Stock photography has officially achieved critical mass in the absurdity department. I grant you, stock photographers are as much instruments of the marketplace as any other professional service provider and are therefore subject to the whims of the focus groups, the advertising big wigs, the ebb and flow of the dollars that keep them knee-deep in lenses and strobes. But when was the last time you saw a product advertised by a stock photograph and thought to yourself, That could totally be me in that picture?

There you are, holding a slice of kiwi in front of each eye, like any normal Tuesday, right? You look so happy about this kiwi you could make a coke addict jealous. The look on your face is one of such unbridled joy, such boundless euphoria, it would be hard for any bystander not to want your life at that moment.

Dear stock photographers… Quit it!

I’m not going to try to say that pictures of women ecstatically eating salad, men jumping up in the air in business suits, or families in pastel clothing not looking at each other are unnecessary or devoid of value. Quite to the contrary, if the market demands photos of people just about to take a bite of something delicious with a look of drug-induced bliss on their perfectly lit faces, that is what the market shall receive.

No, I’m only saying, really, seriously, don’t we have enough of these yet? Where’s the originality, where’s the inspiration? Where’s the creativity, people?!

The ad agencies are just as much to blame for this, flipping through their iStockPhoto dot coms and their Getty libraries and always choosing the group of conveniently diverse people huddled around a clipboard with blank paper on it instead of something, oh I don’t know, realistic.

Cracked does a phenomenal job of pointing out just how ridiculous and profuse some of these archetypical images have become, in the article linked below. Just a word of warning: there is some coarse language, which is uncommon for my blog, and is the only reason I mention it.

• The 12 Most Baffling Genres of Stock Photo, Explained, via Cracked.com

Have you run across some ridiculous stock photography lately? Do you make ridiculous stock photography? Leave a comment and tell us all about it.

It’s a sad day for Olympus, the venerable maker of both artistic and scientific optics equipment based in Japan. Business news outlets are reporting that Olympus has allegedly covered up decades of financial losses through questionably large payments to advisers and other tricks that could only be described as “cooking the books.”

Bloomberg’s photographer Tomohiro Ohsumi captured the photo at right of Olympus president Shuichi Takayama bowing his head during a news conference. On the front page of the Olympus global site, Takayama writes:

We wish to make a profound apology for all of the distress and trouble caused due to the recent series of media reports and fall in the stock prices triggered by our recent change in President.

No business executive longs to write words like those.

Read more coverage:

• Olympus Admits to Hiding Losses, The Wall Street Journal
• Olympus Says Top Executives Hid Losses For Decades, NPR
• Olympus Hid Losses With Acquisition Fees, Bloomberg

This is how non-photographers (and perhaps even some casual hobbyist photographers) think pros spend their time:

Meanwhile, according to the results of a survey completed by the International Society of Wedding Photographers, this is how professional photographers actually spend their time:

These graphs and the results of the survey are from ISWP’s article, The Secret Life of Wedding Photographers, which I encourage you to read.

To go along with the above graphs, they also have some quotes from the respondents of the survey related to their non-photography responsibilities. For most independent professionals in the photography industry, success hinges on being able to perform most of the duties of an entire business, from strategic planning, marketing, billing, and fulfillment to the photography itself.

And people ask me why I don’t want to quit my job and photograph full time…

In his latest blog post, Chase Jarvis mentions Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book, FREE, which is more or less about the effects that digital media has had on the cost of distribution of creative works.

I haven’t read the book so I don’t claim to know what Anderson’s conclusions might be, though I have spent a lot of time ruminating on this whole free content movement that is slowly developing and I think it deserves some discussion. More of my ramblings after the jump.

Anderson mentions something he calls zero marginal cost, which refers to the fact that the cost of distributing digital assets nowadays is approaching zero. By comparison to pre-digital, pre-Internet distribution models, the cost is effectively zero. This means that the words I’m typing right now and the images that surround them are reaching you at virtually no cost (to me or to you).

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So what happens if we make the presumption that photography is a zero marginal cost business for the distributors? Photographs as salable assets have been slinking closer and closer to commodification with each passing day, meaning that much photographic content is bought and sold on the basis of price alone. For stock and travel photography, this seems to be even more true.

