A few problems arrived that made it harder for us to extract keywords from the popular sites. While we are fixing this we hope to find the time to adjust and develop the site even further. I use the tool myself, so we want it fixed as much as you do.

Please don’t write to me about this. We are working on it right now.

Best Yuri
 

This is the don’t-make-the-same-mistakes-I-did post. Enjoy.

Things I Recommend you Don’t Buy

1. Don’t buy at Canon 1Ds Mark lll

Don’t buy a Canon 1Ds Mark lll. Buy the new 5D instead and wait for whatever is around the corner coming from Nikon. It just so happens that I have bought my staff three of these cameras, so I guess I kind of regret that…Doh! Canon is for sure going to launch a bigger sensor camera that will top the mark III and my guess is that they will do so within the next six months. It will probably also have a slightly bigger sensor than the full-frame.

2. Don’t buy at a PC for Image or Film processing.

Don’t buy a PC! Any PC! They are just not meant for working with image processing. I really regret starting out as a PC guy and investing in PCs for my first employees. Good quality PCs, and expensive with 4GB of super fast memory, raptor hard drives and great monitors. I now have only Macs and my expensive PCs are just standing there in my storage area unused. Very stupid indeed!

 3. Don’t buy at a Mighty Mouse or a Mac wireless keyboard.  

Don’t buy a Mighty Mouse, the new thin Apple keyboard or any wireless input device. When using Photoshop all day you need precise input devices. The Apple mighty mouse and their new ultra thin keyboard are meant to be pretty before practical. This one aspect irritated me so much when I was going from PC to Mac that I was close to giving up the transition. To this day I am still irritated that Apple has not given us better ways for adjusting the mouse speed and acceleration and still doesn’t have a “high performance” mouse available. Get a hold on the old mac keyboards, the bigger ones, and get a hold of the Logitech G5 mouse. You’ll be much better off with them than what Apple offers today. The Logitech G5 runs well even without a driver, but make sure you use a good surface for the sensor to pick up the movement. A good surface has texture.

4. Don’t buy Battery Packs

Don’t buy large battery packs and lights. Here’s a better and cheaper alternative: buy a couple of compact heads that run on normal electricity and a generator for when you want to be mobile. Put the generator far away from the shoot and bring a long extension cord. The thing they don’t tell you anywhere is that the batteries for the power packs are so heavy that you could just as well have brought along a compact generator, which will run for way longer then the batteries and will generate much more power. Battery packs sometimes take more then two seconds to charge between flashes which is quite long. Compacts flashes charge very fast so for a superior and more cost effective setup, buy compact heads instead. My favorite is the Profoto Compact 600R (radio). We have 12 of those in my studio.

5. Don’t buy a fancy car.

Don’t buy a fancy car. Your models and assistants just want more pay and you spend more money on gas.

6. Don’t buy cheap basic equipment

Don’t buy cheap basic equipment. It’s a waste of money because you will replace it with better equipment along the way.

7. Don’t buy the Manfrotto Neotech Monopod….unless…

You see my video on how to prepare this device for professional use. If you don’t do these small adjustments you end up with a useless product that will last three to five shoots and be worn down so much that it is useless. That is why the "manfrotto Neotech" is under things you should not buy, because straight from the factory, it is useless.

8. Don’t buy any off these lenses. They are too unsharp.

Don’t buy the canon 35mm 1.4L, the canon 50mm 1.2L or the canon 24-105mm 4L. They under perform in sharpness so much that they are not usable for fashion or stock. (The canon 24-105mm is ok above f9). The 35mm 1.4L can be very sharp, but 2/3 are lemons and you need to return them. Therefor, don’t buy the lens unless you can get it sent back if you are unsatisfied.

Things I am really glad I bought.

1. Get an Apple X-serve and X-raid

My Apple X-serve and X-raid with 7 Terabytes of storage. Once we resolved the write permission issues we had starting out (and still have a little today) this machine just worked and never failed. It just runs and runs. Simply a fantastic piece of hardware with read and write speeds of up to 250mb per second. The Mac Server hardware FTP solution is fantastic, yet very simple, and again, it just works!

