The
online image agencies you should look at.
Getty’s and Corbis.
These two agencies are the big boys of the stock industry,
together they account for more than 65% of the industries
sales. Getting into either of these agencies is very
tough and if you have what it takes you will not need
this book. These agencies deal with only the most professional
photographers at the top of their game, photographers
who do nothing but produce stock photography and do it
with huge budgets and productions. Gettys and Corbis
sell primarily Commercial Stock, they charge huge fees
for their licenses and have massive marketing and sales
teams to handle the distribution of their library. In
addition they are multinational with offices in all the
big markets. Once you have a library of many thousands
of highly saleable images you can think about approaching
these agencies, for the average photo-hobby’ist
the agency you want to look at is Alamy.com.
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First and foremost this book is a strong advocate of Alamy Images, found on the
web at www.alamy.com This is the largest online stock photography agency and
is also the industry leader in terms of its revolutionary concept of having no
editorial control of the stock it sells. Once accepted to the agency, the photographer
is free to submit as many images as desired, the only stipulation being that
they must meet the stringent quality control guidelines of the agency, currently
Alamy has 7.9 million images.(and counting) Alamy screen all submissions for
dust, scratches, jaggies, visible photo-retouching and other imperfections. They
will fail a submission that does not pass their quality control screening.
To join Alamy go to the web site and read the contributor agreement first. Alamy
is great in that they allow anyone to join and that includes you. They offer
two commission splits: 75/25 with a storage fee of US.10 per image per month.
Or 65/35 with no storage fee. These two plans are called Alamy Green and Alamy
Blue. If you elect Alamy Green your storage fees will be deducted out of your
sales earnings. (Undate: Alamy no longer offer Alamy Green to new members)
Once you are registered as a contributor you can mail Alamy a CD or DVD with
your high resolution images for testing in QC. The first disc you mail goes to
QC and then when this passes all subsequent submission discs get mailed to SUBMISSIONS.
In their own words “Alamy welcomes diversity, the only barrier to entry
is the technical quality of your images” and Alamy has very stringent
QC. You will find a detailed explanation of their QC requirement at http://www.alamy.com/contributors/stock-photography-quality.asp
Basically they require that all images be shot on a camera with at least 6
megapixels which will render a file of 17MB before interpolation. Interpolation
is the process
of increasing the resolution of an image with a computer program to increase
the size at which it can be effectively printed. All images must be upsized
to at least 48megabytes before submission to Alamy. As mentioned you must not
have
any dust or scratches on your images and you must ensure that they are not
noisy. Alamy will fail your images for ‘noise’.
Read the QC requirements very carefully and edit your submissions ruthlessly.
Alamy will fail an entire disc of otherwise perfect images if more than one or
two on the disc fail. In other words if one image fails the whole lot fail for
being on the same submission disc. Guilty by association.
Next Lesson: Setting the License |