This theory dovetails with something rather surprising that Dan Heller said last night. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that his photographs really have no intrinsic value. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but his point was that even though he has tens of thousands of photographs, they can pretty much be replaced or reproduced, so even the entire collection is of little inherent value; it’s the business model and organization that surrounds them that makes them into a product and a profitable enterprise. In short, it’s Dan himself that people pay for.

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Chase Jarvis said almost the same thing in his entry when he concluded that photographers of the future “will make their money getting hired to deliver their commissioned, artistic vision for the newest product, trend, or photo of the moment, NOT to deliver the ones and zeros from yesterday’s digital file.”

I won’t go as far as to say that photographs themselves are worthless, because I truly don’t believe that. Nevertheless, if you want to be successful in the photography business, or to make money through photography in any way, you have to be intimately aware of what you’re selling and who wants to buy it from you.

This month the debate over Creative Commons licenses in photography flared up once more, with Jim Goldstein declaring that he would never use CC licenses, and Brian Auer retorting that he had before and would most certainly continue to in the future. Underscoring the points made by both of these fine fellows was an interview I read with author Cory Doctorow about giving away free electronic versions of books that brought many relevant points into play.

I’m revisiting the topic here today, not simply to agree or disagree with anything Goldstein, Auer, or Doctorow said, but rather to paint a picture of why I think the Creative Commons plays a very valuable role in photography in today’s copy-and-paste culture and why you should be thinking very seriously about how it can help you.

Creative Commons?

If you haven’t heard of them, the Creative Commons is a group focused on developing new “rights management” tools for creators. Whether you’re an author, painter, musician, or photographer, Creative Commons has developed “licenses” to allow you to more easily define the prohibitions and concessions you desire to make regarding the use of your work by others.

Fundamentally, Creative Commons licenses were developed for creators who wish to allow uses of their work that typical “all rights reserved” declarations prohibit. If you never want anyone to use your work for anything without asking you, you probably don’t need the Creative Commons. You should probably also turn around and walk straight back through the last few decades because you would be ignoring everything that has changed since about 1980.

Read more about the Creative Commons and their goals on their website.

Copy-and-Paste Culture

Cory Doctorow put this so elegantly that I will use his words:

It’s the 21st century, there’s not going to be a year in which it’s harder to copy than this year; there’s not going to be a day in which it’s harder to copy than this day; from now on.¹

Before I go further, I want to make it clear that I’m writing this opinion from the perspective of a fine art photographer. If your particular photographic enterprise is closer to stock or retail portraiture or industrial/commercial/product work, much of what I’m about to say will simply not apply to you. I want to give more than one perspective, but my opinion is very much formed from an artistic point of view.

Doctorow continues,

… if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st century.

Whatever industry you’re in, his statements are true. Consumers of our creations have historically fought for the ability (if not the right) to copy and redistribute everything we make. The legal entanglements of Sony’s Betamax format greatly publicized the push and pull between creators and consumers in 1984 when Sony was taken to court by Universal City Studios. Only the technologies have changed since then; people will always be excited about multimedia creations and desire to share them, remix them, and pass them around.

If you accept the proposition that it’s culturally and socially beneficial for creative works to be made (and as photographers, I could not imagine a world or a situation in which you wouldn’t), then you must also recognize some of the hurdles faced by creators wishing to build upon the works of their forebears.

I won’t go deep into detail; for those interested in reading a truly revealing look at the state of copyright law and how it affects culture and creativity, I highly recommend reading attorney and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture.

So, if you accept all of that, and if you further accept Doctorow’s idea that people are going to make copies (no matter what you do) and that remixes and mash-ups are fundamentally good for culture (and even for you, personally), your only concern is how to maximize your recognition and profits gained from a creative work without strangling the life out of this copy-and-paste culture we live in.

Some Rights Reserved

What Creative Commons does, in essence, is formalize the concession of certain usage rights to creative works such that the rights yielded and the rights retained are drawn up in defensible legal mumbo-jumbo.

