Ed: Shannon Fagan was one of the speakers at the New Media Conference held in conjunction with the June 2010 CEPIC Congress in Dublin, Ireland. Fagan has been in the stock business for a decade, is represented by most major agencies and is the president of the Stock Artists Alliance. He shares his observations about the state of the industry with PhotoLicensingOptions readers.

Looking for some vacation reading material? Here are some suggestions. If you want to know how successful stock photographers do it, here are links to a series of interviews done over the last couple years. There are lots of different strategies. Some of these photographers are among the world’s most successful. Other’s like Todd Klassy and Holger Mette are relatively new to the business, and have adopted unconventional strategies that may be the wave of the future.

Shannon Fagan is a former President of the Stock Artists Alliance and an Advisory Board member of the Young Photographers Alliance.  In the past 18 months, he has attended every major industry conference to gather information on stock photography and licensing’s current direction.  He has contributed both Rights Managed and Royalty Free images directly to Getty Images, Corbis, Veer, Blend, Image Source, Cultura, Spaces, Tetra and many other brands. He has a deep knowledge of the stock photography industry, both from personal experience, and from his role helping other photographers develop their businesses. The following summarizes a few of his thoughts that were first published on Greg Ceo’s blog.

Don’t tell Cathy Yeulet that you can’t make money in microstock. She operates Monkey Business Images, one of the most successful microstock production companies. However, unlike many microstockers, she is not new to stock photography. For many years, Yeulet operated a successful rights-managed business in Oxfordshire, U.K. When traditional royalty-free first began to take off, she created the BananaStock brand, which she sold to Jupiterimages in 2005 for approximately $19 million in cash. She started uploading images to iStockphoto in March of 2008.

At the recent CEPIC Congress in Dublin, Ireland, CEO of UpperCut Images Miles Gerstein offered CEPIC Daily his assessment of the future of the stock photo industry. Gerstein previously owned PunchStock, which he sold to Getty Images in 2006, and Artville, which he sold to The Image Bank in the late 1990s. His years of experience in the industry provide him with an important perspective on where the industry is likely headed.

Jonathan Klein is CEO and co-founder, with Mark Getty, of Getty Images and the most influential person in the global stock photo industry. For fifteen years he led an aggressive acquisition campaign which positions Getty as the leading source of still and moving imagery as well as footage and music. He is a passionate believer in the power of the image to create change in editorial as well as creative photography. In this exclusive CEPIC DAILY interview, he gives frank answers to some tough questions posed by Tweak founder Jerry Kennelly. It gives an intriguing insight into Getty as a privately held company and their vision for the future of the industry.

I had already been a still photographer for over 20 years when I started exploring digital video and the motion medium ten years ago. I had built a successful career shooting editorially for magazines like National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure to name a few, as well as producing annual reports for major corporations.  When digital video hit the scene in the late ‘90’s, I was already starting to feel a slight frustration in trying to tell certain stories with a still camera. I was beginning to think and see in terms of movement and sound.  At the same time, technology was making it possible and affordable with digital video cameras and non-linear editing software for me to use this medium to tell my stories.  The new tools were a means to an end.

Jim Pickerell has a long history in stock photography as a stock shooter, an agency owner, and an industry analyst. In this wide-ranging interview he shares his experience and insight on the future of stock photography.

More and more still photographers are getting into video because of the appeal of the hybrid still cameras that also shoot video.  Photographers love the visual coming out of these big chip cameras – what’s not to love?  But they quickly find out that if they aren’t just going to be laying visuals down to a music track, they will need to start thinking about their audio – specifically a narrative track or one driven by sound bites from interviews.  I work in the corporate sector, as well as create documentaries, so I do a lot of interviews.  The interviews, along with a scripted voiceover comprise my audio track and drive the story.  

Tom discusses his strategies for success in stock photography with advice for both new and established stock photographers. He discusses what to shoot, the importance of RPI, selecting agencies and even what gear he uses.

