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In this doc**ent I have collected all the legal information that I wish someone had whispered in my ear three years ago. Well now I know and consider me the person whispering it in your ear.
These days ten new microstock agencies appear each year and just as many disappear. The new guys will contact you and try to get you to send them your images, and this is where you need to be really careful. A serious agency will have their contracts and the legal side of things covered and will present you with a good contract. A sloppy agency will give you some google translated ukraine contract with ambiguous wording or say “that will come later”.
No clear termination clause.
You should not sign a contract that does not promise you to be able to remove all your images from their site and subdistributors’ sites within a minimum of two years. This is the very longest you should sign a contract for and ideally you should negotiate this down to one year or less.
Bad contract.
When you encounter a bad contract, walk away. A contract that you can’t make heads or tails of even after you’ve read it three times is not worth signing. If you’re really interested in joining the company, demand the contract be rewritten.
No signature back.
You sent them your hard copy, but did you ever get one back? Bad news: it won’t work if you didn’t.
Wrong entity, wrong name, wrong/misspelled company name.
Check the company name and the position of the person signing on behalf of the company. If not you might not be signing anything valid, but will act your part out because you don’t know this (before end up in court, that is).
Look at the jurisdiction:
Do you want to go to court in another country? Choose a jurisdiction that has a legislative history of cases in stock photography and licensing of media, copyright law. etc. The best jurisdictions are New York, Alberta, UK, Australia and New Zealand (We can thank Getty for this)
No user restrictions defined on the site.
This is really dangerous. Do not run the risk of letting an agency sell your images without user restriction that does not follow the stock industry standard. The industry standard for forbidden usage restricts resale or distribution of your image, restricts print runs over 250,000 (without special license) and forbids the use of an image alongside pornographic, defamatory or pharmaceutical or political content (i.e., images may not be used to promote tobacco products, adult entertainment, dating services, personal hygiene products, political endorsements, etc.).
No allowance for due diligence.
“Due diligence” is your right to check all the financial statements and finances of an agency to see if they are in fact keeping track of all sales and providing you with the right amount of money. If an agency does not allow this it is a really bad sign. You NEED this in the contract or you are making a deal with the devil.
Commission offer is too low.
If a new agency approached you then you should not go for anything below 40% commission. They will probably say…”well sorry, that is just too much,” and that’s okay. Wait another two months and they will warm up to the thought, and surprise, you will get yourself the contract.
Trying to squeeze in an submission minimum.
Some agencies have upload minimums or insist that you have to supply images every quarter etc.
Don’t say yes to this ever. Period.
Trying to squeeze in a “non-compete” agreement.
If they try to squeeze in a clause about you not being able to work with agencies or another of their already existing partners, this is a big no-no. A lot of contracts have this section and you should respond with a flat out “NO” to such agreements. If I signed a non-compete with a small agency and that agency had Getty as their partner, I could basically be sued for having my images on Istock.
No payment rules defined.
Payments must happen regularly, monthly or when requested. A contract needs a section about this so the agency cannot drag the payment process out forever. Also, your contract must contain clear terms on a sales statement reporting system.
Are there any dodgy subdistributors you need to know about?
Ask for a subdistributor list. The contract terms you are signing with the agency must be the same as the agency has with its subdistributors.
Who will do submissions, uploading and organizing into their collection?
How will they do this and how much effort is required by you? Get clear lines right away.
NDA
Some agencies will want you to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement, which basically states that you agree to not disclose (talk about) any of the confidential information you might have heard about the agency during the negotiations or contract formation. An NDA is ok, but it must be time limited and must go both ways. Make sure the confidentialinfo is defined.
Below is the standard autoreply I use when new agencies contact me. Feel free to use the same one yourself, or tweak it to make it your own. It is important to send a professional signal to new agencies and not to support legally messy agencies.
Dear agency XXX.
Thank you for showing interest in distributing my collection of images. My collection sells very well and I am sure we can mutually profit from a distribution agreement. When negotiating new contracts there are a couple of things we are looking for and that we would like you to clarify for us so we can move forward:
1. What is the commission offer you have in mind?
2. Will you do the submission and organization of our files on your site if we send you a hard drive, upload by FTP or other means, or are you looking to have us do that? Timeframe?
3. Please send us a copy of your contributor contract.
4. Please send us a copy of your user restrictions defined on the site.
Your contract must include the following:
1. A clear termination clause with a clear promise of complete removal
of all images within 2 years.
2. A allowance for due diligence.
3. Must not include a upload minimum or submission minimum.
4. Must contain a clearly defined payment structure and sales
statement reporting system.