This allows a creator to say, for example, “You may use my work to create new, derived works, and you may distribute those as you see fit, provided that you credit me and that your work remains under the same usage rights as this one.” Some rights are reserved.

I made the image to the right within the “Mansfield Training Center,” an abandoned hospital for mentally retarded children located in Mansfield, Connecticut. It came to my attention almost a year ago that someone had linked to my gallery of images from that hospital within the Wikipedia article about Mansfield’s “sites of interest.” It turns out that I have one of the most “definitive” collections of photographs from that site from recent years.

I came to the decision that I would release one of my images from the collection under a Creative Commons license, which is required for all multimedia content on Wikipedia, so that it could be displayed alongside the article and increase my exposure as a local artist. I chose the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (I overlayed the logo and byline on this image for effect). This license permits derivative works so long as I am credited and the resulting work is released under the same license.

Has this gained me a landslide of website traffic from Wikipedia? Not really. I am of the mind that any amount of exposure is good for business and for your reputation. I believe that being cited in this article (the original citation was added by someone else during their research) increases my overall credibility. Yes, I do think it was worth it.

Giving It All Away

One of the popular arguments against the Creative Commons paraded about online is that these licenses may expressly permit uses you, as the creator, don’t agree with. One recent news item involves young Alison Chang whose picture was taken by a young man in her church group and placed on Flickr under a CC attribution license. The image was snagged and used in a billboard campaign by Virgin Mobile in Australia, which then sparked a legal claim and discussion about licensing of images on Flickr.

Here are some things you need to know:

• It’s always, always your responsibility as a creator to understand the full extent of the concessions granted by a license you release your work under. If you decide you want to use a Creative Commons license, you should actually read it. Not just the “human deed,” but the full text.
• If you don’t understand the license… Don’t use it!
• As Dan Heller has frequently advised in discussions about model releases (this relates specifically to the Alison Chang situation), it is the responsibility of the person or persons putting your work into use (e.g. the publisher) to secure model releases. If you did not get a release when you made the image and the publisher doesn’t ask, it is not your problem.
• If you place your work under a license that permits commercial use and the image is used commercially, you have no recourse. If you did not secure a model release for individuals pictured therein and they decide to sue the publisher… That’s none of your business!

It is always surprising to me how many people post their images on various sites and in online communities without understanding the terms and conditions. As an artist, it is your responsibility to protect your work from misappropriation and misuse, and that means reading the terms and conditions of any sites you post your work on.

When Flickr asks you what type of licensing structure you want to use for your photographs, choose wisely. If in doubt, select “all rights reserved.”

It is not the responsibility of the Creative Commons to make abundantly clear to you what each of their licenses will do. It is your responsibility to read and understand them before you put them to use. It is the same with any contract or agreement; ignorance is no excuse.

Conclusions?

I still believe that the judicious use of Creative Commons licenses can allow you to give back to the artistic community and to our global culture in a way that nothing else can. By selecting licenses carefully and releasing certain works through certain avenues, you can be assured promotional benefits as well as the satisfaction of having contributed to the world.

Using Creative Commons doesn’t mean you stop making money or stop getting credit.

1. Cory Doctorow on kottke.org

Despite plentiful arguments to the contrary, I do believe that photography can be a viable full-time job. Making it work for you requires flexibility and understanding of the marketplace.

Paul Indigo over at Beyond the Obvious writes that the “quality of photography in corporate brochures and magazines is often appalling and the trade press is not much better” and the “reputation for superb photography once held by the UK broadsheets is more than a little tarnished” due to what he calls “a new level of democratisation” wherein everyone is a photographer and putting your entry-level SLR on automatic or program mode gets you salable results most of the time.

Paul’s major evidence for the rise in marketability of what he would describe as sub-par photography is the thriving “microstock” agencies such as iStockPhoto, SmugMug, and so on who sell grandma’s point-and-shoot exposures for $1.00 apiece. In order to understand how microstocks affect your business, however, you have to get into the economics of free trade.

Enter Dan Heller, outspoken stock photographer and armchair industry analyst. Back in March, Dan wrote a thorough op-ed on the effect microstock agencies have on the industry of stock photography (his main source of income) with the conclusion that a myriad of factors outside of price affect the marketability of stock images and that stock agencies are hurting nobody but themselves by offering such inexpensive alternatives to high quality, professional stock photographs.

