Strong Thumbnails


	To be honest I submitted this picture partly as an experiment but, much to my surprise, it made a sale quite soon after being put on line. I'd love to see how it was used.

	I shot this about 14 years ago in Spain and it's been selling steadily ever since. A big advantage of images like these is that they don't date.

Strong thumbnails have become very important recently. This thought occurred to me after receiving several large, mysterious boxes the other day. Upon opening them I discovered they contained thousands of duplicate transparencies which were being returned to me by the photo library which markets some of my images. Over the years the library had made a hundred or more dupes of each of the images which they'd selected from my submissions to distribute to their various offices and agents all over the world. A big investment and yet here they were now, of no further use.

There have been many sweeping changes in the past few years in photography in general but no more so than in the stock photography business. When I first started, a photo library was a collection of filing cabinets containing original transparencies which had to be searched through to find those needed. Publishers employed picture researchers who's job was to visit the libraries where they would spend hours wading through the files and selecting pictures on a light box, a time-consuming and expensive process.

This eventually gave way to the picture researchers phoning various libraries with a list of subjects leaving the library to make a selection to send. These were often kept for many months before a final decision was made, hence the need for numerous dupes of the more highly marketable images. But this too has now largely changed and the big libraries have scanned all of their top-selling images and supply them to clients as digital files. These images can be viewed and selected on line and even supplied down a telephone line if needed, or on a disc.

An original transparency is rarely seen now by clients using the big libraries such as Getty Images and Corbis.The process of selection is now carried out on a computer monitor by entering key words and viewing thumbnails of the resulting images. Looking at a tranny on a light box through a loupe to see how good it is has now been replaced by the need to make an assessment based on viewing an image a few square inches on a screen. Hence the need for strong thumbnails - if an image doesn't look good at this size it's not likely to make the short list.

I submitted this recently to one of the big photo libraries but it was rejected because I did not have a model release. This is beginning to be a real problem now and any picture which shows a person who could possibly be identified will not be accepted by some libraries.


	This is the picture which upset my models so much, it meant they had to wait at least ten minutes longer before sitting down to their dinner. I don't like having to shoot pictures under duress but it proved to be worth having endured ten minutes of threats and insults while I shot it.

	I also submitted this picture to the same photo library and this too was rejected because I didn't have a property release. This requirement appears to apply now to any photograph of a privately owned property which can be recognised.

I find the stock image business very interesting. It's also very important to me as the majority of the photography I do now is designed to illustrate books and magazine articles and I'm seldom directly commissioned these days. I first recognised the potential of stock images many years ago when shooting pictures of models for a travel brochure on the island of Crete. We'd travelled to a beautiful beach a couple of hours drive from the hotel where we were based. Having spent all day there, shooting like mad and waiting around for the evening light, everyone, including me, was knackered. We were dreading the long drive back to the hotel before being able to eat a very late, and much needed, dinner and crashing into bed.

We'd been going for half an hour or so when I drove round a corner to see a stunning sunset over the sea and distant headland. I had to have it. You can imagine the models' reaction when I stopped the car and started getting all of my gear out of the boot. The language was unprintable. But, over a period of a few years, that one picture, which took about ten minutes to shoot, earned me considerably more than the fee for the entire ten-day assignment.

Unless you're an author of blockbuster novels or political memoires, publishers' advances are not very generous and books of photographs don't normally sell in very large numbers. The income from a book seldom covers the expense of providing the images and very often shows a considerable loss. The costs involved in travel photography can be considerable and I'm very dependent upon future sales of the images I shoot for my books to provide income and to fund further trips. Consequently, I take a big interest in the changes which are taking place in the stock library business and how they might affect me.


This is my best-selling picture photographed in the Marais Poitevin in south west France.

There's something satisfying though about earning fees from photographs you've already taken as opposed to being commissioned as it's totally dependent upon the client simply liking the image and has nothing to do with how trendy you look or how much of a good salesperson you are.

I know that many of you who are interested in travel and landscape photography are also interested in seeing their work published and earning fees from it and there's no doubt that having a good photo library market your work is one of the best ways of doing this. In many ways the changes I've described make it easier for the amateur and semi pro to do this than in the past. At that time the libraries were really only interested in photographers who could supply several hundred images initially and submit further images on a regular basis. It has to be said that the vast majority of these pictures would gather dust in the dark recesses of the filing cabinets and seldom be even glanced at. I've heard it said that you could count on a pound a picture, ie. if you had 5000 pictures lodged with a library you could expect to earn £5000 a year. I reckon that was pretty optimistic.


	I photographed this magnificent lobster in Sri Lanka about 14 years ago. It's sold a number of times previously and has just been used as a magazine cover.

With the new on-line system though every image selected is out there for anyone to view and many libraries are quite happy for you to do the scanning and supply them with digital files. You don't even need to part with your originals. Alamy.com is an online library who will accept image files on a disc and, providing they meet the quality criteria, your work will be on view to all and sundry within a few weeks of submission. With the old method, using original transparencies, it could take up to a year or more before your pictures were being made available and any income generated could take much longer still. The new way means that someone in China or Argentina could be looking at your pictures, and buying them, within a few weeks of you submitting them.


This is an image I submitted recently and is now on line so I'm waiting to see if it rings any bells. It's a montage of two images, a road photographed in Death Valley and a sky shot in Brittany.

This has just recently sold after being on line for several months. It was a black and white image which I colorised in Photoshop.

With Alamy you simply register on line and then send a disc with your images which are checked for quality and then displayed. You are responsible for captioning and key wording which is, of course, very important since this is the only way that a prospective buyer can search for and view your images . Your sales record is accessible at all times and when a certain amount is due you will receive a cheque.

So what sells best then? I wish I knew the answer as I've found it very hard to predict. Some of my images which I've considered to be the most striking have not attracted a flicker of interest while others which have seemed relatively ordinary have sold very well. My best selling picture ever is of a meadow in France with a wooden field gate in the foreground shot on a hazy day. It has a pleasant, peaceful atmosphere but could not really be described as stunning. It's been used to advertise everything from air conditioners to tranquillisers and to illustrate articles about things like the the environment and camping holidays, the last time I looked it had sold well over 200 times.

My recent sales include a close up of a duck's rear end, a monochrome image of benches in a Paris park, a close up of an Indian lady's henna-decorated hand, a landscape of the northern Scottish coastline, a small Spanish fishing boat trawling for clams and a shot of the Palace of the Winds in Jaipur. I've also had experience of images which lie dormant for years and then suddenly sell just once for a big fee while others seem to become best sellers early on and continue to earn fees almost every month. The truth is that almost every half-decent picture will have potential buyers somewhere in the world and a big library with on-line facilities can provide the best chance of finding them.