Rolf Sjogren, writes a post about the future of stock photography on his blog
It’s a post from February that I just discovered. Great insight:
I’m actually not sure who can afford to shoot generic stock photography now. Getty itself is not shooting now and every good photographer I talk to who ever made decent money shooting stock part-time has _already_ abandoned shooting stock altogether. Why bother investing time/money/energy in stock productions if your bread and butter is in assignments and you could get more of those if you devoted whatever time you spent on stock to building your assignment work? So what remains is the crowdsourcing – generic stock will come from user-generated sources like the way iStockphoto originally worked (a place for people who work in the industry, but aren’t necessarily f/t photographers, to put the outtakes of their generic projects), and more unique, quirky and “real” imagery (though generally not slick or produced) will be found in collections like Flickr-at-Getty. I’m not really sure where the competent but not very original photographer (hundreds of whom made a great deal of money in the 90s and early 00’s) fits into this stock paradigm, even as a supplemental part of their business.
Read the entire post, click here.
So much of what he writes rights true. It’s a fact that generic stock imagery will be produced by camera enthusiasts and photographers may not be able to put loads of money into stock shoots any longer.
For myself, usually a stock image now has another purpose or was produced for another reason. OR, I have to get the model’s participation for free or for tfp.
Still, some stock images will still bring in good money, just not the kind of money that most photographers got used to in 2005.
See my article on stock in the July/August issue of American Photo. It’s on page 76 and there is no online link to it that I know of…. so I guess you’ll have to buy the issue.