5. A list of subdistributors if any.
6. A specified jurisdiction.
To my big surprise I am on the list of the most influential photographers of this decade. PDN magazine, the biggest photo magazine in the world and host of the PDN Photo Expo in new york every year, has asked the photographic community to list the most influential photographers of this decade.
I feel terribly humble in comparison with the other names on the list and sitting here writing this post I look at my bookshelf and can see at least five of the names on the list together with me.
You can check out the other names on the list here.
Since I am a photography loving guy myself, this is partly my own wish list. I will classify myself as a relatively skeptical and critical person. This list is for the slightly geeky type that enjoys nostalgic retro stuff and photography gadgets. This post I presume is for the girlfriends and wives of photo nerds.
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I have these myself and love them. Very durable too.
Perfect silhouette for the smart office space or for the home. I ordered one of these for my new studio.
Retro style wash bag
Get excited and make thingsIf your husband “get’s excited and makes things” then perhaps you should give him a T-shirt that says just that.
Check out this site for great and funny gifts. Completely overlooked, but full of great small artwork.
The Bridge Despatch Bag One of the more corny things, but if used right It is quite cool. I have one of these in my office displaying my portfolio.
Great kit. Combined with other items from Honl Photo this is a great gift. This is part of my personal travel set up. I can literally do almost everything with this and a couple of flashes.
A very cool gift with in the range of things that would be very appreciated. This super cool disc is small and lightweight but still has massive storage and firewire 800! Mac ready and high reviews.
WhiBal G6 – Pocket White Balance Gray CardA slightly more sophisticated gift. With this gift you are supporting the more professional side of your husbands hobby and not the “hobby” side of things. This card is what I use to measure light temperature.
Canon Powershot G11If you need to buy your husband a point and shoot camera this is by far the best consumer camera out there. It’s simply a fantastic camera for the price. I could and have used this camera for stock images to sell online. This camera is also the only consumer camera that is accepted by Gettys high end collection.
DataColor Spyder3Pro Display Calibration system I never really get to upgrade to the newest calibrator. I would like this as a gift to be honest. With this gift you are again supporting the more professional side.
Huffingtonpost
CNN World
Business Insider
Fox News
Pop Photo
Photography Blog
Grey Scale Gorilla
Chase Jarvis
Digital Photography School
Andrew Sullivan
NY Times Blog – Paul Krugman
Crooks And Liars
The Fix – Chris Cillizza
Boing Boing
Discover – Badastronomy
Tech Crunch
Gizmodo
Perez Hilton
WordPress
Blogger
Lensbaby images sell!…I simply love shooting with my lensbaby and actually have four of them. One for Nikon and three for my Canon. Different kinds and different effects. The lensbaby does something smart: It makes the images look VERY intentionally blurred which is the criteria for getting blurred images online on stock agencies. My lensbaby (or babies..) is one of the only four lenses I bring in my Travel bag.
Lensbaby shots can be used to illustrate speed, motion, action and for subject matter that is ….. sensitive. (like below) Today to my big surprise I saw that Lensbaby is hosting a competition and thought I would give it a try.
Here is the link to the Lensbaby competition. Super easy to compete. Cool stuff. Here are the files I submitted to the competition:
Title: Girls Will Be Girls
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Title: A take on love
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This image was not submitted, but it illustrates a great way of using the Lensbaby
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What is Macro stock? – Revised
Good Question? Macrostock, also known among microstock photographers as “tradition RF” is not as clear-cut to define against it’s counterpart, microstock, as it once was. Now that Istock has launched their Vetta Collection with prices definitively in the macrostock range (70USD for high res) and this being on a microstock platform, it seems that we are entering a phase of mixed prices for stock images. Fotolia has their Infinite collection with prices even higher than Vetta and these files are also selling alongside low priced images. And in high end agencies such as Getty Images, you can now buy web res for an ultra low price of 50USD.
If you ask them, everybody says they know what microstock is, and most people will say that they know what macrostock is too. “It’s those stock agencies selling images at super high prices”, a true microstocker would say. However, as we can see above, that just is not the case anymore, it’s becoming a mix.
Yesterday I had a visit in my production facility in Denmark by the CEO of ScanPix, a Scandinavian Stock agency that dominates the North European territory. We had an interesting discussion about price. He claimed that the primary reason that their customers would pay big bucks (macrostock prices) for an image today was two things: First, authentic looking images of real people and, second, better service. I agree with this, and find it very interesting, because that is exactly what you will not find in microstock: authentic, candid, natural looking images, and great service.