2. Get a Wacom Pen

A Wacom pen. Even though it took me a full week of hand cramps to get this input device under control, I have NOT regretted learning to use this wonderful tool. Today the Wacom is a part of my workday and basically anything I do in Photoshop. I use the Wacom Intuos3 A4 oversize and think this is a perfect match between size and precision.

3. Get Google Documents.

Goggle Docs, Calendar and Gmail. My whole department runs Gmail, a shared G-calender and have tons of shared docs. No one in my department saves any documents or spreadcheets on any computers or hard drive. It’s all Google Docs. This way we can edit, share and discuss real-time the things we are working on. Perfect for any department. My arcurs.com email is forwarded to my gmail account and my gmail account is set up so that my reply address is also from my arcurs.com address. Sending huge files among two gmail accounts takes only seconds – perfect for the creative person. Gmail accounts don’t get spam – fantastic!

4. Get a workstation with Raid.

My maxed out Mac workstation. 32GB of RAM in my workstation. A true time/life saver. My primary workstation is a Mac Quad Core with 4TB in raid and reads with speeds of 200mb sec. A pure pleasure to work with and I have never regret a single penny I spent on this machine.

5. Get an apple 30 Inch Cinema display.

A 30 inch cinema. A perfect monitor. Yes…there are monitors out there that have better colors and better contrast such as the DELL 24". Unfortunately such monitors display your images too good and you end up, under-saturating, under contrasting and sometimes under exposing as well. The 30" apple cinema is perfectly "shitty" in an ironic way, which makes it "not shitty" but pretty darn good!

6. Get 1Password for mac. 

1Password for mac. Could not live without it for one day. Remembers your passwords and log-ins and works perfectly. This comes in a version for PC called Roboform and works just as well.

7. Lenses I love and that are sharp. (added)

The canon 135mm, 2.0L, the canon 85mm, 1.2L, the canon 200mm, 2.0L and the canon 70-200mm 4.0L. I Prefer the new Canon 70-200mm USM IS, 4.0L over the old Canon 70-200mm, 2.8L USM IS. The new one fringe less and is sharper or as sharp as the older.

This an instructional video about how to work with models on the set. The video goes through:

1. Two basic smiles: Full smile and Laughing Smile.

2. Instruct the model to freeze between shots to get sharp images.

3. Working with a second shooter.

1. What models to choose and what models will sell well as stock and normally be liked by your clients.

2. How to give easy instructions to you models when wanting small changes in position.

3. How to teach the model to "free pose".

Return per image (RPI)

Inventor: Tom Grill

An image’s RPI can be calculated per year or per month and is generally quoted in USD. You calculate your RPI by dividing the income you have either per year or per month with the number of images you have for sale through that distribution channel. If you have 1000 images online in microstock for example and this gives you 5000 USD per month in royalties your RPI will be calculated like this:

5000USD/1000Images = 5 RPI (USD return per image, per month.)

A RPI of 5USD per month is very high. Most people in microstock, when taking their total income from all agencies combined, have a RPI of normally 1-2 USD. A RPI is most often quoted as RPI per month and but to avoid confusion, you should write it like this RPI/year and RPI/month. RPI in traditional stock is normally a lot higher than micro, and a combination of a good photographer and a good agency should be able to produce a RPI/month of 15 or higher. In some of Getty’s collections there are rumors of RPI/month of more than 50.

