Photocritic photography blog

Or: The economics behind Microstock.

I make little secret of my dislike for microstock, as re-iterated in my ‘The Problem with Microstock‘ article a few weeks back. The curse of having a relatively high-profile blog, however, is that people tend to disagree with you. Well, that’s not really the curse, that’s a fact of life. The curse, specifically, is that you frequently get incredibly eloquent people disagreeing with you - people who disagree passionately enough to write their side of the story.

Seeing as how I’m not a politician, I’m fully entitled to change my mind about things, including Microstock. And while I still feel that the premise of Microstock is wrong for all the reasons described in that other post, I wouldn’t be much of an Economist subscriber if I didn’t see that there was a flipside to the proverbial coin as well - in this case, expressed by Willie Thomas, a man who makes his living with stock photography.

I caught up with him to find out how he does it… Read the rest of the article »

You’re working as a photographer, you take fantastic photos, and you’ve even got a pretty sweet website to show off your work… So why is your web server just sitting around in the corner, smoking a fag and nipping at a cup of coffee? Why aren’t the buyers running the door off its hinges, and, come to think of it, where are your damn groupies, already?

The internet is a cold and heartless place, and the biggest source of traffic to any website should be coming from search engines (Photocritic, for example, gets about 70% of its traffic from search engines. Mind you, it’s mostly people looking for pictures of nude women. Go figure.)

Luckily, there are quite a few things you can do as a photographer to make your site really zing in the search engines - and for the sake of making a nice round figure (and, of course, so the Digg and Reddit crowds will love it like a kitten loves tuna fish) - here’s a lovely top-10 list to get you started! Read the rest of the article »

We do an experiment with microstock, and discover that while I sold three times more photos, I earned 40 times less money from the micro stock sales than from a full-on agency - with the exact same photos on sale…

The lesson? If you’re a decent photographer, stay the hell away from micro-stock: The bigger agencies treat you better, pay you more, and actually make an effort to sell your photos on a bigger scale. Read the rest of the article »

Have you ever thought about having your photos in a photo gallery? I have, and it’s bloody nerve-wrecking. Whether your work is displayed for sale in a pub, for the sake of art in a gallery, or whether you just printed off a picture and your mum stuck it on the fridge with a magnet, it opens it up to a whole different type of scrutiny than if you post your images, say, on DeviantArt.

Why? Because this time, it’s real, flesh-and-blood people who look at your photos, not strangers with a broadband connection and a dinky laptop.

Having your photos on display for real strips away all the excuses. It can no longer be their monitor. It will no longer be that they are looking at things out of context… It’s all you.

I’m a passionate believer in the idea that you should display your photos - and so is my good friend Bobby Friske, who shares his first experience of a gallery showing, and the lessons he learned in the process… Read the rest of the article »

By now, there are a hundred ways of displaying and selling your art on-line. We’ve looked at a few solutions in the past (Including the rather impressive one-man-band FotoViva I wrote about a while back), but I recently found a new one, Red Bubble, which seems to really resound positively with me.

Using a user interface that reminds me a little bit of JPG Magazine (i.e extremely Web 2.0: Simple but pretty and functional), Red Bubble doesn’t pitch itself initially as a photo sales site. Instead, it’s an online art gallery where you can upload - and sell - your artwork. Read the rest of the article »

I get a lot of questions about how you should prepare your images for magazine submissions. Should you just whack all your images on a CD? Is it worth including the RAW files or should you only send JPEG files? Should you leave all the images in a folder, or should you organise them?

Obviously, things differ from magazine to magazine, and many publishers have guidelines - if they do, try to get a copy of them, and follow them. If you’re submitting unrequested material, however, there are a few things you can do to encourage the image editor / art editor to keep hold of your photos.

The most important thing you need to remember is that magazine production is hectic stuff. That means that decisions are often made quickly, and if you do your submission wrong, you may not get another shot… Read the rest of the article »

I know I have a nasty tendency to keep rambling on about photographer’s rights, but it’s something I find quite interesting. On one of my recent posts, a full 64% of you (that’s 238 people!) told me that people tried to stop you from taking photos. Of course, 35% of you stuck to your guns (and your rights) and continued to take photos anyway - that thread has a lot of interesting comments in it, too, so it’s worth having a peek.

If you’re in Quebec, however, things might just be a little bit different… Read the rest of the article »

A lot of people take photos. No, seriously. A lot of people. But the number of people who actually do something with their photographs are an absolute minority. I decided to catch up with a friend of mine - Jason - to see how he turned his hobby into a multi-million, global sales success. Okay, so I’m full of it: he barely even breaks even. But still - he’s found a cool way of trying to do something with his photos. And that’s worth taking a closer look at, methinks! Read the rest of the article »

If you’re working as a photographer - and perhaps especially if you’re just starting out, in the hope that you can build up a bit of a portfolio - you are often asked to take on the strangest assignments. Some of them can be a lot of fun, while others… in the immortal words of Borat: Not so much.

I’ve done a fair bit of work which involves charities, and a few years back I noticed a new trend: They will want you to sign a contract as part of the photography work. You’ll want to read it carefully, because ‘charity’ isn’t automatically synonymous with ‘good people’: Some of their contracts will try and rob you of all your rights. Read the rest of the article »

A few months ago, I ran a story on how the UK government was trying to restrict public photography. It seems as if they’re now playing the back-pedalling game in a big kind of way. Once the petition hit 60,000 signatures, the Prime Minister’s office issued a statement which can be summarised into ‘uh, no, we never intended these kinds of changes to be made’.

What I really want to know: Do you have any stories of instances where people tried to stop you from taking photos? Leave a comment! Read the rest of the article »