So instead of asking: “What is macrostock”, we should ask: “What justifies ultra high prices or macro-prices”. According to the CEO of Scanpix there will always be high-end customers that want a different experience and are seeking natural looking images, so the market is not dead by the birth of ultra low price microstock agencies.
As a stock photographer, the defining line between what I should sell at a high price and what I should sell at an ultra low price is crucial. Sending thousands of highly microstock looking images and trying to sell them at a high price just don’t work. I did this, sent these high priced collections, my top “micro” images, and leaned back as I expected the images to sell like crazy. Nothing happened! I learned my lesson. The funny thing is that the type of images that are selling at the higher prices would never sell at all in micro. And even more interestingly, would probably get rejected!
Consider this image that I just got online at Getty Images house collection. You do not get much further away from microstock than that. This image would have been rejected again and again and again on microstock. But last month I just sold this image for 1200USD on Getty.
Take another example: Couple and map, Pizza Teens, and Girl. All these images are selling great on Getty, but would be completely lost in microstock. No one would even notice them.
So here are a couple of things to consider: Some subject matter is simply too normal, too plain, and too natural looking to ever get a chance to compete against the super saturated colorful microstock images, but will be selling like hot-cakes at macro prices and the macro clients will love them. Not only will the images sell at a higher price, but they will be treasured and simply loved by their audience.
The above observation suggests four features as being characteristic of what buyers are willing to pay big bucks for. We can call this macrostock:
1. Subject matter that is styled down and natural looking. Forget about bright backgrounds and colorful clothes, big budgets and super fancy locations.
2. Subject matter that has a distinct cultural flavor and feel. A young group of Spanish looking teenagers in a Spanish looking environment should NOT be sold at microstock prices. First off, it would not be noticed, second, the right Spanish buyers are ready to pay a lot of money for images like that, but would never find it in microstock.
3. Images that is very niche such as “a pottery makers daily life” or “five days with expedition north pole”.
4. Images that are newsworthy. Dreamstime and Shutterstock got this wrong. Editorial images simply need to sell at a higher price because for the microstock royalties of five sales, say, of the major of New York giving a public speech, you do not even have enough to pay the taxi to get there.
You are probably wondering where to start selling your “justifiable higher priced material”. Well, traditional agencies are very hard to get into, so you need to do some research and make sure to put together an application that contains the kind of material that sell at a higher price. The agencies that are worth dealing with in the area of traditional agencies are Getty and Corbis. I wish I could point to more, but there really are none right now. Corbis will give you a slightly better commission but sell a little less than Getty, where the commission is a poor 20%. The return per image in the higher priced collections are about the same as in the micro priced collection, but if you misunderstand what to send where, it will be much lower.
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These are just a few of the challenges in this new industry. However, there are also many upsides to microstock. If you are about to enter microstock as a photographer, you can read my “Two minute quick guide to microstock,” which will mention most of the things you need to know about where to sign up, what agencies to submit to, income level etc.
You were probably just as confused as I when that came up on my blog. The reason it went up was simple human error: a fairly new employee I just granted site access to was working on a set of google meta text and he accidentally pressed "post", so it went live. The result was a bunch of gibberish that made no sense about making money from stock…etc, a good laugh. It "only" went out to about 3000 subscribers so no big deal right..….Argh.
I'm really sorry about this, and in fact I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for the overall wackiness of my site recently. This last week has been a bit of a tecnho-joke where everything (I mean *everything*) that can go wrong, has.
Step One: Malware
The first whammy came when our server was hit by some malware and labelled by Google as a "virus" site (despite it being cleaned within hours of the attack). Trust me, you don't want to get on Google's bad side. After our massive cleanup effort, we found out that it was not us that was under attack, but our hosting company and, poof, our new cleaned version go attacked again. We then worked literally day and night to get the site up and running again, with three programmers in different time-zones overlapping, working around the clock. We decided to move everything to a new server hosting company and in the process our current server hosting company went cold. Died and we could not transfer our files… Unbelievable!
Step Two: Annoy loyal visitors by taking away their favorite tool – the keywording site. And while we where fighting with our server issues we also had to battle 5-10 p***** off emails per day telling us our keywording site was down – which we knew…
Step Three: Confuse the heck out of people by posting weird things. So after all that craziness, I wasn't all that surprised when today my new guy decided to misunderstood the "post" and "save" function in wordpress and posted a nonsensical article filled with gibberish and google meta-text. Awesome. Just great. We needed that!