Rick Becker-Leckrone, CEO of Blend Images, is interviewed about his background, the success of Blend Images, and the state of the stock photo industry.

Anyone who has heard the term microstock has probably heard of Yuri Arcurs. He is recognized as the worlds most successful microstock photographer, but is much more than just a photographer. He is a brilliant businessman adept at marketing, self promotion and managing a large staff. He is a production company with a full-time staff of about 30 and another 20 part-timers who work at least 10 hours a week. Included as part of his staff are 4 or 5 other photographers who actively shoot and whose work is marketed under the Yuri Arcurs brand.

In response to “Stock Photo Lottery,” Bill Bachmann said: “I don’t know where you get the idea that 1% of images are sold are RM. I think you are pulling that figure out of a hat.” This story provides a step by step process as to how I arrived at that figure.

This is an interview with Holger Mette, an Australian photographer who's been traveling the world for two years earning his living from a small portfolio of photos he distributes in the microstock market. We discuss travel, photography and microstock, with example photos and links to his microstock portfolios.

[Source: Microstock Diaries - used with permission. All photos Copyright Holger Mette]

Photographer, Art Director and Editor Sarah Golonka shares with us her knowledge and tips on succeeding in stock photography.

After great success at producing and selling traditional rights-managed and royalty-free imagery for more than 25 years, Ron Chapple started producing microstock in 2006. He uploaded 5,000 images in February 2007 and aggressively produced images for microstock until early 2008. By September 2008, he had about 15,000 images in his iofoto collection, available on a non-exclusive basis through a number of microstock distributors. In October 2007, Selling Stock did a story outlining his early experience with microstock.

Travel photographer Bill Bachmann is an ardent advocate for basing stock image pricing on usage (the rights-managed model), not on file size (the royalty-free and microstock models). In 2009, Bachmann is on track to earn almost $1 million from licensing his travel and lifestyle images. Over 80% of Bachmann’s income will come from more than 50 agencies that represent his work around the world; the rest is from direct sales. For most of the last 25 years, he has grossed over $1 million in stock sales per year.

Is Flickr a place for a professional photographer to display his work and sell images? Todd Klassy thinks so. Right now he is an amateur devoting maybe 3 hours a week to shooting and another 6 in post production and studying photography. After the first of the year he intends to quit his job of 17 years and start working full time as a photographer.

Jim Erickson breaks all the stock photography rules and yet is one of the world’s most successful sellers of stock images. Pick any strategy that everyone agrees is the key to success in stock, and Jim Erickson is probably doing the opposite. He sells stock to clients rather than through agencies. Erickson never licenses rights to an image for less than $350, and the average license fee is about $1,800. He produces an annual print catalog and distributes it to only 20,000 top buyers. His gross revenue from stock sales in 2008 was over $2 million and he couples his stock business with an assignment business that grosses an additional $2 million. Read more about how he does it.

While the transition from still photographer to television commercial producer is difficult, David Scott Smith’s odyssey illustrates that an image creator and storyteller can find satisfaction in shooting and producing video.

Many traditional stock photographers question whether it will ever be possible to earn enough money from microstock production to justify the effort. Ron Chapple’s experience is instructive. For more than two decades, Chapple has been a leader on the cutting edge of each new trend in stock photography.

For 25 years Ron Chapple has been one of the world's leading stock photographers, always on the cutting edge of the next trend. In the 1990s he was the top seller of RM imagery for FPG, a major stock photo agency of that period. After Getty Images purchased FPG, Ron established Thinkstock, an RF production company. In 2004 he sold Thinkstock to Jupitermedia for more than $4 million. While still producing RM and traditional RF, he recently became an aggressive producer of microstock.

Many professional photographers claim no one could make a living selling images for $1.00 to $2.00, but there are always exceptions. At 28, Yuri Arcus is the world's top selling microstock photographer and has a good chance of reaching his aspiration of earning $1 million from stock photography before he is 30.