The Great Game of Constant Divination

(credit : Creatista / Zymmetrical.com)

It’s like playing with a set of Tarot cards. Or looking down at coffee residue at a bottom of coffee cup. Or better yet, hopping that the big round glass ball will reveal its wonderful secret.

Running a photo agency is  just really a never-ending game of predicting the future. On any given day, one has to figure out what will be the next big story. Picking from a thousand of daily news items, the trick is to pick the ones that will last longer than the time it takes to read them because of national, if not international interest.

And everything is game : a local murder, a politicians comment, a weather system coming through, a celebrity that might get engaged, everything can be the next big story. And, in order for the images to be relevant, it also has to be timely. Too soon, no one cares, too late, it’s over and done. Thus, as much it is important to have the right pool of photographers that will add even more value to an event, it is the constant act of divination that is crucial.

Wire services have minimized the gamble to a minimum by covering everything and having photographers everywhere.  That is what corporations do : minimize and rationalize risk. The little and medium guys cannot afford to keep an international pool of photographers  always on the ready mode. So they have to carefully pick and choose.

Get it right once and it’s luck, get it right often and it is talent. Because there is even more  than just predicting what will everyone will talk about tomorrow. There is also predicting what the media will think is the next big thing. And they have their own vision of the importance of a story. So its not just figuring out what will be hot but what the medias will think will be hot and thus, make hot.

It is certainly not a science and can not really be taught by anything else than experience and an acute sense of human sympathy ( Etymology: Latin sympathia, from Greek sympatheia, from sympathēs having common feelings, sympathetic, from syn- + pathos feelings, emotion, experience). Knowing what people will care about tomorrow, not what is important.

Scarlett Johansson getting engaged is not important but everyone cares. Darfur is important but no one cares anymore. So what is a savvy photo agency to do ? Get images of Scarlett’s new ring, and forget Darfur.

Now, if it had been a really good photo agency, it would have known or smelled it, and would already have the picture, even before the story broke. How ? By brightly anticipating the engagement and having someone follow her for the last week.

This is just not in the celebrity world. It is useless for a small or medium agency to have 2 full time photographers follow Hillary and Obama everywhere in the hopes of getting a picture that will sell. It is, however, very important to read their schedule carefully and smell the right photo op. When and where will it happen ?

Same goes for commercial stock albeit in a different way . Trying to forecast the need of imagery is similar. The parameters are slightly different but the divination game the same. However, it is more a science when it comes to Commercial stock. Companies like Corbis and Getty will hire field engineers, card readers, to investigate the future. Others, who cannot afford to pay expensive fortune tellers will just put up as many images as possible in order to cover all potential needs now and forever. Nether approach usually  reap a lot of success. If it did, Getty would no longer have any competition, would they ?

A really good stock agency could make a fortune with maybe no more than 100 new images a month. A really good editorial agency could do with 10 stories a month. You have the 10 top stories of the month  every month over a year, and you will be making more than Getty Images.

But it is not because you have the divination gift that others do not, which makes it a tad harder. You can also  beat the divination game by having a better photographer, one that will make the better images even if they are not the first, making the event more caring. But that is beyond the point here.

So, while the Getty whale is about to sink deep into silence ( pay attention to Jamd.com and viewimages.com, two great divination tools) in its never ending quest for more revenue, that Jupiterimage will be the first let microstock merge with its traditional offering  ( announced in Russia this week), that traditional Commercial RF and RM are about to reunite in their last yearly bacchanal in Malta, that someone somewhere is about to launch the first model that will pay you to use their images (Picapp ?), and that about anything and everything is fair game these days, one should keep in mind that with no talent there will be no success.

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This entry was posted on May 6, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under celebrity, magazine, Zymmetrical, commercial stock, Midstock, photojournalism, news, editorial, wire service, getty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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