Step Four: Well.. so far I am waiting with baited breath to see what step four will be. So far, within the last hour, nothing has happened. It's eerily quiet. Maybe the techno(logy) gods are giving me a day off? If so, I expect their efforts to redouble and that tommorrow I'll wake up to my office burnt down, my staff infected with swine flu, my old and new server companies under terrorist attack, all my images to be loaded onto Flickr as free downloads.. …What else ya got techno gods? What else??
I have learned a lot during the last week. Most notably, how to cut your traffic in half in about a day. If you want the recipe you can re-read the above and execute it as a strict plan.
Please hold on. Please bear with us, because not only are we back on track, but we're just inches away from launching some seriously cool new features, resources and downloads. Stay tuned. I mean, what else could go wrong? Literally.
Yuri – out – sleeping – with one eye open….hmmm
Canon vs. Nikon: Battle of the TitansI recently bought a new Nikon D3X and after playing with it I’m now ready to let you know how it stacks up against the some other comparable cameras on the market, specifically the Canon 1Ds Mark III.
Today in my studio you’ll find the one Nikon D3X, three Canon 1Ds Mark IIIs, two Canon 5D Mark IIs, and one 39MP Hasselblad H3D-II. Because I’m constantly swapping between bodies, a lot of practical experience has surfaced about these cameras. Through time, trial and error, I’ve realized that each body has its own particular place to shine. I also get a lot of feedback from my assistants as to which cameras they prefer to shoot with and why.
You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: I am a huge stickler for sharpness. When our new Nikon D3X came in, the first issue my team and I wanted to test was sharpness. How much detail could we capture? Could we use this camera for stock production or maybe even for fashion (which probably has the highest degree of quality concern in the photography industry)? Could we get a similar or maybe even better result than with the Canon (or even the Hasselblad)?
We tested the body with a couple of the sharpest Nikon lenses and the result was surprisingly good. (I must say I was personally quite happy that I had not just wasted $8,000 USD, plus another $5,000 USD on lenses.) Here are the results:
Center FocusThe first thing we tested was the Nikon 85mm 1.4 vs. the Canon 85mm 1.2L. I personally use the 85mm a lot and find this focal range very suitable for stock, so this was a very interesting test for me. We tested the center area in sharpness as the first. Remember that to do this comparison we had to downsize the nikon file to match the canon.
Peripher FocusThe second thing we tested was the Nikon 85mm 1.4 vs. the Canon 85mm 1.2L in it’s peripher focal abilities. Here are the results:
With the right lenses the Nikon easily matches the Canon. But if you make the mistake of pushing some Nikon lenses to the edge, they certainly do not do justice to the full 24MP that the D3X is capable of handling. To get great sharpness out of this camera, you really need to know which F-stop range each lens achieves maximum sharpness within. Once my team and I figured out the right parameters, we soon learned to work beautifully with this camera. We ordered a whole bunch of lenses and returned the ones we did not find sharp.
Unfortunately, we did not find any of the Nikon Zoom lenses in the mid-range 24-70mm to be sufficiently sharp for our needs. We were however extremely impressed by the Nikkor 14-28mm f2.8, which was completely in its own league with outstanding sharpness and fringing kept in check. Canon simply does not have a wide zoom lens or prime that matches this lens in sharpness. (In fact, I believe you would have to go to medium format to match this lens.)
Before the new Nikon, I would always go to my Hasselblad prime 28mm if I was doing a wide shot. The wide Canon lenses weren’t worth using because they’d fringe the whole thing so much that it took my outsourcing staff hours per file to fix the issue. Now it seems I can shoot wide without having to get the heavy firearms in position. Great!
So to the big question—in terms of sharpness, could I do stock or fashion with this lens? The answer is yes….but.
The “but” comes in because you really have to know what you’re doing and chose just a few handpicked lenses to work with. If you look at it from an overall perspective, the canon lenses perform slightly better all around. After much research we settled on using these lenses from Nikon:
Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 (impressively sharp lens)
Nikon 50mm f1.4 (useless below f3.0, sharpness lacking, will be rejected for stock)
Nikon 85mm f1.4 (too blurry below f2.0, very sharp at f5.6)
Nikon 70-200mm f2.8
Noise is a problem for Nikon. If you remove the noise reduction setting that is on by default and take a look at the unfiltered RAW file, the Nikon D3X has much more noise than the Canon 1Ds Mark IIIs RAW. With both cameras set to “no noise reduction”Canon significantly outperforms. In fact, a Canon ISO 1600 file looks almost like a Nikon ISO 800 or 640. We borrowed the graphs from Dpreview to illustrate this:
This was quite a surprise to us because most online forums had predicted that Nikon would be better than Canon at handling noise. In retrospect, this is probably because a) Nikon has turned their noise recognition on by default, making most images look much more noiseless than they really are, and b) Nikon is often regarded a photojournalistic tool and the choice for tough conditions in photography. However, when going above 1600 in ISO the noise handling of the Nikon looks to be slightly better than the Canon. But shooting above ISO 1600 is a very rare thing, so I would have liked to see the Nikon better at the lower ISOs.
