The good news is that the amatuer landscape community appears in rude health, with large and active communities posting images and compared to 2005 there are now relatively affordable mature digital camera systems capable of delivering professional image quality. Many amateurs are monetising their images by selling prints, merchandise and submitting images to photo stock agencies. In 2008 the stock photo agency Getty formed a partnership with Flickr for access to the sites global photography community and their video/stills images. Amateurs don't have to incorporate the costs associated with running a profitable business in their selling price and there are a large number of amateurs across the globe now supplying the global demand for stock photography to global photo stock agencies.
The not so good news is with the professional photography community. It appears that stock photography once underpinned a large majority of professional photographers careers and in the golden age of professional photography the time and effort invested in compiling a large stock image library would pay off in later years with a steady income stream and the photographer was then at leisure to pick and choose commercial work, concentrate on personal photography projects, publish a book etc. The figures banded about for stock image sales range from 60% to 80% of business income for an average sized stock image library, those figures were before the digital revolution disrupted the market. A google archive search will reveal that back in the early noughties as digital photography and the internet started to gain momentum there were predictions made for the demise of the stock photography industry. Those pundits blessed with foresight and common sense, observed that analogue capture didn't quite fit in with the new digital world and scanned film was no substitute for pure digital capture. Predictably their sage advice was flamed in online photography forums and the online forums did what they do best with innumerable posts, long threads, heated discussions and ad hominem attacks on why film was better than digital and vice versa. The astute commercially minded photographers took the opportunity to invest in digital, create a new all digital stock library and reap the rewards until the herd changed direction.
The stock photography industry had already witnessed the impact of digital on the analogue systems of filing, searching, indexing etc and a brief history of the stock image industry is outlined in this 2015 article from Alamy. To illustrate the effect of stock photography incomes and market pressure, it is worth reading this article published in 2006 by www.luminous-landscape.com titled Micro Payment Agencies at the end of the article was a short bio of the author
'George Munday graduated from the Birmingham (England) School of Photography in 1975. After leaving college he became a photo – journalist for four years, before moving to Ireland to become a business partner in an advertising and commercial studio, later becoming a stock photography agency.
Last year he set up Copper Coast Workshops which offers residential, weekend workshops for digital photograpers. Apart from the workshops, he supplies stock photography to various stock agencies, writes and photographs features about Ireland and Irish Gardens, and will soon be teaching photography in the local college. He’s always happy to talk endlessly about photography and give participants at the workshops advice about shooting stock, shooting commercially and any other aspects of photography that he has garnered during his 30 years as a photographer.'
As an aside, no-one in the early noughties predicted that mobile phones would one day have cameras and stills/video capabilities, with Apps and internet connectivity to upload online within seconds of the image/recording being made.
The Financial crisis of 2007-2008 according to the International Monetary Fund initiated the worst global recession since World War II an event that even disturbed the rarefied high end photography market which was evidenced by the sudden appearance in the photography media of photographers whose commercial work activities in London had concluded (cough) and announced they were now focusing again on their true passion of landscape/travel photography. I'm sure a lot of people reading the articles said 'Who?' The global recession combined with falling stock image incomes forced professional landscape photographers to further diversify and/or concentrate their endeavours on profitable income streams. The problem was that not just professional landscape photographers have been affected by recent events, it is market wide and that means professional photographers of all 'genres' are looking to diversify their revenue streams. Where professionals websites were once 'genre specific photographer' they now encompass several genres of photography, I guess to cover all the bases. The achilles heel for professional landscape photographers is that - as was stated in a South Korean court - 'anyone can take a photograph of a landscape' and indeed they do.
The above video was uploaded to youtube in 2009 and has received over 2,000,000 views and over 250.000 subscribers to date. If only 0.5% of those viewers bought DVD's, signed up for workshops or purchased other merchandise that is over 10,000 customers. The photographer is clearly not a 'landscape' photographer, but kudos to him, as he effectively demonstrated and communicated some salient principles of landscape photography. There are professional landscape photographers who have failed miserably to effectively convey those same salient points across a variety of media.
The one area where professional landscape photographers can capitalise on their
The conventional wisdom expressed at the time of the financial crisis was to ride out the storm and reap the rewards when the storm blew over. Disruptive events have a nasty habit of obsoleting products, markets and careers, I suspect no one at the time took into account the combination of
- Disruptive technology of digital capture
- The popularity of digital photography across the globe
- Amateurs able to compete on a professional level and facilitated by the stock photography agencies
- The price of stock images could fall to such low levels
- Smartphones, display sizes and social media
- The extent and duration of the global financial crisis
* The French Government report into the professional photography industry can be downloaded after some rigmarole in English. However there is a link at the bottom of the Petapixel article to the Hyperallergic website where an article highlights some trends and numbers. I thought these statements from the article of interest :
Some 6,000 of France’s roughly 25,000 professional photographers — working in every field, from fashion and photojournalism to fine art and corporate photography — were surveyed for the study, which was conducted between December 2013 and December 2014 by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and its Department of Studies, Probability, and Statistics.
- Between 1995 and 2010 the number of French people identifying as professional artists of any kind increased by 16%, but the number of photographers increased by 37% over the same period
- Between 1995 and 2010 the number of men photographers increased by 25% while the number of women photographers increased by 85%.
- 58% of respondents had other jobs before becoming professional photographers, 40% of them in a related field (graphic or web design, public relations, animation, etc.).
- 40% of respondents said portraits are the most important type of image they produce; 17% said landscapes; 13% said photojournalism.
- Eight out of ten respondents make money from multiple sectors of the photography market; the most popular revenue stream is corporate photography (executive portraits, event photography, conference materials, annual reports, etc.).
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