Mark Baigent Photography

In the “good old days” of stock photography a photographer made photographs on film, usually using medium format equipment, the photographs were reproduced in a catalogue which was then sent to buyers. The whole process was time consuming and expensive. Worse, for the photographer, was that images that did not make it into the catalogue did not get in front of photo buyers easily. For me the costs, in time and materials, of building a stock collection were too high.

Digital cameras and the internet changed all that. For me the first sign that I could add stock photography to my income stream was when I found Alamy.com. I already owned a pro spec digital camera so for no real extra cost I could shoot stock photographs and upload them to the Alamy website where they would then be available to buyers quickly.

Alamy also broke the mould by not editing the content of the images, photographers could make the photos that they wanted to and as long as they were up to Alamy’s strict quality control all was fine. Even now most photolibraries edit the content of the images photographers submit so a human decides if your photographs are saleable before they even get to the market place. Alamy lets the buyers decide.



I have to admit that like many photographers I initially took a lazy approach to shooting stock, I gave them my full attention technically (as Alamy demand) but I shot a lot of “well maybe it will sell” images. Amazingly some photographs did sell, which woke me up.



I started to think and plan my stock photography a bit more carefully, no more grab shots, and sales improved I’m pleased to say. Over three years I did market research and I increased the number of  photographs that I have on Alamy to 2300. My sales have been regular and the income was especially useful during a long bout of illness when I was unable to work. I have a long term goal of getting 10,000 photographs on line but that will take me years to achieve.

So all good news then

Well no, Alamy is an evolving beast, in an evolving marketplace, and goalposts are ever moving. For instance the way that photographs should be keyworded (the photographers responsibility) has changed, meaning that I have had to wade through Alamy’s clumsy software to re-keyword a couple of thousand images more than once, very time consuming. The promised bulk editing software from Alamy is still eagerly awaited (as of Feb 09).

Competition for sales in now fierce, the ease and low cost of shooting stock which I saw as an advantage also worked for everyone else, there are currently 14.99 million stock photos on Alamy and that number is growing fast. Amazingly Alamy’s 15 million images are a drop in the ocean of stock photographs available for sale via the likes of Getty, Corbis, imagefile etc.



The average price for a photograph has tumbled as a result of the huge amount of photographs available, good old supply and demand.

However, despite all of the downsides I like Alamy and I will keep making images for Alamy. I usually shoot stock photographs during quiet times and the more images that I have the better, the photographers with 10,000 + photographs on Alamy are still doing fairly well, but I will also start looking at niche markets and making photographs for them as well. (see my thoughts on Trevillion).

Tags: Stock photography // 5 Comments »