I’m not going to quote or paraphrase Dan’s lengthy analysis, but I encourage you to take a skim through it for the juicy bits. Though Paul Indigo and Dan Heller operate in slightly different industries and on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean, both make compelling arguments from within their own experience.

At the beginning of this article I said that photographers have to be “flexible.” What I meant by that is not that a photographer should have the ability to cross their legs behind their head, but rather that a photographer should stay open-minded to available revenue sources within the industry as a whole. Within the photography industry there are at least this many distinct specialties that offer opportunities to profit:

• Stock/travel
• Studio/portraiture/fashion/glamour
• How-to/writing/teaching/blogging
• Photojournalism
• Commercial/product/food/commissioned
• Fine art

There are probably more that didn’t come to mind. My point is that the business of photography is like any other business out there: you have to be willing to change with the demands of the marketplace and find new avenues to reach potential customers. If your stock sales falter, you might consider mining your library for fine art prints and showing in local galleries, putting together a book of your best work, and so on.

Although fine art prints has been my primary source of income, sales are variable and it’s hard to predict what any month’s sales are going to be like, especially in the fine art world. Diversification is a great tool to supplement the income of a business and so I have started to do in-the-field workshops to share my experience with others who want to get more serious making photographs.

In addition to actual “shooting workshops,” which consist almost entirely of in-the-field, hands-on photography, I’ll also be teaching an introduction to the digital workflow course at Calypso Imaging in Santa Cruz, one of the top photo labs in the country. Students will have access to their million-dollar lightjet printer, large-format Epson plotters, and will be given three-days of intensive guidance through Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, Photoshop, and more.

I see workshops not only as a way to make money, but also an opportunity to give back to the photographic community in what small way I can. I know that photography can be a hard business to get into, but it does offer a great deal of satisfaction and, yes, profit as well. So don’t give up!

That said, everyone has a different threshold of charity, and that threshold seems to be linked to their success and recognition. Completely unrecognized people give things away to gain exposure. After achieving success, they often stop giving things away to maximize their gains. Then, if they become very successful, they may begin giving things away again because they can afford to.

Because there are so many nuances to the ways in which creators may wish for their work to be used by others, the Creative Commons emerged, creating whole new gradations within the copyright system. Now, rather than saying “all rights reserved,” we can easily say “some rights reserved” and call upon a pile of pre-written legalese. Good idea?

Understanding Copyright

Fundamentally, copyright is an agreement among the people to treat creative works in specific ways. Historically, copyright established a monopoly over a creative work that its creator could wield to derive (usually financial) benefit from it, thereby coercing others to create works of their own. Without getting mired in the specifics of copyright law, the intricacies of which have been explained at length elsewhere, the whole shooting match was designed to safeguard creativity in modern society. In the words of Lawrence Lessig¹:

The owner of a still live copyright, that is, one that has not yet expired, controls the rights of others to produce derivative works. … At least until that copyright expires, though the idea of copyright expiring seems itself an expired idea.

Under copyright law, the creator of an original work automatically receives full rights to its use. Only through a specific exception can certain rights be surrendered and others retained, at least until the copyright lapses. In America’s litigious climate, even such a simple thing as stating “you may use this song of mine to make remixes but you can’t charge money for them” requires pages of legalese to avoid ambiguity. That’s where the Creative Commons comes in.

Understanding the Creative Commons

Creative Commons “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.” Their chief contribution is in the form of “licenses,” which are basically rules of use for creative work stated in defensible legal terms, written by lawyers. Using their handy license selection questionnaire, you can simply choose the rights you wish to yield to others and the appropriate Creative Commons (or “CC” for short) license will be provided to you.

There are three major categories of rights that CC licenses allow you to control:

• Attribution
• Commericial use
• Derivative works

Attribution means receiving credit, or some indication of ownership. Typically that means a piece of accompanying text containing your name, and possibly the same information in the metadata. Attribution is polite and it appears in the license only because you may wish to waive it, and for completeness. I hope that all of you out there give credit where credit is due without being forced to by a lawyer.