Skewed/false ranking

Stock pictures will normally sell less and less because pictures will gradually start to look outdated. For example, looking at pictures from the 80s and you can almost always tell, the hair, the clothes, etc. People in the future looking back at the pictures being taken now will feel the same, and would probably be hesitating to buy such pictures. Now when you see a search display on a stock agency, the first page almost always is a show-off of very popular images. The search engine ranking is based on an automatic feature based on the amount of clicks, views and downloads this image has. So when pictures become naturally outdated they get less clicks, views and downloads and therefore go backwards in the ranking. A picture that was once very popular will gradually get placed further and further back in the search ranking. This is the normal case, but sometimes agencies use parameters to push curtain images forward or change the search result ranking. This is know as skewed or “false ranking”. For example, if I was the CEO of a stock agency and I had just launched a new collection of images alongside my other images, it would be tempting to push these images a little forward in the search results so they become more visible and therefore sell more. This would give the impression that this new collection was and is a great success and it would be easy to convince photographers and agencies to give their material to this collection. Being a photographer contributing to a collection that is falsely pushed forward can be very profitable. However, it can also be very dangerous if the CEO stops favoring your collection as your income will drop immediately to the generic level (not pushed forward). It is rumored that some Getty photographers experienced this a couple of years ago and went from making 30,000USD+ per month to 3,000-4,000USD+ per month. Skewed collections are not necessarily bad, but if they represent a large portion or all of your income, then you should be very careful.

The most familiar skewed rankings are:

• Freshness ranking. Ultrahigh priority on new images. Shutterstock is the most known example, where you can go up in income by 100-200 percent by uploading a new batch of images about 10% of the size of your total portfolio. This boost of income lasts about a week and then you are virtually back to status quo.
• Oldness handicap. Giving old pictures a handicap counter that pushes them backwards before they naturally get outdated. This keeps the search display fresh and filled with new images but the old images will almost never sell. iStock is speculated to do this. On iStock, images more than a year old are almost invisible in the default search ranking.
• Collection ranking. Giving a curtain collection of images a higher rank than other images.
• Inspector rating ranking. A lot of agencies operate with an inspector ranking system that marks a picture and gives it a preference in the search queue ranking. Agencies like Crestock, Dreamstime and Fotolia are public about this ranking.
• Photographer success ranking. Based on the success of the photographer the images are pushed forward. This system is currently only used by Alamy.
• Title/description skew. If an agency has problems with getting accurate and flawless search displays, they sometimes do something drastic: include the title and description to have weight in the ranking. This means that if I search for “fun” the images that have this keyword will appear, but the images that has “fun” in their title and description will be ranked much higher. The reason this ranking system is “desperate” is because photographers don’t put in titles so they contain keywords. They put in titles so they are titles, like “a wonderful day” or “I need a new job”. So instead of letting the keywords have weight they base their ranking on an assumption: that in general, people will have titles with important keywords in them. Dreamstime, Fotolia and Luckyoliver are the only agencies operating with this kind of ranking, and it is highly unpopular among photographers.
• Branding. If you are good at branding yourself, this will give you more views, clicks and downloads than other users and skew the normal buying patterns to your advantage. Branding is extremely difficult in microstock, and requires a lot of forum activity, interviews, writing tutorials, doing blogs or just simply being visible. In the most extreme case of branding (Yuri Arcurs) it is estimated to skew the normal buying patterns by up to 10 – 15 percent. This means that I estimate my income to be 10-15 percent higher on the accounts where I use the Yuri Arcurs name because people recognize this brand.

False rankings are good business for an agency, and there is nothing wrong with doing so. The only thing that you, the photographer, should do about it is try to have awareness of it so you don’t get surprised. Spread your collections out over more agencies so you don’t lose too big.

Half Life (referred to as "Tom Grill’s Half Life ")

Inventor: Tom Grill

The concept of half life is stolen from physics and applied to stock distribution theory. In physics, the half life concept refers to the time it takes for a radioactive compound to reach half of its original radioactive energy. In stock theory, half life refers to the time it will take an image or collection to sell half as much as it did when it was first launched. Because of fashion trends pictures that are old will “look old” and they will gradually sell less and less. A picture or collection will never stop selling completely, just like the radio active compound will never stop being radioactive completely. Half life for images in traditional stock is said to be around five years, which is extremely high compared to microstock. In microstock half life is very short. Half life for iStock exclusive photographers is speculated to be less than a year, but the RPI in this first year is very high. Half life for microstock non-exclusive contributors is speculated to be around two years if the photographer has his images online almost everywhere that they host non-exclusive images.

Half life speculations:

Non-exclussive microstock: 2 years.

Istock: 1 year.

Traditional stock: 5 years.

