Cameron Davidson

Zen and the Art of UK Stock Photography

OK. Let’s set the scene.

Stock photography is for many Brits fast becoming one of their main hobbies. It comes pretty high on the pastime list. Just behind gardening, keeping pets and fiddling with train sets but before DIY home improvement and tinkering with the car. In other words, it’s big. Very big.

These days, every hobby photographer has a digital camera capable of taking a stock shot that will cut the mustard and the UK is small, very small. Smaller than Finland, smaller than Spain, smaller than Italy, smaller than France. In fact, it’s about the same size as Georgia, USA.

So, what we have is a very small island with a vast number of people taking stock images of it and in it, above it and around it. Especially landscape and flowers guys….enough is enough OK?! The market here is pretty saturated and growing every day thanks to regular media articles that are popping up along the lines of “make easy money from your photographs”. Yeah right. Wake up call reality check forthcoming…! There’s no easy way to make money in stock. There’s no free lunch.

Stock for professional assignment photographers like me is becoming a vital part of their income. The recession has meant job fees are being squeezed (some editorial fees haven’t increased in years but that’s another post altogether!) and we can’t rely on getting the usual large-scale ad projects multiple times a year. Stock is a good way of leveraging additional income from our talents in another direction.

All these factors: the increase in hobby stockers, the size of the market and the dilution of the income for pros both from assignments and stock has to lead to a big change in the way professional photographers in the UK approach the business. We have to think harder, work smarter, up the production values and use those talents, contacts and opportunities the amateur shooters don’t regularly have.

Making a good return on stock has become an art but as many discover, art does not always sell well as stock. But more than this, the search for enlightenment by stock industry professionals has become an obsession – one that we all strive for on a daily or even hourly basis! If not quite a religion, then stock is certainly a huge driving force, an adrenalin-filled roller coaster of a game that wakes you in the night wondering if you shouldn’t add a couple of keywords before breakfast.

For the working pro, increasing your stock opportunities (no not the money kind – we don’t have any of those!) is a sneaky game of Bond-style 007-type hide and seek with its own set of rules and regulations. Tell no one what you might shoot next. Tell no one where you are placing certain images. Tell no one what you plan to do next. Well, tell no one you don’t trust! But at the same time – know thy enemy! Find out all you can as quickly as you can to save you from financial death by a non-selling image!

We are obsessed with statistics. We cut things by type, by license, by library, by return per image over the period, by location, by style, by return per shoot, by general subject matter. We analyse stats until our eyes burn and calculate until our calculators break – which mine did last week – gave up the ghost, chucked in the towel, shuffled off this mortal coil and went to join the choir invisible….and no, it wasn’t just a flat battery caused by over-use.

And what do we learn from all this cutting and dicing and analysing I hear you ask? Well……you need to shoot more stock. That’s it. The end.

That’s what it boils down to. It’s a profession within a profession and one that consumes an awful lot of time and effort but it can be extremely rewarding if you learn to play it right.

In the UK we have a lottery game on TV and while we all play it every week (because you’d be mortified if your numbers came up and you’d not bought a ticket) we know – off by heart – that the odds of winning are 14 million to one. Everyone knows this. Kids of five know this. It is an accepted truth. But we still play it.

And while the odds are much better that the next shot I produce for stock will sell, it’s still a lottery, albeit with better odds. Despite this we keep going. Keep putting images out there to our favourite libraries, still striving for that one big sale, still speaking in hushed tones about when Joe sold that image of his for $10,000, still using every opportunity, every day, every holiday to shoot more and more and more.

It has its downsides too. No longer do I see on my travels a beautiful landscape, a picturesque town – I see a potential stock shot and wonder what crop might be the most saleable or whether I can wait until someone in a red jacket pops into view and get a model release. How sad is that! I look at the perfect meal my wife has just cooked for me and wonder whether I ought to nip into the studio and shoot it before I devour it.

When you are zoned into the mechanics of producing images for resale, shooting for stock is all-consuming.

But you know, we love it! Stock is fantastic. You can make money while you sleep – what’s better than that? And while for me, editorial photography of real people on location will always be my first love and will always be how I define myself; my stock side gives me both great challenges and rewards in equal measure!

For more of my musings and to see some of my work you could go to my blog www.jonboyes.com/blog or see my website at www.jonboyes.com