Pictures & Photography

I started taking pictures with a terribly expensive ($350.00) Nikkormat camera I bought in 1965 while still an undergraduate.  In those days I used slide film which has since been lost.  In the 1970's I made the switch to color print film and continued that until going entirely digital recently.

As you might imagine this has lead to a massive pile of unsorted negatives.  As I grow in my understanding of digital technology it become clear this is another piece of enabling technology which will disrupt industries and provide opportunity for many.  In other words, I think technology and the internet are bringing the Long Tail effect to the stock photography and digital image sales business.

Profiting from going digital

I have come to believe existing stock photography companies are in a world of trouble.  They are used to paying photographers sizeable sums of money for rights to carefully selected images.  They stock photo companies become responsible for storage, organization, sales, distribution, and copyright enforcement.

The rights management policies of stock photo companies are draconian and , in my opinion, completely unenforceable in a digital age.  They run several pages of fine print designed to give them absolute control.  I am reminded of the music industry and its efforts to control downloads.  It hasn't worked for the music industry either.

All that corporate activity has to be expensive.  Photographers have to make a living and must charge a lot for each image to do that.  The whole system is set up to manually handle film on an image by image basis.  It's art, not a production setting.  That's insane in a digital world.

You can buy an 8 megapixel digital camera and selection of lenses for less than $2,000.  Photoshop to do all your image processing and stock management is another $600.  A computer to run it all will be less than $2,000.  Lots less if you are trying to shoehorn your way into the business.  You no longer have to pay for film processing.

Domain registration and website hosting is almost free; certainly less than $5.00 per month.  Hosting often comes with free templates and shopping cart software.  In other words, you can now position yourself to take all the pictures, store and process them yourself and sell directly to the customer yourself for less than $5,000.

To take advantage of this opportunity you need to educate yourself in several areas.

• You must be able to take good pictures, or know someone who does. 
• You have to know how to drive traffic to your website. Search engine optimization of your photography website (SEO) is a developing art best learned by constant practice and experimentation.
• You need a website where you can "Play" without fear of failure.  We use our Cedro Peak website as a website photography test bed. (Coming soon)
• You will have to come up to speed with ecommerce software.  We are working on Ecommerce Tips as a place where we describe and discuss our experiences with shopping cart software as applied to sales of photographs and digital downloads.   (also coming soon)

What picture products could you sell?

Does any of this sound like an industry ripe for disruption
by long tail business models?