Hunt, VP of Corporate Relations at Index (www.indexstock.com), and Managing Editor of MacTribe (www.mactribe.com), the three hour session was titled: “What Stock Business Model is Right for You?”
At the party, this important group of business ‘movers and shakers’ was joined by other top leaders in the industry, including Duncan Grossart - Co-CEO of Image Source, Jeffrey Burke and Patty Vargas - Senior Executives of Jupiter Media, Bahar Gidwani - CEO of Index Stock Imagery, Dan Russelman - President of Index Stock Imagery, Jon Oringer - CEO of Shutterstock, Sonia Wasco - Director of Grant Heilman Stock, Bruce Livingstone - CEO of iStockphoto, Betsy Reid - Director of SAA, Cathy Sachs - Director of ASPP, Brian Wilcox - Director of Photography at SuperStock, Rick Becker-Leckrone - Director of Blend Images, Carol Heller - Director of Sales at Getty Images, Susan Jones - Director of Sales for Agefotostock, Lindsey Nicholson -Managing Editor for Wire ImageStock, Randy Taylor - CEO of StockPhotoFinder, and Jeff Roberts,Publisher of PDN, to name only a few.
Luminaries from the publishing industry included Steven Diamond of Scholastic, Richard Fox of Wiley Publishing, Karen Sutorius of Newbridge Publishing, Jill Waterman of PDN, Annette Melvin of Random House, Michael Baynes of Thomson Learning, John Clarke and Towny Dickinson of MacMillan Publishing, Justin Nisbet of Workman Publishing and Dan Robillard of MacTribe.
Important faces in the RF industry were Tom Grill, Jack Hollingsworth, Mark Anderson, Jose Pelaez, and Mark Hunt. All enjoyed wining and dining in a relaxed atmosphere, and trading industry insights to background music. It was the perfect way to launch the best-attended seminar at Photo Plus this year.
Posted by Pat at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
Media Bakery Represents Index Stock Imagery
http://www.mactribe.com/articlenews.asp?ArticleId=3
Chad Newell is the CEO of the most entertaining stock media resource on the Internet – Media Bakery. It blends royalty free imagery, footage, flash and audio to “kick butt” and provide a fun user experience.
MacTribe - Media Bakery has stepped into the forefront this year. How did it get there?
Chad - A little over a year ago, we really thought hard about how to capitalize on the market according to our size. As necessity is the mother of invention, we had to really think about making an impact to visiting users, so we decided to build on our creative name. An initiative was launched to re-work our website design, having the mandate to speak to the design community. It was important to communicate to our target market. I feel the current design and functionality really speak to our demographic. Literally designed as an oven, our home and sub pages invite users to navigate amongst our product offerings and review new products with style and ease. The home page is fun and inviting to browse.
MacTribe - Please describe your variety of content, including audio and footage.
Chad - Media Bakery was conceptualized as the convergence of many media types. Having one brand to market which can easily wrap around our entire product offering makes it a powerful user experience and reinforces the wide variety of products we offer. Footage, Flash and Audio are all offerings that make Media Bakery a one stop shop for any campaign medium that a Creative might be developing. Although imagery is our bread and butter, these other offerings provide the diverse posture that Media Bakery was founded upon.
MacTribe - What is your custom assignment business model?
Chad - Finding the right image at the right price is not always a luxury the creative can afford. This is a great idea that we have made available to clients on really tight budgets who can’t find what they are looking for in RF. Since the bakery is an all Royalty Free resource, we offer a custom shoot from supplied story board concepts that will deliver a non-exclusive image for about the same price as an Ultra High Res file. If the client needs multiple shots the pricing slightly scales down. Typical shoots yield several images from one setup. The image(s) are then retained for Media Bakery to use in its own library, making it available to others for an RF license.
MacTribe - How successful is your visual search technology?
Chad - I can truly say it kicks butt. I’ve worn every hat in this business, from researcher to buyer, and hands down this technology is the best I have seen. Not only can you upload your own comp, or an image you might have found at another site, you get accurate, truthful visual matches based on intelligent feedback. It works best if you already know in your mind’s eye what image you’d like to find. The user experience is so simple to use, it really feels like magic after a couple of uses.
MacTribe - How did you get into the business?
Chad - In 1996 I was looking for a change from theatrical distribution sales at New Line Cinema. I jumped at the chance to move out of Hollywood and up to San Francisco to help start what was then the Image Bank footage and film office. The ability to stay in the creative visual industry in Northern California was a dream-come-true. There I starting shooting projects myself – a sidetrack that I was really thankful to experience. I found a new respect for the production process. My next venture in stock was back down to Southern California at Adventure Photo and Film. There I became Managing Director and ran the film division. Eventually the goal was to help posture the agency for the Globalstate acquisition. Back then, GlobalState had sister brands for their footage and audio offerings. There were three brands in total: Imagestate, VideoState and MusicState. I joined the company’s footage brand VideoState as an Operating Officer. After the company moved to New York and changed directions by consolidating their content offerings, I decided to stay behind and start the Bakery! I saw a real need for a consolidated RF stock content offer on one brand platform.
MacTribe - What are the challenges you face in this business?
Chad - What’s great about Media Bakery is that we are small. This is considered an attribute because it allows us to really cherish each and every customer as they directly affect our bottom line. The challenge for any small company in this business is to capture more market share in a very fragmented marketplace. Suffice it to say, with so much competition, we really work hard to retain our customers. I really want to see Media Bakery continue its charm as we see substantial growth year to year.
MacTribe - With your meteoric rise, what are your future plans?
Chad - Media Bakery is where it is because our customers enjoy the whole experience: the site design, the customer service and the whole cheeky ride that our marketable name lends itself so well to. With a little luck and hard work we will stay in the front of our customer’s minds.
(Article by Pat Hunt, as published in MacTribe, www.mactribe.com.)
Posted by Pat at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2005
Our Newest Images- October 25, 2005- Internet, Children, Animals, Marine Life, International Destinations
We are always adding new, fresh images to our already spectacular collection. Take a look and see the newest images we have added.
Our newest Rights Managed Images
Our newest Royalty Free Images
Check back to see a whole new set of images next week.
Posted by Valerie at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Featured Image: Girl cheating in examination