Commercial use is exactly what it sounds like. A work tagged for commercial use means you don’t mind if someone uses it to make money on their own somehow, and one tagged for no commercial use means the opposite.

Derivative works is an interesting twist on copyright law. Under US copyright law, derivative works are almost always permitted, and disputes over whether certain works are suitably different from the originals to be considered “derivative” or whether it’s plagiarism has typically been a decision for the courts. This right permits or denies end users from deriving new creative works from yours, period. In my opinion, denying derivative works is contrary to creation as a whole, but CC leaves the ball in your court.

There is another license attribute used in two of CC’s six major licenses called “share alike,” which means that work based on yours must carry the same (or suitably similar) license as yours. This is much like the idea of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) for open source software.

Each of these categories can be toggled “on” and “off” using the CC license selection questionnaire, and each combination of desired rights has its own CC license, presented in full, specific, defensible legal jargon. They even give you pretty little buttons to use on web-based copies of your work that link to the license’s page on CC’s website and announce that you have released some (or none) of these rights to end users.

In addition to the buttons, there is a “deed” page on CC’s website for each of their licenses, which spells out in very simple and easy-to-understand language what you are permitted and not permitted to do with work carrying that license. Each deed is then linked to the full text of the license for the hardened lawyers among us.

If You Love Something, Let it Go…

I believe in sharing. In my Web Rules for Photographers article, I stated that “sharing is caring,” and I stand behind that. I am not anti-capitalist, nor would I deny anyone the fruits of their labor, but sometimes a little bit of giving goes a long way.

Let me break this down from a photographer’s perspective. I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to photograph the abandoned and decrepit Mansfield Training School, which was a hospital for mentally retarded children in Mansfield, Connecticut from around the turn of the century until about 1993. Of all my photographs, the ones I took inside that place seem to be the most popular, and generate the most traffic from web searches simply due to the scarcity of photographs and information about the place. I have been contacted by several people looking for directions to it and more information about it.

People who search Google for “Mansfield Training School” inevitably find my gallery, and I think that’s pretty sweet. Some time later, as someone was editing the “Mansfield, Connecticut” article on Wikipedia, they thought to mention the Mansfield Training School in its “Places of Interest” section, and linked to my gallery page, undoubtedly found in a search.

When a friend of mine pointed out that I had been linked from Wikipedia, I immediately thought two things simultaneously: 1) that’s really cool, and 2) can I make more out of this? Contributing to Wikipedia is one of those things that can be helpful to you and to others at the same time, and I like helping myself at least as much as I like helping others, so I decided to contribute more. What I actually did was to select a photo from my Mansfield Training School gallery and place it on the Wikipedia article page.

Wikipedia requires a fairly comprehensive copyright history for items submitted to its site, and for good reason: used as a reference, Wikipedia’s media items should be at least as free (as in speech) as items published in traditional print encyclopedias. To that end, they require a selection from a fairly long list of licenses from popular sources including Creative Commons, GNU, and others.

What this meant for me was that I would have to give up some rights to that particular work in order for it to appear on Wikipedia. Aside from the intangible exposure I would gain from it, and of course my own sense of altrusim, I hoped to see a bit of traffic from my submission.

Being the generous man that I am, I selected the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license (the link leads to the “deed” page, conveniently available in about 30 languages), which means that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, remix, and adapt the work as long as what you create from it carries the same license and that I am credited for the original if displayed in any way.

I think that releasing a portion of your work in this way, especially in a high-traffic and high-exposure location such as Wikipedia, can definitely pay off in terms of recognition (both for the work itself as well as your reputation for generosity) and help to promote your other work, to which you retain all rights. Give a little, get a lot.

The way I see it, if everyone gives a little, we all gain a lot.

Postscript

If you are serious about protecting your copyrights, you may wish to officially register your work with the United States Copyright office. It isn’t terribly difficult or expensive, and it will give you huge leverage if you ever take a claim to court. For more information, check out Copyright Office Basics on the Copyright Office’s website.

1. Lawrence Lessig (2002) “Innovating Copyright”, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, 20:611-623