Taking Stock
If you despair of the amount of time you spend selling your images rather than taking them, it's time to consider placing your work with an agency or stock library
Words Ian Farrell
A professional photographer needs many skills to succeed in business. He or she must be a creative marketeer, a shrewd negotiator and an ambitious salesman, as well as a talented photographer, of course. Adopting these extra roles means time away from the camera, and therefore time away from creating pictures - the basic essential of any photographic business. But before you resign yourself to working 25-hour days, consider having other people do some of the legwork for you by selling your pictures through an agency.
There are literally hundreds of picture agencies and libraries that will take your pictures and sell them on your behalf. Of course, they will want a substantial cut of the profits for their efforts, but consider that they will market your photographs, negotiate a good price for them, supply them, invoice for them and even chase up any bad debtors. Not such a bad deal after all, is it?
In the past, many photographers viewed selling their pictures through agencies as a last-ditch attempt to get money for photography that they couldn't sell themselves, but this is the wrong attitude. For a start, what self-respecting picture library is going to accept a photographer's dregs and cast-offs? Both quality and quantity are key when approaching any agency, as John Tracy of the Bureau of Freelance Photographers (BFP) told us. "Most libraries will not feel it worthwhile taking on a contributor who only has a dozen images," he explains. "In fact it isn't really worth it as a photographer either - you'd wait a very long time to see a cheque. It's more sensible to make your initial approach to an agency with around 100 pictures, then top that number up with updates throughout the year"
Finding a suitable library isn't exactly a piece of cake, but there are some resources that can make life easier. Indeed one is the BFP's annual handbook, which has a chapter dedicated to agencies and libraries, with each broken down by category and listed with useful contact numbers. Or try the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies, BAPLA. This industry body has over 400 members and its online database lets users search according to a number of categories.
Once a shortlist has been found, it's time to make an approach. No two companies will be the same, so it really pays to do some research. Listings such as those at the BFP and BAPLA often contain some detail about what is expected of photographers making their first submission, but there really is no substitute for making personal contact. Don't be afraid to call an agency. Ask to speak to someone about their current areas of demand and if there is a particular type of photography they are looking for. Also get the specification for supplied images: 50MB unsharpened TIFF files are not uncommon.
Be special
Although there are some very well-known examples of photo libraries who tackle just about every genre under the sun, the majority are more specialised, and if you are a photographer with a successful niche, it makes sense to find a library on the same wavelength.
Aerial photographer Will Cross did just this when he started selling through Skyscan - a library that specialises in images taken from the air. "I started to supply pictures to them because they are specialist, and they know the market that I'm in better than a general library does."
Cross also says that the market-sector knowledge afforded by a specialist library is crucial when deciding what he is going to photograph in the first place. "There are markets for certain things that I wouldn't perhaps otherwise know of. How many people take pictures of sewerage farms? Not many, I'd guess, but they are needed. I've sold many to trade magazines and historians."
Presumably then, Cross is in no rush to beat a path to the door of behemoth's such as Corbis, Getty and the like? "There's nothing wrong with these big organisations, and what most people don't know is that Skyscan places its images in Corbis' collection anyway, so by working with a smaller library, I get the best of both worlds."