Unfortunately, Nikon’s auto-noise reduction makes their files look slightly filtered, so to my team and I (and some very qualified iStock inspectors) these files qualify for rejection by default. Not good.
Bottom line: How bad is it really? Well, because the margins are small in today’s digital camera offerings in terms of quality, this noise issue is not enough for us to disqualify the Nikon in any way. To be realistic, maybe only a handful out of about 1000 people in the world are capable of looking at a Nikon file with the default noise reduction turned on and say “hey this file looks slightly filtered,” so in real life, this simply does not matter. Will this work for stock? Yes, but not above 360-400 in ISO.
As I mentioned earlier, because the margins are small between the top end Canons and top end Nikons, usability is the real tie-breaker. Nikon has a far better reputation for listening to their photographers than Canon, and this is plainly illustrated by the features available in the new Nikon D3X. (In fact, Nikon listens so much, that I am expecting a phone call from them to talk about their new camera next week.)
The Canon Mark II, 16mp, was a nightmare in terms of usability. To change basic settings you had to free both hands and press three buttons at once. To review an image, press two. This camera was a joke and any photographer shooting with it for five minutes prior to release would have told them so. Even Canon’s basic point and shoot cameras launched at the same time had better usability options at that point. The Canon 1Ds Mark III was greatly improved in terms of usability but it now risks being compared to the new Nikon D3X and frankly, it looks like a joke again. Let me take you on a tour of the small differences in the D3X that make a real difference in real life:
Instant, one press, 100% cropped view of focus area (the little red spot in one spot metering). This feature is unbelievable. For the first time in digital history on a top end camera, I can actually routinely check if I am shooting in focus. To navigate to a 100% view of the focused area on a Canon takes anywhere from 10 to15 button presses (with both hands) and requires a cognitive effort that is better used shooting. This Nikon feature is simply fantastic and is something that can be found on other Nikon high-end cameras as well.
Things we are missing on the Nikon:
The Canon has lower noise levels and the lenses perform generally better, but what does this matter if your images are more out of focus, if the camera is much harder to work with on a daily basis and if you can get the same results form a Nikon by just choosing the right lenses and get another 3 mega pixel on top? For stock and fashion, about 90% of what we shoot is shot on ISO 100 and here the two cameras are so close in their noise levels that this is not something that would ever be a defining matter in choosing a Nikon or a Canon.
Formerly, I would shoot most things on my Hassy and move down to my Canon when shooting subject material that required flexibility or that was fast moving. Now that I’ve met the Nikon, this will change for sure. I plan for my basic setup going forward to be: Hasselblad for studio and high-resolution stuff and Nikon for the rest. Because I know what lenses to use, never shoot much more then ISO 400 anyway and need to count on the focus system, the Nikon D3X is a dream come true. I will report back a couple of months into using the Nikon and let you know if I still feel the same way.
If Canon is to stay competitive then they have to start listening to their photographer’s needs and they also have to come up with a new top model within the next six months or so. We will probably see a full frame 28MP just around the corner. I predict Canon will supplement this new camera with a new lineup of two or three central range lenses with their new glass, which will create impressively sharp images even at this resolution.
Two years from now, both camera brands will have to consider going beyond full frame. While Canon might be able to do this (with new and better lenses in the horizon) this might be a problem for Nikon unless they upgrade their current lineup of lenses. The challenge for Canon will be usability and functionality as well as developing a better focus system. The challenge for Nikon will be noise control and better lenses.
Nikon should probably start working on a semi-medium format top-end camera with a new and physically larger lineup of lenses that can handle the extra mega pixels required in the future to come. Nikon could also win even more on usability by launching a TLC compatible radio controlled flash series, instead of their nearly useless infrared system. This would be a massive winner for press photographers, location photographers, travel photographers, wedding photographers, etc. The alternative, without TLC, is to bring four or five Pocket Wizards along all the time, which fills up quit a lot of space in the camera bag, needs batteries…and is expensive…
So, to conclude my review, I’d say that the Canon 1DS Mark III and the Nikon D3X, are neck and neck in many regards – each trumping the other in certain areas. Overall, I choose the Nikon D3X as my winner for its super focus capability and its great functionality. Stay tuned for more reviews to come.
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