Shutterstock is a very extreme case with a life time of about a week. However the stability of the baseline income on shutterstock after that week is very stable. Half life on shutterstock as taken from a baseline income (without the massive freshness income boost) is very accurately estimated from multiple users with inactive accounts to be quite long: 3 years and 6 months.

MPM, Maintenance production minimum.

Inventor: Yuri Arcurs

This concept refers to the minimum production necessary to eliminate your half life or in other words “maintain” the same income as you have now when you hit your half life . My maintenance production minimum is about 220 images per month. If I produce less than this, my income should drop slowly. If you know your half time on the agency or distribution channel (see above) you contribute to, and the number of images in your current collection with that channel you can calculate your MPM like this:

(N/HT)*0,61 = MPM

N: Number of images in current channel/agency

HT: Half Life in months for that channel/agency

MPM: Maintenance Production Minimum in images per month.

Example: For my current collection of images (microstock non-exclussive) my MPM calculation looks like this: (8664/24 months*0.61 = 220) images per month. This means that I estimate my half time to be around 24 months and that to maintain my current income I need to produce at least 220 images per month.

To understand how this formula works it is best to take this calculation from the start. The first MPM calculation I formulated was based on a very negative approach; that when you reach your half life you will need double the amount of images you have now to maintain your income. The formula looked like this:

N/HT = MPM

This is not true however, and I revised this theory to take a few factors into account: Let’s say you where a photographer that just wanted to keep your MPM and not produce any more than that. Using the formula on my portfolio data I would get (8664/24 months= 361). What this tells me is that if I want to have double the amount of images in my portfolio as I do how, I would have to keep a MPM of 361 images per month. But the problem is that if I have twice as many images as I do now when I hit my half life , I will actually earn more than what I do now because the pictures I have produced up to that point are newer and have a longer half life than my current collection. Are you following? This also needs to be taken into consideration. If we put this into consideration you get the revised MPM:

(N/HT)*0,61 = MPM

By putting in a ratio of 0,61 we get the accurate MPM: The amount of images necessary to maintain the same income without producing too much as the first calculation would aspire to. The first calculation without the ratio leads to a overproduction of 1.63 (63%) at half life, so the number 0,61 arrives when calculating backward making sure you hit 100% at halftime and not 163%. This number is accurate for half life longer than 6 months, but below 6 months this number should be about 0.69 instead.

You can also use your MPM number to figure out what it would take to be earning double or more at halftime. If I want to be at 200% in income at half life i have to produce 440 images per month (MPM*2)

Related reading: Basic Stock Photography Terminology

Microstock 

Stock agencies selling images at a very low price. Normally around 1USD for a small resolution royalty free license.

Midstock 

A term that has been the subject of a lot of controversy. Prices at midstock collections such as the Fotolia Infinity collection, Snapvillage, Featurepics or the 123RF EVO collection are normally 10 USD for a small web resolution and either 50 to 100USD for a ultra high res. Midstock operates with commissions of normally 50% and together with the high prices compared to microstock, these collections are effective ways for a small agency to compete efficiently against bigger agencies that have lower prices and lower commission such as istockphoto.com or shutterstock.com. Midstock normally operates with price-exclusivity (see below).

Macrostock

Macrostock or "traditional stock" describes all the agencies not selling their images at microstock prices, such as Corbis, Getty, JupiterImages, Veer, Alamy, etc. Prices in macrostock have dropped and you can now buy a low res web usage license at Getty for only 49USD. However the prices in macro are much higher than micro and midstock, normally between 50 - 750USD depending on size.

Cannibalization

This term in relation to stock photography covers the idea, that if a photographer suddenly starts selling his images at a much lower price point than before, he will be "cannibalizing" his own ability to make real money from his own higher priced images. The concept of cannibalizing is most often used as a criticism of microstock and it is often said that microstock is cannibalizing the whole macrostock industry by under pricing images too much.

Price point

At a given agency, the lowest price for one royalty free license for one image is it’s starting "price point". When discussing stock theory, people often say things like "this is too low a price point" or "we should try selling at the lower price points" Price points are often referred to as the lowest price at which you can buy an image. The price point in microstock is therefor normally 1USD, the price point in midstock is 10-20USD and the price point in macrostock is 50USD, but often higher.

