September 8, 2020

Photography Notes:

Even though the photography industry is breaking apart we must keep our professional standards when making great images and our mission of being present in a great landscape totally immersed in mother nature. 

What the photo industry giants have done is poison the water, making it virtually impossible to make a decent living through creating images that used to be sold for good wages.

Because of the greed of the of the photo agencies trying to compete and claim they are the top agency, come join us, which is a farce in itself, because they have lowered the standards of images being submitted and the worse deal for photographers not being paid a decent amount for their hard earned efforts by eliminating Rights Managed and going with the poverty income of Royalty Free. 

Now this is only for us peons that don’t have the financial backing of the photo agencies glorified editors, to travel with their crew to create images that are beginning to look like all the other cliche images we see in the billions each and every day. Where is the originality of the past stock photographers? The answer is they couldn’t survive doing something they loved for pennies on the dollar. Who in their right mind would want to spend thousands of dollars traveling to exotic places and then after submitting their original intuitive, insightful images find out that their images are being sold for bargain basement prices. How is that supposed to inspire anyone to go out and make more images for that agency when they have bills to pay and mouths to feed and they can’t do it for peanuts? 

But do the super egotistical Goliath’s, the editors of Royalty Free care about the people making them a living. I doubt it for their intellect has shrunk as their big heads have become huge as if they know anything about hard earned image creation.

And besides there are so many shooters now in this world giving their images away basically for free that the pros are doomed and can’t compete in that low ball arena with the agencies reaping the benefits of  signed contracts that allow them basically to sell the photographer’s photos for anything they want while the photographer gets to eat peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And the young photographers don’t really care they  just want to see their images in print no matter how bad their images were sold for. 

Nowadays everyone is a photographer with billions of images being created on a daily basis.

In this lowering of professional standards we need to maintain our professionalism our insightfulness in creating great images no matter how competitive it is to get any good image sold for a decent price.

We must never lower our integrity and cut corners in order to get an image sold. 

Nowadays everyone wants to just take snap shots with their phone and then send the images to the agency just to see if anything sells, and to be honest when you add up your costs to get the image made your travel time, gas, equipment, not to mention foreign countries, you could be talking about thousands of dollars of out of pocket expenses and for what, your first sale was worth less than a buck!  This is an insult to all photographers, it is highway robbery as the agencies makes billions and you reap the benefit of pennies. These agencies should be ashamed of themselves for the scam they are running on the photographer. I wouldn’t be surprised if these mega agencies lower the payment again soon to 90% for the agency and 10% for the newcomers that came into to the stock photo game too late to know  previously how the agency and the photographers worked together. They respected each other and they respected the photographer’s hard earned work they created and the photographer respected the photo agencies honesty and the sales force that made the selling of imagery their responsibility that allowed more time for the photographers to keep traveling and shooting. The sale split in the beginning of stock was 50/50 so the photographer and the agency both got equal pay for the great work they both had done.

Now photographers feel that shysters rule the photography Industry and all these men of avarice want is money and they could care less about the photographers out there sacrificing their lives and livelihood trying to create images that sell. The problem is that the stock photo industry is a losing bet. We now have so called free agencies giving your image creations away for free. Free for the photographers perspective his ego thinking that free is better than nothing, but the agency makes a profit off the images for how could they stay in business.  Someone always makes money at the expense of us photographer peons.

And on social media you have viewers stealing your work and selling them as their own. 

Once a price has been reduced to its lowest possibility you can never bring the price back up to a living wage. For all intents and purposes stock photography is dead. There is no possible way to make a decent living wage when the agency you work for screws you with pennies on the dollar sales.