Photography used to be about creating that one image that would sell over and over again. Film, processing, archiving, duping was expensive enough that editors would harshly cut through a shoot to find the quintessential image. As we all know, with the advent of digital, both photographers and agencies have reduced their editing efforts in Read More →

I hear a lot of talk about agency size. Not about how many employees they have, or how many square feet they occupy, or even the size of their profit but rather how many images they have in their database. Agencies, these days, are caught in a numbers race to see who has the most Read More →

Can an agency survive by itself anymore ? Can one create, nurture and maintain a client base of its own, like it used to be, without any fear of competition ripping through your front door and luring your precious income away ? One of the least understood evolution generated by the digital age is that Read More →

I have read many blogs and news snippets about Getty Images buying Jupiter Images for an obscene amount of US issued dollars. After what I have read and heard about royalty free microstock and looking at that space, if I was Alan Meckler, I would also quickly get out of that market before it collapses. Read More →

There are too many images available in the editorial market these days. The pressure has been such that the prices of images are going down, following one the basic rules of economy: When supply exceeds demand, the prices drop. And like 1929, it could lead to dramatic results for the stock photo industry business. A Read More →

There is no imagination left in the professionnal fields of stock RM and RF photographer. Nothing. zip. Zilch.Nada. Has to be, because when you look at the images being offered by most stock agencies, they all look the same. Especially those taken with a piece of plastic added to their lenses. Stop it. Please. whoever Read More →

It is about time… One key part of where photo agencies could save a lot of time, and thus money, is in their transactions. As I wrote earlier, one of microstock’s, and before that, traditional royalty free success’, is the credit card transaction. Since every transaction is made by credit card payment, theĀ  billing process Read More →

Thanks to Andy Goetze of the fame Stockphototalk blog, I received many comments regarding my first blog. I was not really expecting anyone to read it, as it was more a part of my new site MelcherSystem. I figure, if I do have a receptive audience, I might as well continue. So here are some Read More →

I was reading an article by Leslie Hugues on mactribe.com , an old boss of mine at Corbis, regarding Microstock companies like Istockphoto and other. I noticed a few things: Apart from the fact that she writes a lot to really no end, for which she is notorious, the whole point of the rise of Read More →