Production Companies
StockFood has launched
StockFood Studios, an innovative production service for food photography. The Munich-based food experts, whose international brand is synonymous with professional food photography, are expanding their portfolio to include commissioned productions. The website www.stockfoodstudios.com offers this new service.
In the not too distant future there will be few, if any, new professional images created that require pre-planning, paying for models, renting locations, building sets, acquiring props, or anything that adds to the cost of producing such images. Currently the costs of producing a large segment of images in demand far exceeds the revenue generated from licensing such images. Producers trying to earn their living from such production will find it necessary to drop out of the market.
Image Source has completed its second move this year to its now permanent residence at 66 Old Compton Street – the former home of a cardinal London creative icon, Rushes Post-Production House - right in the heart of Soho. The move to a larger and more modern creative space is the first of many new initiatives for the premium agency which was bought back by its Founder, Christina Vaughan together with professional Investor and successful businessman, Michael Jackson at the beginning of 2018.
Blend Image, at one time the leading stock photo production company in North America, has announced to its image creators that it is “winding down” operations, “trying to negotiate deals that might provide members with the option to move their content without having to resubmit it,” and making plans to otherwise return content by October 2018.
As of January 31st Anthony Harris has stepped down as CEO of Image Source and Christina Vaughan has returned to the CEO position. In 2015 Christina turned over her leadership of Image Source to Mr. Harris, but remained a small shareholder. She moved to the position of CEO at
CueSongs, and oversaw the initial deployment and beta testing of the new CuePro platform, which won the Technology Strategy Board competition in 2014 and received a substantial grant to develop its “Frictionless Music Licensing for Online Broadcast”.
A three-year-old specialist stock agency in France call
HOsiHO (meaning High So High, in French) is finding strong demand for aerial stock photography. The agency has a collection of 3000 aerial videos and stills shot by a pool of more than 40 talented contributors based at the four corners of France.
Assuming you are taking pictures because you want to earn some money from what you produce, it would be very helpful to have some information about which images among the hundreds of millions out there are actually selling, and how frequently.
What’s in demand?
As prices for the use of stock photos decline it becomes important to find ways to cut overhead and production costs in order to earn a profit from your efforts. If you’re a photographer, living in New York or Western Europe, and looking to for ways to reduce the costs of studio production shoots with multiple models you might want to consider flying to Kiev, Ukraine.
Many of the non-sellers are very good images and would sell if customers only had a chance to see them. Back in January in as story entitled “
How Can Shutterstock Grow Revenue?” I outlined an idea for a two-tier pricing system that could not only work for Shutterstock, but many other distributors with large collections, and grow their revenue, even if there is no increase in the number of images downloaded.
I wrote about the huge percentage of images being produced by a relatively small number of
large production companies. Let me examine in some detail how one of these companies operates.
Photographee.eu is a microstock production company in Lodz, Poland. It is owned and operated by Kasia and Lech Bialasiewicz. Lodz is Poland’s 3rd largest city located right in the middle of the country. According to the
microstock.top list of Shutterstock suppliers photographee.eu is its 157th largest collection (out of over 190,000) with over 76,000 images at Shutterstock. These same images are marketed through multiple distributors.
Where are the major producers of stock images located? One might expect then to live in New York, London, Los Angeles and Berlin near where the major customers. We also must not forget San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary. Think again.
The basic operating structure of how most stock photo agencies acquire and market images has not changed in 15 to 25 years. Image creator produce and submit their work to an agency. The agency may reject some of it, but most will go into an online collection that customer can review. When a customer finds something she wants to use she pays a fee and the image creator receives a percentage. The agency’s job is to manage the material, make customers aware that the collection exists, license use of the image for whatever they can get and collect money.
Seattle based
Blend Images workflow team is seeking an innovative, results-oriented, stock video professional to oversee content editing, quality control, distribution and support of its fast building stock clip library. The ideal candidate will have experience in stock video production, solid technical skills, sound business judgment and work well in a team environment.