Stock photography - recent image sales

Published on 10 February 2011 by David

It has been a busy couple of weeks arranging several rights-managed image sales of photographs to clients. The stock photography market is a difficult one to gauge, sometimes there is an exceptionally good or a disappointing month and it’s hard to understand out why. At times the photos that sell seem quite random, as the images below show.

One of the biggest sales in the last couple of years was the above image to a large business in the US for their annual financial report.

Random time - two sales via Alamy of the new YMCA building in Liverpool. Not quite sure why but it all helps!

Finally, a good sale of an image showing the biggest department store in Helsinki, which came from a direct inquiry by a publisher who had found other Helsinki images taken by me on this site.

My business plan with regards to stock goes for a scattergun approach, filing images with several quality and respected libraries, and using a variety of different accounts and pseudonyms.

I get quite a few clients coming to me directly, which is brilliant as there is no agency or third party fee deducted from the sale. This also benefits my clients as I can provide a bespoke service, for example last year a client required an image in both colour and as a black and white conversion, and was prepared to pay for them – something which the usual stock libraries would find difficult to provide. Also speaking to clients directly, means that they benefit from my expertise providing images; I can make suggestions, send over lightboxes from the archive or offer to create something new and unique – much easier and quicker than trawling through libraries millions of images.

Obviously if you are after cheesy, American grinners, that the world and his Mother have used then I am not for you – check the post about why cheap micro-stock is bad for business. For unique images or to commission new specific photographs, please get in touch.