Picture Pooling

First used by: Yuri Arcurs

This phenomenon is normally used as a criticism against subscription agencies. It describes the fact that buyers that have a subscription will download more pictures then they use and will sometimes download pictures for future purposes. The result is pools of pictures that the designer can use instead of buying new pictures. Picture pooling is a real threat and it is confirmed by multiple users that if you opt out of subscription selling at Stockxpert for example you will actually earn more almost immediately, despite not getting any income from subscription sales. This can however be caused by more factors then just the result of picture pooling.

Self-pricing

Inventor: Featurepics, Snapvillage among others.

Self-pricing agencies are very popular and basically let the photographers decide at what price point they want to sell their images at, low as well as high prices. Self-pricing is normally between 1USD - 50 USD for the highest resolution file.

Non-exclusive

Non-exclusive agencies and collections allow for the images in them to be sold elsewhere. Normally non-exclusive images don’t have a price-exclusive agreement and you can basically sell the same images at all price points.

Exclusive images

Exclusive images are found on one agency only and cannot be sold elsewhere. The most successful exclusivity program is the iStockphoto exclusivity program or the Getty Collections. This program offers a wide range of extra benefits for the exclusive photographer, such as higher commission, faster inspections, etc. The iStock exclusivity program requires not only the images, but also the photographers themselves to be completely exclusive in the sense that the photographer is not allowed to sell Royalty Free stock for any other agency accept Getty.

Photographer exclusivity

Photographer exclusivity occurs when a photographer chooses to sign a contract forbidding him to produce stock material for any other agency. Normally he receives special benefits for doing so, but it is very criticized and very dangerous because the income is limited to one agency only, so if that agency falls back in sales, the photographer will experience a drop in income, but is bound to stay with that agency. Some photographers report having gone from making as much as 30000USD per month to 3000USD per month in less then two months in exclussive collections.

Price exclusive

Price exclusive images are images that belong to a collection that are not allowed to be sold at a lower price then the price they have in this collection. The Fotolia Infinite collection is a price exclusive collection, and will not allow that you sell the images at other agencies at a lower price. Price exclusive images are non-exclusive, but just price exclusive.

Duplication/plagiarism

Plagiarism is a very controversial subject. When a photographer is looking for new images to produce it is very normal to get "inspiration" from another photographers. Sometimes however, photographers will go a little too far in this endeavour and duplicate another photographer’s pictures a little too much, being that the resemblance is simply too similar to the original. This causes great debates and forum tantrums and can cause a great deal of heat among photographers. Before you accuse someone of duplicating your images, make sure you really are the first one to have come up with the concept and that the other image really is similar to yours. For example, if the accused duplicator has also duplicated your titles and keywords too, this is a good indicator of intentional plagiarism. Stock photographers in microstock will re-invent a lot of concept that have already been thought of and been well executed in traditional stock. These new "inventors" in microstock will then claim and believe they are the original inventors of this concept and think that everyone is duplicating them. The most controversial and talked about duplication case is for sure the "jumping goldfish" from iStock and the most duplicated photographers are Andres Rodriguez, Yuri Arcurs and Lise Gagne from iStock.

Technical quality vs aesthetic quality

Technical quality describes a photographer’s ability to control and produce digital images without well known and defined technical mistakes such as fringing, artifacts, shaken focal point, flare, moire, etc. The aesthetic quality refers to all the aspect that makes a photograph interesting: the conceptual, emotional and creative elements of the image. The lowest degree of technical quality is often found on amateur forums such as diviantart.com or flickr.com, while the highest technical quality is found on iStockphoto. IStockphoto has far more strict technical quality standards than any place in macrostock, despite the much higher prices. The ability to produce high aesthetically pleasing images that also have high technical quality is what defines the difference between the amateur and the professional. Places like iStock, with extremely high technical standards, are often criticized for being too straight and rejecting too many images that have high aesthetically quality but not "perfect" technical quality.

Forum slang / acronyms for photography related forums:

Related Reading: Advanced Stock Photography Terminology