Worth more than a thousand words

Apperently the stock photo industry isn't getting dragged under the wheels of the recession. At least not yet (anecdotal from one photographer). There is a digital ton of cheap stock photos out there, and although ads have seriously dried up, it's a huge industry, and people still need to sell their products and services.

I thought it was all hobbyists, and that just the stock sites were maybe making money, but there are career photographers that just do stock photos, sometimes making as little as a quarter when someone choose their photo from istock.com, or one of the competitor sites. But those quarters can add up if you have a large enough body of work available at the sites, and more importantly of course, that your work sells. That you can think like an everyman photo buyer. Most photographers can't do it consistently (it's not an easy sounding task), and so they make just a trickle of cash. But at least it's a fairly consistent trickle for the last few years. I like the idea of guiding tributaries together untilt they make a consistent stream.

I wonder how long it will last though. I've heard that agency workers will sometimes use flickr as their stock pool, and pick something interesting and use it without notifying the photographer or getting a model release. It happened very publicly a year or so ago with a lady whose image ended up plastered on, I believe it was, bus stops in Australia. She noticed and I expect she was paid. It's low risk for big companies to take advantage. If they're caught they pay a little more. But mostly I imagine they don't get caught.

But no one would deny that photography is exploding and there are websites that can make an amateur photo interesting--at least to another amateur, i.e. most consumers. For instance, I have a facebook image of myself that looks like a cartoon. I just happened to run across a site one day, when I wasn't even looking for one, that turns your photos into a cartoon image. There are various options, all free and all very easy. Much easier than photoshop. If there aren't already, I expect wildly popular hd phography, where 3 or more images are taken with different settings then merged into one photo and manipulated will become largely automated through a free site soon.

Of course pro photographers say it's composition and tonal values and so much more that really matters, and that amateur work shows. I think that's true, but does the public care? They may not care enough. Before we know it 5 million new photos will be loaded up on flickr and picasa and on blog posts throughout the net, and almost all will be amateur work and perhaps many processed for free at a site like the cartoon site I used. In other words, they may look good enough for the price of free. It's an interesting market that I expect is going to change in unexpected ways over the next decade.